Fall 1999 Cyberseminar in Objectivist Studies:
"The Continental Origins of Postmodernism"

Week 3: September 27 - October 3

JAMIE MELLWAY ON ROGER DONWAY'S REVIEW OF HEIDEGGER'S "WHAT IS METAPHYSICS?"

Sent: Friday, October 01, 1999 3:23 PM

Subject: Cyberseminar: JM Comment on RD on Heidegger

[From: Jamie Mellway ]

COMMENT on "Heidegger's Attempt to Redeem Metaphysics"

"It's a show about nothing." -Seinfeld


* Note on references *

I am quoting from two books on Heidegger:
Murray, Michael, editor. 1978. _Heidegger and Modern Philosophy: Critical
Essays_. New Haven: Yale University Press. (refered to as Murray)

Heidegger, Martin. 1993. _Basic Writings_. David Krell, editor. San
Francisco: HarperSanFrancisco. (refered to as Krell)

I do not have a copy of _Being and Time_ (BT), so any BT quote either is
from "Being and Time: Introduction" in Krell, or was quoted in Murray.

(WM) refers to "What is metaphysics?"


* Preamble *

Before I begin, I want to thank TOC for letting me participant in this
CyberSeminar, to say that I've been reading the discussion so far with
interest, and that I am always delighted to see Objectivists giving
charitable readings of other philosophers (besides Aristotle, that is).

Having said that, I am having a harder time giving a charitable reading of
WM than others have. Perhaps that is because I have not had much exposure to
existentialism and continental philosophy...


* On point #1 *

Roger Donway says he believes that WM "must be read as a polemical lecture
trying to rebut the logical positivists of his day, who said that man's only
true knowledge of the world is given by the positive sciences and these
sciences tell us only what sorts of things exist." While I agree that
Heidegger is trying to rebut the positivists, I do not think he believes
that the positive sciences *can* tell us what sort of things exist. That
sort of talk still sounds a bit too "metaphysical" for the Positivists.

Heidegger denies that the symbolic logic of the Positivists has any
philosophic authority as "its formal nature prevents it from gaining
access to the living problems of the meaning of proposition, of its
structure and cognitive significance" (from his dissertation, quoted from
Murray p.6) and that "propositions are dissolved into a system of 'mapping
and interconnecting'; that become the object of a 'calculus,' but not of an
ontological interpretation" (BT202 from Murray p.7).

What is the semantic status of 'Being'? Aristotle tells us that Being is
not a genus (998b22); Kant tells us that "Being is obviously not a real
predicate" (A5098=B626); and Pascal points out that Being can not even be
defined (see BT, Krell p.43.) The Positivists do not even have the tools to
talk "meaningfully" about Being(!)--let alone "the nothing."

While Heidegger is trying to rebut the positivist project, he also needs to
be seen as to be implicitly rebutting three "prejudges" (Heidegger's term)
on the question of the meaning of Being. These are:
1. "Being" is the most "universal" concept
2. The concept of "Being" is undefinable
3. "Being" is the self-evident concept. (BT in Krell 42-4)

While we can be sympathetic to Heidegger as he rejects that notion that we
should upgrade symbolic logic to the rank of true logic, we must grasp in
horror that he is also rebutting our "prejudges!" :)


* More on Positivism*

Since we are discussing the Positivist/early-analytical-school, it might be
of interest to note two things:

First, Heidegger showed an acquaintance with the works of Frege and
Russell/Whitehead and even said, "it seems to me that the real significance
of G. Frege's logico-mathematical investigation has not yet been
appreciated; much less have his writings been exhaustively dealt with."
("Recent Research in Logic", quoted from Murray p.5).

Second, it should be noted that the logical positivist Rudolf Carnap did
comment on WM. His comments can be found in _Logical Positivism_ and this
selection can be found as "The Overcoming of Metaphysics through Logical
Analysis of Language" in Murray (pp. 23-34, esp pp. 23-6).

In this essay, Carnap claims that "the possibility of forming (the)
pseudostatements (of Heidegger) is based on a logical defect language" and
gives a chart to illustrate the Heidegger quotes "cannot even be constructed
in (logically) correct language." Unfortunately, Carnap gives a rather
uncharitable interpretation of the essay and even claims that Heidegger
introduces " 'nothing' as a name or description of an entity."


* On Point #5 *

Roger says that Heidegger's idea seems to be "Metaphysics inquires into the
nature of beings just in so far as they are beings." I don't think he is
doing that, unfortunately I am not very clear _what_ he is doing. But he
seems to be saying that "metaphysics is inquiry beyond or over being" (WM
Krell p.106), "that metaphysics belongs to the 'nature of man'" (p.109),
that metaphysics "is Dasein itself" (p.109), and that metaphysics is
definitely not the study of being qua being.


** Dread and Our Response **

Anyway, I have not made any comments on the sections on dread because,
frankly, this is not important to our "answer" to Heidegger. (BTW, my own
escape from dread is that I "dread" the thought of becoming an
existentialist more that I dread death. :) We become too charitable if we
discuss which emotions do or do not reveal what ontological what-is and so
on.

Instead we need to do is:
1) reclaim and elaborate our Aristotelian "prejudices" (including reuniting
existence and identity!)
2) make sure that our semantics are such that:
a) we can formulate the question of the meaning of Being (which
Heidegger denies that us Aristotelians can do) and answer it
b) if we can formulate the question of the meaning of "the nothing",
then it only refers to a negation
3) deny Heidegger's move to place metaphysics into the "nature of man."


Jamie Mellway
Senior Undergrad Physics/Philosophy
University of Waterloo (Canada)


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Fall 1999 Cyberseminar in Objectivist Studies

All Cyberseminar posts are working papers with copyright
reserved to the author. They may not be published or adapted
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