Early Twentieth-Century Continental Philosophy

4 The Thought of the Nothing: Heidegger’s “What Is Metaphysics?” (1929)

88 4 The Thought of the Nothing: Heidegger’s “What Is Metaphysics?” (1929) Before we turn to the transition that Heidegger represents, let us recapitulate the structure of thinking we have seen up to this point. First, the starting point is Cartesian. This kind of thinking starts from immanence. Freud is not an exception to this claim since he too speaks of inner perception . Yet, and second, we have seen a transformation of immanence into difference. All the philosophers we have considered discover within immanence a relation: the battlefield topology of the Ucs and the Cs; the uncommon parallelism between the transcendental and the psychological. Yet it is Bergson who discovers, within immanence, multiplicity. The Bergsonian concept of multiplicity is an incomplete multiplicity since there is no unitary theoretical explanation; the whole is not given. Multiplicity in Bergson is no longer an adjective, modifying multiple things like multiple objects or multiple subjects. Being incomplete, this multiplicity makes immanence immanent to nothing but itself. Husserl recognized that this idea of immanence (continuous heterogeneity) is paradoxical. Therefore, third, immanence requires a thinking beyond logic, beyond “tertium non datur.” In contrast to his definition of multiplicity as determinate, Husserl also, as we saw, argues for a kind of an-exact rigor for phenomenological psychology and for phenomenological philosophy. Similarly, Bergson speaks of improper or fluid concepts. These contestations of traditional or formal logic lead to a new understanding of language: language is more than logic. As Heidegger says (in the 1943 “Postscript” to “What Is Metaphysics ?”), “It now becomes necessary to ask the question . . . of whether The Thought of THE Nothing · 89 thinking already stands within the law of its truth when it merely follows the thinking whose forms and rules are conceived by ‘logic.’ . . . ‘Logic’ is only one interpretation of the essence of thinking” (GA 9: 308/PM: 235). But then, fourth, and following from this transformation of the concept of language and thinking, Bergson, Freud, and Husserl call for a reform of psychology. For Husserl, in particular, we saw that the epoché must be universal, the universal suspension of all positing of existence whether in everyday life or in science. The universality of the epoché means the overcoming of psychologism, but also, and more importantly, going beyond the reform of psychology, it means the overcoming of dogmaticpositivistic metaphysics. The universal method of the epoché leads at first to what looks like a renewal of metaphysics, but then to an overcoming of metaphysics as such. Therefore the four components of the structure of this thinking, of the research agenda called continental philosophy, are: (1) the starting point in immanence; (2) the transformation of immanence into multiplicity; (3) the liberation of language (and thinking) from logic; and (4) the overcoming of metaphysics. Overcoming metaphysics means the creation of concepts oriented by the idea that the whole is not given, that is, the creation of concepts not oriented by the idea that all things are defined by the ready availability of what is present before our eyes, that is, by static forms and teleological genesis. But it is Heidegger who shows us that the overcoming of metaphysics includes a transformation of humanity . Heidegger represents the transition from the renewal of metaphysics to the overcoming of metaphysics. But to overcome metaphysics, we must ask, “What is metaphysics?” We have selected the 1929 essay “What Is Metaphysics?” because, like the Encyclopedia Britannica essay, it is a compact presentation of Heidegger ’s early thought (the period around Being and Time up to the middle of the 1930s). But there is an additional reason for selecting it. Heidegger himself in effect singles out “What Is Metaphysics?” for its importance, since he writes a “Postscript” for it in 1943 (which we just mentioned) and an “Introduction” to it in 1949. These elaborations provide the thread to Heidegger’s later writings, after the so-called “turn.” To anticipate, we can say that Heidegger’s thought as a whole, both earlier and later, is driven by the attempt to make us—this is the transformation of humanity that truly defines the overcoming of metaphysics—understand our place in the difference between Being (Sein) and beings (Seiende),1 to make us 90 · Early Twentieth-Century Continental Philosophy learn how to dwell in the ontological difference, which Heidegger will eventually call “the event of propriation” (Ereignis). As we shall see, the learning to dwell within the event of propriation occurs only...