April 17, 2004

Heidegger: What is Metaphysics

I would like to briefly turn back to Heidegger in the light of the comments here and here on the analytic continental divide.

One of the suggestions made in those posts was that epistemology (the key analytic concern) was displaced by a concern for metaphysics in continental philosophy. This is clear in Heidegger, especially his lecture 'What is Metaphysics', written in 1929 after Being and Time. This works with a conception of the disclosedness of Dasen as being-in-the-world. What is disclosed is not knowledge or opinions but moods. The primary or primoridal mood is anxiety when I realize that I have been thrown into the world and that my life and death is something that I have to face.

In What is Metaphysics (different translation) Heiddger probes this public mood of anxiety in terms of the category of nothing. He says that nothing ts not a suitable subject of the sciences:


"The nothing is rejected precisely by science, given up as a nullity.....science must now reassert its seriousness and soberness of mind, insisting that it is concerned solely with beings. The nothing — what else can it be for science but an outrage and a phantasm? If science is right, then only one thing is sure: science wishes to know nothing of the nothing. Ultimately this is the scientifically rigorous conception of the nothing. We know it, the nothing, in that we wish to know nothing about it. Science wants to know nothing of the nothing."

He goes on to say the nothing is what we seek and that "the nothing is the complete negation of the totality of beings." He then makes a distinction:

"In the end an essential distinction prevails between comprehending the ensemble of beings in themselves and finding oneself in the midst of beings as a whole. The former is impossible in principle. The latter happens all the time in our existence. It does seem as though we cling to this or that particular being, precisely in our everyday preoccupations, as though we were completely abandoned to this or that region of beings."

Heidegger then gives an example of what he means --boredom:

"Even and precisely then when we are not actually busy with things or ourselves this “as a whole” overcomes us — for example in genuine boredom. Boredom is still distant when it is only this book or that play, that business or this idleness, that drags on. It irrupts when “one is bored.” Profound boredom, drifting here and there in the abysses of our existence like a muffling fog, removes all things and men and oneself along with it into a remarkable indifference. This boredom reveals beings as a whole."

Anxiety is a fundamental mood that reveals the nothing.

I mention this here to show how far Heidegger has moved away from science---the positivists (eg Carnap) thought that he was simply talking nonsense. But this philosophy is talking about the 'fundaments' of everyday existence and is making public mood a subject of philosophical concern. It is a long way from the concerns of analytic philosophy.
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Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at April 17, 2004 11:47 PM | TrackBack
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