Much Ado About Nothing(ness): Phenomenology and Meontology in Early Heidegger
Þessi ritgerð, sem fjallar um möguleikann á því að hugsa neindina ásamt Heidegger, var skrifuð vorið 2020 fyrir áfangann “Origins of Phenomenology” við Warwick-Háskóla. Verkið í haus er eftir Munakata Shikō frá árinu 1963.
Preamble: The Nothing Bursts Forth
Martin Heidegger’s Being and Time (1927)[1] aims to articulate what he calls a “fundamental ontology.”[2] The prospect of this ontology is the beating heart of Being and Time—and its guiding principle and ultimate goal is what Heidegger calls “the question of Being.”[3] In the work’s Introduction, Heidegger contends that this primordial or original question must be formulated through an entity which questions. This entity Heidegger calls Dasein, which is “an entity which each of us is himself.”[4] He argues that in order to formulate this long-forgotten question of Being, we must first explicate this questioning entity. Being and Time is thus an inquiry into Dasein, the inquiring entity for which its very own Being is an issue, the entity which is capable of questioning Being.
The work, then, articulates in a phenomenological manner the various and distinct existential aspects of Dasein—which was to become the foundation upon which he could then proceed to build this elusive question. Being and Time was originally planned to consist of two parts; the first one was to carry out an existential analytic of Dasein in three divisions, interpreting it in terms of temporality, the second part was to delineate the basic features of what Heidegger called “the phenomenological destruction of the history of ontology” in another three divisions. However, the first part was never completed—its third division never appeared—and neither was the second part. Heidegger left the project unfinished.[5] The question of Being, then, was never posed in Being and Time. It did leave us with quite a substantial account of Dasein, however, and is to this day considered by many to be a landmark work in the history of phenomenology and continental philosophy. The work has even earned Heidegger the reputation of being modern philosophy’s quintessential thinker of Being.
Even so, in Being and Time Heidegger seems to display an awareness of a certain lack present in the work: it becomes clear that he’s missing an ontological account of “notness,” or of the “not” in general.[6] Being and Time, then, is lacking an account of lack itself. This he attempts to remedy in his inaugural lecture at the University of Freiburg in 1929 called “What Is Metaphysics?”—in which he delves into the question of the ontological origin of the “nothing.”[7] As such, it is undeniably a text important to any interpretation of early Heidegger,[8] since it clearly and concisely demonstrates how even Heidegger—famed for being the philosopher of Being par excellence—is forced to address the question of Nothingness from within his ontological account. It seems as if a burgeoning meontology struggles to burst forth from his ontological interpretation—where previously there had been nothing of the sort. Can we truly speak of a Heideggerian meontology, or is the very pursuit of such a question a fool’s errand?
The question I will attempt to explore and elaborate in this essay thus regards the very possibility of a Heideggerian meontology: what could a phenomenological but meontological account of the nothing mean for Heidegger? Could he have considered Nothingness as a phenomenon to be questioned in itself through the nothing in the same manner he considered himself capable of questioning Being in itself through beings? To this end I will begin by showing in what sense Heidegger’s account of the nothing is an ontological one before I delve into whether and how he might have understood the nothing meontologically, as a Nothingness. Following this preamble, the essay is comprised of three main sections. The first is expositional and serves as an interpretive account of the general trajectory of Heidegger’s argument in Being and Time and “What Is Metaphysics?” The second part contains a critical examination of Heidegger’s construal of Dasein’s experience of the nothing: while Heidegger’s account of the nothing is in fact an ontological one, it does reveal to us the fundamental limitation and finitude of Being itself. The anxious experience of the nothing demonstrates how Being itself hovers in the absolute Nothingness of death, Dasein’s ownmost possibility. In the third part, I conclude by considering whether Heidegger’s thinking of the nothing and the meontological implications underlying such a thinking may have influenced his consequent development as a thinker in ways which have hitherto gone unnoticed.
Dasein, Ontology and the Nothing
In this first section, I will trace Heidegger’s account of Dasein and delineate a few of those concepts he utilizes in Being and Time and “What Is Metaphysics?” which are most relevant to my analysis and argument. I will not go into unnecessary detail during this exposition—which means, unfortunately, that various aspects of his larger argument will be left out of the picture. Unfortunate as this may be, isolating these particular concepts will allow me to maintain a tighter focus and clarity, an advantage which seems to justify a greatly truncated exposition of Heidegger’s argument. Let us begin at the beginning, then.
a) Dasein, world, Being-in and mood
First and foremost, Dasein is always in a world. Dasein, of course, literally means “therebeing,”[9] which is an important signification, since it definitionally locates Dasein—it defines Dasein as having, in essence, a dwelling or a residing.[10] This residence is of an ontological character: Dasein, in its very Being, is formally defined as “Being-in” a “World,” and its essential state is simply Being-in-the-world, being in and alongside this world and being absorbed in it. This simply means that by and large, Dasein is captivated by its locale—fully engaged and concerned with it without experiencing any sort of gap or break in the experience and handling of phenomena.[11]
In other words, this basic state is one of smooth absorption. The world—the referential totality of things which are “ready to hand” for Dasein—forms a sort of background to Dasein’s everyday affairs. This background only becomes apparent in and through a breakdown or rupture in the expected referential order of entities ready to hand for Dasein. In phenomenological terms this simply means that Dasein in its everydayness is intentionally mired in practical necessities: it is non-thematically engaged with matters themselves, simply concerned with the world and its myriad of beings-at-hand. This non-thematic engagement is Dasein’s “default” mode of Being—it is only in rare cases, such as in “obstinacy,” “obtrusiveness” and “conspicuousness,” that Dasein is torn out of its fascination with the world and the world qua world is revealed to Dasein—that is, when things go haywire or refuse to work as they should.[12]
Now that we’ve noted some characteristic elements of the “world” we must turn to Heidegger’s thematic analysis of “Being-in,” the antecedent half of the formula he calls “Being-in-the-world.” In his analysis of “Being-in,” Heidegger delineates Dasein’s “where?” Dasein is already located by its very definition: it is always its own “there” and is always capable of pointing itself out as a “here.”[13] As Heidegger puts it, “Dasein is its disclosedness,”[14] in the simple sense that any being-there is always itself a disclosure of there-being. Dasein is always disclosed to itself in a certain attunement [Stimmung] which might also be called its mood [Gestimmtheit] at any given time. It is in and through Dasein’s mood that it comes to understand itself: in and through its own disclosure, Dasein finds itself thrown into the world and understands what it is capable of—it projects itself into its capabilities, it comes to view what is possible for itself.[15] Heidegger then proceeds to introduce a notion crucial to setting his conceptual apparatus into motion: the idea of a particular mood which he calls anxiety [Angst]. Anxiety differs from the more everyday mood of fear in a significant manner: while fear is in essence a fear in the face of something more-or-less at hand, some entity that threatens Dasein, anxiety is rather a being-anxious in the face of an indefinite threat—the threatening factor in anxiety is “nowhere” in particular.[16] In other words, in anxiety, Dasein is anxious about “nothing,” which means that Dasein is in truth anxious about Being-in-the-world itself. In a sense, then, anxiety makes Dasein become acutely aware of its own directionality or bearing: anxiety discloses Dasein’s “Being towards its ownmost potentiality-for-Being—that is, its Being-free for the freedom of choosing itself and taking hold of itself.”[17]
Dasein is an entity which, through its basic ontological-existential features, is disclosed to itself in its state-of-mind or mood as Being-in-the-world. Dasein’s disclosure to itself is perhaps most significant in anxiety—a mood in which Dasein feels uncanny about existence itself, in which it finds itself as thrown, oriented and projected towards its very own existential possibilities. We might even say that it is anxiety which reveals Dasein to itself qua Dasein. Furthermore, and most importantly, Heidegger argues that it is through Dasein, the entity for which its own Being is an issue, that we are capable of formulating the question of Being, an ontology proper, as it were. However, as is foreshadowed in and through the experience of anxiety, we will come to see how Heidegger’s account of fundamental ontology necessitates the inclusion of a seemingly extra- or even anti-ontological element, something which seems to be of a me-ontological character: the “nothing.”
c) The nothing
“What is that noise?”
The wind under the door.
“What is that noise now? What is the wind doing?”
Nothing again nothing.
“Do
“You know nothing? Do you see nothing? Do you remember
“Nothing?”[18]
During his analysis of the concept of guilt in Being and Time, Heidegger makes a curious remark which he does not expand upon in the text itself: he notes that certain important concepts remain unclarified—the concepts of “notness” or of the “not” in general.[19] These concepts remain unexplored until Heidegger explicitly addresses them in his 1929 lecture, “What Is Metaphysics?” In the lecture he purports to seek an understanding of a particular innocuous phenomenon: his objective is to explicate the meaning of our common use of the privative word “nothing.”[20] Modern rigorous inquiry seeks to examine beings, “and nothing further,” he begins by noting[21]—but what, precisely, is this “nothing”? Heidegger uses this manner of speaking as a springboard to ask the broader question of what precisely is meant by the “nothing”—and whether this concept has been adequately understood. By speaking of and expecting to meaningfully the nothing the inquirer already expects there to be such a nothing to be “encountered,” which implies that Dasein must already have some experience of a nothing in order for us to be able to speak of it as we do, an experience which might then be articulated phenomenologically.[22]
Heidegger begins by sketching out a preliminary definition of the nothing as “the complete negation of the totality of beings.”[23] In order for this totality of beings to be negated in the first place, it must be experienced as a totality. Such an experience is possible, Heidegger says, in moods such as boredom or in a certain kind of joy.[24] However, boredom or joy actually serve to conceal the nothing insofar as they bring the whole of beings to the fore.[25] We must therefore seek the nothing in a different kind of mood—one which dispels this totality, one which “nihilates,” and Heidegger has a particular mood in mind—the very same special kind of mood which he explored in great detail in Being and Time: anxiety. It is anxiety which “reveals the nothing,” Heidegger contends, and further asserts that anxiety, in a sense, leaves us “hanging” since it “induces the slipping away of beings as a whole.”[26] Of course, this is foreshadowed in his treatment of anxiety in Being and Time, where anxiety was in the face of “nothing at all.”[27] In neither case, however, is the nothing he describes a “total nothing” but is rather akin to a an uncanny feeling of being “not-at-home” in the world.[28] Anxiety is thus not an “actual” annihilation or negation of beings, but is rather an experience of a sort of weightlessness in which one floats—a meaningless indifference to beings.[29] Furthermore, the nothing revealed by anxiety must always be encountered in tandem, or in Heidegger’s terms, “at one” with beings as a whole. The nothing is this very “slipping away” or “repelling” of beings.[30] Ontologically, this nothing is thus “neither an object nor any being at all”—not an ontic “thing”—but it seems as if it might instead be described as a movement or an “unfolding”[31] of beings relative to each other, a fleeting event which takes place within Being: “In the Being of beings the nihilation of the nothing occurs.”[32]
Thus, Heidegger understands the nothing to be revealed through Dasein’s anxiety, the mood in which beings as a whole are “repelled,” leaving Dasein “hovering” or “held out” into the nothing. This entails that Heidegger’s nothing is not at all an absolute nothing or an annihilation of beings—it is not truly a “nothingness.” We are still well within the limits of his ontological project; phenomenologically it seems to be akin to an epi- or quasi-phenomenon, one which appears alongside Dasein’s disclosure to itself—all in all, the nothing is. The Heideggerian nothing is a relative nothing, a lack which appears as beings “slip away” from each other, or rather it is this slipping away—a negative space, if you will, or a void relative to the fullness of beings. The nothing, then, seems to be a lack inscribed into Being itself.
Being and Nothingness
a) Movement: Ground-Becoming-Figure
Now that we have followed along the general trajectory of Heidegger’s argument, I will consider a few aspects of Heidegger’s conception of the nothing in greater detail.
As we have seen, it is anxiety that discloses Dasein’s hovering in the nothing and it is through the event of the nothing—the experience of the relativity, contingency, finitude and alterity of beings in their repelling—that the Being of beings is revealed, in the sense that it becomes questionable, marking the commencement of metaphysics as such. It seems as if we have reached a somewhat obscure conclusion. How are we to clarify it? It seems that a particularly promising point of departure in the search for greater clarity might be his characterization of the nothing as a movement or an event, a repelling. In order to pursue this line of thought further, we would do well to juxtapose Heidegger’s account with a brief phenomenological description of our own, which may hopefully bring us clarity of understanding through analogy.
Let us imagine ourselves to gaze upon a sheet of white paper. A plethora of sentences and words have been inscribed on the sheet, and in gazing upon it we immediately recognize them as such, as meaningful signs, each referring to a myriad of other signs through an immense chain of signification. We may imagine ourselves to be completely immersed in the experience, absorbed in this vision of a miniature “linguistic world” inscribed upon the sheet: each word or phrase is “ready-to-hand” and in constant and infinite relation to any other given word or phrase by way of cross-referential signification. Now, let us imagine that, suddenly and without warning, we are gripped by anxiety. What changes in our experience? To begin with, we can be sure that our anxiety is not in the face of any particular sign written upon the sheet of paper. Rather, our anxiety has to do with our very gazing, our potentiality for relating to this miniature world of references. What happens, then, is that our focus is displaced: our sense of connection to this chain of signification is disrupted and we seem to become indifferent to it. Instead of relating to this chain immediately, our attention fastens upon the negative space between the positive symbols inscribed upon the sheet. Each word, each sentence, seems to be pushed away from any other word, as if repelled. We might even feel as if each sign was adrift upon a sea of white, floating in a nullity—hovering in nothing at all.
Our analogy should be clear. Dasein’s anxious experience of the nothing reveals the Being of beings in the same way that our anxiety vis-à-vis the sheet of paper draws our attention to how the negative space (the nothing) between the significatory figures (beings) itself reveals the sheet upon which the figures are inscribed to be itself figure—the sheet itself (Being) becomes subject to questioning. The two analogically identical movements (which we might, with prospicience, call “clearings”) reveal the groundlessness in which beings exist, or to use a later Heideggerian term, the groundlessness out of which beings ek-sist, from which they protrude—for what is a figure other than a standing-out? The experience of negative space is the movement of ground-becoming-figure, a positive movement of reversal, a revelatory juxtaposition: the experience of the nothing makes of Being an issue to be questioned or interrogated, and we’ve returned to our starting point—that Dasein is the being for which its very own Being is an issue, metaphysical being.
Even so, it is unclear at this point what this reversal truly entails. If anxiety has made a figure of what was previously ground, where is the ground of this new figure? It does not seem particularly illuminating to revert to a chiastic structure here—for example, by contending that just as Being was revealed to be the ground of figurative beings, Being becomes figure as beings become ground[33]—it rather seems as if we’ve reached completely new territory by experiencing this reversal, and Heidegger even speaks of a “ground of wonder.”[34] Where are we, then? Or, again, what novel ground are we treading? On my interpretation, the “ground” upon which we experience Being as a figure cannot be any other than Nothingness. I will elaborate upon this in the following section.
b) Being and Nothingness
At first glance, Heidegger seems to offer us a wholly ontological account of the nothing—a nothing devoid of Nothingness. To see this one must only take note of a few crucial constitutive aspects of Heidegger’s conception of the nothing, aspects which we delineated above:
α. The nothing is never encountered in isolation but always at one with beings as a whole.
β. The nothing belongs to the Being of beings.
γ. The nothing is a repelling, a movement of beings.
Reading them together, we can see what his understanding of the nothing entails. To begin with, we can see how the nothing is always bound up with and into beings (α)—so closely, in fact, that the nothing belongs to the Being itself of beings (β). This nothing seems, then, to be a relative nothing—an experience of an abyss in which all relation hovers, a movement of beings away from each other, a drifting apart or a repelling (γ). All three aspects of the nothing thus point towards the same direction—towards Being: the nothing is merely epiphenomenal, it is never to be experienced apart from beings, and so on.
Even so, we couldn’t help but notice something profound in our phenomeno-analogical experiment—what had previously been foreground upon background disappeared in lieu of the background’s becoming foreground. Being suddenly became our foreground, the intentional object, but this isn’t a return to pre-critical substance metaphysics. We’re not discussing an ontotheological substance-deity—the Being Heidegger speaks of is finite and fragile and bound up with and into the very entity which is capable of questioning it and of disclosing it to itself. As he remarks elsewhere, there could not, strictly speaking, “be” any Being without Dasein.[35] The Being which we have before us is an essentially finite Being, a figure ek-sisting from the ground of Nothingness. Dasein’s Being is ground hovering in groundlessness. This is an unspoken,[36] albeit recognized Nothingness: an un-written and self-effacing meontology, a “m̶e̶o̶n̶t̶o̶l̶o̶g̶y̶,” if you will—無 [Mu], in Zen terminology.[37]
By hovering in the nothing, Dasein’s Being is revealed to be a “groundless ground.”[38] What does it mean for a ground to be “groundless”? Does it not merely signify the emptiness on which any grounding must ultimately rely? Does it not simply mean that any true ground must also put an end to all possibility of further grounding, a ground which is itself ungrounded and ungroundable? Heidegger realizes that through Dasein’s questioning, through the movement of ground-becoming-figure, Being itself is revealed to be essentially finite.[39] It turns out that Dasein’s Being ends, that it is limited: Being qua ground is itself groundless, and beneath the ground is simply Nothingness pure and simple. Of course, Dasein’s Being ends because Dasein dies. It is in death that Heidegger will locate this ultimate limit: “The “nothing” with which anxiety brings us face to face, unveils the nullity by which Dasein, in its very basis, is defined; and this basis itself i s as thrownness into death.”[40] Dasein’s ownmost possibility, its very own death, its thrownness towards it—that is the ultimate nullity, the primordial Nothingness in which Dasein’s Being hovers. “As for man, [his days] are numbered,/whatever he may do, it is but wind […].”[41] Heidegger may not say it outright, but his approach to ontology and the whole question of Being ultimately rests upon this impenetrable “known unknown,” the absolute Nothingness we refer to as death. It is precisely in this sense that we are anxious: our anxiety is in the face of the primordial Nothingness which threatens to swallow us anytime, anywhere.
It might help to return, briefly, to the analogy above, and to intertwine it with a bit of myth—as Heidegger was wont to do every now and then. Consider the wolf Fenrir, spawn of the trickster-god Loki: in the same way that the chains of signification on our sheet of paper were shattered in the face of anxiety, Fenrir obliterated the first two fetters he was bound with by the mighty Æsir. Læðingr, the first fetter, and Drómi, the second, were both heavy chains, wrought by the most skillful hands available—but Fenrir shrugged them off as if they were made of twine. Finally, Fenrir was bound by the ultimate fetter, Gleipnir, which was famously constructed out of “nothing” at all: the sound of a cat’s footfall, the roots of a mountain, the beard of a woman, and so on.
We might seek to chain away our ownmost possibility for Being, our Being-towards-death, in the same way the Æsir sought to bind Fenrir—for example, by constructing immense chains of signification through idle talk and meaningless chatter—but our finitude breaks through every time we try to suppress and fetter it in such a manner: anxiety could grip us at any moment. Only by approaching our finitude in and through Nothingness are we capable of meeting it resolutely and keeping it in check, making it our own—although even this ultimate fetter must break come death—or come Ragnarök, in Fenrir’s case.
The Silence unto Death
Have we found our answer, then? Have we laid out the possibility of a Heideggerian meontology? In one sense, we have—in another sense, we have not.[42] We have not yet overcome the impossibility of faithfully rendering Nothingness in words, and we likely never will.[43] We have, however, seen that while Heidegger explicitly seeks an ontological account, a “m̶e̶o̶n̶t̶o̶l̶o̶g̶y̶” lurks just beneath the surface. We have seen that Dasein’s Being is revealed to be essentially finite in anxiety, hovering in the Nothingness of death. Even so, any logical or verbal account of the phenomenon of death always shows itself to consist of nothing but a thin veneer of fearfulness. When we attempt to make death understandable we are fleeing in the face of it and not resolutely facing the necessity it truly imposes upon us.
On the other hand, by remaining mindfully and silently anxious we open ourselves up to the experience of the movement of beings and the nothing—an experience which discloses the finitude of Dasein’s Being, Dasein’s groundless ground, as it hovers in Nothingness. Mindful and attentive anxiety is the realization of this truth; death is an ineffable and absolute void which we can only designate by way of demarcating an event-horizon, beyond which the unspeakable lurks. If Being and Time truly is an ontological account of Dasein by Dasein, it is only capable of maintaining the question of Being and the questioning of Dasein through a meditative but unspeaking consciousness of the Nothingness that awaits Dasein. Fittingly, the ontological speaks while the meontological remains silent.
Perhaps the appearance of this oppressive silence[44] could shed some light on why Heidegger abandoned the project of Being and Time. Perhaps he came to understand this deeper truth while working on it and realized that when all is said and done, any systematic account of fundamental ontology inevitably hypostatizes into a sort of idle talk or chatter, distracting Dasein from mindfully dwelling in Nothingness, distracting it from maintaining a resolute Being-towards-death. In any case, it seems clear that something happens to Heidegger’s thinking around the year 1930—something radical, something which he can’t simply turn away from. Following what has been called his “turn” in 1930, Heidegger begins exploring different ways of thinking and philosophizing, “more open-ended, exploratory, nontheoretical”[45] ways of contemplation. Is it too far-fetched to suggest that through thinking the nothing—and consequently coming to grips with the meontological, the ineffable and absolute Nothingness—he may have realized the impossibility of a systematic analysis such as the one in Being and Time? I would contend that it is not.
In any case, we set out to explore the possibility of an early-Heideggerian account of Nothingness, or a meontology—and we have located Nothingness as a wound in the beating heart of Being, a rift beyond the event-horizon of the particular phenomenon known as death. To reiterate, then: there is a pulsating Nothingness hiding beneath the surface of Heidegger’s courageous attempt at a fundamental ontology—but this Nothingness is essentially a non-utterance or a silence, precluding any possibility of capturing Nothingness within any λογος. Paradoxically, then, we may speak of a Heideggerian Nothingness—but not of a Heideggerian meontology which captures and narrativizes or interprets it.
Perhaps our search for a meontology in early Heidegger can thus be concluded as being neither a success nor a failure. Perhaps what we have found was not exactly what we set out to search for—perhaps we won’t truly have anything substantial to show for all the trouble. Perhaps our conclusion simply consists of a pointing-towards a meditative silence—an acceptance of the object of anxiety. Perhaps it is rather a pointing-towards a thoughtful and communicative openness in the face of the fragility and evanescence of Being. In any case we can not conclude in favor of an active forgetfulness and thoughtlessness in the face of finitude—for the very simple reason that it obscures and annihilates what matters most to us: it makes us nasty and brutish. Our Being is finite—as revealed by the nature of temporality, which seems to allow us a mere “amount” of Being, so and so many years, months, days, hours—so we would do well to be mindful and careful during this short time.
Bibliography
Cited works by Martin Heidegger:
Heidegger, Martin. Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Foreword by Taylor Carman. New York: HarperCollins, 2008.
Heidegger, Martin. Basic Writings. Edited by David Farrell Krell. Translations by David Farrell Krell, Joan Stambaugh, J. Glenn Gray, John Sallis, Frank A. Capuzzi, Albert Hofstadter, W. B. Barton, Jr. and Vera Deutsch. Foreword by Taylor Carman. New York: HarperCollins, 2008.
Other works cited or consulted:
The Epic of Gilgamesh: The Babylonian Epic Poem And Other Texts in Akkadian and Sumerian. Translated by Andrew George. London: Penguin Books, 1999.
Eliot, T.S. The Waste Land: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism. Edited by Michael North. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2001.
Hoo, Hau. The Sound of the One Hand: 281 Zen Koans with Answers. Translated by Yoel Hoffman. Introduction by Dror Burstein. New York City, NY: New York Review of Books, 2016.
Krummel, J.W.M. “On (the) nothing: Heidegger and Nishida.” Cont Philos Rev 51, 239–268 (2018). URL = https://0-doi-org.pugwash.lib.warwick.ac.uk/10.1007/s11007-017-9419-3.
Laycock, Steven William. Nothingness and Emptiness: A Buddhist Engagement with the Ontology of Jean-Paul Sartre. New York: SUNY Press, 2001.
Japanese and Continental Philosophy: Conversations with the Kyoto School. Edited by Bret W. Davis, et al. Indiana: Indiana University Press, 2011.
Footnotes
[1] Martin Heidegger, Being and Time. Translated by John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson. Foreword by Taylor Carman. New York: HarperCollins, 2008. Henceforth referred to as “SZ” followed by page number, referring to the pagination of later German editions.
[2] SZ, 13.
[3] SZ, 2.
[4] SZ, 7.
[5] Taylor Carman, “Foreword” in Martin Heidegger, Being and Time. P. xx.
[6] SZ, 285-286.
[7] Martin Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics?” from Basic Writings. Translated by David Farrell Krell. Foreword by Taylor Carman. New York: HarperCollins, 2008. P. 93. Hereafter referred to as “WIM” followed by page number.
[8] Worth emphasizing here is that my interpretation only applies to early Heidegger. I will not be covering any later formulations of his concept of nothing.
[9] SZ, 7. See also footnote 1 on page 27 in the Macquarrie & Robinson translation referred to above.
[10] SZ, 54.
[11] SZ, 113-114.
[12] SZ, 74.
[13] SZ, 132.
[14] Ibid.
[15] SZ, 143-144.
[16] SZ, 185-186.
[17] SZ, 188.
[18] T.S. Eliot, The Waste Land: Authoritative Text, Contexts, Criticism. Edited by Michael North. New York: W.W. Norton and Company, 2001. P. 21.
[19] SZ, 285-286.
[20] Even so, it is important to recall here that just as Heidegger’s goal in Being and Time was the articulation of the question of Being through an ontological-existential analysis of Dasein, both his method and aim in “What Is Metaphysics?” are very much the same. That is, there is no meontological approach in sight yet, even if the nothing has shown itself.
[21] WIM, 95.
[22] WIM, 95.
[23] WIM, 98.
[24] WIM, 99.
[25] WIM, 100.
[26] WIM, 101.
[27] SZ, 186.
[28] SZ, 187.
[29] SZ 187.
[30] WIM, 103.
[31] WIM, 104.
[32] WIM, 104. Italics mine.
[33] Such a reading seems to make of Heidegger a substance metaphysician—as if Being were somehow to be portrayed as the infinite substratum interlacing the totality of beings.
[34] WIM, 109.
[35] SZ, 212.
[36] Of course, we would betray it by speaking of it at all.
[37] The logograph “無” means something like “no-thing” or “non-existence.” For reference, see Hau Hoo, The Sound of the One Hand: 281 Zen Koans with Answers. Translated by Yoel Hoffman. Introduction by Dror Burstein. New York City, NY: New York Review of Books, 2016. P. 21.
[38] WIM, 109.
[39] WIM, 108.
[40] SZ, 308.
[41] The Epic of Gilgamesh: The Babylonian Epic Poem And Other Texts in Akkadian and Sumerian. Translated by Andrew George. London: Penguin Books, 1999. P. 19.
[42] Could an essay concerning ontology and meontology conclude any other way?
[43] It would be most fruitful here, I imagine, to bring Heidegger into rapport with Japanese thinkers such as Nishida Kitaro, philosophers steeped in the Zen tradition for whom the meontological constituted the starting point of inquiry. Unfortunately, this is outside the scope of my essay, although many themes explored here would be well worth examining in greater detail alongside these other thinkers.
[44] There are foreshadowings, of course. For example, silence is used in juxtaposition with idle talk (See SZ, 164-165)—and similarly, the call of conscience is a “silent” call (See SZ, 277).
[45] Taylor Carman, “Foreword”. P. xx.
