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April 24, 2004
Heidegger says that nothing is what produces in us a feeling of dread {Ger. Angst}. He spells it out this way in What is Metaphysics:
"With the fundamental mood of anxiety (dread) we have arrived at that occurrence in human existence in which the nothing is revealed and from which it must be interrogated. How is it with the nothing? " (para 26)
He then proceeds to answer, or rather interrogates the question he has posed:
"The nothing reveals itself in anxiety — but not as a being. Just as little is it given as an object. Anxiety is no kind of grasping of the nothing. All the same, the nothing reveals itself in and through anxiety, although, to repeat, not in such a way that the nothing becomes manifest in our malaise quite apart from beings as a whole."
If we some up the argument from the previous post, then anxiety (dread) is unlike its near-neighbour fear, which is fear of something. Anxiety is indeterminate and objectless. Heidegger suggests that this lack of determination means "[w]e can get no hold on things": beings recede, things slip away. Because of this, anxiety brings us face to face with the nothing.
He then characterises our response to the nothing revealing itself in our anxiety:
"In anxiety occurs a shrinking back before . . . which is surely not any sort of flight but rather a kind of bewildered calm. This “back before” takes its departure from the nothing. The nothing itself does not attract; it is essentially repelling. But this repulsion is itself as such a parting gesture toward beings that are submerging as a whole. This wholly repelling gesture toward beings that are in retreat as a whole, which is the action of the nothing that oppresses Dasein in anxiety, is the essence of the nothing: nihilation. It is neither an annihilation of beings nor does it spring from a negation. Nihilation will not submit to calculation in terms of annihilation and negation. The nothing itself nihilates."
The nothing 'nihilates', literally, the nothing nothings. It is rather stange is it not?
I guess its a kind of dialectical argument that reworks Hegel's Encycl Logic that that being and nothing belong together and give rise to beccoming. For Heidegger our being-there or being in the world {Ger. Dasein} is subject to a systematic, radical uncertainty. Because we know that we will die, concern with our annihilation is an ever-present feature of human experience: Death is the key to Life. In the face of dread we need to create our existence. As he says:
"In the clear night of the nothing of anxiety the original openness of beings as such arises: that they are beings — and not nothing. But this “and not nothing” we add in our talk is not some kind of appended clarification. Rather it makes possible in advance the revelation of beings in general. The essence of the originally nihilating nothing lies in this, that it brings Dasein for the first time before beings as such." (para 32)
This then is Heidegger''s version of the dialectical interchange of being and nothing that is becoming.
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