Heidegger and Philosophical Atheology: A Neo-Scholastic Critique 9781472546685, 9781847064516, 9781441143990

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“May the First Principle of things grant me to believe, to understand and to reveal what may please His majesty and may raise our minds to contemplate Him.” John Duns Scotus A Treatise on God as First Principle

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Acknowledgments

I would like to thank several people who have played a special role in shaping my philosophical and spiritual development. Though they may disagree with much of what I say, I hope they will discern some value in it. Thanks to Richard Aquila, the late Bruce Batts, Kathleen Bohstedt, Gary Ebbs, Gary Levvis, John Nolt, Harrison Pemberton, and James Ross. Special thanks to Pastor Gerald Bultman, Father William C. Casey, Father John Martin, Mary Alice Dillard, Joan Howard, Father Andrews Kollannoor, Tom and Brenda Macaluso, Mark Mussari, Father Richard Troutman, Charles Tunstall, Reverend Dr. Steve Weisz, Father Matthew Williams, and James Winfree. This work is dedicated to Father William P. Lane.

Introduction

This work is not about Heidegger or the history of Heidegger’s philosophy but about Heidegger’s philosophy itself and how it challenges traditional metaphysics, particularly high Scholasticism. I shall be mostly concerned with Heidegger’s later philosophy and those portions of his earlier and middle thought which complement it. Much of Heidegger’s later philosophy can be seen as part of a venerable metaphysical tradition that includes Plato, Aristotle, Aquinas, Scotus, Spinoza, and Hegel. Yet this shouldn’t lead us to conclude that the later philosophy is intended to be a continuation of metaphysics. For Heidegger’s principle aim is to “overcome” metaphysics, and overcoming metaphysics involves repudiating traditional metaphysical concepts, theses, and arguments as objects of serious intellectual inquiry. In particular, then, overcoming metaphysics means consigning Scholastic natural theology to the dustbin of discarded ideas. Hence, Heidegger’s later philosophy can be described as a kind of atheology. Many contemporary theologians and philosophers of religion such as Caputo, Milbank, Marion, and others embrace Heidegger’s repudiation of metaphysics yet also look to Heidegger’s atheology to reconstruct at least some elements of orthodox theistic belief. One upshot of the present work is that any such attempt is a grievous mistake. For as we will see in Chapter 3, in rejecting what he calls “onto-theology,” Heidegger means to reject the notion that the universe is created by a metaphysically independent Creator: not only are the traditional arguments for a First Cause flawed, but from a Heideggerian perspective the very idea of a First Cause is incoherent. Once the notion of a Creator is abandoned, it is obscure what remains of orthodox theistic belief. One might say that drawing upon Heideggerian atheology to elucidate faith is like parking the Trojan horse inside the walls of the City of God.

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The focus of this work is not primarily theological but philosophical. Its main target is the Heideggerian atheologian’s contention to have “overcome” traditional metaphysics once and for all. In the course of arguing that nothing could be further from the truth, I hope to help reinvigorate certain aspects of the Scholastic tradition. I write from a perspective that draws upon the impressive intellectual resources of medieval metaphysics, aspires to analytic rigor, and respects phenomenological insight while eschewing the rhetoric and methodology of deconstructionism. Although my perspective isn’t purely “Thomist” or “Scotist,” in places my preference for the Scotist outlook is discernible. Perhaps this is fitting, since the Subtle Doctor is the medieval thinker who influenced Heidegger most. Before outlining the structure of the work, I want to describe my approach to metaphysics and to Heidegger’s philosophy.

Metaphysics and methodology I take seriously the conception of metaphysics as a scientia in the medieval sense: a linguistically articulated discipline whose sayings may be evaluated according to whether they are adequate. Mathematics, natural science, poetry, and literature are also such disciplines, though they contain different kinds of sayings—theorems, hypotheses, poems, stories—assessable by varying standards of adequacy. As a scientia, metaphysics resembles mathematics and natural science in that its standard of adequacy is literal truth. (I am aware that Heideggerian atheology challenges metaphysical conceptions of truth; we will come to that presently.) Like mathematics, much of metaphysics is remote from empirical evidence. Even if metaphysical arguments often don’t achieve it, or even when they achieve it without their achieving it being recognized, such arguments aim at the same level of certainty as mathematical demonstrations or proofs (though some metaphysical proofs, such as Scotus’s Causal Argument for God’s existence or Aquinas’s Five Ways, proceed from at least some premises based on experience). Seeking a proof for a metaphysical thesis isn’t the same thing as engaging in a cost-benefit analysis of some philosophical problem, a contemporary view of metaphysics familiar from philosophers such as David Lewis

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and David Armstrong. On the cost-benefit view, a given metaphysical or philosophical claim—no matter how outlandish—may be endorsed if doing so yields sufficient theoretical benefits. This would allow the Heideggerian atheologian to argue that, despite the difficulties I shall describe concerning philosophical assertions about Appropriation and nothingness, we should endorse those assertions (or hope for a nonwilled event of Gelassenheit whereby the assertions come to be generally endorsed) because they provide us with the overwhelming theoretical benefit of radically simplifying our conceptual scheme by “overcoming” all metaphysics. Such a view makes things far too easy for the Heideggerian atheologian. Thus I am not interested in whether a philosophical claim is cost-effective but in whether it is coherent, and if so then whether it is true, and if so then why. On the other hand, metaphysics also resembles poetry and literature in that it has a strong personal and creative component nourished by a vibrant tradition. Each of the following chapters may be regarded as an intellectual foray in which, drawing upon my understanding of the relevant material and the excellent work of my predecessors, I attempt to advance our knowledge of a specific topic. Ideally, other metaphysicians should step in to evaluate a foray of mine by eliminating what is erroneous in it, consolidating what is correct in it, and proceeding to make their own forays on the same or some related topic. I hope that in time a comprehensive and plausible metaphysics covering a broad range of topics—in older terms, a metaphysical “system”—will emerge from this interplay among investigators. In this way, metaphysics proceeds in fits and starts toward truth. Alas, since the series of metaphysical forays presented here are all my forays, and since the thrust of my analysis is largely critical rather than constructive, the work doesn’t actually exemplify the vision of metaphysical inquiry sketched in the previous paragraph. Nonetheless, I beg the reader’s indulgence, for I am illustrating the methodology as best I can in connection with the serious challenge Heideggerian atheology poses to traditional metaphysics. To a certain extent, the critical commentary on earlier chapters by later ones approximates the kind of intersubjective investigation I have in mind, as do my remarks about what other metaphysicians have said concerning the topics under discussion.

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The dialectic of thought I am more interested in the dialectic of Heideggerian atheology than in the actual course of Heidegger’s intellectual development. This dialectic is a quasi-logical progression from weaker to stronger philosophical positions in response to possible objections. A philosopher’s position at a given time may be strengthened by ideas he expresses many years later, or even by ideas expressed in his earlier work; hence, the dialectic of thought need not follow the historical succession of ideas. As I see it, beginning with the seeds planted in Heidegger’s early monograph on Duns Scotus, Heideggerian atheology progresses to the very late writings, such as On Time and Being, where Heidegger develops an atheology of Appropriation as the ultimate explanans of the history of being. From there, the atheology progresses to Heidegger’s seminal writings of the period from 1929 through 1935, including “What is Metaphysics?” and An Introduction to Metaphysics, which contain the materials for constructing a powerful atheology centered on radical contingency, or nothingness. Being and Time is conspicuously absent from this dialectic—an absence that, for reasons given at the end of Chapter 1, is by no means accidental (though as we shall see in Chapter 5, some of Being and Time’s ideas shape the atheology that can be recovered from Heidegger’s middle period). The force of an objection is directly proportional to the number of background assumptions the objector can grant the opponent and still refute him. Guided by this principle, I pursue an approach to Heidegger’s texts that is critical and analytical rather than merely exegetical: from a given text, I extract the strongest philosophical position I can, doing my best to motivate Heideggerian views that might otherwise seem odd. I then consider the most forceful objection against the position I have extracted before turning to other texts in the Heideggerian corpus which supply the strongest possible reply to the objection. My analysis culminates with a fatal objection to the most powerful version of Heideggerian atheology. Without ruining the suspense, I will conclude my introduction by saying a bit about each chapter. Chapter 1 explains how young Heidegger draws upon Thomas of Erfurt and Duns Scotus in an ambitious attempt to reconcile an

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antipsychologistic conception of judgment and logic with Scholastic realism, a plausible view of the knowing subject, and the possibility of a univocal and phenomenologically rich account of the nature of being qua being. After raising objections to Heidegger’s early Scholastic view, in Chapter 2 I explain how the very late atheology of Appropriation provides strong prima facie replies to the objections I raise and also addresses young Heidegger’s lingering doubts about the phenomenological veracity of Scotus’s univocal account of being in terms of the transcendentals. Chapter 3 underscores the antimetaphysical character of the atheology of Appropriation by showing how it constitutes a formidable challenge to Scotus’s sophisticated version of the Causal Argument for God’s existence. In Chapter 4, I develop a Scholastic response which emphasizes what I will call the Problem of Sufficient Comprehension. Then, in Chapter 5, from Heidegger’s middle period I extract an atheology of radical contingency or nothingness that avoids this problem. The stage is thus set in Chapter 6 for the Scholastic attack on Heidegger’s assumption that even though there might not have been anything at all there still could have been something. Finally, in the conclusion I incorporate one salvageable aspect of Heidegger’s thought about nothingness within a Scholastic framework to develop a solution to an outstanding metaphysical problem: the status of mathematical truth.

Chapter 1

Early Heidegger and Scholasticism

In his Duns Scotus’s Theory of the Categories and of Meaning,1 the Habilitationsschrift or dissertation he submitted in 1915 to qualify as a Privatdozent at the University of Freiburg, the young Heidegger appropriates certain elements of Scholastic metaphysics for his own purposes. At this stage of his career, Heidegger is avowedly prometaphysical. Yet a critical examination of the Habilitationsschrift will teach us much about the dynamics of Heidegger’s later antimetaphysical and atheological thought. Heidegger refers primarily to De Modis Significandi Sive Grammatica Speculativa, a work he incorrectly attributes to Scotus but which was actually written by the fourteenth-century Modist grammarian Thomas of Erfurt.2 Three dominant philosophical motifs shape Heidegger’s treatment of Erfurt: an antipsychologistic conception of judgment and logic, the concern to allow for a plausible view of subjectivity which also allows for a robust form of objectivity, and the question of the nature of being qua being. On a psychologistic conception of judgment, judgments are particular psychic acts, and logical laws are general empirical descriptions of how we actually think. Psychologism faces two objections. Intuitively, judgments (or their contents) are true or false independently of any psychic acts occurring in individuals. If there is a cactus in my backyard, then it is true that there is a cactus in my backyard even if no one is perceiving or thinking about it; and it remains true that there is a cactus in my backyard even after anyone has stopped perceiving or thinking about it.3 Furthermore, a psychologistic conception of judgment misses the normative nature of logic, since different empirical laws may describe the thinking of other people, communities, and cultures. Yet logic governs all possible thinking: to think at

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all is ipso facto to think in accordance with logical principles. In his doctoral dissertation of 1914, Heidegger vigorously defends an antipsychological conception of judgment and logic against writers such as Theodor Lipps. The Habilitationsschrift continues and deepens this antipsychologism. Heidegger’s concern to harmonize subjectivity with objectivity arises from his neo-Kantian inheritance and his desire to appropriate aspects of medieval thought. For Scholastics such as Scotus and Erfurt, categories are not mere mental structures but real natural kinds existing independently of our minds. As we shall see, the philosophical program of the Habilitationsschrift requires a robust realism about some system of categories. However, following Kant’s arguments in the Transcendental Dialectic that attributing a categorical structure to reality results in antinomies, the neo-Kantians identify categories with structures of transcendental subjectivity. Prima facie, a commitment to Scholastic realism cannot be squared with a commitment to transcendental idealism. If a variant of realism is to be adopted, then at the very least it must allow for a plausible view of how the knowing subject apprehends categories of reality that avoids paradox. For the young Heidegger, such a view promises to emerge from Husserl’s exciting work in Logical Investigations and Ideas. The third motif, the question of the nature of being, is implicated in any inquiry into categories of reality. It may be asked, not only whether a given system of categories is metaphysically adequate, but also whether there are any trans-categorical attributes which apply in the same sense to beings falling under distinct categories—in Scotist terms, whether being is univocal. The Scotist metaphysics in which Erfurt grounds his grammatical speculations answers in the affirmative and takes this univocal content to be expressed by the transcendentals of being (ens), unity (unum), truth (verum), and goodness (bonum).4 Though the young Heidegger elaborates this Scotist position, he also insists that to avoid collapsing into a system of empty and bloodless classifications a theory of categories must capture the “depth and richness” of the life world inhabited by those for whom the categories mark real distinctions.5 Whether there is a trans-categorical, phenomenologically adequate account of univocal being is not decided by the

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conclusion of the Habilitationsschrift, though the possibility of such an account is left open. Although Heidegger develops an ingenious attempt to reconcile these three philosophical motifs, the attempt ultimately fails. This failure is instructive, however, for it allows us to see how details of the very late atheology to be discussed in Chapters 2, 3, and 4 address difficulties with the earlier view. Furthermore, Heidegger’s discussion of negativity in the Habilitationsschrift lays the groundwork for the atheology of nothingness that can be extracted from his writings in the 1930s.

A Précis of Erfurt’s Speculative Grammar Thomas of Erfurt’s Grammatica Speculativa, written probably between 1300 and 1310, is perhaps the best-known and most sophisticated work in a tradition of medieval grammarians known as the Modists.6 Erfurt seeks to explain how signs become not only words (dicta) with semantic content but also parts of speech (partes orationis) capable of combining with one another to form grammatical sentences which express complete judgments. In a brilliant synthesis of Scholastic philosophy of mind, philosophy of language, and metaphysics, Erfurt argues that the grammatical properties of linguistic expressions, or modi significandi, are derived from features of extralinguistic reality apprehended by the mind. One might say that, unlike the standard reading of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, according to which the ontological structure of the world can be read off from the logico-grammatical structure underlying any possible language, Erfurt maintains that the grammatical structure of any possible language can be read off from the ontological structure of the world. Once the possibility of parts of speech combining to form grammatical sentences has been explained, the stage is set for an investigation of the logical relations among sentences and the judgments they express in syllogistic reasoning. For Erfurt and the other Modists, then, speculative grammar is a propaedeutic to logic. Erfurt divides his treatise into three sections: the Preamble, the Etymologia, and the Diasynthetica or Syntax. The Preamble sets forth Erfurt’s conceptual apparatus and describes in general terms how the

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modi significandi are bestowed on dicta so that the latter become genuine parts of speech. In the Etymologia, Erfurt lays out in specific detail how the modi significandi of each traditional part of speech—nouns, pronouns, verbs, participles, adverbs, conjunctions, prepositions, and interjections—are derived from corresponding features of reality, or modi essendi. The Diasynthetica elaborates the syntactic principles by virtue of which parts of speech as constructibles combine to form complete constructions of sentences capable of expressing judgments. I will discuss each of these sections briefly, calling attention to several philosophically salient points. For Erfurt and other Scholastic realists, the mind is capable of apprehending modi essendi through the modes of understanding, or modi intelligendi. Each of the latter is either an active mode of understanding (modus intelligendi activus), whereby the mind conceives things, or a passive mode of understanding (modus intelligendi passivus), whereby the mind perceives or apprehends things.7 Similarly, the modes of signification are divided into active and passive. An active mode of signification is directly derived from a passive mode of understanding when the mind’s ability to track an apprehended feature of reality is bestowed on a sign.8 Erfurt does not discuss the passive mode of signification, but it might be identified with hearing or seeing an expression already functioning as a part of speech. There is a two-sided process, in which a vocal expression (vox) becomes a sign (signum) and then a word (dictio) with semantic content; and in which an active mode of signification derived from a passive mode of the intellect that has apprehended a mode of reality is bestowed upon the dictio so that it becomes a part of speech possessing the potential to combine with other parts of speech in grammatical constructions.9 Erfurt’s realism requires that for every part of speech and grammatical difference there is a distinct mode of signification derived from a mode of the intellect which in turn has apprehended a distinct mode of extralinguistic reality. This has led some commentators to complain that Erfurt’s theory exhibits an ontological profligacy that makes “even Meinong seem parsimonious.”10 This complaint insinuates the misconception that modes of signification are an ontologically distinct category of objects or meanings, whereas these modes are

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merely acts of mind. Moreover, if reality contains all the features Erfurt and other Scholastics ascribe to it, then a theory of grammar which posits a corresponding number of passive modes of intellect and active modes of signification isn’t ontologically profligate but merely accurate.11 We should expect a grammatical theory grounded in a complex reality to be equally complex.12 In the Etymologia, Erfurt specifies the various modes of signification for the eight traditional parts of speech. In each case, he begins with the essential modes, which are then further divided into general, subaltern, and special modes. The general essential mode provides the definition of the part of speech under consideration, whereas the special and subaltern modes are specific differences within this general essence. Erfurt then presents the accidental modes of signification for the part of speech, which are nonspecific differences within the general essence. Working through a couple of parts of speech should suffice to give us the flavor of Erfurt’s theory. The general essential mode of signification for nouns is the mode of an entity and determinate understanding.13 By this, Erfurt means that the noun’s definitive mode of signification is derived from the passive mode of the intellect which apprehends as modes of extralinguistic reality the enduring through time of substances and the definiteness of their properties. The two main subaltern modes of signification for nouns are the common mode associated with common nouns (e.g., “horse”) and the proper mode associated with proper nouns (e.g., “Rome”). The common mode is derived from the mode of reality whereby properties can be multiply instantiated by particulars, while the proper mode is derived from the mode of reality whereby particulars themselves cannot be instantiated.14 The common mode is further divided into the mode of independence associated with substantival nouns (e.g., “whiteness”), which is derived from the mode of reality whereby properties are ontologically distinct from the substances in which they inhere, and the mode of adjacency associated with adjectives (e.g., “white”), which is derived from the mode of reality whereby properties nevertheless inhere in substances. The mode of independence is then divided into five special modes and the mode of adjacency is divided into 24 special modes; the proper mode of the noun is divided into four special

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modes. Each of these special modes corresponds with a distinct mode of reality apprehended by a passive mode of the intellect.15 Erfurt completes his analysis of the noun by specifying six accidental modes of signification nouns may possess: type, gender, number, form, case, and person. Unlike the subaltern and special modes, the accidental modes do not yield different species of nouns but merely differences among nouns which occur within the same general essence. Like the subaltern and special modes, however, the accidental modes are derived from corresponding modes of extralinguistic reality. For example, the first person of a noun is derived from that mode of reality whereby a person is speaking of himself or herself.16 For verbs, the general essential mode of signification is derived from the passive mode of the intellect which apprehends as modes of reality the being (activity, flux, succession) in substances and the separation of this being or activity from substances.17 Erfurt divides this general essential mode into three subaltern modes: the substantival mode (e.g., “is”) derived from the general being that applies to anything in reality, the vocative mode (e.g., “He is John”) derived from the mode of reality whereby substances are named or identified, and the adjectival mode (e.g., all other verbs) derived from the mode of reality whereby substances act or are acted upon. Erfurt then specifies four special modes of the adjectival verb—active, passive, neutral, common and deponent—each of which is also derived from a particular mode of extralinguistic reality.18 A brief consideration of what Erfurt says concerning the accidental modes of signification for the verb provides a transition to his account of syntax. The verb has two accidental modes which enable it to link with either a noun subject (NV) or with a post-posed oblique (VN, where N is, e.g., a direct object), thus forming a single construction. Since the essential mode of the verb contains the mode of separation, Erfurt introduces these additional modes to explain how such syntactic linkage is possible; the additional modes must be accidental, since otherwise it would be impossible for meaningful verbs possessing syntactic potential to occur outside of NV or VN constructions. The accidental mode linking verbs with noun subjects is the mode of composition (compositio), which reflects the mood of the verb differentiated into five modes: indicative, imperative, optative, conjunctive,

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and infinitive.19 The accidental mode linking verbs with noun objects is the mode of signification (significatio), which reflects the voice of the verb and is also differentiated into five modes: active, passive, neuter, deponent, and common.20 The other accidental modes of the verb are quality, conjugation, number, form, tense, and person—though these modes are not as important syntactically as the modes of compositio and significatio. Interestingly, though the mode of compositio is said to be partly derived from the mental states of the speaker, Erfurt also notes that every verb implicitly contains a copulative element (“est ”) “which cannot be understood without some [nominal] term.”21 Symmetrically, although the mode of significatio also reflects mental states of the speaker, it too derives from an implicit requirement in certain verbs for “the mode of an independent entity in any post-posed oblique [nominal object].”22 Thus, we see that not every grammatical property is explained in terms of a distinct mode of signification derived from a corresponding feature of extralinguistic reality. This will become increasingly apparent in Erfurt’s account of syntax, and the point has important philosophical ramifications to which I shall return at the end of this section. Erfurt elaborates three main principles of syntax in the Diasynthetica. The first of these is the principle of construction. For Erfurt, each construction is a union of two constructibles. For example, the construction homo albus currit bene is a union of the constructibles homo albus and currit bene; in turn, the former construction is a union of the constructibles homo and albus, and the latter construction is a union of the constructibles currit and bene. Each construction consists of a dependent constructible and a determinant constructible upon which the former depends.23 Erfurt then proceeds to distinguish between transitive constructions, in which the first constructible is the dependent and the second constructible the determinant, and intransitive constructions, in which the converse relation holds between the first and second constructibles. Additional divisions Erfurt makes within both transitive and intransitive constructions need not concern us here.24 The second main principle is that of congruity. Among the several requirements for congruity, the most important is that either concord

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or complementation must obtain between determinant and dependent constructibles. In a construction where the dependent constructible (e.g., a personal verb) derives its modes of signification (e.g., gender, number, and person) from those of the determinant constructible (e.g., a noun subject), there is concord between the dependent and determinant constructibles. However, when the dependent constructible (e.g., an adjective) derives its modes of signification not from those of the determinant constructible (e.g., a noun subject) but from a passive mode of the intellect that bestows those modes directly on the dependent constructible, then the modes of signification of the dependent and the determinant constructibles must be merely complementary (e.g., the adjective’s mode of adjacency complements the noun’s mode of independence).25 Once a speaker has united the right congruent constructibles into a sentence with the intention of expressing a judgment that can be grasped by someone who hears the uttered sentence, the third principle of completion follows naturally enough.26 Philosophically, it is important to notice that Erfurt’s theory does not explain the grammatical structure of an entire sentence by introducing a new mode of signification derived from a corresponding mode of reality. Though Erfurt isn’t explicit on the point, it is easy to see why this is so. Grammatically distinct sentences such as “Socrates pursues Plato” and “Plato is pursued by Socrates” nevertheless describe the same (possible) fact. If the grammatical structure of a sentence were itself a mode of signification derived from extralinguistic reality, then these sentences’ different grammatical modes would either be derived from the same feature of extralinguistic reality or not. Given Erfurt’s requirement that different modes of signification reflect distinct features of extralinguistic reality, the first alternative is impossible. And allowing at least one of these grammatical modes not to be derived from extralinguistic reality would violate Erfurt’s requirement that all modes of signification be derived from modes of reality.27 Instead, Erfurt explains the distinct grammatical structures of these sentences in terms of congruity between the modes of signification of expressions already analyzed in the Etymologia.28 Thus for Erfurt, a sentence expressing a judgment does not “fit” an actual or possible fact in virtue of some logico-grammatical form

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common to the sentence, the judgment, and the fact. Rather, parts of speech in their various modes of signification mirror features of extralinguistic reality by virtue of the mind’s prior ability to “track” these features through passive acts of the intellect.29 The point of correspondence is not between sentences and facts but between the mind and the world it directly apprehends.

Heidegger’s appropriation of Scotus and Erfurt Heidegger devotes the first part of the Habilitationsschrift to a sympathetic reconstruction of Scotus’s theory of categories, which serves as a metaphysical basis for Erfurt’s speculative grammar and for Heidegger’s own project: We want to know what Scotus thinks is covered in the Grammar (as a theory of meaning). The singularity of its domain of objects is to be recognized. Thus, we are led back to something even more primordial, to the domains of objects; and in this is indicated the proper direction, the sole one in which our task can be accomplished.30 As Heidegger sees it, one problem with the ten traditional Aristotelian categories is that they apply only to actual spatiotemporal objects and their properties.31 It is unclear how mental states, numbers, fictions, privations, and putatively logical objects such as meanings fit into this traditional classification. From Scotus, Heidegger extracts a new taxonomy of domains of beings. The two major domains are sensory beings and extrasensory beings. The sensory domain comprises what Heidegger calls natural reality and is further divided into the domain of physical objects and the domain of psychical acts. The extrasensory domain comprises what Heidegger calls metaphysical reality and is further divided into the domain of mathematical beings and the domain of logical beings (and perhaps the domain of supernatural beings, if God and angels exist).32 This Scotus-inspired taxonomy seems preferable to the Aristotelian categories in two respects: it applies to beings not easily classified by the traditional conception; and, supplemented by Scotus’s theory of the trans-categorical attributes, it holds open the possibility

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of a univocal account of the nature of being common to beings in different domains. Concerning the transcendentals, Heidegger follows Scotus in characterizing being (ens) as the minimal conceptualization prior to any categorical conceptualizations of beings.33 Heidegger analyzes unity (unum) as the “contrariety” whereby a given being is not any other being.34 All the transcendentals are predicable of being itself, or as Heidegger says, “convertible with ens.”35 We shall return to the transcendental of unity later in this chapter. For now, the most direct route into Heidegger’s early philosophy lies in his reflections on the transcendental of truth (verum). For Heidegger, truth pertains primarily to judgments: “Judgment is that which admits being called true in the proper sense.”36 Wherein does the truth of a judgment consist? In answering this question, Heidegger wishes to steer between the Scylla of psychologism, which he takes himself to have refuted in his 1914 dissertation, and the Charybdis of traditional correspondence theories of truth. The Habilitationsschrift is peppered with antipsychologistic passages like the following: As compared to the understanding and solution of logical problems in the psychologistic sense (a view that has only recently been losing strength), scholastic thought has a maturity of view for the peculiarity and proper value of the domain of logic that is not to be disregarded or undervalued, no matter how much it restricts itself to generalizing view points.37 Against the “copy theory” of truth, according to which there is some kind of “copy, a sort of repetition in thought, of that which ‘lies in things’ as if the judgmental relation also existed ontologically,”38 Heidegger objects that there is no more similarity between true judgments and the facts they describe than there is between the hoop on the tavern sign which signifies wine and the wine served inside; furthermore, on the “copy theory,” to ascertain the truth of a judgment J we must first ascertain whether J copies reality, and to ascertain this we must first ascertain whether the further judgment that J copies reality itself copies reality, and so on ad infinitum.39 Heidegger doesn’t

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develop these objections sufficiently for them to be conclusive.40 Yet given his endorsement of Erfurt’s speculative grammar, he has available to him the deeper reason for rejecting traditional correspondence theories described in the previous section: grammatically distinct sentences can describe the same fact, so that there is no distinct mode of signification derived from extralinguistic reality in virtue of which a sentence “copies” a possible fact. More positively, Heidegger maintains that a judgment is a psychic act which nonetheless possesses a purely logical, extrasensory content (ens rationis) existing independently of the mind (ens in anima). When I judge that there is a cactus in my backyard, I perform a psychic act whose content is that there is a cactus in my backyard. My judgment is true if and only if this content obtains—that is, there is a cactus in my backyard. Since true judgments may be made about any being, including judgments themselves, the transcendental of truth applies to all beings. Moreover, by sharply demarcating between psychic acts, which are studied by empirical psychology, and the contents of such acts, which fall solely within the purview of logic, Heidegger neatly avoids psychologism. Here it may appear that Heidegger runs into a serious difficulty. How do logical contents become the contents of psychic acts of judgment? Heidegger echoes Scotus’s characterization of logical beings as having ens diminutum or “diminished being,” implying that “logical being doesn’t have the reality of actual existence and, for this reason, the category of causality isn’t applicable to this domain either.”41 It is then mysterious how a causally inert ens diminutum can “become” the content of a psychic act, or how psychic acts subject to causes and effects can “grasp” logical contents which aren’t. Heidegger seems to avoid psychologism only at the cost of banishing the logical contents of judgments to an epistemically inaccessible “third realm” of abstract beings totally dissociated from empirical reality. Might Heidegger circumvent this difficulty by appealing to some of Husserl’s ideas? In Logical Investigations, Husserl claims that a logical “meaning” stands to the mental acts of which that meaning is the content as redness stands to red particulars. The logical content common to different psychic acts of judging would then stand to them as a universal stands to a particular which instantiates it.42 Unfortunately,

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this reply is not available to Heidegger. In line with Scotus’s realism, Heidegger holds that real universals only exist ante rem, or in particulars which instantiate them.43 Hence, if a logical content is a universal, then it exists only if at least one psychic act instantiates that content. Yet Heidegger is emphatic that “if the subject doesn’t think and judge . . . that doesn’t mean that with the disappearance of the act of judgment the content is destroyed too.”44 As noted earlier, if there is a cactus in my backyard, then it is true that there is a cactus in my backyard even if no one is judging this to be so. Alternatively, Heidegger might relax Scotus’s ante rem realism in the case of logical contents by construing them as something like independently existing Platonic forms/properties, or he might identify logical contents with abstract objects similar to Fregean thoughts (Gedanken) which “are the same in timeless identity”;45 in either case, he might urge that our ability to grasp logical contents is a primitive capacity of the mind. Aside from the unattractiveness of taking such a capacity as primitive, postulating a nonspatial and timeless realm of abstract beings greatly complicates any inquiry into the nature of being qua being—especially one seeking a univocal account of being. For the being of nonspatial, timeless beings in the extrasensory domain is entirely unlike the being of spatiotemporal beings in the sensory domain.46 The mere fact that we can make true judgments about beings in each domain hardly provides us with an informative and phenomenologically rich characterization of their common being; indeed, it is the epitome of the sort of empty and bloodless classification Heidegger derides.47 It is precisely at this juncture that Erfurt’s realism offers Heidegger an attractive way out of his quandary. Recall that according to Erfurt, logic depends on grammar, and grammar itself depends on reality. Specifically, sentences expressing judgments contain parts of speech whose grammatical properties mirror distinct features of extralinguistic reality. Even though such sentences do not “copy” reality in virtue of some shared logico-grammatical structure, they do present reality as being a certain way. For example, the sentence “There is a cactus in my back yard” presents reality as being such that there actually is a cactus in my backyard—or as Heidegger puts it, as “intending an affair complex of the object”48 consisting of there

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actually being a cactus in my backyard. The judgment expressed by this sentence is true just in case there actually is a cactus in my backyard. Furthermore, in the Habilitationsschrift Heidegger maintains that being or reality is not limited to what is actual: “Not every special object of cognition is in fact determined by the ten categories, but only actual objects. . . . Thus the categories of the nonreal must necessarily come into the horizon of the logician as is the case in fact with Duns Scotus.”49 In addition to actual affair complexes, there are nonactual affair complexes which nevertheless have being. One such complex is that there is an oak tree in my backyard. The judgment that there is an oak tree in my backyard is false because it presents as actual an affair complex that has nonactual being. In general, on Heidegger’s theory a judgment is true if and only if either it presents as actual an affair complex that has actual being or it presents as nonactual an affair complex that has nonactual being; otherwise, the judgment is false.50 This Erfurtian theory allows Heidegger to embrace antipsychologism without relegating the logical contents of judgments to a mysterious third realm. Logical contents are not causally inert abstract beings; as Heidegger boldly asserts, “the meaning itself cannot in the first place gain existence and reality through its act [of judgment] because it does not really exist at all.”51 Rather, the logical contents of judgments are affair complexes having actual or nonactual being. Thus, judgments made in accordance with logical rules are ultimately accountable to actual and nonactual features of extralinguistic reality that is the way it is independently of whether anyone is making judgments about it. Contrary to psychologism, there cannot be different “logics” corresponding with different ways of thinking. There is only one logic grounded in being itself. Nor is there a problem of how we can grasp nonactual affair complexes comparable to that of how we can grasp abstract logical contents. To grasp an actual or nonactual affair complex is just to recognize that the affair complex is logically possible—or in Scotist terms, that it is not repugnant to being as such. Certainly there are questions about the nature of logical possibility, some of which we will take up later in this work. However, recognizing the logical possibility of

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a given affair complex seems much less daunting than “grasping” a nonspatiotemporal, causally inert being. On Heidegger’s view, perhaps it is also easier to see how one might construct a univocal and phenomenologically rich account of being than it is on a view that postulates abstract logical contents. There is no domain of nonspatial and timeless beings standing over against the domain of spatiotemporal beings of concrete empirical reality, and thus it is not necessary to devise a substantive, trans-categorical characterization that straddles these diverse domains. If anything, nonactual affair complexes seem phenomenologically “closer” that nonspatiotemporal abstract beings do to actual affair complexes containing spatiotemporal beings, since nonactual beings are at least presented “as if” they are in space and time, whereas purely abstract beings are not.52 In a masterstroke, then, it seems that Heidegger has reached a compelling solution to the philosophical problems taken up in the Habilitationsschrift. Or has he?

The problem of subjectivity One philosophical motif of the Habilitationsschrift is the concern to allow for a plausible account of subjectivity. Does Heidegger’s appropriation of Erfurt meet this concern? Erfurt explains the grammatical properties of parts of speech in terms of the mind’s ability to apprehend distinct features of extralinguistic reality and to bestow corresponding modes of signification on dicta. Hence, to avoid circularity, the mind must be capable of apprehending these features of reality independently of possessing a language containing grammatical expressions. What constitutes this intellectual capacity? Erfurt does not say. And Heidegger’s remarks about the possibility of thought without language are surprisingly terse: This separation [of the logical content of thought from language content] must be looked at as a purely theoretical one. How far it is possible to live in a completely logical framework, to comprehend without linguistic supports, remains a factual question left

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over from the psychology of thought. However the problem is solved, the validity of the separation carried out above is not affected by it in the least.53 Thus, Heidegger is content to leave the question of how thought is possible apart from language to future theoretical investigations. The unsatisfactory nature of this promissory note becomes apparent when we reflect that Erfurt’s speculative grammar attributes to the mind the ability to apprehend a bewildering number of features of extralinguistic reality independently of possessing a language: substances and their determinate properties; the fact that properties can be multiply instantiated by particulars; the fact that particulars cannot be instantiated; the fact that properties are ontologically distinct from the particulars that possess them; the fact that these same properties necessarily inhere in particulars; the 33 modes of reality corresponding to the special modes of signification for substantival nouns, adjectival nouns, and proper nouns; the six accidental modes of signification for nouns in general—and these are the modi essendi corresponding to the modi significandi for just one part of speech! By the time Erfurt has completed his Etymologia, the mind has been attributed the nonlinguistic ability to apprehend an entire world of substances, attributes, activities, persons, places, times, other minds’ mental states, and the complex welter of interdependencies among all these features. Yet not even the barest sketch has been given of how such cognitive apprehension is possible without already possessing a fully grammatical language in which the fine discriminations of sophisticated Scholastic metaphysics can be made. Let us speculate about whether such a cognitive capacity might be explained in terms congenial to Erfurt and Heidegger. One possibility is that the features of extralinguistic reality corresponding to grammatical properties are first apprehended by the “mental words,” or dicta, which are not yet grammatically functional. A problem with this suggestion is that it remains obscure how a dictum can signify an extralinguistic feature explaining some grammatical property without the dictum itself becoming grammatically functional. More seriously, Erfurt ascribes to the intellect “the faculty of signifying, which can be called signification by means of which a sign or

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significant is effected, and so it is formally a word”54—that is, the ability to convey semantic content upon a mental word. Thus even if dicta could signify extralinguistic features explaining grammatical properties, their ability to do so would be derived from the mind’s prior and still unexplained capacity to apprehend the requisite extralinguistic features. Another possibility is that apprehension of the extralinguistic features initially occurs in a purely mental “language of thought” which underlies every possible natural language and conveys the same deep grammatical structure upon it.55 Obviously this raises the question of how the parts of speech in the mental language themselves possess grammatical properties which mirror features of extralinguistic reality. Not in virtue of any mental acts, since on the proposal under consideration all mental acts take place in the language of thought. It might be suggested that parts of speech in the language of thought mirror extralinguistic features in virtue of certain yet-to-be specified causal or tracking relations between “mentalese” tokens and extralinguistic features. But this suggestion threatens to render the mental language superfluous, since we may ask why the same nonmental relations can’t obtain directly between expressions of a natural language and the requisite extralinguistic features. Moreover, from a Heideggerian perspective, recourse to nonmental relations in an explanation of how expressions become parts of speech is not an attractive option, since it seems to allow no role for the mind in determining the grammatical properties of language, and hence provides no plausible view of subjectivity. Eventually Heidegger himself comes to repudiate the radical independence of thought from language. In Being and Time, language is understood as discourse (Rede) which is said to be “existentially equiprimordial with attunement and understanding” and hence not derived from the intellect.56 And in his later writings Heidegger urges that any understanding of being is vouchsafed by language: language is the house of being.57 Let us consider the repercussions this repudiation has for the two other philosophical motifs of the Habilitationsschrift. Suppose it is conceded that thought of extralinguistic reality is impossible apart from language as a fundamental mode of Dasein.

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What then becomes of the question of the nature of being qua being? In Being and Time, attention shifts from being as something our minds can directly apprehend to the understanding of being possessed by Dasein and embodied in its linguistic practices and other activities. The question of being is thus postponed until a phenomenologically adequate account is obtained of Dasein as the only being that has an understanding of being, at which point Heidegger hopes to extend the analysis to encompass being in general.58 The serious metaphysician can be forgiven for regarding this as a colossal red herring. After all, if one wishes to clarify the nature of quantum reality or numbers, then it is highly circuitous—if not entirely irrelevant—to study humans merely because they have a conception of quantum reality or numbers. Certainly an inquiry into the nature of being in general should explain the place of human beings, but focusing on human beings and their conception(s) of being threatens to skew the search for a univocal, phenomenologically rich account of being into something unrecognizable. For this reason, I believe that we must turn to later Heidegger’s less anthropocentric inquiry into the nature of being. Later Heidegger collapses the distinction between being and the human understanding of being by identifying being as such with successive collective understandings of being that make up the history of Western philosophy. There is nothing more to being than the linguistically articulated “dispensations” of being shared by humans in different historical epochs.59 We shall explore this view in greater detail in the next chapter. For now, it is important to appreciate how the later, historicized approach to being apparently conflicts with early Heidegger’s commitment to an antipsychologistic conception of judgment and logic. If judgments made by humans living in a particular epoch reflect not extralinguistic reality but the linguistic conception of being defining that epoch, then since different epochs are defined by different conceptions of being it follows that humans living in different epochs make judgments in accordance with the prevailing metaphysical conception of their day. Consequently there is no common set of logical principles governing all possible thought; indeed, on the later Heideggerian view logic is a relic of a particular conception of being, with roots in

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Plato and Aristotle but clearly emerging with Descartes and flowering in Hegel, in which being is understood as objectivity comprehensible to representation (Vorstellung). There are only the different ways of thinking characteristic of distinct historical epochs.60 The evolution of Heidegger’s philosophy seems to vindicate rather than to refute psychologism. Does Heidegger abandon his earlier antipsychologistic conception of judgment in favor of historical psychologism or cultural relativism? To understand why the answer to this question is no, the next stage in the dialectic of thought must turn to the atheology of Appropriation that can be extracted from Heidegger’s very late writings. First I will describe the elementary meontology, or theory of nonbeing, that emerges from early Heidegger’s analysis of the transcendental of unity (unum). Heidegger’s meontology in the Habilitationsschrift is important because it foreshadows the very different atheology of nothingness that can be recovered from his middle period.

Negativity in the Habilitationsschrift Unity is that by virtue of which a being is the unique being it is. Hence unity is a transcendental because it applies to beings in all categories: there are unique substances (e.g., Socrates), unique quantities (e.g., the number 5), unique qualities and relations (e.g., whiteness and being larger than), and so forth. Heidegger argues that the unity of a being is not itself a being; otherwise, every unique being would consist of two beings—itself and its unity—instead of just one.61 The fact that the unity of a being is not a being also establishes that the being’s unity is not a number, since numbers are beings.62 Nor is the unity of a being a privation, since a privation “doesn’t posit an object”63—for example, a person who comes to suffer the privation of blindness doesn’t thereby become a different unique being. What then is unity? Heidegger answers that the unity of a being X is the contrariety in virtue of which X is not any other being Y: “Unum bestows a determination on the object through the privative mode of meaning. An object is one object and not any other object.”64 The contrariety whereby X is not any other being Y is not the same as the “pure negation” or nonbeing

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of Y, for the nonbeing of Y is compatible with there being nothing whatsoever, including X.65 Ultimately, Heidegger settles for a relational analysis of contrariety as the relation X has to any other being Y in virtue of which X is not the same as Y: The sole relation which characterizes the nature of both terms of the relation is contrariety. For it is proper to the terms of the relation here that each of them posits another object with different content.66 Any being, then, exemplifies a kind of relational nonbeing which is distinct from pure negation and which distinguishes that being from other beings. Heidegger’s analysis of unity in terms of contrariety appears to have the unwelcome consequence that it is impossible for only one unique being to exist. For on the analysis, a being’s uniqueness consists its not being other beings, so that if there exists a unique being there must also exist at least one other being that it is not. Certainly, Scotus and other Scholastics would reject this consequence, since it precludes God from existing as a unique even if nothing else exists (the contingency of the created universe). Heidegger’s commitment to nonactual beings and affair complexes might afford him some room to maneuver here: the unity or uniqueness of a being consists in its not being any other being, actual or nonactual. Then there can be a unique being X even if there is no other actual being, since in that case a contrariety still obtains whereby X is not any of the nonactual beings which are also part of reality broadly considered.67 My point is not to resolve the problem of unity here but to call the reader’s attention to early Heidegger’s taxonomy of negativity. Contradictions, such as X’s being white and not white all over at the same time, are not the same as pure negations, such as X’s not existing, since contradictions cannot obtain but pure negations may or may not obtain.68 A pure negation is also compatible with a total yet contingent state of nothingness, which might be called “maximal pure negation” as opposed to a minimal pure negation such as X’s existing though other beings exist. Pure negations, both maximal and minimal, are different from privations and from the contrariety

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constituting the negativity of a given being.69 This taxonomy of negativity is another way Heidegger’s supplements Scotus’s theory of categories. In a later chapter, we will take up the matter of whether the nothing that “nihilates” and that serves as the crux of Heidegger atheology of nothingness fits into this taxonomy.

Chapter 2

Heidegger’s Atheology of Appropriation

Throughout his later writings, Heidegger stresses the need for a kind of post-metaphysical thinking that “explicitly enters Appropriation in order to say It in terms of It” in such a manner as “to overcome any obstacles that tend to render such saying inadequate.”1 Heidegger’s reflections on post-metaphysical thinking culminate in the atheology of Appropriation (Ereignis) that can be extracted from the very late lecture “Time and Being.” I take Heidegger to conceive of “thinking” as a normative discipline intended to serve as a nonmetaphysical successor to traditional logic, in which judgments made solely in accordance with logical principles are replaced or at least augmented by “sayings” assessable as adequate in some sense.2 Ideally, such thinking leads those who pursue it to “overcome” all metaphysics, so that no further dispensations of being will be “sent,” and to embrace a common and radically nonmetaphysical vision of the world as a “fourfold” of earth, sky, divinities, and mortals.3 Furthermore, though avowedly post-metaphysical, Heidegger’s atheology of Appropriation purports to engage traditional metaphysical concerns. Therefore, presumably post-metaphysical thinking is a disciplined linguistic activity that nonetheless maintains some sort of continuity with traditional metaphysics.4 The philosophical content of Heidegger’s atheology of Appropriation will concern us in this chapter, and some of its far-reaching consequences will be traced in Chapter 3. We will see that the very late view not only escapes many of the objections raised in the previous chapter but also makes substantial progress toward early Heidegger’s goal of a univocal, phenomenologically rich account of being.

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Opening moves in the discipline of thinking Traditionally, metaphysics begins with what is known as the intuition of being, a minimally conceptualized awareness of beings not insofar as they have shape, size, color, motion, or any other specific property but insofar as they have being (which is usually not understood as a property or genus). On the one hand, the intuition of being is more than the vague and confused conception of being everyone possesses; on the other hand, it falls short of allowing us to ascertain the nature of being. For metaphysicians such as St. Thomas Aquinas and Duns Scotus, the intuition of being is an intellectual cognition which guarantees that metaphysics has a definite subject matter which may then be conceptualized more precisely. Heidegger opens “Time and Being” by claiming that his thinking has a “matter” too. However, he differs from Aquinas and Scotus on this point in at least two respects. First, he holds that his thinking has two matters: being and time. I will return to the nature of these matters in the next section. Second, the minimally conceptualized intuition of being and time at the outset of Heidegger’s thinking is not an intellectual cognition but a form of awareness evoked and articulated by poetic idioms of the form “It is . . .” or “There is . . .” in English (“Es gibt . . .” in German, “Il y a . . .” in French). I will list a few examples given in the series of notes taken during the seminar where “Time and Being” was originally presented: It is a vineyard, burned and black with holes full of spiders. It is a hissing wind which circles around empty huts. Il y a une petite voiture abandonée dans le taillis, ou qui descend le sentier en courant, enrubannée. (There’s a little carriage abandoned in the woods or rolling down the path, with ribbons all over it.) Il y a une troupe de petits comédiens en costumes, aperçus sur la route á travers la lisière du bois. (There’s a troupe of child actors, in costumes, whom you can see on the road through the edge of the wood.)5

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These instances of poetic language aren’t merely bland statements of ontological commitment for Heidegger. They perform several functions at the outset of his inquiry: (1) Grammatically they are subject-predicate sentences, but since their subjects do not designate beings (just as the “It” in “It is raining” doesn’t designate a being), the matters of thinking are not automatically reified as special beings of which certain properties are predicated.6 (2) The poetic statements reveal beings of different kinds as interconnected: plants (a vineyard, a wood), animals (spiders), natural phenomena (wind), buildings (huts), equipment (a carriage, a road), works of art (plays presented by a troupe of child actors), and humans (the children, those dwelling or who have dwelt in the huts). (3) The statements reveal beings as situated in a time that encompasses past (the vineyard that was burned, the carriage that was abandoned or set into motion), present (the wind that is hissing, the carriage that is rolling), and future (where the carriage will roll, what the troupe of child actors will do next). (4) A sense of uncanniness akin to that felt by someone who wonders why there is something rather than nothing is insinuated by the poetic statements, making it legitimate to regard the statements as calling our attention to the being and temporality per se of the revealed beings.7 How, then, does thinking proceed from this quasi-poetic intuition of being and temporality? Following Aristotle, Heidegger offers a partial further conceptualization of these matters by first categorizing or classifying the kinds of beings revealed in the poetic intuition of being. Yet Heidegger’s kinds—things of nature (Vorhandenheit), equipment (Zuhandendheit), buildings as dwellings, artworks, and human beings (Dasein)—differ markedly from the traditional Aristotelian categories adopted by Aquinas and Scotus.8 Here a possible point of disputation arises: which classification is correct, Heidegger’s or his Scholastic opponents’? Heidegger might urge that his classification is phenomenologically accurate, since undeniably we experience beings of the kinds

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he describes. To this, the Scholastic realist may object that the Aristotelian categories (or some system of categories based on them, such as the taxonomy of domains of beings early Heidegger extracts from Scotus), in addition to being phenomenologically accurate, are objectively correct because they exist not merely in our minds but also ante rem.9 However, from Heidegger’s perspective, the notion of objective correctness assumed here is tendentious.10 To see why, let us consider the next stage of Heideggerian thinking. It will help to provide some additional context from Scholastic metaphysics. For Aquinas, being is actuality which may or may not be limited by potentiality. Different kinds of beings possess being in different yet analogous senses: God is pure actuality, whereas creatures are a mixture of act and potency. Scotus agrees with Aquinas that being involves actuality, but against St. Thomas he holds that being is predicated univocally of God and creatures: God has being in the infinite mode, creatures have being in the finite mode.11 In this dispute, which I shall not pursue here, we have seen that early Heidegger sides with Scotus: to say that something has being per se is to say the same thing, whether one is talking about rocks, houses, or humans. These beings may have being in various phenomenologically manifestable modes, such as Zuhandenheit or Dasein, yet there remains a univocal sense in which they have being. A commitment to the univocity of being is retained in later Heidegger as well. This is apparent from the various understandings of being later Heidegger detects in the history of metaphysics. Whether being is understood by the pre-Socratics as the unique unifying One (hen) or the source of all intelligibility (logos), or by philosophers from Plato through Hegel as objectivity ultimately comprehensible to representational judgment (Vorstellung), or by Nietzsche as objectivity ultimately subjected to willing (the Will to Power), or as a “framing” (Ge-stell ) that culminates in modern technology, each of these understandings is a maximally general conception which applies to all beings of every kind.12 For example, according to Heidegger, on the modern technological conception of being trees, rivers, hydroelectric plants, airplanes, and even persons are all disposable resources or “standing reserve” in a complex, interlocking socioeconomic system. Thus, this conception consists in applying the notion of standing reserve univocally to all beings, despite the differences in their various modes of being.13

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We saw that Scotus identifies the proper attributes of being with the transcendentals of being itself, unity, truth, and goodness, as well as with disjunctive transcendentals such as finite or infinite and contingent or necessary. In distinction from other attributes such as wisdom and spatiality, the transcendentals apply to all beings. Later Heidegger’s maximally general conceptions may be viewed as transcendentals, though radicalized in two respects: first, maximally general conceptions are not static attributes of being but dispensations which unfold in history and define separate epochs from the ancient Greeks onward.14 Second, Heidegger’s historicized transcendentals differ in number and content from the traditional transcendentals. Instead of being, unity, truth, and goodness, we have each of the epochs in the history of being described in the previous paragraph. As a maximally general conception of being, a given historicized transcendental or dispensation is how beings are unconcealed (aletheia) or show up for humans in a particular epoch. Heidegger speaks of being’s effect on beings as a “marking”: To mark—related to showing—points to the contour, the gestalt, so to speak, the what-gestalt as it were, which is native to beings as such. With regard to beings, Being is that which shows, makes something visible without showing itself.15 Heidegger’s point is that each historicized transcendental in the history of being has a rich phenomenological content: there is a world of difference between seeing beings as precious focal points abiding for a little while under the sheltering rule of logos and seeing them as dispensable cogs in the machinery of Ge-stell. By historicizing the transcendentals and imbuing them with rich phenomenological content, Heidegger implicitly addresses his earlier worry in the Habilitationsschrift that the traditional transcendentals are empty and bloodless classifications. Is being itself distinct from the dispensations of being? Before answering this question, let us return to the point of disputation mentioned earlier. By now, it should be clear that for Heidegger, the notion of “objective correctness” assumed by the Scholastic realist who argues that the Aristotelian categories exist ante rem is part of the historicized

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transcendental in which beings are conceived as objects of representational judgment. The Scholastic realist takes the division of beings into traditional categories to correspond with real properties or common natures of the objects; his nominalist opponent takes these divisions (though not the objects themselves) to exist only in the mind. An avowed post-metaphysical thinker, Heidegger rejects both options in this debate. He regards any conceptualization of beings, whether by a maximally general conceptualization of being (historicized transcendental) or by a less comprehensive classification (Aristotelian categories or Heideggerian kinds) as mediated by language as “the house of being.” Against later Wittgenstein, who thinks that ordinary language is metaphysically innocent, late Heidegger maintains that some maximally general conception of being becomes embedded or encoded in the language of any given historical epoch. Language, along with the maximally general conceptions it encodes, is dependent on human conceptualizers; however, it is no less true that humans who conceptualize in a definitive mode are dependent on language and the specific maximally general conception it encodes. I will return to the latter dependence in the next section. Thus, Heidegger posits a purely formal interdependence between language encoding a certain conception of being and human language users conceptualizing in a certain way. In fact, I see this formal interdependence as akin to Scotus’s formal distinction, whereby X (e.g., the haecceity in a given individual) and Y (e.g., that same individual’s common nature) cannot exist independently of each other and are even really the same, yet can still be conceived independently of each other in a manner that isn’t purely subjective. We have here an example of continuity between Heideggerian post-metaphysical thinking and traditional metaphysics. By seeing the interdependence between linguistically encoded conceptions of being and a definite mode of human conceptualizing in language as a formal distinction between two aspects of the same real and unitary phenomenon, Heidegger avoids the potential circularity that results from trying to define the former in terms of the latter (nominalism) or the latter in terms of the former (realism). Furthermore, the minimal formal interdependence between language and language users seems metaphysically neutral, in that it is not committed to any one conception of being in the history of philosophy. This in turn would allow the

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division of beings into Heideggerian kinds to survive the “overcoming” of metaphysics Heidegger seeks, provided that the language in which humans conceptualizing the world in accordance with Heidegerrian kinds does not itself encode a particular metaphysical conception.16 At least provisionally, then, the Heideggerian atheologian can set aside the point of disputation. If the notion of objective correctness or “correspondence with reality” (as either fitting or tracking) is internal to a given epoch in the history of being, then it does not afford the thinker an external criterion with which to evaluate the Truth or Falsity or various epochs: Not only do we lack any criterion which would enable us to evaluate the perfection of an epoch of metaphysics as compared with any other epoch. The right to this kind of evaluation does not exist. Plato’s thinking is no more perfect than Parmenides’. Hegel’s philosophy is no more perfect than Kant’s. Each epoch of philosophy has its own necessity. We simply have to acknowledge the fact that a philosophy is the way it is. It is not our business to prefer one to the other, as can be the case with regard to various Weltenschauungen.17 Heidegger goes even further, insisting that “the history of being is being itself.”18 In any given epoch, being as how beings are concealed for humans collapses into the dispensation of being which defines that epoch. Here Heidegger seems to flirt with the sort of historical psychologism or cultural relativism described toward the end of Chapter 1. Does the absence of an external criterion of correctness imply that there is no way to criticize a particular conception of being, or that human “sayings” are accountable to nothing but the conception of being prevailing during epoch in which they are made? I will take up these questions later in this chapter. For now, rather than defending Scholastic realism or the traditional doctrine of transcendentals, let us hold out for a deeper refutation and proceed to the next stage of Heidegger’s thinking.

The matter of time Commensurate with each maximally general conception of being is a certain range of possible modes of being human. For example,

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commensurate with the ancient Greek conception of being are the possible modes of being a hero, a slave, the ruler of a city-state, or a barbarian. Commensurate with the medieval conception of being are different possible modes of being human: saints, sinners, believers, and pagans. Being a saint would have been impossible in the ancient Greek epoch, just as being a hero in the distinctively ancient Greek sense would have been impossible in the medieval epoch.19 Implicit in a range of modes of being human—and hence in the formally interdependent conception of being commensurate with it— is a kind of time. We have seen how the poetic statements which for Heidegger articulate the intuition of being reveal beings as situated in a time encompassing the temporal dimensions of past, present, and future. This same time applies to us as we work out the possible modes of being human made available to us by a given historicized transcendental of being. I take this to be the point of the following difficult passage: . . . what is germane to the time-space of true time consists in the mutual reaching out and opening up of future, past and present. Accordingly, what we call dimension and dimensionality in a way easily misconstrued, belongs to true time and to it alone. Dimensionality consists in a reaching out that opens up, in which futural approaching beings about what has been, what has been brings about futural approaching, and the reciprocal relation of both brings about the opening of openness.20 Humans immersed in a given conception of being aren’t merely gazing at the passing show but are actively engaged in working out the possible modes of being human commensurate with that conception. Consider a stage in the life of an ancient Greek man who is working out the mode of being a hero. At that particular time, the stage is the man’s immediate present. Since the possibility of being a hero was already latent in the genesis of the ancient Greek conception of being, the present stage is dependent on the past. Yet since the possibility of being a hero also depends on the final outcome of the man’s life (e.g., whether he succeeds in being a real hero, and hence whether the earlier stages of his life are steps on the path to

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living a completely heroic life, depends on whether he lives the rest of his life courageously), the present stage is also dependent on the future. Any given stage in the trajectory of the man’s life exemplifies this kind of unity among the three temporal dimensions. The unity is not static but has a definite direction determined by the interplay of the man’s ongoing agency with the various circumstances in which he finds himself over the course of his life. Heidegger sometimes speaks of this interplay as “the fourth dimension” of true time.21 It is important to observe that Heidegger sees the working out of possible modes of being human commensurate with a historicized transcendental not just as an individual affair. A community, culture, or nation that arises within a given dispensation of being also has possible modes of being or “vocations” open to it which it then works out in the temporal dimensions of past, present, and future. The possibility of these modes may be revealed by works of art, such as an ancient Greek temple. It is the temple work that first fits together and at the same time gathers around itself the unity of those paths and relations in which birth and death, disaster and blessing, victory and disgrace, endurance and decline acquire the shape of destiny for human beings. The all-governing expanse of this open relational context is the world of this historical people. Only from and in this expanse does the nation first return to itself for the fulfillment of its vocation.22 From the last sentence, it is apparent that Heidegger has in mind not merely individual destinies but also collective destiny. The time implicit in working out modes of being human is not itself something worked out by humans, nor is it applicable only to humans; it applies to all beings unconcealed or disclosed through a given historicized transcendental. Whether we are faced with a vineyard or a carriage, and whether we understand it as an object of representation or as standing reserve, the being is revealed to us in a unity of past, present, and future. What is the relation of being qua historicized transcendentals and time? A possible answer is that being and time are identical. However, we have now sufficiently developed Heidegger’s later thinking to reject this answer. For suppose that being is time. Since being is nothing but

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the history of being as the succession of distinct historicized transcendentals, it would follow that time has a history of distinct manifestations. Yet “time itself is nothing temporal.”23 Furthermore, the basic structural unity of the temporal dimensions implicit in any conception of being and its commensurate range of possible modes of being human always remains the same. Since there is no succession of distinct manifestations of time in the way that there is a succession of distinct conceptions of being, time remains the same while being doesn’t. Therefore, time is not identical with being. Another possible answer is that time is metaphysically prior to being and explains how it is possible for there to be any conception of being at all. This answer, too, should be rejected.24 For if time explains how there can be any conception of being, then to avoid circularity time must be comprehensible apart from being. Yet the poetic statements articulating intuition of being make it clear that time and being are given together.25 Time, as the working out of possibilities latent in a particular conception of being, is no less dependent on being than being is dependent on time. Therefore, time is neither metaphysically nor explanatorily prior to being. In my reconstruction of this stage of Heidegger’s thinking, I hesitate to say that time and being are formally interdependent in the same way that a certain conceptualization of being and humans conceptualizing in a certain way are. For at least one term of the latter interdependence—humans conceptualizing in a certain way—consists of beings, whereas Heidegger holds that neither time nor being are beings. Instead, I suggest that for Heidegger the dimensions of true time are structural principles of all being, similar to the way in which actuality and potentiality are structural principles of all being for Aristotle, Aquinas, and Scotus. We have already seen how true time applies equally to human beings (in working out possible modes of being human) and to all nonhuman beings which are disclosed to us.26 Moreover, like actuality and potentiality, the dimensions of true time aren’t themselves beings but are intrinsic to beings: just as the potentiality of a being consists in what it hasn’t yet become but may become, so the past and the future of a particular being consists in what it no longer is but once was and what it isn’t yet but may be.27 Thus, it is reasonable to view the dimensions of true time as implicit in any conception of being—that is, as structural principles of being itself.

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So far, I’ve stressed some continuities between the concerns of traditional metaphysics and Heidegger’s very late thinking. We come now to a major contrast, the so-called “overcoming” of metaphysics. Specifically, in “Time and Being” Heidegger aims at understanding time and being in radically different terms by arriving at nonmetaphysical “sayings” about these matters which are assessable as adequate. How does he propose to do this? It is at this point that Heidegger introduces the notion of Appropriation as the “It” that “gives” both time and being. As such, Appropriation is explanatorily prior to time and being. To allow for the “overcoming” of metaphysics, though, Appropriation cannot be understood in substantive terms drawn from any historicized transcendental in the history of being. In particular, Appropriation is not “an indeterminate power which is supposed to bring about all giving of being and of time,”28 since then Appropriation would be a being like the God of Aquinas and Scotus, only stripped of all determinate attributes. It would be more accurate to say that unlike these metaphysicians, Heidegger reverses the explanatory priority of being and becoming: Appropriation is an ultimate form of becoming lying at the heart of reality, through which being and time are to be understood and, ultimately, set aside as matters for philosophical analysis.29 Or, since describing Appropriation as an ultimate form of becoming may insinuate the misunderstanding that Appropriation is something temporal—which It can’t be since It “gives” time—perhaps a better description is that Appropriation is a certain potentiality for being qua the history of being and the structural dimensions of true time, a potentiality whose realization is radically atemporal and contingent. In any case, if Heidegger can succeed in thinking of Appropriation in a radically nonmetaphysical way, then he will also have shown how we can dispense with natural theology as a branch of traditional metaphysics. Evaluating Heidegger’s atheology of Appropriation will occupy us in Chapter 4. For now, we may ask why we should believe there is any Appropriation. Aquinas and Scotus would certainly demand an answer to this question, since Appropriation serves as something like a First Principle for Heidegger just as God serves as the First Principle for them; and in any discipline, whether metaphysics or post-metaphysical

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thinking, that there is a First Principle at all stands in need of demonstration. As is well known, in his version of the Causal Argument for God’s existence Scotus argues from actual cases of causation to the possibility of God as First Cause, and from that to His actuality and necessity; whereas in his Five Ways Aquinas also infers God’s existence in various ways from the existence of creatures. Heidegger utilizes neither of these methods to justify belief in Appropriation. Nor does there seem to be a direction “intuition of Appropriation” comparable to the intuition of being and time evoked and articulates by certain poetic statements. Does Heidegger’s atheology of Appropriation immediately founder? I conclude this section by sketching a reply on Heidegger’s behalf. Consider the historicized transcendentals, each of which discloses beings in true time. These transcendentals with their intrinsic temporal character aren’t metaphysically necessary (in the way the Platonist construes numbers and other mathematical objects to be) but rather come to be and pass away. Therefore, phenomenologically it is undeniable that there is some sort of coming to be and passing away here. Let that coming to be and passing away—whatever its precise nature— be the First Principle of Heidegger’s atheology of Appropriation. Whether there is nothing more to say about “It”, so that Appropriation reduces to the sequence of historicized transcendentals in each of which beings are disclosed in a certain away in accordance with the same dimensions/structural principles of true time, or whether there is something more to say remains an open question to be investigated further.30

An interim Quodlibet To deepen our preliminary understanding of Heidegger’s atheology of Appropriation, it will help to consider several objections raised against it in the contemporary literature. Thus in this section I will play the devil’s advocate by defending the atheology. Once these objections have been set aside, we may focus on more difficult issues in the next two chapters. Objection: In claiming that Appropriation is the “It” that gives being and time, Heidegger is positing a transcendental explanans to explain

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the phenomenological availability of the being and temporality of beings. (Here “transcendental” signifies a condition of possibility, not a proper attribute of being.) Call this a type A explanans, and call the phenomenon whose availability is to be explained a type B explanandum. Either the type A explanans is directly available to us without the mediation of some further transcendental explanans or it isn’t. If it isn’t, then we must posit some further transcendental explanans to explain the availability of the type A explanans, leading to an infinite regress. On the other hand, if the type A explanans is immediately available to us without the mediation of some further transcendental explanans, then it is obscure why the original type B explanandum itself can’t be immediately available to us without the mediation of the type A explanans. Therefore, since Appropriation is a type A explanans, positing Appropriation either leads to an infinite regress or is superfluous.31 Reply: The objection confuses the order of phenomenological availability with the order or theoretical explanation. In general, it does not first have to be demonstrated that a theoretical explanans (whether physical, metaphysical, or post-metaphysical) is phenomenologically available to us before the explanans can be posited to explain the phenomenological availability of some explanandum. Photons, molecules involved in neurochemical reactions, atoms, subatomic particles, and perhaps even more fundamental quantum events are posited to explain the phenomenological availability of ordinary objects in the world; yet it isn’t necessary first to show that these theoretical posits are phenomenologically available (indeed, some of them may never be!), provided that they genuinely explain what is phenomenologically available.32 Similarly, Appropriation may be introduced as a theoretical explanans, provided that it genuinely explains phenomenological availability of being and time without appealing to traditional metaphysical notions.33 Perhaps no such explanation is forthcoming, but prematurely dismissing it without carefully considering Heidegger’s texts is mere handwaving. If it turns out that the Appropriation reduces to the history of conceptions of being then the explanans is the same as the explanandum, trivially avoiding the problem envisaged by the objection.

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Objection: Heidegger doesn’t treat all conceptions of being in the history of being equally, for he maintains that the understanding of being by early Greek philosophers like Heraclitus, Anaximander, and Parmenides is more “primordial” than the modern conception of being as “standing reserve.” Contrary to the interpretation of Heidegger’s very late thinking presented here, Heidegger’s preference makes no sense apart from some metaphysical notion of “objective correctness” or “correspondence” in virtue of which one conception of being may correspond better with reality than another.34 Reply: I agree that Heideggerian “primordiality” is hard to understand apart from some metaphysical notion of “objective correctness” or “correspondence with reality.” However, though Heidegger may be inconsistent in rejecting “objective correctness” while preferring a certain conception of being because he thinks it is more “primordial” than its rivals, it doesn’t follow that the atheology of Appropriation is committed to this inconsistency. Remember that we are concerned not with Heidegger, but with Heidegger’s later philosophy. Logically, there is nothing to prevent the Heideggerian atheologian from rejecting the notion of “primordiality” as metaphysical and maintaining a neutral stance toward the various historicized trancendentals in the history of being which he seeks to overcome—including the early Greek one. Objection: The interpretation of Heidegger’s atheology of Appropriation as neutral toward rival metaphysical conceptions leads to something like Kuhn’s relativism of paradigms, any one of which is as good (or as bad) as any of the others. This is problematic for the atheology of Appropriation, which obviously includes a critique of the modern technological conception of being as “standing reserve.” More generally, a Kuhnian reading is unattractive because it precludes the Heideggerian atheologian from criticizing any conception of being except from the perspective of another conception. That in turn would make “overcoming” all metaphysics impossible.35 Reply: The objection offers a false dilemma between requiring the atheologian to appeal to a metaphysical notion of “objective correctness” in criticizing a conception of being and barring the atheologian from criticizing any conception of being because all such conceptions are on a par. A path between these horns is opened up by the

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possibility of criticizing a conception of being without appealing to any metaphysical notion of “correctness.” This can be done in a number of ways: (1) A conception of being may be criticized on the ground that it is internally inconsistent. (2) A conception may be criticized on the ground that those conceptualizing within it erroneously believe that certain beings are disclosed by the conception.36 For example, the atheologian of Appropriation may object that medieval philosophers erroneously believed that the existence of God was disclosed by the Cosmological or Ontological Arguments that were part of their conception of being. Conversely, a conception may be criticized because it makes no attempt (i.e., “forgets”) to understand Appropriation as what “sends” the historicized transcendentals which constitute the history of being. These alleged errors can be exhibited without recourse to any metaphysical notion of objective correctness or correspondence between representational judgments and features of extralinguistic reality. (3) A conception may be criticized on the ground that it encourages humans conceptualizing within it to treat the conception itself as a being. For example, the technological transcendental of “standing reserve” treats everything as a being which is capable in principle of being manipulated or engineered by human beings either individually or collectively, including the technological transcendental itself. This in turn can lead humans to misunderstand the origin and the ultimate fate of that transcendental, which they see as a being (a “view”) they have deliberately chosen to accept which they can just as easily choose to abandon— whereas in fact the rise and fall of any conception of being is not a factor entirely under human control.37 (4) A conception can be criticized on the ground that it misleads humans conceptualizing within it to think that they’ve escaped it, when actually they’ve become more deeply enmeshed in it. For example, in his “Manifesto” the Unabomber decries modern technology as an impersonal system that destroys human individuality. Yet in attempting not just to “overcome” but also to overturn

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it, he devises his own terroristic system involving threats and letter bombs that is no less destructive of human individuality. Should such a system take hold, the resulting new order and the means necessary to enforce it would be just as impersonal and destructive as modern technology; indeed, the new order would merely be another version of the technological system the Unabomber abhors, disguised as neo-Ludditism.38 Each of these criticisms merits further discussion; part of the second criticism will be the topic of the next chapter. My point here is not to prove that the Heideggerian atheologian is right about them all but that, whether he is right or wrong, in advancing these criticisms nothing commits him to a metaphysical conception of “correctness” or to any conception of being. Like the notion of formal interdependence between a certain conception of being and humans conceptualizing in a certain way, the notions of internal consistency/inconsistency, of having failed to show something claimed to have been shown, of having confused something not under our control with things under our control, and of believing that one has abandoned a certain conception when one really hasn’t, all seem metaphysically noncommital, and hence, along with basic logical principles, available to the post-metaphysical thinker. In this way, then, the atheology of Appropriation offers an alternative both to traditional metaphysical realism and to Kuhnian relativism. Objection: The “overcoming” of metaphysics sought by the Heideggerian atheologian is said to involve an “event of Appropriation.” Yet it remains uncertain why this “event” would be valuable rather than detrimental for us.39 Reply: Certainly, freedom from philosophical confusion is valuable. To the extent that definite errors and misunderstandings are latent in each of the maximally general conceptions which constitute the history of being, “overcoming” metaphysics frees us from all errors and misunderstandings, and therefore is valuable rather than detrimental. Nevertheless, I don’t wish to gloss over the ethical difficulties raised by the atheology of Appropriation. In the aftermath of “overcoming,”

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the world will be free of any past, present, or possible transcendentals; instead, beings will understood through true time in what Heidegger calls the “fourfold” of earth, sky, divinities, and mortals. Heidegger’s tentative description of this post-metaphysical world raises unanswered questions about its moral character. Specifically, even if “overcoming” enables us to avoid metaphysical confusions, would a post-metaphysical world still allow morally objectionable practices such as authoritarianism? The atheologian might reply that such practices are themselves the result of metaphysical confusion, and that in a post-metaphysical world powerful decentralizing tendencies would block the emergence of any centralized absolute authority. As an example, Heidegger describes how our appreciation of earth, sky, mortals, and divinities in true time can be focused by local and intimate things such as a jug of wine, rather than by One Central Thing that defines an entire culture or nation.40 Unfortunately, this reply is inconclusive since it leaves open the possibility of a local authoritarianism in which a smaller community becomes focused around particular things in an intolerant way—for example, the tyranny of a xenophobic majority in a hamlet whose appreciation of the fourfold is focused by things carved from wood taken from the nearby Black Forest. In my view, the ultimate resistance to authoritarianism, whether national or local, comes from a commitment to individual rights which are in some sense nonnegotiable. Since the Heidegerrian atheologian would probably regard any commitment to individual rights as inherent in some metaphysical conception he wishes to overcome; this antiauthoritarian mode of resistance is unavailable to him. Even so, the fact that the atheology of Appropriation doesn’t rule out morally objectionable practices like authoritarianism hardly deprives it of all intellectual value, any more than the fact that Aristotle’s political philosophy condones slavery renders it devoid of intellectual value. We can still learn something from these thinkers. Let us acknowledge the ethical difficulties raised by their views and move on. Objection: Later Heidegger’s history of being is a “monomaniac” history of the West that has no basis in actual political, social, or economic history.41

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Reply: Let it be granted that Heidegger’s history of being neither explains the entire history of Western civilization nor takes into account the findings of various historical disciplines.42 Nonetheless, the sequence of historicized transcendentals Heidegger describes roughly conforms to the history of Western philosophy. Furthermore, the alleged “monomaniac” of Heidegger’s description doesn’t prove the illegitimacy of the philosophical issues which interest us here: whether these transcendentals are possible conceptions of being, whether they can give rise to definite kinds of confusion, and whether there is Appropriation qua ultimate potentiality that (1) explains the phenomenological availability of conceptions of being in which beings are disclosed in true time, and (2) can be adequately assessed in purely post-metaphysical terms. Even if Heidegger is wrong in believing that all history can be explained in terms of the history of metaphysics, these issues and the need to address them remain. Objection: The claim that Heidegger’s atheology of Appropriation is a linguistic discipline whose sayings are assessable as adequate ignores the fact that the Heideggerian atheologian is trying to move beyond thinking to a mystical experience of Appropriation.43 Reply: At times Heidegger toys with a conception of post-metaphysical thinking as more like mystical experience than a speculative discipline. The “Summary of a Seminar on the Lecture ‘Time and Being’” contains the remark, presumably approved by Heidegger, that the seminar “is thus the attempt to speak of something which cannot be mediated cognitively, not even in terms of questions, but must be experienced.”44 And later in the same “Summary” what is described as “the step back” required to think Appropriation in nonmetaphysical terms is likened to the apophatic method of negative theology.45 Yet Heidegger ultimately rejects what he sees as a false dichotomy between thinking and experiencing: Indeed, thinking and experiencing cannot be contrasted with each other in the manner of alternatives. What happened in the seminar remains an attempt at a preparation for thinking, and thus for experiencing. But this preparation occurs already in a thinking manner in that experiencing is nothing mystical, not an act of illumination, but rather the entry into dwelling and Appropriation.46

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Whatever experiencing “the entry into dwelling and Appropriation” will be, preparing for it “in a thinking manner” is said to be the task “to overcome the obstacles that render such saying [of Appropriation] inadequate.”47 Thus thinking remains the attempt to arrive at an adequate, linguistically articulated understanding of Appropriation. At least that is Heidegger’s aim.48

*** Heidegger’s atheology of Appropriation requires careful scrutiny, especially the idea of Appropriation as a potentiality to “send” being qua the history of being and time qua true time. Nevertheless, the atheology of Appropriation is a step forward in the dialectic of Heidegger’s thought because it not only provides answers to the contemporary objections canvassed above but also addresses the difficulties with Heidegger’s early view. I conclude this chapter by revisiting the three philosophical motifs in the Habilitationsschrift in light of the very late atheology. Whatever additional content Heidegger attributes to it, post-metaphysical thinking includes basic logical principles and conceptual distinctions (e.g., the formal interdependence between language and language users) that are metaphysically neutral between rival conceptions of being because they are common to all such conceptions. Our “sayings” need not accord with the conception of being defining the epoch in which we happen to find ourselves, as on historical psychologism/relativism, but merely with these minimal principles and distinctions. Heidegger’s earlier metaphysical notion of extralinguistic reality consisting of actual or nonactual affair complexes is thus discarded, but not the idea of a normative discipline which governs all human thinking. Consequently, post-metaphysical thinking can be said to be antipsychologistic. In his later model of the knowing subject, Heidegger replaces Erfurt’s view of the mind apprehending features of extralinguistic reality independently of language with the formal interdependence between language and language users. Admittedly, this is not a full account of human subjectivity. However, the formal interdependence seems congenial to a more plausible approach to human subjectivity, according to which the interplay between human conceptualizing

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and linguistic meaning involves a kind of “bootstrapping”: a few nonlinguistic mental capacities (e.g., perception of colors, shapes, sounds, the simple inductive reasoning involved in learning language) make it possible for the developing subject to grasp basic linguistic meanings. In turn, these basic meanings make it possible for the subject to have more complex, language-dependent mental states. By means of such states, the subject may proceed to grasp more complex linguistic conventions and practices, eventually coming to understand the world as the mature members of her culture do.49 At most, only a handful of primitive mental capacities are required at the outset of this exponential process; from that point on, conceptualizing and language go hand in hand. Obviously, this “bootstrapping” approach needs to be developed in much greater detail, but it seems more promising than the view of subjectivity to which Heidegger’s earlier view is committed. Finally, by replacing the static transcendentals of traditional metaphysics with the historicized transcendentals constituting the history of being, Heidegger can claim to have moved beyond a system of empty and bloodless classifications to trans-categorical characterizations of being possessing rich and distinctive phenomenological content. For each of the historicized transcendentals is a definite way beings show up for humans in a particular epoch. The history of being as the history of how beings have been disclosed to humans provides the link between Heidegger’s later thought and his earlier phenomenological concerns.50 Nevertheless, exactly how is Heidegger’s atheology of Appropriation supposed to “overcome” metaphysics—specifically, the metaphysics of high Scholasticism and its attendant natural theology? This question will occupy us in the following chapter.

Chapter 3

Heideggerian Atheology and the Scotist Causal Argument

According to Scotus, the proper subject matter of metaphysics is the transcendentals, including the simple transcendentals of being, unity, truth, and goodness and the disjunctive transcendentals (e.g., finite or infinite, caused or uncaused) which are said to be coextensive with the simple ones. Using his knowledge of these trans-categorical attributes, the metaphysician then proceeds to demonstrate the existence of God as the First Being: “If an effect represents something posterior, possible, or finite, such properties imply their cause enjoys an unqualified primacy, actuality, infinity, and the like.”1 For this reason, Scotus says that God is not the subject but the goal of metaphysics, which provides the roots for natural theology as one of its branches. Up to a point, Heidegger’s later thinking parallels the Scotist picture before radically subverting it. In the previous chapter, we saw that the proper subject matter of Heideggerian thinking includes being as well as time. From the initial poetic intuitions of being and time, Heidegger proceeds to understand being in terms of the historicized transcendentals constituting the history of being and to understand time in terms of the unified temporal dimensions of past, present, and future. This sets the stage for arriving at adequate “sayings” about Appropriation as what “sends” the history of being but Itself isn’t any kind of being or cause and can be understood in wholly nonmetaphysical terms. Unlike Scotus, then, Heidegger takes his own reworking of traditional metaphysical concepts to pull the rug out from under all metaphysics—including any attempt to demonstrate the existence of a First Being. We are left not with a natural theology but with an atheology of Appropriation.

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My purpose in the present chapter is to bring the confrontation between the Heideggerian post-metaphysical thinker and the Scholastic metaphysician/natural theologian to a head by pitting the atheology of Appropriation against the Scotist Causal Argument for the existence of a First Being. I choose the latter because it is perhaps the most sophisticated version of the argument to be found in the history of philosophy, and possibly the closest a Scholastic metaphysician has come to proving a substantial theoretical result in natural theology. My analysis will be guided by Scotus’s detailed presentation of the argument in A Treatise on God as First Principle2 and by two excellent recent discussions of Scotus’s argument.3 I will not examine every controversial point raised by the argument but only those issues that have a direct bearing on our assessment of Heideggerian atheology.

Formulating the causal argument Scotus’s proof proceeds from actual cases of causation observed in nature rather than from purely a priori premises: “something can be produced and therefore something can be productive.”4 Such cases are understood in terms of the metaphysical notion of essentially ordered causes, where both the being and the causal activity of a given cause depend on the next cause in the series. For example, a swallow and its flying (i.e., displacing air molecules) depend on the swallow’s nature and its causal activity; the swallow’s nature and its causal activity depend on genetically organized carbon molecules and their causal activity, which depend on certain atoms and their causal activity, and so on.5 Based on actual cases of essentially ordered causes, Scotus argues for the possibility of a First Cause whose being and causal activity cannot be caused. He then argues from the possibility of a First Cause to its actuality and from its actuality to its necessity.6 In considering an actual case of causation, it is helpful to distinguish two questions: (1) Might the series of essentially ordered causes producing a given effect go on ad infinitum? (2) Might the series of essentially ordered causes producing a given effect terminate in a cause which, though uncaused, could be caused?

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A negative answer to (1) amounts to Scotus’s claim that there cannot be an infinity of essentially ordered causes.7 Call this negative claim the lemma. The lemma has generated much controversy over the centuries. Ignore that controversy for now; what is important to see is that if the lemma is granted, then the answer to (2) must also be “Not unless a first uncausable cause is possible.” Suppose for the sake argument that the series of essentially ordered causes producing a given effect (e.g., the swallow’s flying) terminates in a cause C (e.g., the behavior of certain quantum particles, perhaps) that is actually uncaused but could be caused. Scotus may then reason as follows: if it is possible for C to be caused, then either it is possible for the cause of C to be caused (even if it actually isn’t) or it isn’t possible. If it isn’t, then it is possible for there to be a first cause which cannot be caused—which is Scotus’s desired conclusion. On the other hand, if it is possible for the cause of C to be caused (even if it actually isn’t), then the question arises whether it is possible for this additional cause to be caused. Either at some point we reach the possibility of a first cause that cannot be caused—again, Scotus’s desired conclusion—or we don’t. In the latter case, it is possible for there to be an infinite series of essentially ordered causes. But by the lemma, this is impossible. Therefore, given the truth of the lemma, we obtain Scotus’s desired conclusion: it is possible for there to be a first uncausable cause. Everything then appears to rest on the lemma. Can it be demonstrated? In their discussion of Scotus’s Causal Argument, Ross and Bates give the following argument: Someone who says, “still, maybe such a line [of essentially ordered causes] does not twist up to a first” is committed to a contradiction. For this person has to say that at every stage a sufficient condition [for the final effect] is absent and one is never reached by stepwise regression; so one is always absent. And at the same time, he has to postulate the final effect, and, so, that there is a sufficient condition for it. That is explicitly contradictory.8 The idea here is that the possibility of an infinite series of essentially ordered causes entails an inconsistency. Since every stepwise or

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partial regression in such a series contains causally necessary but not causally sufficient conditions for the effect, the entire series lacks causally sufficient conditions for the final effect. Yet obviously, there is a final effect, and thus causally sufficient conditions for it. Consequently, there are causally sufficient conditions for the final effect and there are not causally sufficient conditions for it, which is a contradiction. I would like to accept this argument but I can’t. The trouble is with the fallacious inference from the premise that every stepwise regression in an infinite series of essentially ordered causes lacks a sufficient condition for the effect to the conclusion that the infinite series itself lacks a sufficient condition for the effect. In general, from the fact that every finite subset or subseries of an infinite set or series lacks a certain property, it doesn’t follow that the infinite set/series lacks that property. For example, consider the set W of whole numbers. Every finite subset of W (each of whose members may be ordered in a series) lacks the property of possessing the same cardinality as the set of natural numbers. But clearly W (whose members may also be ordered in a series) itself possesses this property; in more Scotist terms, we may say that every finite subset/subseries of W lacks a sufficient condition for being equinumerous with W, but that W itself does not lack this sufficient condition.9 Correlatively, though every finite series within an infinite series of essentially ordered causes lacks a sufficient condition for the effect, it is obscure why the entire series of causes can’t constitute a sufficient condition for the effect. To rule out this possibility with complete certainty, it seems we must assume that there can’t be an actual infinity in an essential order of causes – which is the very issue at stake. Fortunately, all is not lost. Suppose that it is possible for there to be an infinite series S of all the essentially ordered causes (i.e., an infinite series of causes in which each cause and its causal activity is caused by another cause) producing a given effect, such as the swallow’s flying. The series S itself a contingent being, since S might not have existed because any one or more of its members might not have existed.10 Scotus observes that any contingent being, even if it is actually uncaused, might have been caused.11 Hence, even if S is uncaused it is possible for S to be caused. Call this possible cause C. Presumably

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C causes S by causing both the being and the causal activity of the causes that make up S; in other words, all the causes in S are essentially ordered to C. Either it is possible for C itself to be caused or it isn’t. If it isn’t possible for C to be caused, then we have Scotus’s desired conclusion that it is possible for there to be a first uncausable cause. On the other hand, if it is possible for C to be caused—both its being and its causal activity—then it is not only possible for the other causes in S to be essentially ordered to C but also for C itself to be essentially ordered to yet another cause. But then C itself is a member of S, since by definition S is the series of all the essentially ordered causes producing the effect.12 Since C causes the being and causal activity of the causes that make up S it follows that C causes itself and its own causal activity (is essentially ordered to itself), which is impossible.13 Therefore, an infinite series of essentially ordered causes is also impossible, so that the lemma is true. And as we’ve seen, if the lemma is true then the possibility of a first uncausable cause—that is, of a First Being that is not essentially ordered to anything else—is established. From the possible existence of a First Being, Scotus argues for its actual existence as follows: if a First Being doesn’t actually exist (¬p) then it can’t exist (¬◊p). For suppose it doesn’t actually exist. Then it can only exist by being caused by another being, caused by nothing, or self-caused. None of these three possibilities is compatible with the nature of a First Being, which by definition is uncausable. Yet it has been already established that the existence of a First Being is possible (◊p). Therefore, by modus tollens, a First Being actually exists14; in terms of variables for the relevant propositions:

¬p ⊃¬◊p ◊p(i.e., ¬¬◊p) ¬¬p (i.e., p) Furthermore, a First Being necessarily exists.15 For suppose that although a First Being actually exists its nonexistence is possible. Since a First Being actually exists, its existence is possible (◊p). And since whatever is possible is necessarily possible, the existence of

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a First Being is necessarily possible (†◊p). However, by the reasoning sketched in the previous paragraph, if a First Being doesn’t exist then its existence is not possible (since it would have to be caused by another being, caused by nothing, or self-caused, all of which are impossible). Hence, if it is possible for a First Being not to exist, it is possible that its existence is not possible (◊¬◊p). But then its existence is not necessarily possible (¬†◊p).16 Thus from our supposition that the nonexistence of a First Being is possible we have obtained a contradiction: the existence of a First Being both is and is not necessarily possible (†◊p and ¬†◊p). Therefore, by reductio ad absurdum, the nonexistence of a First Being is not possible, in which case a First Being necessarily exists.17

Contingency and causation: a Heideggerian counterargument Though there is room for further discussion, Scotus seems to have succeeded in constructing a prima facie powerful proof of the possibility, actuality, and necessity of a First Being, as well as in anticipating typical objections.18 He goes on to argue that there can be one and only one First Being, so that we may speak of the First Being which is the uncausable cause of all contingent being, is simple, intelligent, endowed with a will, and infinite.19 I shall not pursue these arguments here. Rather, I call attention to an assumption that is central to Scotus’s proof: whatever is contingent can be caused even if it is in fact uncaused; not only are there are no contingent beings or events which in their very nature are uncausable, but also there cannot be such uncausable contingencies.20 For if there could be, then a series of essentially ordered causes producing a given effect (such as the swallow’s flying) could terminate in a cause that is uncausable yet contingent, undermining Scotus’s inference from actual cases of causation observed in nature to a First Being that is both uncausable and noncontingent. More generally, the universe then contains or could contain ultimate contingencies which are in principle unexplainable in terms of anything—including the First Explanatory Being that is supposedly the necessary ground of all contingency. Is Scotus’s assumption true, or are there counterexamples to it?

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It is tempting to look to the micro-level for counterexamples. Perhaps the series of essentially ordered causes containing the swallow and its flying, the swallow’s nature and its causal activity, genetically organized carbon molecules and their causal activity, and so on terminates in the behavior of certain quantum particles or events. Presumably these quantum events are not only contingent because they might not have happened but also purely random. If the quantum events in which the series terminates are essentially random—if their randomness is somehow intrinsic to their nature—then such contingent events cannot be caused. However, there seems to be no reason why a contingent event can’t be random, and hence actually uncaused, yet still be causable. This is clear from cases of randomness at the macro-level: according to mathematical chaos theory, whether a stick balanced on end falls either right or left is indeterminate, so that if the stick falls right the event is both contingent and purely random. Yet certainly, it is possible for something to cause the stick to fall right even if when the stick actually falls right it does so randomly. The possibility of random events being caused, at either the macro- or the quantum level, doesn’t imply that such events aren’t really random.21 Let us refocus our question: does the Heideggerian atheologian propose any counterexample to the assumption that whatever is contingent can be caused? Yes. Rather than looking to the micro-level, later Heidegger looks to the big picture for an uncausable contingency. Specifically, he claims that Appropriation “gives” or “sends” being, where being is just the entire history of being or the series of conceptions of being dominating different epochs of Western culture, in which humans work out their understandings of themselves and of other beings in accordance with the three dimensions of true time. Heidegger is no Hegelian; he thinks the sending of being by Appropriation is contingent, since it might have happened in another way or even not at all.22 As we’ve seen, he also denies that the sending is caused or brought about by some indeterminate power.23 If there actually is an event or happening which is the sending of being by Appropriation24 then even though the sending is contingent and uncaused, can it be caused? The answer must be “No.” For if it is possible for the sending of being by Appropriation to be caused, then it is possible for something to cause the sending of the

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entire history of being by Appropriation. Whatever is a cause is a being, and whatever is a being has being. Moreover, causation itself is an event or happening, and a cause is temporally prior to its effect. Thus if something causes the sending of the entire history of being, then there is an event or happening in being prior to the entire history of being. Yet any event or happening in being is part of the history of being. Consequently, if it is possible for the sending of being to be caused, it is possible for there to be something in the history of being before the entire history of being. But that is impossible. Therefore, it is also impossible for the sending of being to be caused. Whatever else it involves, the sending of being by Appropriation is contingent, uncaused, and uncausable. It just happens. Accordingly, it seems we must reject Scotus’s assumption that everything contingent can be caused. When we speak of an event that has occurred, such as a Neanderthal getting mauled by a saber-tooth tiger, we are describing something that really happened then and hence is part of human history, broadly understood, that was already unfolding though only conceptualized as such much later (as when we find the skeleton of the Neanderthal bearing marks of a saber-tooth tiger attack). So it would be with any cause of the sending of being by Appropriation: something is really happening in being then and hence is part of the history of being that is already unfolding, though only conceptualized as such much later (in the pages of Heidegger’s later writings). But if a cause of the sending of being (i.e., the unfolding history of being) itself requires that the history of being already be unfolding, then plainly there can be no such thing as a cause of the sending of being, since that would involve the impossibility of a history of being unfolding before its unfolding. The Heideggerian atheologian’s counterargument can be stated in another way: suppose that the sending of being qua history of being by Appropriation is caused. In addition to being, this sending also “gives” time. Hence, the giving of time would also have to be caused. But since causation is in part a temporal process, the causing of the giving of time occurs in time. Therefore, time is temporally prior to the giving of time, and hence time is temporally prior to itself—which is impossible. Again, the past causing of the giving of time may only

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be conceptualized as such in some subsequent epoch, yet that still amounts to conceptualizing the causing as past and thus as in the very time that the causing is supposed to “give.” Because the Heideggerian counterargument is aimed at the natural theology of Scotus and other Scholastics, a natural reply suggests itself. Suppose that there is a sending or giving of being/time, where the phenomenological availability of being/time is explained in terms of Appropriation. Then even if this sending or giving is actually uncaused, it certainly can be caused. For the First Being which is the uncausable cause of all contingency could cause the sending or giving—not by exercising an agency that unfolds in history or time, since on the orthodox view the First Being isn’t in time, but by exercising an atemporal causal agency. Recognizing the First Being as the atemporal cause of the sending or giving of being/time avoids the impossibility of the history of being already unfolding prior to the history of being unfolding, or of time before itself. Even Heidegger admits that time is nothing temporal, and so there is no reason why he shouldn’t extend the nontemporal character of time to the First Cause of the sending or giving of being/time. This reply misses the full force of the Heideggerian atheologian’s counterargument. Being, for Heidegger, fundamentally involves unconcealment or disclosure (aletheia) of beings—that is, how beings are phenomenologically available at all. The disclosure of any being is to be explained in terms of the sending or giving by Appropriation of the history of being as the history of ways in which beings have been disclosed; nonetheless, the proper explanandum here is any disclosure of beings per se. If the sending or giving of being/time could be atemporally caused by the First Being, then this sending or giving could be caused by something that already has intellectuality, and hence to which some being is already disclosed: namely, itself (since the First Being is completely intelligible to itself). Thus, the disclosure of beings in the various epochs of the history of being would be essentially dependent on a First Being which is disclosed to itself. By the simplicity of the First Being, the First Being is the same as its act of being disclosed to itself. Hence, the disclosure of beings would be essentially dependent on the disclosure of a being.25 But for both Heidegger and Scotus being is univocal: being qua disclosure is being

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qua disclosure, regardless of whether we are talking about a First Being or some other being. Consequently, on the supposition that the sending or giving of being/time could be caused by the First Being, being qua disclosure could be essentially dependent on being qua disclosure, which is absurd. The point can also be expressed in terms of explanatory failure: because the Heideggerian atheologian demands an explanation of all disclosure or phenomenological availability of beings, no real progress is made by postulating a First Cause/Being whose being is somehow self-disclosed to itself. For then at least some being qua disclosure of beings (the First Being’s essential self-disclosure) would remain totally unexplained.26 The Scholastic natural theologian might reject the Heideggerian atheologian’s demand for an explanation of all disclosure of beings. Yet in the absence of detecting some conceptual flaw inherent in the atheologian’s demand, such a rejection seems worrisomely ad hoc. On the other hand, the Scholastic might deny that being should be understood in terms of disclosure or unconcealment of beings and insist that, although being is univocal, finite beings are nevertheless essentially dependent on a self-explanatory infinite being. But this invites the charge that being has been stripped of any phenomenological content. At this point, then, it is by no means apparent that the Scholastic natural theologian can turn aside the Heideggerian atheologian’s claim that the sending of being/time by Appropriation is an uncausable contingency, and thus a fatal counterexample to Scotus’s assumption that whatever is contingent must be causable. Where does this leave us? In contradistinction to the Scotist view that a First Being necessarily exists as the ultimate causal ground of all contingency, we have a view in which there is no such cause. Indeed, if Heidegger is right then the very idea of a necessary cause of all contingency, including the sending of being/time by Appropriation, is incoherent: there cannot be such a cause. To the extent that Heidegger’s very late atheology provides any philosophical explanation of contingent beings, it consists in the observation that beings are disclosed through the series of historicized transcendentals constituting the history of being, each of which is characterized by unified dimensions of true time as structural principles. The possibility of anything being disclosed by some historicized transcendental

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or other in accordance with true time is further explained in terms of the sending of being/time by Appropriation. However, there is no explanation of this sending itself. At the very heart of any possible disclosure of beings lies a radically contingent, uncaused, and uncausable happening.27 Undermining Scotus’s proof of a First Being and replacing it with the ultimate contingency of Appropriation sending being and time would be substantial steps toward overcoming traditional metaphysics.28 By no means is this the end of the matter, however, but rather the exciting point at which the battle between the Scholastic natural theologian and his Heideggerian opponent truly begins. The very late atheology explains the history of being in terms of the sending of Appropriation. Let us see whether this explanation makes sense.

Chapter 4

Appropriation and the Problem of Sufficient Comprehension

Heidegger’s atheology of Appropriation postulates the sending of being and time by Appropriation as a bedrock contingency that is in principle inexplicable. As we saw in the last chapter, this sending event is held to be not only contingent and uncaused but also uncausable: the fact that there is no causal explanation for the sending isn’t a problem because the sending isn’t the sort of thing that can be caused. It just happens. To persist in demanding a causal explanation here is misguided. If there really is such a bedrock contingency, then the Heideggerian atheologian can only try to make us aware of it. At best, we can hope for a final phase of the “sending” in which it happens that we refrain from all metaphysical thinking and cultivate a postmetaphysical appreciation of the world and our place in it. Still, Heidegger’s atheology of Appropriation doesn’t forego all attempts at explanation. For it purports to explain being and time— that is, the coming to be and passing away of the historicized transcendentals in the history of being, each of which discloses beings structured by the dimensions of true time—in terms of the sending of Appropriation, even though the latter in principle cannot be explained. From later Heidegger’s post-metaphysical perspective, in addition to satisfying the usual requirements of comprehensibility, consistency, noncircularity, and so on, to be adequate this explanation must refrain from drawing upon any traditional metaphysical notions embedded in a particular historicized transcendental; otherwise, achieving Heidegger’s avowed aim of overcoming all metaphysics would be impossible. How might a nonmetaphysical explanation of being and time in terms of the sending of Appropriation proceed?

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In Chapter 2, we noted that if Appropriation reduces to the sequence of historicized transcendentals, then the explanans is trivially the same as the explanandum. Appropriation is then no different from being and time. Such a result may be viewed as the recognition that nothing deeper can or need be said about being, disclosure, or the phenomenological availability of beings in time than by summarizing the history of being as the history of ways beings have shown up for humans and pointing out its attendant philosophical confusions. Once that is done, we may disown metaphysics and turn our attention to more serious intellectual tasks. This deflationary understanding of Appropriation is similar to the contemporary pragmatist view that the history of philosophy amounts to a series of vocabularies whose contingency gives us the option of overcoming all philosophy, including metaphysics, by abandoning the terms which seem to make philosophical problems compelling.1 Suppose, though, that Appropriation is more than the history of being, so that Appropriation and being/time are not the same. This presents a different picture of Heideggerian overcoming, in which metaphysics as the history of being is overcome not by recognizing it as something contingent but by thinking something different from the history of being that explains it and is understood in purely nonmetaphysical terms. Appropriation is then conceived as an explanans that is genuinely distinct from the joint explanandum of being (the history of being) and time.2 To borrow a term from early Heidegger, on this picture we have something like a cosmic affair complex consisting of Appropriation and the temporally structured historicized transcendentals which are somehow explanatorily dependent on the sending of Appropriation, though this sending isn’t caused by Appropriation or by anything beyond the cosmic affair complex.3 The goal of post-metaphysical thinking is then to understand as fully as possible the aspects of this affair complex and precisely how they are related. That in turn requires arriving at a linguistically adequate understanding of Appropriation and its relation to the history of being.

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The relation between Appropriation and Being and Time It was also suggested in Chapter 2 that Heidegger’s atheology of Appropriation countenances the possibility that Appropriation is “metaphysically prior” to being and time. In line with the aim of overcoming metaphysics, we must be careful not to understand this notion of priority in traditional metaphysical terms, or at least not in metaphysical terms which are embedded in some epoch in the history of being. For example, Appropriation is not metaphysically prior to being and time in the way that God is metaphysically prior to His creation in Scholastic metaphysics. Not only would that reduce Appropriation to a particular being, but it would also make Appropriation in its nature wholly independent of being and time in a manner that Heidegger rejects. He views Appropriation as essentially a “giving” or “sending” of being and time.4 Since X cannot be a giving or a sending unless X gives or sends some Y, it follows that Appropriation is also in some sense dependent on the being and time It sends. Can we clarify this mode of dependency? One possibility is to deploy the metaphysically neutral notion of formal interdependence introduced in Chapter 2: Appropriation and being/time qua the actual sequence of intrinsically temporal transcendentals which make up the history of being are formally interdependent in the same way that a particular conception of being encoded in language and humans conceptualizing in language in accordance with that conception are formally interdependent. However, contrary to the nondeflationary view of Appropriation we are exploring, this reduces Appropriation to the actual history of being. In particular, since Appropriation is dependent on the actual sequence of transcendentals, if the sequence had been different then there would have been no Appropriation. This consequence is counterintuitive, for even if the history of being had unfolded otherwise than it actually did, presumably there would still have been a “giving” or “sending” of being and time. One might propose that different Appropriations or “sendings” correspond to different possible histories of being—but then we may ask what these different Appropriations have in common that makes them “sendings.”

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In explicating the relation between Appropriation and the history of being, it is useful to utilize another Scotist notion. Scotus introduces the idea of signa or instants of nature to explain how the will can choose other than it does even at the very moment of its actual choice, which Scotus thinks is required for genuine freedom.5 Instants of nature are ontologically distinct aspects present in the same temporal moment. For example, consider the case in which at time t I choose to turn right instead of left. According to Scotus, t itself contains at least two instants of nature: my power to turn right or left, and my actualizing this power by turning right instead of left. One instant of nature is naturally prior to another instant if and only if mention of the former is required in an explanation of the latter.6 Since an explanation of actualizing my power to turn right or left must mention my power to turn right or left, my power to turn right or left is naturally prior to my turning right instead of left. Yet both of these instants of nature exist in t. Hence even though t contains an instant of nature at which I turn right instead of left, t also contains a naturally prior instant of nature at which I have the power to turn right or left, so that my choice at t to turn right instead of left is genuinely free. Think of the entire unfolding of the history of being as a single protracted cosmic event7 containing at least two instants of nature: Appropriation and the actual sequence of historicized transcendentals It sends. Since, according to Heidegger, an explanation of the sending of being qua the history of being (i.e., the actual sequence of historicized transcendentals) must mention Appropriation as what sends that history, the instant consisting of Appropriation is naturally prior to the instant consisting of the actual history of being. However, Appropriation is not temporally prior to the history of being, since both instants of nature are contained in the same protracted cosmic event. We then have a cosmic affair complex consisting of two instants of nature, one of which—viz., Appropriation—is naturally prior to the other—viz., the actual sequence of historicized transcendentals which disclose beings through the dimensions of true time. We have come closer to capturing Heidegger’s view, but we haven’t quite. For a time t may contain an instant of nature (e.g., my power

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to turn right or left) that is naturally prior to another instant (e.g., my actually turning right) while being in no way dependent on the other instant (i.e., my power to turn right or left doesn’t depend on my ever turning right or left).8 Yet we saw that Heidegger takes Appropriation in some sense to depend on Its “sending” or “giving.” A more accurate statement of Heidegger’s atheology of Appropriation includes the following pair of claims: (1) Appropriation is naturally prior, in Scotus’s sense, to the actual sequence of historicized transcendentals. (2) Appropriation is formally interdependent, not with the actual sequence of historicized transcendentals, but with the more general fact that there is some sequence or other of historicized transcendentals. Claim (1) maintains that an explanation of the actual history of being must mention Appropriation and Its “sending.” To avoid treating Appropriation as a cause, this explanation must be noncausal. Claim (2) allows Appropriation to depend on some history of being or other without depending on any particular such history.9 Appropriation should not be conceived as a sort of pre-metaphysical “Big Bang” that gives rise to the history of being, but rather as an atemporal potentiality that must be actualized by “sending” some sequence of historicized transcendentals in a protracted cosmic event, though which particular sequence is actually sent is radically contingent (not only uncaused but also uncausable).10 Heidegger speaks of the “finitude of Appropriation” as “finitude in itself.”11 What does he mean by that? We might take him to be claiming that the number of historicized transcendentals Appropriation can send is finite—that is, that the atemporal potentiality of Appropriation can be actualized in only a finite number of ways. However, this claim is impossible to evaluate in the absence of a clearer understanding of the nature of the potentiality Appropriation supposedly “is.”12 A more cautious interpretation links the finitude of Appropriation to the possibility of overcoming metaphysics: if it is really possible for humans to experience a Gelassenheit in which no more historicized transcendentals are ever sent and the history of being ends,

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then the actualization of Appropriation as the potentiality to send conceptions of being will have a limit, and hence will terminate in finitude.13 On this interpretation, Heidegger is not saying that the sending of metaphysical conceptions by Appropriation must terminate, but only that it may. Using the notions of formal interdependence and of instants ordered in terms of natural priority to characterize the relation between Appropriation and being/time has its advantages and its drawbacks. An advantage is that the abstractness of these notions makes them appear innocent of metaphysically controversial concepts drawn from any particular historicized transcendental. The formal interdependence of X and Y implies only that X and Y are equally real and necessarily interrelated; the natural priority of an instant N1 to N2 implies only that an explanation of N2 must mention N1 since the former essentially depends on the latter. Heidegger is then free to utilize these notions in his post-metaphysical explication of Appropriation and the sending of being and time. A drawback is that these notions are too abstract to provide us with any positive insight into the nature of Appropriation itself. Without this insight it is difficult, if not impossible, to understand how Appropriation qua atemporal potentiality for “sending” can serve as a viable explanans for the history of being as explanandum. It is important to state the problem clearly: the Heideggerian atheologian need not provide a complete comprehension of the nature of Appropriation. But he does need to provide a comprehension of Appropriation sufficient to understand how Its “sending” can function in genuine noncausal explanation of being and time. And to allow for the overcoming of metaphysics, the sufficient comprehension must not make use of any metaphysically loaded concepts from the history of being. For the sake of argument, let us concede the metaphysical neutrality of the notions of formal interdependence and of instants ordered by natural priority. Nonetheless, so far all we’ve learned about the alleged explanation of being/time in terms of Appropriation is that it can’t be a causal explanation. Is there anything else to say beyond that? I take Heidegger to be aware of the problem of sufficient comprehension, and I discern two strategies he outlines for addressing it.

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The quasi-Scotist strategy Scotus holds that properties such as goodness apply to God and created beings univocally yet in different modes since, for example, God is infinitely good while created beings are finitely good. Heidegger compares Appropriation qua sending or giving to the dimensions of true time qua what he calls “extending”: This determination showed itself as we look ahead through the interjoined modes of giving: sending and extending. Sending of Being lies in the extending, opening and concealing of manifold presence into the open realm of time-space. Extending, however, lies in one and the same with sending, in appropriating.14 Thus, Appropriation qua sending is said to be an extending in precisely the same (univocal) sense that the dimensions of true time extend to each other to constitute any stage in the life of an individual or of a culture encountering a world of beings. Yet Appropriation and the temporal dimensions possess extending in different modes, since the dimensions are phenomenologically accessible to us whereas Appropriation is not. Evidently, Heidegger thinks that by understanding a property of phenomenologically accessible temporal dimensions we can form some understanding of phenomenologically inaccessible Appropriation, just as Scotus thinks that by understanding certain perceptible properties of created beings we can form some understanding of imperceptible God. Unfortunately, the drawback in utilizing the notions of formal interdependence and instants ordered by natural priority to characterize Appropriation as sending is now pushed back to the extending allegedly shared by Appropriation and the dimensions of true time. So far, such extending has been given no positive content. Interestingly, Heidegger seems to acknowledge this shortcoming: Even assuming that in our discussion of Being and time we abandon the common meaning of the word “event” and instead adopt the sense that suggests itself in the sending of presence and the extending of time-space which opens out—even then our talk about “Being as Appropriation” remains indeterminate.15

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Even more interesting is the fact that, in his subsequent discussion, he analyzes the notion of extending said to apply univocally to Appropriation and to the temporal dimensions—particularly the past and the present—as withholding: (1) The past and the future are modes of withholding because past beings which no longer exist and future beings which don’t yet exist nevertheless become phenomenologically accessible to us (e.g., we can think about the last World Series or the next one); in other words, this phenomenological accessibility is made possible by a withholding of actual being.16 (2) Appropriation is a mode of withholding (“Expropriation”) because by remaining phenomenologically inaccessible to us it allows the historicized transcendentals with their intrinsic temporal structure to become phenomenologically accessible to us (e.g., we can be aware of the fact that we conceive of all beings as standing reserve); this phenomenological accessibility is made possible by a withholding of Appropriation.17 Hence the quasi-Scotist strategy hopes to glean a sufficient comprehension of the nature of Appropriation, which makes being/time accessible to us by remaining inaccessible Itself, through the manner in which past and future beings become phenomenologically accessible to us by having their actual being withheld. Immediately a difficulty arises. What is withheld when a past or future being becomes phenomenologically accessible to us—namely, its actual being—is nevertheless phenomenologically accessible to us: past and future beings are still disclosed or “show up” for us as nonexistent beings (beings which are no longer or are not yet) of which we are aware. By contrast, what is withheld when being/time becomes phenomenologically accessible to us—namely, Appropriation—is thereby concealed, and thus remains phenomenologically inaccessible to us in Its very nature.18 Consequently, there is a fundamental discrepancy between temporal withholding and the withholding (withdrawing, expropriating) of Appropriation, making it hard to see how the former can be used to form a sufficient comprehension of the latter. I conclude that, at least at this stage of inquiry, the quasi-Scotist strategy doesn’t solve the problem of sufficient comprehension.

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The quasi-Thomist strategy According to Aquinas, properties such as goodness apply to God and created beings in neither a univocal nor an equivocal sense but only in an analogical sense: by understanding how these properties which we first encounter in perceptible creatures apply analogically to God, we can form some positive understanding of imperceptible God. To understand the nature of Appropriation, we must understand the relation between Appropriation and the being/time which Appropriation sends. One strand in Heidegger’s later writings explores the manner in which poetry discloses beings to us. Might we attain a sufficient comprehension of the relation between Appropriation and being/time by seeing it as analogous to a certain relation between poetically revealed beings? Initially, the prospects for this strategy seem promising. Recall that the poetic idioms instrumental in conveying the intuition of being and time serve as the starting point for the atheology of Appropriation. The absence in these poetic statements of a subject term designating a particular being allows them to disclose particular beings in their being/temporality without reifying being/time as a particular being. Thus such statements—or more generally, certain kinds of poetry—might disclose a phenomenologically accessible relation between beings and being/time that is analogous to the phenomenollgically inaccessible relation between Appropriation and being time without reifying either Appropriation or being/time. That Heidegger may be thinking along these lines is indicated by his increasing interest in the poetry of Rilke, Trakl, and Hölderlin. In the late essay “Language,” Heidegger studies Trakl’s poem “A Winter Evening.”19 There Heidegger claims to find a poetic rendering of concepts central to his own thinking: “the threshold” for the “difference” between being (world) and beings (things); “pain” for the “rift” between world and earth in which humans strive to work out possibilities latent in their historicized transcendental; bread and wine shown in “limpid brightness” for the “stillness” in which metaphysics is overcome and the “fourfold” of a post-metaphysical world holds sway. To Heidegger, poetry and thinking appear to proceed on

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parallel tracks in which the matters of being, time, and now Appropriation are understood in the distinctive modes characteristic of these respective disciplines. His idea seems to be that by picking up clues from the poetry of the preferred poets, the atheologian can triangulate to a sufficiently comprehensible “saying” of the nature Appropriation that enables us to understand Its sending of being and time. How? In another late essay, Heidegger considers some verses from Hölderlin.20 At one point, Heidegger speaks of the relation between the sky, which Hölderlin describes as “lovely blueness,” on the one hand, and “Everything that shimmers and blooms in the sky and thus under the sky and thus on earth, everything that sounds and is fragrant, rises and comes—but also everything that goes and stumbles, moans and falls silent, pales and darkens”21 on the other. Heidegger calls this relation between the sky as one being and the beings revealed in and under the sky the dimension. Concerning the dimension he says, The poet calls, in the sights of the sky, that which in its very self-disclosure causes the appearance of that which conceals itself, and indeed as that which conceals itself. In the familiar appearances, the poet calls the alien as that to which the invisible imparts itself in order to remain what it is—unknown.22 As Hölderlin’s “lovely blueness,” the sky makes various beings in and under it phenomenologically accessible to us, allowing us to measure them against each other and against ourselves in the fundamental way in which poets take the measure of life. In doing so, the sky itself is a being that becomes partially yet not totally phenomenologically accessible to us. For no one perspective can reveal the sky in its plenitude: breadth and depth, dusk and dawn, night and day, all types of weather.23 Trying to step back and reveal the sky in its entirety would require a trip to outer space, where there is no “lovely blueness” whatsoever. Heidegger’s thought seems clear: the sky qua “lovely blueness” is to the beings it allows us to see and to measure poetically as Appropriation qua Expropriation is to the history of being which It allows us to

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see as a sequence of historicized transcendentals structured by true time. The relation between Appropriation and being/time isn’t the same as the dimension between the sky and the beings it reveals, since the sky is a spatiotemporal expanse that is partially phenomenologically accessible to us whereas Appropriation is not. Yet the two relations are analogous, so that understanding the dimension allows us to form some positive understanding of Appropriation and Its sending. (To understand Appropriation’s sending relation to being/ time is to understand Appropriation, since It essentially involves sending.) Here we find ourselves treading on familiar ground. As in the metaphysics of Aquinas, some notion of analogy is exploited in an attempt to render sufficiently comprehensible a reality that is not directly accessible to us. This isn’t the place to review Aquinas’s theory of analogy and subsequent developments by Cajetan and others, so I will confine my remarks to a few salient points.24 The analogy between the sky and Appropriation appears to be that of proportionality. In an analogy of proportionality, X and Y are analogous because they stand in analogous relations to other relata. To take Aquinas’s classic example, the mind and the eye are analogous by proportionality because the mind is to the soul as the eye is to the body. The mind–soul relation is not the same as the eye–body relation, since mind and soul are immaterial but eye and body are material; as Aquinas would say, these two sets of terms do not have a common nature. Rather, the mind–soul and eye–body relations are analogous. Similarly, the sky and Appropriation do not share a common nature; indeed, one is a being while the other is not! Thus, the relation between sky and the beings in and under it cannot be the same as the relation between Appropriation and being/time. Yet according to the quasi-Thomist strategy, these two relations are analogous. A question about analogy is whether it has a real basis or is merely a human projection. To understand this question, it is helpful to compare analogy with counterfactual possibility. Other than extreme modal realists, few philosophers are comfortable saying that for something to be possible is a primitive fact. Most philosophers prefer either to analyze counterfactual possibility in terms of some more

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basic reality, such as real powers in nature (Aquinas) or combinatorial properties of certain concepts (Armstrong), or to treat counterfactual possibility merely as a form of imaginative projection (Quine). A similar concern might be raised about analogy. It is difficult to fathom how it can be a primitive fact that two nonidentical relations are nevertheless analogous. One might be tempted to say that the analogy between such relations is a human projection, so that it is nothing real but only a simile or metaphor. Neither Aquinas nor Heidegger would take this route, since it would reduce our talk about God or Appropriation to merely figurative language and thus preclude us from forming any positive comprehension of God or Appropriation as real. Additionally, Heidegger’s atheology of Appropriation would collapse into poetry and no longer be a distinct discipline. From a Thomist perspective, one approach is to understand the analogy between God and created beings not as an analogy of proportionality but as an analogy of causation: a created being’s goodness is analogous to God’s goodness in virtue of the fact that God is the proper cause of the created being’s essence and existence and the fact that any effect (e.g., a healthy complexion) resembles its proper cause (e.g., healthy food) in some respect.25 Note however that there remains an analogy between relations here—specifically, causal relations—since God is not the cause of created beings’ essence and existence in exactly the way that created causes cause various effects in the world. Then in virtue of what is there an analogy between divine causation and worldly causation? Either Aquinas must take this as a primitive fact, in which case it is obscure why the initial analogy between God’s goodness and the goodness of created beings can’t be taken as a primitive fact. Or he must analyze the analogy between these causal relations in terms of some more basic reality, which he can’t do because he denies that there is any reality more basic than God. Or he must ultimately explain the analogy between divine and worldly causation in terms of God as the most basic reality. I mention these points, not to distract us with Scholastic subtleties, but to drive home what is at stake in the Heideggerian atheologian’s commitment to Appropriation as what sends being/

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time. The quasi-Thomist strategy hopes to solve the problem of sufficient comprehension by postulating an analogy between relations: Appropriation is to being/time as the sky is to the beings revealed in and under it. Call this the Central Analogy. If we are to avoid taking the Central Analogy as a primitive fact, then there must be some more basic reality in virtue of which it obtains. From the perspective of Heidegger’s atheology of Appropriation, what might serve as this more basic reality? Not causation. For not only is Appropriation not the cause of being/time, but plainly the sky isn’t the cause of the beings revealed in and under it. Might there be some reality more basic than Appropriation, being/time, and beings that ground the Central Analogy? Obviously, we would then have to ask about the comprehensibility of this more basic reality. Finally, just as the Thomist might try to explain the analogy of causation in terms of God as ultimate reality, the Heideggerian atheologian might try to explain the Central Analogy in terms of Appropriation as ultimate reality. Yet then we are running in a circle, since a sufficient comprehension of Appropriation requires the Central Analogy and a sufficient comprehension of the latter requires a sufficient comprehension of Appropriation. As with the quasi-Scotist strategy, I conclude that at this stage of inquiry the quasi-Thomist strategy doesn’t solve the problem of sufficient comprehension. We are left bereft of any positive insight into the nature of Appropriation that enables us to understand how Its sending can serve as a noncausal explanans for the explanandum of being/time as the sequence of historicized transcendentals structured by true time. All we’ve been told about this “sending” is that it isn’t a causal relation, and that’s not enough.26 The consequences for Heidegger’s atheology of Appropriation are disastrous. No account of “sending” means no account of the explanatory role of Appropriation. And no account of the latter means that the view of a cosmic affair complex or a protracted cosmic event containing Appropriation (N1) and being/time (N2) as instants of nature where N1 is naturally—that is, explanatorily—prior to N2 collapses. Without the sending of being and time by Appropriation as a clear case of an uncausable contingent event, the Heideggerian atheologian is unable to raise a convincing counterexample against the

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assumption, central to Scotus’s proof of a First Explanatory Being, that every contingent event is causable. To overcome Scholastic “onto-theology” one should consider its most sophisticated version, and Scotus’s proof is arguably the most sophisticated attempt to establish the foundations of Scholastic natural theology. Since the Heideggerian atheologian fails to undermine this proof and the metaphysics/natural theology it supports, he fails to overcome Scholastic “onto-theology.”27 Or does he? Any good story contains more than one chapter. In the following one, we will consider the next stage in the dialectic of Heideggerian thought: the atheology of nothingness that can be extracted from some of Heidegger’s writings in his middle period. As with the atheology of Appropriation, the atheology of nothingness ups the ante and deepens the inquiry by developing cogent replies to previous objections.

Chapter 5

Heidegger’s Atheology of Nothingness

In a recent book, Michael Friedman contrasts the respective attitudes of Carnap and Heidegger regarding the place of logic and the exact sciences in philosophy. On Friedman’s reading, for Carnap, logic enables the overcoming of metaphysics by showing that its central claims violate the rules of logical form. Heidegger agrees with Carnap that metaphysical claims violate logical form, but rather than rejecting such claims as nonsensical pseudo-sentences Heidegger upholds the rigor of metaphysics and denies the centrality of logic to serious philosophical inquiry: It is clear, then, that Heidegger and Carnap are actually in remarkable agreement. “Metaphysical” thought of the type Heidegger is trying to awaken is possible only on the basis of a prior overthrow of the authority and primacy of logic and the exact sciences. The difference is that Heidegger eagerly embraces such an overthrow, whereas Carnap is determined to resist it at all costs.1 According to Friedman, Carnap wants to overcome metaphysics and resists the overthrow of logic, Heidegger wants to overthrow logic and resists the overcoming of metaphysics, and ne’er the twain shall meet. Given what we have learned so far, the idea that in his later writings Heidegger eagerly embraces metaphysics is seriously mistaken. No less than Carnap, Heidegger seeks to overcome all metaphysics. Admittedly, Heidegger is less sanguine than his logical positivist counterpart about the prospect of deploying modern logic as a weapon against metaphysics, since Heidegger thinks that logic itself can all too easily mask underlying metaphysical presuppositions that have arisen in the history of being. By engaging in radically antimetaphysical

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reflection or “thinking,” in his later writings Heidegger hopes to prepare for a Gelassenheit in which the history of being comes to an end and humans arrive at a post-metaphysical understanding of the world as a fourfold of earth, sky, divinities, and mortals. As for the “thinking” intended to facilitate this transition, it contains little more than basic logical principles and a few metaphysically innocuous notions such as formal interdependence and natural or explanatory priority. Even so, in Heidegger’s famous—some would say infamous—1929 essay “What is Metaphysics?” it is easy to find support for Friedman’s interpretation. At the beginning of the essay Heidegger says that his goal is to “provide metaphysics the proper occasion to introduce itself.”2 He proceeds to characterize both the natural and the human sciences (the Naturwissenshaften and the Geistwissenshaften) as disciplines which investigate various kinds of beings, not nothingness. However, it is this nothingness, understood not as a form of negation but as an unsettling condition most primordially revealed by anxiety, that first discloses the being of beings to us: as Heidegger puts it, Das Nicht selbst nichtet; nothingness itself “nothings” or “nihilates.”3 By originally disclosing being as such to Dasein, nothingness “awakens for the first time the proper formulation of the metaphysical question concerning the being of beings.”4 In particular, we are prepared to pursue the fundamental question “Why are there beings at all, and why not rather nothing?”5 Thus, Heidegger certainly appears to believe that a primordial experience of nothingness inexpressible in purely logical terms sets the stage for rigorous metaphysical inquiry into the nature of being. Yet appearances can be deceiving. In the current context, this becomes clear when we approach “What is Metaphysics?” from the perspective of Heidegger’s very late atheology of Appropriation and the problems confronting it. In the last chapter, we saw that in the absence of a sufficient comprehension of the nature of Appropriation, it is impossible to understand how being and time can be noncausally and nonmetaphysically explained in terms of the essential sending of Appropriation. Suspiciously, Heidegger’s very late atheology looks like a piece of residual metaphysics—only now reality is to be explained ultimately in terms of a mysterious “Appropriation” and Its “sending” rather

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than in terms of God and His creating, the One and its emanating, the Absolute and its dialectical progression toward total self-consciousness, or the Will to Power and its striving. Far from overcoming metaphysics, the atheologian of Appropriation seems to have become more deeply enmeshed in it. In this chapter, we will see that, rather than securing a new foundation for metaphysics, Heidegger’s essay and subsequent writings from his middle period supply the materials for constructing a powerful atheology of nothingness which escapes the problem of sufficient comprehension. In short, what explains being and time isn’t Appropriation but literally nothing. There might not have been any beings or any being or any time. There might not have been anything at all! The fact that there are and have been beings disclosed to us through constant temporal dimensions and varying transcendentals in a history of being, as opposed to there being nothing whatsoever, is a brute, inexplicable, uncausable cosmic occurrence or event. Since nothing “sends” being and time, there is nothing to understand about this cosmic event except its radical contingency. For the Heideggerian atheologian of nothingness, then, in fully appreciating the fundamental possibility of total nothingness “we liberate ourselves from those idols everyone has and to which they are wont to go cringing.”6 That is, we can set aside once and for all the metaphysical theories we cobble together to explain reality in terms of essential structures, particularly God as the First Being. In this way, I will argue, the atheology of nothingness reinvigorates the Heideggerian challenge to Scholastic metaphysics.

Negation and nothingness At the end of Chapter 1, we considered the taxonomy of negativity Heidegger presents in his Habilitationsschrift to complement the taxonomy of domains of beings he extracts from Scotus’s theory of categories. Heidegger’s elementary meontology includes contradictions in being (e.g., X’s being white and not white all over at the same time) which cannot obtain, pure negations (e.g., X’s not existing) which don’t obtain but may, privations (e.g., X’s being blind), and contrarieties (e.g., X’s not being another being Y). We noted

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that a special case of pure negations is maximal pure negation, which is a total yet contingent state of nothingness in which no beings exist. Symbolically, letting “x” and “F” be unrestricted variables for individuals and properties, respectively,7 and assuming that self-identity is a necessary condition for existence, we may express the obtaining of maximal pure negation as follows: (P1) ¬(∃x)(∃F)(x = x • F=F) • ◊(∃x)(∃F)(x = x • F = F) Of course (P1) is false since there are self-identical individuals and properties. But if there were no beings whatsoever even though there could be, then the possibility (P1) describes would obtain. Thus, when Heidegger speaks of pure negation in the Habilitationsschrift, he has in mind the negation of all beings. Early in “What is Metaphysics?” Heidegger takes up negation and its relation to nothingness. Here he also speaks of negation as “the negation of the totality of beings,” as well as “a specific act of the intellect.”8 Presumably, this act of intellect or judgment is expressed by (P1). Accordingly, in Heidegger’s later essay the term “negation” pertains to what we may call the ontological mode (the contingent state of total nonbeing), the material mode (the judgment expressing this contingent state) and the formal mode (the negation operator in the sentence expressing this judgment). Carnap, in “The Elimination of Metaphysics through Logical Analysis of Language,”9 contends that the concept of nothingness is completely articulated by sentences like (P1) containing the negation operator and the existential quantifier. Heidegger vigorously disagrees: “We assert that the nothing is more original than the ‘not’ and negation.”10 No claim Heidegger goes on to make about nothingness, such as “Nothingness itself nihilates,” can be equated with (P1), for (P1) is actually false whereas Heidegger’s claims about nothingness are supposed to be true. Since these additional claims cannot be regimented into formal notation using negation and existential quantification, Carnap dismisses them as pseudo-sentences. However, contrary to what Friedman’s interpretation might lead us to believe, Heidegger does not exclude the “not” and negation from his philosophical speculations. To see why, let us consider what Heidegger’s account of how nothingness is revealed by the mood of anxiety.

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In anxiety, Heidegger says, we are not anxious or fearful about any particular being but instead overcome by a certain unease in the face of beings as a whole. Beings “recede” or “slip away” from us so that they sink into a pervasive indifference. Notice that, like each of the historicized transcendentals, this indifference applies to all beings of different kinds. Yet unlike the transcendentals in the history of being, each of which makes possible a distinctive form of metaphysical theorizing, when beings as a whole recede from us “we can get no hold on things.”11 We experience a “bewildered calm”12 in which “all utterance of the ‘is’ falls silent”13 and the impetus to metaphysics is stymied. It is this slipping away of beings as a whole in the face of anxiety that Heidegger is getting at when he says that nothingness itself nihilates. If anything, what we have here is a profoundly antimetaphysical attitude, not a springboard for constructing yet another metaphysical system. Heidegger describes in vivid terms a particular upshot of this antimetaphysical attitude regarding the nature of human being, or Dasein: We “hover” in anxiety. More precisely, anxiety leaves us hanging because it induces the slipping away of beings as a whole. This implies that we ourselves—we humans who are in being—in the midst of beings slip away from ourselves. At bottom therefore it is not as though “you” or “I” feel ill at ease; rather, it is this way for some “one.” In the altogether unsettling experience of this hovering where there is nothing to hold onto, pure Dasein is all that it still there.14 Anxiety is said to disclose Dasein in such a way that “there is nothing to hold onto.” Specifically, the human being of one who experiences anxiety is not revealed as an “I”—that is, a Cartesian ego, a substantial form in matter, or any other kind of “present-at-hand” object—but as pure Dasein finding itself thrown in the midst of other beings.15 We are left hanging with nothing to hold onto precisely because anxiety reveals that there is no metaphysical entity which constitutes the nature of our individual being. These ideas stand out more clearly against the backdrop of Heidegger’s discussion of authentic versus inauthentic human existence in Division II of Being and Time.16 Briefly, everyday Dasein is

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absorbed in various practical activities and projects which it takes for granted as the basic framework for making sense of itself and the world. However, in anxiety (Angst), Dasein comes face-to-face with the constant possibility of its own death. As such, Dasein is revealed as nothing but a finite “thrownness” toward its own death that finds itself in the midst of various activities and projects. “Thrown” Dasein does not determine the range of possibilities open to it (e.g., being a philosopher versus being a soldier or a doctor, etc.) but must choose from among these possibilities. Anxiety reveals that there is no essential structure beyond the possibilities my individual Dasein chooses to pursue that justifies my choice. For example, there is no immortal soul whose salvation depends on obeying moral laws that justifies my choice to be ethical. Nor is there a particularized essence which is most fully actualized by being a philosopher that justifies my choice to be a philosopher. As Heidegger puts it, “Ontologically, Dasein is in principle different from everything objectively present and real”17 which might serve as an ultimate justification for Dasein’s choices. Beyond the activities and projects, Dasein chooses to pursue there is literally nothing. In the “moment of vision” (Augenblick) Dasein can either accept its ultimate “thrownness” and exist authentically without any metaphysical supports, or it can lapse back into its everyday, inauthentic existence and console itself with the illusion that its choices are ultimately grounded in some present-at-hand “nature.” Note that the negation operator and the existential quantifier can be used to express part of what Heidegger is getting at in his remarks about anxiety and nothingness as they pertain to Dasein. In anxiety, the truth of the following negative existential is allegedly revealed to an individual Dasein D: (P2) ¬(∃x) (x = D • x justifies D’s choice to pursue certain projects) where the variable “x” ranges over all “present-at-hand” objects (substances, forms, essences, etc.). Therefore, negation and related logical concepts play some role in the elaboration of Heidegger’s position. In Being and Time, Heidegger develops a localized antimetaphysical attitude centered on a particular kind of being—namely, Dasein. In “What is Metaphysics?”, this antimetaphysical attitude is extended to

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include the being of all beings: “The nothing does not merely serve as the counterconcept of beings; rather, it originally belongs to their essential unfolding as such. In the Being of beings the nihilation of the nothing occurs.”18 What is the content of this all-encompassing antimetaphysical attitude? We have seen that for later Heidegger, the being of beings is just the history of being as the sequence of historicized transcendentals. Hence, to say that the nihilation of the nothing occurs in being is to say that the nihilation of the nothing is related to the unfolding of the history of being. How? Instead of the possible projects open to an individual Dasein, think of the transcendentals as possible ways of conceptualizing beings open to humans in various epochs of Western history. Just as we may ask whether there is any metaphysical essence beyond Dasein’s activities and projects, we may ask whether there is any metaphysical structure beyond the history of being. In “What is Metaphysics?”, Heidegger’s answer is “No”: “In the clear night of the nothing of anxiety the original opening of beings as such arises.”19 Parallel to how anxiety reveals Dasein as an individual “thrownness” whose choices aren’t grounded in any fixed essence, Heidegger thinks that the same anxiety can somehow reveal being qua the history of being as a cosmic “thrownness” in which (A) There is ultimately no entity (e.g., Platonic Forms, Aristotelian substances, a First Explanatory Being, Cartesian egos representing objects, etc.) that justifies one transcendental in the history of being (or some possible transcendental) over the others. (B) There is ultimately no explanans (e.g., Hegelian dialectic, Nietzschean Will to Power, Heideggerian Appropriation) that explains the entire history of being itself. When anxiety reveals that nothing underlies not only Dasein’s being but also the being of all beings, only then “can the total strangeness of being overwhelm us” and “arouse and evoke wonder.”20 We are left hanging with the history of being and nothing else. That is the content of Heidegger’s broader antimetaphysical thesis in “What is Metaphysics?”

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His reasons for maintaining it remain obscure. I will return to this issue in the next section. For now, I want to round out this section by returning to the role of negation in middle Heidegger’s thinking. Heidegger claims that even when Dasein isn’t experiencing anxiety, there can still be a distorted revelation of nothingness through negation.21 Someone may deny that humans beings are immaterial souls or embodied substantial forms without embracing the truth of (P2)— the “existential” negative existential, as it were—perhaps because the denier still identifies human beings with some other object or present-at-hand being, such as a stream of psychological states or a biological organism. The denier’s use of negation partially reflects Dasein’s nothingness while failing to express its full content. Similarly, certain negative existentials partially express the content of the more general antimetaphysical position Heidegger adopts in “What is Metaphysics?”: (P3) ¬(∃w)(w is a Platonic Form)22 (P4) ¬(∃x)(x is a First Being) (P5) ¬(∃y)(y is a thing-in-itself) (P6) ¬(∃z)(z explains the sequence of historicized transcendentals) and so forth. Anyone who denies some kinds of metaphysical entity while accepting others can be seen as revealing, albeit in an incomplete and distorted manner, the fact that there is nothing beyond the history of being. In this connection, Heidegger describes “possibilities of nihilative behavior” which speak out “in the ‘no’ and in negation,” such as “unyielding antagonism and stinging rebuke.”23 A Scholastic denies that there are Platonic Forms while insisting that there is a First Being. A Hegelian denies that there is a First Being in the Scholastic’s sense or that there are Kantian things-in-themselves while insisting that there is a dialectical process through which a pantheistic Spirit unfolds in history. A Heideggerian atheologian of Appropriation denies (P3) through (P6), since he thinks the various “entities” they describe are mere shadows cast by different transcendentals in the history of being, while insisting that there is something that explains the history of being by “sending” it. In these disputes, which certainly

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may exhibit plenty of antagonism and rebuke, a metaphysician partially reveals nothingness by denying his opponent’s position yet falls short of the total denial of all metaphysical entities.24 Negation and existential quantification are thus equivocal between partially antimetaphysical uses and their totally antimetaphysical use in (A) and (B) above. Contrary to Carnap, then, Heidegger holds that although such logical vocabulary—and more generally, logic itself— plays a role in philosophy, that role cannot be a central one. For mere logic does not bring us face-to-face with the fundamental fact that nothing justifies any transcendental or explains the history of being.

Why accept the broader antimetaphysical thesis? The claims (A) and (B) may be coalesced into the “cosmic” negative existential claim that nothing justifies any particular transcendental in the history of being or explains the history of being itself. Now that we have a better grip on Heidegger’s more general antimetaphysical thesis, let us ask why we should accept it. The emphasis on anxiety as originally revealing the being of all beings might suggest that Heidegger is appealing to purely phenomenological considerations to justify the thesis. That would be unfortunate. For it is difficult to understand how a particular mood or experience can reveal beyond a shadow of a doubt the nonexistence of God, the Forms, substances possessing common natures, things-in-themselves, the Dialectic of Spirit, the Will to Power, Appropriation, or any other conceivable metaphysical or post-metaphysical explanans. In particular, many such posits—for example, the Forms or Appropriation—are admitted to be phenomenologically unavailable but accessible only to reason or “thinking.” Hence, the fact that they aren’t revealed by the experience of anxiety hardly proves that they aren’t real. An indirect argument for the general antimetaphysical thesis can be extracted from Heidegger’s remarks concerning Dasein’s transcendence: Holding itself out into the nothing, Dasein is in each case already beyond beings as a whole. This being beyond beings we call “transcendence.” If in the ground of its essence Dasein were not

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transcending, which now means, if it were not in advance holding itself out into the nothing, then it could never be related to beings or to itself. Without the original revelation of the nothing, no selfhood and no freedom.25 By “selfhood” and “freedom,” I take Heidegger to mean the possibility that an individual Dasein exists authentically by accepting the fact that nothing justifies its activities or projects. Heidegger links this realization of Dasein’s essential nothingness to “the original revelation of the nothing” beyond the history of being. He seems to be saying that Dasein is nothing “present-at-hand” (has no fixed nature or essence) only if nothing justifies any particular historicized transcendental or explains the entire history of being. From this it follows by contraposition that, (C) If some explanans justifies a particular historicized transcendental or explains the history of being, then Dasein is something present-at-hand (has a fixed nature or essence). By the more limited phenomenological considerations presented in Division II of Being and Time, anxiety reveals that the negation of the consequent of (C) is true: Dasein is no present-at-hand being but merely a “thrownness.” Therefore, by modus tollens we may infer that the negation of (C)’s antecedent is true: there is no explanans that explains the history of being or justifies any transcendental in it over the others. A plausible case for (C) can be made when we recall that commensurate with any maximal conception of being is a range of possible modes of being human. For example, the possibilities of being a saint, a sinner, a monk, a nun, and so on are commensurate with the medieval conception of being. Suppose now that the medieval transcendental is justified over the other transcendentals in the history of being because there actually is a First Cause who creates everything else. According to the medieval conception of being, the First Cause creates human beings with a determinate essence or nature. Various modes of being human are then different ways of actualizing this fixed nature. An individual still faces a choice between different projects, but it is a choice between projects which are equally justified as acceptable ways of actualizing the individual’s divinely created essence, not a choice

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between equally unjustified or ultimately baseless projects. Whichever of these ways an individual chooses to actualize his/her essence in accordance with moral precepts that are a reflection of God’s absolute goodness is ipso facto a legitimate choice, whereas other “projects” are simply not legitimate possibilities. Given that only one God exists who is the author of all justice, striving to be an ancient Greek hero seeking glory as a participant in a wider struggle between gods and goddesses is not only wrong but also, strictly speaking, impossible. On the other hand, suppose that the modern conception of being as standing reserve is the only correct transcendental. Then there is no God who is the ultimate source of value but only a vast interlocking system of mineral, vegetable, animal, and human resources whose value consists solely in the fact that they are made available for consumption. To be human is then to consume, and the only legitimate possible projects open to humans are manifold ways of consuming. Whichever way an individual chooses is justified so long as it doesn’t upset the system. By contrast, eschewing consumption and devoting one’s life to God is not only an impossible way of being a consumer but also indeed ridiculous, since there is no God and there is no value in living a life of religious asceticism that makes no resources available for widespread consumption. Finally, suppose that instead of an explanans that justifies a particular historicized transcendental, there is an explanans that explains the entire history of being, such as Hegel’s Dialectic of the Spirit or Nietzsche’s Will to Power and Eternal Recurrence of the Same. Human nature is then understood in terms of some kind of goal-oriented process. The goal of the Hegelian process is abetting the Spirit’s total self-consciousness (which Hegel believed is realized in the history of being). Hence, an individual or a group is justified in pursuing a particular project provided that doing so promotes greater individual and collective self-consciousness. The goal of Eternal Recurrence is the Dionysian one of completely affirming life (which Nietzsche believes has been thwarted by the forces of traditional morality and resentment as they express themselves in the history of being). Hence, an individual is justified in pursuing a project provided that doing so is part of life he/she would be willing to live over and over again for all eternity.26 In the case of either Hegelian Dialectic or Nietzschean Recurrence, a

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number of possible projects may be equally justified because they each promote the desired goal. This stands in stark contrast to Heideggerian Angst, the point of which is that there is no ultimate philosophical justification for any project Dasein might pursue. In the last few paragraphs, I’ve argued that there are good reasons to accept (C). However, Heidegger’s broader antimetaphysical thesis follows only if it is also true that anxiety reveals Dasein as having no fixed nature or essence or any other present-at-hand element in its being. Regarding even this more limited phenomenological claim, there are good reasons to be skeptical. For there to be any scenario in which an individual Dasein is spurred by Angst to confront the possibility of its own death and to reflect on whether there is any justification for choosing among the various possible projects available to it, the Dasein in question must possess at least two fundamental capacities: an intellectual capacity and a volitional one. The intellectual capacity allows the individual Dasein to distinguish among the possible projects available to it, as well as to grasp the ultimate possibility of its own death/finitude and to reason about whether it is justified in pursuing any project. The volitional capacity enables the individual Dasein to choose some of its available projects, such as being a farmer, over others, such as being a carpenter, even if the choice is ultimately groundless. Since Heidegger believes that every Dasein is capable of experiencing Angst, the requisite intellectual and volitional capacities are part of the Dasein’s being. Certainly, they are not possible projects or activities Dasein may reflect upon and decide whether to choose, since all reflecting and deciding are impossible unless these capacities are already firmly in place. If anything, the relevant capacities seem to be fixed elements or “present-at-hand” structures that are at least partially definitive of human nature. Against this, Heidegger might reply that there is no principled difference between these capacities and other circumstances in which Dasein finds itself already “thrown.” Being a woman, being born in 1974, being gay, being in a world where others hate you for your race, creed, or country of origin are all circumstances in which different individuals find themselves and which they didn’t choose.27 Certainly such circumstances are in no way constitutive of the nature or essence of an individual Dasein “thrown” into them. Perhaps being capable of

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rationality and agency are similar, except that these are circumstances in which all (normal) human beings find themselves and which they didn’t choose. If so, then intellectual and volitional capacities aren’t part of Dasein’s nature either. The problem with this reply is that possessing these capacities is much more closely connected with the fact of being Dasein than are the circumstances of being woman, being born in 1974, and so forth. With each of these latter circumstances, it is logically possible for a being to have Dasein without finding itself already in them. Is it logically possible for a being to have Dasein without already being capable of rationality or agency? Not at all—especially if “This being which we ourselves in each case are and which includes inquiry among the possibilities of its being we formulate terminologically as Dasein.”28 Clearly, a being which includes inquiry among the possibilities of its being which it may or may not pursue cannot exclude the capacity to reason and to act. I conclude that anxiety doesn’t reveal Dasein’s essential nothingness but in fact presupposes a rudimentary human nature consisting of intellectual and volitional capacities. Rather than discouraging metaphysical theorizing, the presence of this rudimentary nature invites further metaphysical and philosophical questions which aren’t settled by the phenomenology of Angst. Do the intellectual and volitional capacities of this nature operate merely in accordance with principles of rational self-interest, as Hobbes thought? Or do they operate in accordance with utilitarian or deontological principles? Do capacities reflect an external norm, such as God as summum bonum or perhaps some overarching historical process? Is Dasein’s exercise of these capacities determined by prior circumstances, so that efforts at reducing crime should focus on prevention, or is Dasein completely free to do otherwise no matter what the prior circumstances are, so that crime-reducing efforts should focus on punishment? Depending on what the answers to these questions turn out to be, Dasein will objectively be a determinate way and certain projects will accord with its nature while others don’t—just as given the objective way a cherry tree is, growing and fruiting but not splintering and bursting into flames accord with its nature.29 More to the immediate point, we still have been given no cogent argument from (C) and the Dasein’s allegedly lacking a fixed nature or essence to the cosmic negative existential that nothing lies beyond

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the history of being that justifies any part of it over the rest or explains it in its entirety. Heidegger’s broader antimetaphysical thesis remains unsubstantiated.

Narrowing the focus Although the writings from Heidegger’s middle period don’t establish the cosmic negative existential, there may be grounds for a more limited antimetaphysical result aimed at the kind of Scholastic natural theology discussed in Chapter 3. Here it is helpful to leave behind the dubious phenomenological assertions in Being and Time concerning Dasein’s “nullity” and return to the threads left hanging by Heidegger’s atheology of Appropriation. Heidegger develops that atheology partly in response to his early quest for a phenomenologically substantive account of being. By identifying being as such with the sequence of historicized transcendentals, the concept of being is rescued from barren abstraction. For these transcendentals are precisely the ways beings in general have “shown up” or been disclosed to humans in the history of the West. Philosophically conscious humans can also become aware that a particular transcendental, such as that of standing reserve, dominates or “holds sway” over the epoch in which they live. Thus in the place of a system of empty and bloodless classifications, we have a cosmic affair complex or a protracted cosmic event the various dispensations of which are endowed with rich experiential content. Heidegger further analyzes this protracted cosmic event as containing two main constituents or, in Scotist terms, instants of nature: Appropriation and the actual sequence of historicized transcendentals It “sends” through which beings are disclosed in accordance with the dimensions of true time. In Its very nature Appropriation is a sending that depends on there being some history of being, though not necessarily the actual one, an atemporal potentiality that may be actualized in a number of possible ways. The actual history of being structured by temporal dimensions is noncausally explained in terms of the sending of Appropriation, but nothing explains this sending itself. Using the example of the sending of history of being by Appropriation, the Heideggerian atheologian can press a specific objection

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against Scholastic metaphysics epitomized by the Causal Argument for a First Explanatory Being. The Causal Argument assumes that every contingent event, even if it is uncaused, can be caused. Clearly, Appropriation’s sending of the history of being is contingent, since it may not have happened at all (so that there would have been no Appropriation) or may have happened differently (so that there would have been another sequence of historicized transcendentals). Furthermore, Appropriation’s sending of the history of being cannot be caused. For any possible cause of it would either be a happening in the history of being—in which case we have the absurdity that the history of being is already unfolding before itself—or it would be an atemporal cause that is totally self-disclosed—in which case we have the absurdity that being qua disclosure is “explained” by being qua disclosure. In embracing a view of ultimate reality as a radically contingent, uncausable sending of being/time by Appropriation, the Heideggerian atheologian hopes to overcome the view that there is a First Cause of all contingent being. However, we saw that the atheology of Appropriation hits a snag. Precisely because Appropriation’s essential sending is phenomenologically unavailable, we can form no sufficient comprehension of how It can serve as a viable explanans for the history of being. Nor do Heidegger’s attempts to meet this problem of sufficient comprehension succeed. The Scholastic metaphysician can then turn aside the objection to the Causal Argument by observing that the Heideggerian atheologian’s purported example of a contingent and uncausable event is simply unintelligible. It is here that the Heideggerian atheologian gains traction by exchanging an atheology of Appropriation for an atheology of nonbeing or nothingness. Consider the following passage from the 1935 work An Introduction to Metaphysics, where Heidegger is wondering why there are any beings at all rather than nothing: Instead, this essent [i.e., the totality of beings] through questioning, is held out into the possibility of nonbeing. Thereby the why takes on a very different power and penetration. Why is the essent torn away from the possibility of nonbeing? Why does it not simply keep falling back into nonbeing? Now the essent is no longer that which just happens to be present; it begins to waver and oscillate, regardless of

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whether or not we recognize the essent in all certainty, regardless of whether or not we apprehend it in its full scope. Henceforth the essent as such oscillates, insofar as we draw it into question.30 Heidegger is taking seriously the possibility of total nonbeing. There is something, and so there can be something. Yet even though there can be something there might not have been anything; in terms of our earlier symbolism for maximal pure negation: (P7) ◊[¬(∃x)(∃F)(x = x • F = F) • ◊(∃x)(∃F)(x = x • F = F)] Why then is there anything at all? Nowhere in An Introduction to Metaphysics does Heidegger answer this question. I suggest that is because, at least in his middle period, Heidegger thinks the question neither has nor demands any answer: there is and need be no explanation for why there is anything rather than nothing—there just is. Specifically, there is a protracted cosmic event whose sole constituent is the history of being as the actual sequence of historicized transcendentals. Yet unlike the very late atheology of Appropriation, no phenomenologically unavailable explanans “sends” or explains the actual sequence. Nothing whatsoever sends or explains the history of being. There might not have been anything at all. Or there might have been nonhuman beings but no humans. Or there might have been some other possible history of being besides the actual one. That the actual history of being occurs rather than any of these alternative possibilities is a radically contingent and ultimately inexplicable fact. Notice that this atheology of nothingness avoids the problem of sufficient comprehension. If ultimately there is no explanans, causal or otherwise, for the history of being, then obviously there is no need to understand the nature of any such explanans. This effectively deprives the Scholastic metaphysician of any toehold for his objection that Heidegger postulates an explanans for which we lack sufficient comprehension. The Heideggerian atheologian may then renew his attack on the Causal Argument. As an example of a contingent and uncausable event, the atheologian offers not the sending of being/ time by Appropriation but the actual sequence of historicized transcendentals in the history of being. This history cannot have a cause

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because if it did then in exercising its causality this cause would be an occurrence in being, and hence be part of the history of being, and hence be causing itself—which is impossible. Essentially the Heideggerian atheologian’s objection to the Causal Argument is the same as before minus any postulation of some mysterious “It” called “Appropriation.”31 At the very least, the atheologian of nothingness appears to have made a case, if not for a global antimetaphysical position, then for the more limited antimetaphysical thesis that there is no First Being, and thus that Scholastic metaphysics/natural theology should be abandoned.32 The case is deepened by reflecting on an intriguing passage from “What is Metaphysics?” where Heidegger criticizes the Christian doctrine of creation ex nihilo: The questions of Being and of the nothing as such are not posed. Therefore no one is bothered by the difficulty that if God creates out of nothing precisely He must be able to relate Himself to the nothing. But if God is God he cannot know the nothing, assuming that the “Absolute” excludes all nothingness.33 Heidegger seems to be arguing that for God qua First Being to create the world from nothing, He would have to relate Himself to nothingness understood as a contingent state of pure negation in which no other being besides God exists. Since ex hypothesi only God exists then, the contingent state of negation out of which God creates would have to be included in God. Yet negation cannot be included in God, since He is a pure plenitude of being. Therefore, God cannot create the world ex nihilo. On the surface, the Scholastic has a straightforward reply to this argument. Any universe God might create He would do so contingently. Suppose God creates a universe U that has no beginning or end. U is still contingent, since it might not have existed. There is no state of pure nonbeing, negation, or nothingness independent of U out of which God creates U and to which He somehow has to relate Himself without including nonbeing in His own being. The U is metaphysically dependent on God’s existence and His eternal choice to create U. To say that God creates U ex nihilo is merely to say that God’s choice to create U is not caused by anything. Mutatis mutandis

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for any other universe God might create, including one which begins and/or ceases to exist. Even though there is “nothing” besides God before and/or after such a universe, God doesn’t have to relate Himself to some contingent state of pure nonbeing in order for such a universe to be metaphysically dependent on His being and creative choice. However, the Heideggerian atheologian may be expected to latch onto the claim that God’s choice to create any universe He might create is uncaused. The divine choice to create the actual universe is contingent, since according to the Scholastic conception of God there is no necessity that God create any universe. Furthermore, the divine choice is not only uncaused but uncausable, for it were caused by God’s nature then it wouldn’t be contingent and if it were caused by something else then God wouldn’t be God. Admittedly, the divine choice to create the actual universe isn’t an event in time; nonetheless, it is an uncausable contingency. Nothing can explain this choice. It simply obtains. It is easy to see where the Heideggerian atheologian is going here: if the Scholastic explanation of the contingency of the universe rests on a radical contingency in the heart of the divine being, then contingency is never really explained but merely taken as a bedrock fact.34 But then there is no reason why contingency can’t be taken as a bedrock fact, not about the timeless choice of a First Being, but about the universe understood in Heideggerian terms as the history of being. Instead of explaining the contingency of the history of being by appealing to the inexplicable contingency of a First Being’s choice, we should stop trying to explain the contingency of the history of being and accept it as ultimately inexplicable. Nothing causes, sends, or explains the history of being. It just happens.

Chapter 6

Nothingness and the Problem of Possibility

At the end of the last chapter, we were left hanging over an abyss. Taking being and time as its subject matter, Heideggerian atheology radically reworks these traditional metaphysical concepts. In its simplest terms, being (ens) is understood as disclosure. Disclosure is further explicated in terms of the maximally general conceptions or historicized transcendentals constituting the history of being. Intrinsic to each transcendental is a certain temporality whereby future possibilities already latent in the past emergence of the transcendental unfold in a present in which beings are encountered. Being is then identified with the history of being as a protracted cosmic event characterized by a series of dispensations structured by time. The Heideggerian atheologian initially analyzes this cosmic event or “happening” as the actualization of an atemporal potentiality known as Appropriation. Yet the fundamental incomprehensibility of Appropriation renders his analysis untenable, leading the Heideggerian atheologian to jettison It and settle for saying that the protracted cosmic event that is the history of being is itself purely contingent and uncausable. That is a felicitous step, since after all Appropriation’s alleged “sending” of the history of being is purely contingent and uncausable. By adopting the view that nothing explains the history of being, the Heideggerian atheologian is able to drop the epistemological baggage associated with Appropriation while retaining the basic idea that reality is ultimately inexplicable. Thus, we have the atheology of nothingness. The result turns High Scholasticism topsy-turvy. Rather than providing a firm foundation for natural theology, Heidegger’s radical reworking of metaphysical concepts paves the way for its destruction.

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God is no longer the goal but now the casualty of the new “metaphysics.” There is no First Cause of all contingent being, only uncausable contingent being/time in which we find ourselves interacting with other beings. Even if Heidegger’s atheology of nothingness doesn’t sabotage all forms of traditional metaphysics, with regard to the Scholasticism of Scotus and Aquinas it certainly seems fair to say that nothingness itself nihilates. What is the proper response to this post-metaphysical challenge? Several possibilities might tempt us but shouldn’t. One is to sever the essential connection Heidegger sees between being and disclosure. As we learned in Chapter 1, he is motivated by the desire to endow being with rich phenomenological content, a desire that eventually culminates in his radical reworking of the traditional transcendentals we find in his very late writings. Phenomenology isn’t everything, but it is something—particularly when we are dealing with a concept like being which, no matter how vague it is initially, nonetheless applies to things of which we can be aware. If we wish to resist Heideggerian atheology yet hold on to some version of Scotus’s doctrine of the transcendentals, then we will need to find a way of endowing being and related transcendentals with suitable phenomenological content without treating them merely as dispensations in a radically contingent history of being. That is a matter I will take up in the Conclusion; my reasons for addressing it there and not in the main body of this work will only become clear later. A more drastic response denies that metaphysics and natural theology play any role in clarifying religious belief. This response, which has its roots in Luther and Calvin’s antiScholasticism and finds expression in contemporary theological trends such as Reformational philosophy and Radical Orthodoxy, takes its rationale from the apparent fact that using metaphysical concepts to explicate theistic beliefs allows the Heideggerian atheolgian to upset the applecart by reinterpreting those concepts in a radically nontheistic way. Instead, we should take Christian religious beliefs revealed to us through Scripture, as in Reformational philosophy, or by various liturgical and poetic practices, as in Radical Orthodoxy, themselves to be foundational. The trouble with this kind of approach is that there are other

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thinkers—Jews, Muslims, Hindus, Buddhists, atheistic materialists, Derridean deconstructionists, post-metaphysical Heideggerians, and so on—who disagree with us. Each of these positions has its own canon of texts, some of them tantamount to scriptures, and its own accepted procedures and practices, some of them quite poetic. Without a shared set of overarching metaphysical and philosophical principles, how is substantive debate among these divergent intellectual traditions possible? In the case of Radical Orthodoxy, the answer seems to be that it isn’t and an inquirer has to be lucky enough to be indoctrinated into the right tradition.1 In the case of Reformational philosophy, “philosophy” is reduced to the dreary prospect of pointing out how the foundational commitments of other positions differ from those of Biblical thought. Apart from the unlikelihood of showing that, for example, atheistic materialism is internally inconsistent, serious criticism of that position seems impossible because either we commit a petitio principii by assuming our own ultimate commitments or we contradict ourselves by appealing to considerations whose ultimate commitments conflict with ours.2 Another possible response is if you can’t beat ‘em join ‘em by reconceptualizing orthodox Christian beliefs in post-metaphysical terms.3 God is not construed as a timeless, necessary being but as a participant in the “fourfold” of earth, sky, divinities, and mortals where beings are encountered in accordance with the dimensions of true time yet free from metaphysical distortion. Such a strategy is wrongheaded from the start—and not because it places God in time, since God’s relation to time is a legitimate question even for traditional natural theology. Notice, rather, that “divinities” are said to participate in the Heideggerian fourfold, not “divinity.” What are these divinities? Not Zeus, Hera, Apollo, and so forth, since for Heidegger belief in the ancient Greek gods is part of a metaphysical epoch in the history of being he wishes to overcome. As we saw in Chapter 2, Heidegger thinks that particular beings can focus our practices, giving our lives direction and purpose to a lesser or greater extent. Lesser focal points like a jug of wine, a pair of peasant shoes, and a farmhouse in the Black Forest do so intimately or locally,4 while a monumental work of art, a political movement, or a charismatic leader can exercise its focusing power in a much broader context. These greater focal points, which I suggest

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are what Heidegger means by “divinities,” can act as replacements for traditional religious idols by engaging equally intense emotions and commitments in us.5 However, their plurality is redolent of polytheism rather than the monotheism that is the mainstay of the Judeo-Christian tradition. Heidegger needs a “polytheism” of greater focal points counterbalanced by one another, as well as by lesser focal points that decentralize the world’s “worlding,” to offset the danger of a monomaniacal Thing like Der Führer.6 It is no accident that later Heidegger remains entranced by ancient Greek thinking with its plastic, multifaceted conception of divinity. Any such “polytheism” is alien to Judeo-Christian monotheism, so that any attempt to recast theistic beliefs in a Heideggerian mold at best changes the subject and at worst lapses into incoherence. If not down one of these unacceptable paths, then whither hence? In Wittgenstein’s words, “Back to the rough ground”—only not the ground of ordinary language, but that of our metaphysical heritage. Heidegger’s atheology of nothingness is now complete before us, in the cross hairs, so to speak. To assess this atheology let us draw upon deeper Scholastic resources. A good place to begin is with St. Thomas.

The third way revisited Aquinas’s Third Way argues from the existence of contingent beings to the existence of an intrinsically necessary being that is the ground of all contingency. In the course of his argument, Aquinas makes the following remarks: If nothing was in being nothing could be brought into being, and nothing would be in being now, which contradicts observation. Not everything therefore is the sort of thing that need not be; some things must be, and these may or many not owe their necessity to something else.7 Aquinas proceeds to argue that a series of necessary beings which owe their necessity to something else must terminate in an intrinsically necessary being, which is the First Cause or God.

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In the quoted passage, Aquinas is considering the hypothetical case in which absolutely nothing exists—or in Heideggerian terms, in which a contingent state of maximal pure negation obtains. Nothing can then be brought into being by something else because ex hypothesi there is no “something else.” The Angelic Doctor need not be read merely as saying that, as a matter of fact, there has always been something because otherwise there wouldn’t be anything now. Instead, he may be read as saying that if absolutely nothing existed then nothing would be possible, since there would be no “something else” to serve as the ontological foundation for possibility.8 Let us relate Aquinas’s point to the Heideggerian atheologian’s central contention that even though there can be something there might not have been anything. Suppose that there hadn’t been anything at all. Then there would have been no ontological foundation for any possibility, in which case nothing would have been possible. In particular, p wouldn’t have been possible, where p is the actual history of being (or some actual being conceptualized through a transcendental in that history and the dimensions of true time). If p isn’t possible (¬◊p) then it is possible that p isn’t possible (◊¬◊p). But then it isn’t necessary that p is possible (¬†◊p). However, since p is actual, trivially p is possible. And by the basic modal principle that whatever is possible is necessarily possible, it follows that p is necessarily possible (†◊p). Thus from the Heideggerian supposition that there might not have been anything at all, we have derived the contradiction that p is both necessarily possible and not necessarily possible. Therefore, the Heideggerian supposition must be rejected. More generally, nothing—neither the actual history of being nor some other history of being nor anything else—would be possible in a state of maximal pure negation, so that a state of absolute nothingness would be necessary. By simple observation of existing beings we know that to be false.9 The Heideggerian atheologian may resist this Thomist objection at two points. He may challenge Aquinas’s apparent assumption that something is possible only if something else can bring it into being. Or, he may reject the “basic modal principle” that whatever is possible is necessarily possible. Let us take up these points in order.

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The ontological foundation of possibility Aquinas seems to assume that for p to be possible there must exist an actual power to bring about or realize p. At first blush, this completely misses the point of Heidegger’s atheology of nothingness, according to which some history of being (actual or otherwise) is possible even though there is no actual power or potentiality, such as Appropriation, to realize it. The Heideggerian atheologian needn’t claim that a maximal state of pure negation obtains prior to the history of being but only that a maximal state of pure negation is possible, and that in such a state it would still be possible for there to be some history of being in the absence of any actual power or potentiality to realize it. This reply underestimates the force of Aquinas’s insight, which can be appreciated independently of an account of possibility in terms of actual power. Suppose again that there hadn’t been anything at all, and substitute some other account of possibility for the real power account—for example, a combinatorial account, according to which p is possible if and only if p is a possible combination of certain elements (perhaps simple objects as the Wittgenstein of the Tractatus thinks on some readings, or simple concepts/notae as Scotus thinks10); or an ideational account, according to which p is possible if and only if there is an idea of p in the divine mind; or a propositional account, according to which p is possible if and only if the proposition expressing p is a member of a maximally consistent set of propositions. In the case in which absolutely nothing exists, not only is there no power or potentiality to realize p, neither are there any elements which can be combined to form p nor a complex concept of p, nor any ideas of p, nor any maximally consistent sets of propositions including the proposition expressing p. There is nothing whatsoever. In particular, there is no ontological foundation in virtue of which p is possible. Contrary to the atheology of nothingness, then, if there hadn’t been anything there couldn’t have been any beings, history of being, or anything else. As a last-ditch effort, the Heideggerian atheologian might insist that in a state of maximal pure negation there are certain brute possibilities with no ontological foundation: the brute possibility in which the actual history of being unfolds, the brute possibility in which some other history of being unfolds, the brute possibility in which no

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history of being unfolds, and so forth. Furthermore, these brute possibilities are possibilities, not actualities, which are precluded from existing in a state of absolute nothingness. The notion of “actuality” is relative to a world, yet reality encompasses not only what is actual relative to our world but also what is merely possible. This sort of modal realism, familiar from the work of David Lewis,11 requires a substantial metaphysical commitment incompatible with the global antimetaphysical position the Heideggerian atheologian wishes to espouse. Nonetheless, the atheologian may regard that as an acceptable tradeoff if it allows for the overcoming of Scholastic theology. In truth, this sort of modal realism is inimical to Heideggerian atheology. Remember that on the latter view, every being disclosed in the history is utterly contingent, not only on the sense that its existence is contingent, but also in the sense that whatever attributes the being possesses are contingent because the various historicized transcendentals through which beings are disclosed are themselves contingent. For example, it is a contingent fact that the pepper tree in my backyard is standing reserve at current time t because it might have been disclosed otherwise at t. Lewis’s modal realism actually implies that this is not a contingent fact. A being X possesses an attribute Y contingently only if there is some possible world in which X exists but doesn’t have Y. But on Lewis’s modal realism, a given being doesn’t exist in different possible worlds but only has counterparts in some other worlds. So the pepper tree in my backyard only exists in this possible world, not in any others. Trivially, then, there is no possible world in which that tree exists but isn’t standing reserve at t, so that it is an essential attribute of the tree that it is standing reserve at t. The Heideggerian atheologian would want nothing to do with such necessitarianism. And is an account of possibility really “an acceptable tradeoff” for the atheologian if in principle it prevents him from ever developing a global post-metaphysical position in which not only God but also Forms, Spirit, the Will to Power, and the metaphysics of modal realism are all overcome?12 In addition to the difficulties raised by an extreme version of modal realism like Lewis’s, an ontology of brute possibilities threatens to erase the epistemological advantages the atheology of nothingness has over the atheology of Appropriation. Specifically, it is obscure

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how we can form any sufficient comprehension that reveals the actual series of historicized transcendentals, or the same transcendentals ordered in a different series, or some series of entirely different transcendentals, to be brute possibilities. A commitment to totally unknowable brute possibilities is no better than a commitment to a totally unknowable Appropriation.

Is the “Basic Modal Principle” really basic? The Thomist objection against Heidegger’s atheology of nothingness derives a contradiction from the supposition that there might not have been anything: if there hadn’t been anything then nothing would have been possible, including the history of being. Thus the history of being isn’t necessarily possible. On the other hand, the history of being is actual, so trivially it is possible. By the basic modal principle that whatever is possible is necessarily possible, the history of being is necessarily possible. Therefore, the history of being is both necessarily possible and not necessarily possible, which is a contradiction. Based on this reductio ad absurdum, the Scholastic metaphysician rejects the supposition that there might not have been anything. But, the Heideggerian atheologian might respond to the reductio differently by rejecting the principle that whatever is possible is necessarily possible. On this approach, in the hypothetical case in which absolutely nothing exists the history of being wouldn’t have been possible. But in the actual case, the history of being is possible. Just because something is possible in one case doesn’t mean that it is possible in all cases. In other words, something may be possible without being necessarily so.13 This requires the Heideggerian atheologian to abandon the claim that if there hadn’t been anything there still could have been something. That by itself isn’t so bad, for he can continue to maintain against the Scholastic that the protracted cosmic event consisting of the actual history of being is not only contingent, since there might not have been anything, but also inexplicable, for the reasons broached earlier. Yet there is a more serious problem. Consider again the hypothetical case in which there isn’t anything at all. According to the Heideggerian response under consideration, in that case

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nothing is possible. So the actual history of being isn’t possible (¬◊p). Trivially, any truth that obtains is possible (p→◊p). Hence, in the case in which there isn’t anything at all, trivially it is possible that the actual history of being isn’t possible (◊¬◊p). But now we are back to Aquinas’s earlier point: in a state of maximal pure negation, ex hypothesi there is absolutely nothing that constitutes the ontological foundation for this or any other possibility. There is no metaphysical basis whatsoever that secures the possibility of the impossibility of p as opposed to, say, the necessity of the impossibility of p—or, for that matter, any modal permutation on p. Nor, we have seen, does the Heideggerian atheologian have the option of taking the possibility of the impossibility of the history of being or any other possibility in a maximal state of pure negation to be a brute possibility. I conclude that we have a refutation of the Heideggerian atheology of nothingness, courtesy of St. Thomas. It isn’t possible for absolutely nothing to exist, since otherwise nothing would be possible, including the actual history of being. And the actual history of being, along with many other things, is obviously possible, since it is actual. The view that instead of the history of being (or reality in its totality or absolutely EVERYTHING—whatever you want to call it) there might be nothing at all is fundamentally incoherent. The dialectic of Heidegger’s thought teaches us that Heideggerian atheology culminates in the atheology of nothingness, and we have now learned that the atheology of nothingness is a failure. It is thus Heideggerian atheology, not Scholastic natural theology, that should be consigned to the dustbin of discarded ideas.

God and contingency Our work is not done, however. At the end of the last chapter, we confronted a puzzle about the Scholastic view that the contingency of the universe is ultimately explained by God’s contingent choice to create it. One doesn’t have to accept Heideggerian atheology to be gripped by this puzzle—a pesky mouse that has been rattling around in the basement of the cathedral for a long time, so to speak. The puzzle may be approached either from the direction of contingency or from that of necessity. From the direction of contingency, it may

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be asked: if the contingency of the universe and everything in it is ultimately explained by God’s contingent creative choice, what explains this choice? Apparently nothing. But then it seems that explaining the contingency of the universe in terms of the unexplained contingency of God’s creative choice is no explanation at all. From the direction of necessity, it may be objected: on the Scholastic conception, God necessarily exists. God is also absolutely simple. By the divine simplicity, God’s will and so God’s creative choice is the same as God. But then, the divine necessity, God’s creative choice is necessary, not contingent.14 We are swimming in deep waters. My goal isn’t to resolve all questions about divine simplicity, the divine will, and God’s aseity or necessary intrinsic being, but only to outline an initial solution to the puzzle so that it doesn’t act as a stumbling block to further theorizing about these questions within a Scholastic framework. First, the direction from necessity. It is natural to begin by imagining God on the one hand and God’s creative choice on the other. The former is said to be necessary, the latter contingent. So far so good. The crunch comes when we imagine God’s absolute simplicity as a coalescing of these two independently conceived components. It then seems that the modal character of only one of these components must prevail, so that God’s creative choice must be necessary (or else God Himself must be contingent). This is like looking through the wrong end of a telescope. Instead, let us look through the right end and begin with God’s simplicity. Think of it as a divine singularity of pure being, the mirror image of the purely negative singularity at the center of a black hole. On the Scholastic view of Scotus and Aquinas, this divine singularity exists by necessity. Now consider the actual universe U as everything other than the divine singularity. The existence of U is metaphysically dependent on the divine singularity, in the sense that if, per impossibile, the latter hadn’t existed, U wouldn’t have existed either. Furthermore, we can certainly imagine many different possible universes U*, U**, and so forth, each of which is different from U yet which, like U, would be metaphysically dependent on the divine singularity if it actually existed. That’s all we have to imagine to make initial sense of how a necessary and simple being like God can nevertheless

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contingently create any number of possible universes. To say that God is simple and necessary is to say that the divine singularity cannot not exist. And to say that God can contingently create any number of possible universes is to say that the divine singularity is compatible either with there being no universe or with there being any one of a number of possible universes that is metaphysically dependent on it. True, this is merely a heuristic aid, not a full theoretical account. We may still ask whether the divine singularity implies that God’s attributes are merely different ways we conceive His essence, as Aquinas thought, or whether within the divine singularity there is a formal (more-than-conceptual-yet-less-than-real) distinction among God’s attributes. Even so, hopefully, the heuristic aid will encourage us to pursue these questions rather than to throw our hands up in consternation. Now let us approach the same puzzle from the direction of contingency. In precisely what sense is God’s creative choice the ultimate explanation of contingency? We need to be careful here. Something is contingent if and only if it is possible but not necessary. Furthermore, there are contingent beings, such as the universe and everything in it, which, in addition to being possible but not necessary, are also actual. Therefore, when we ask what ultimately explains contingency, we may be asking (1) what explains the fact that a given contingent being is possible, or (2) what explains the fact that a given contingent being is actual. Concerning question (1), the answer adopted by Scotus and Aquinas is that a given contingent being p is possible in virtue of God’s absolute essence. God Himself is the ontological foundation of all possibility. For Scotus, the ontological foundation of the possibility of p is the idea or complete concept of p existing in the divine intellect, a concept which ultimately consists in a combination of simple concepts or notae which are mutually nonrepugnant.15 For Aquinas, the ontological foundation of p’s possibility is God’s power to bring p about.16 On both views, since God always exists even if absolutely nothing else exists, if p is possible then p is always possible. And since God necessarily exists, on both views it also follows that if p is possible then it is necessary that p is possible, in line with the basic modal principle discussed above.

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The point I want to make is that God’s contingent creative choice plays no role in determining what is (necessarily) possible for either Scotus or Aquinas. That’s because what is possible is a reflection of God’s essence, understood in terms of the divine intellect (Scotus) or in terms of the divine absolute will or power to bring things about (Aquinas). And God does not determine His own essence by some contingent creative choice.17 Rather, God’s creative choice is the answer to question (2): the reason why any contingent being isn’t merely possible but actual is that God freely decides to create it. If God’s decision to create p were necessary, then p wouldn’t be merely possible but necessary. Hence, to guarantee p’s contingency, God’s creative decision must be contingent. Yet the ontological foundation of p’s modal status (†◊p) remains God’s necessary essence, not God’s contingent creative choice.18 Though agreeing that God is the ontological foundation of possibility, Scotus and Aquinas present two very different views of the divine aseity. Let us contrast them in light of the question of how God knows actually existing contingent beings. On the Scotist account, God’s simplicity doesn’t preclude a merely formal distinction between the divine intellect with its multiplicity of complete ideas and the divine will. God knows an existing contingent being by knowing His complete divine idea of that being and knowing His formally distinct decision to create it. Scotus thinks there must be at least a formal distinction between God’s intellect and God’s will, since otherwise He fears that the necessity of the former would transfer to the latter. This requires a satisfactory account of the formal distinction, particularly as Scotus applies it to the divine attributes.19 On the Thomist account (or at least one way of reading St. Thomas), God’s absolute simplicity is incompatible with any more-than-conceptual distinction, formal or otherwise, between the divine intellect and the divine will. God is simply a fully actualized power. We can begin to understand the divine power by analogy with our own power of vision. Aquinas understands vision to be an immaterial power not reducible to any material object or physical process: intuitively, one’s power of perfect 20-20 vision isn’t decreased by losing an eye or increased by gaining a hundred eyes, though exercising our power of

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sight requires possessing at least one normal eye.20 God’s absolute power is like that, unlike our cognitive powers it doesn’t depend upon a physical medium. Just as the power of vision extends to colors and shapes yet not to sounds and smells, God’s power extends to the logically possible yet not to the logically impossible; in neither case is this a defect or an imperfection, but rather an intrinsic determination of the power under consideration. In addition, just as we have a degree of freedom in how we actualize our power of vision in what we choose to see or even whether we choose to see, so God is perfectly free in how He actualizes His absolute power in what—if anything— He chooses to create. Finally, in seeing a proper object of vision we know what we see; the seeing and the knowing are one and the same. Similarly, in exercising His absolute power, God knows what He wills, and indeed His will and knowledge of His will are one and the same. These remarks are not intended as the last word on these matters but only as a propaedeutic to further inquiry concerning them. One way forward from here is to develop the contrasting Scotist and Thomist positions in greater detail, drawing upon the source texts and informed commentary and relating the discussion to contemporary philosophical concerns in both the analytic and continental traditions. The contrasting positions may then be evaluated along a number of metaphysical and epistemological dimensions, including but not limited to modality. Ultimately, a reinvigorated Scholastic metaphysics should emerge. Perhaps it will be definitely Scotist or Thomist in orientation. On the other hand, perhaps it will be a hybrid combining the best elements of both. Or perhaps it will be some as-yet-undreamt-of alternative that grows from Scotist and Thomist roots. Only the dialectic of thought, now freed from the errors of Heideggerian atheology, will tell.

Chapter 7

A Positive Application

Refuting Heidegger’s atheology of nothingness may give the impression that there is nothing of philosophical value in it, particularly for Scholastic metaphysics. That is a mistake. Even if it is impossible that absolutely nothing exists, certainly it is possible that no contingent beings exist. In this chapter, I will suggest that reflecting on the possibility of a state of pure negation restricted to contingent beings serves as a useful metaphysical tool, for it allows us to develop a Scholastic solution to the problem of mathematical truth. Whether the metaphysical instrument Heideggerian atheology has bequeathed us has other philosophical applications is a question I invite others to investigate for themselves. In presenting the problem of mathematical truth, it is helpful to turn to the discussion of number in Heidegger’s Habilitationsschrift. Recall that according to the taxonomy of domains of beings Heidegger extracts from Duns Scotus, the domain of sensory beings is distinguished from the domain of extrasensory beings, which is further divided into the domain of logical beings, such as the contents of judgments, and mathematical beings, such as numbers and perhaps sets. The status of mathematical beings is related to an issue we initially encountered in understanding early Heidegger’s theory of judgment. If the contents of judgments are causally inert abstract beings like Fregean senses existing in a nonspatiotemporal “third realm,” then it is obscure how we can grasp such contents in psychic acts of judgment. We saw how Erfurt’s realism allows Heidegger to maintain an antipsychologistic conception of judgment without positing causally inert abstract beings. The logical contents of judgments are affair complexes having actual or nonactual being, and to grasp a given affair complex is merely to recognize that it is logically possible.

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What of numbers and other mathematical beings? Unlike logical contents, Heidegger seems to regard them as abstract objects divorced from empirical reality: Number has its pure and genuine “existence” only as non-sensible object, and as such it is related to the objects [in empirical reality] to be counted. Just as there are real and non-sensory relationships, so there are real and non-sensory quantities.1 Yet if numbers are nonsensible, causally inert objects in “the abstract realm of pure number,”2 then since the proper exercise of our normal cognitive capacities involves causal interaction with the objects of cognition it is wholly mysterious how we can ever know or even think anything about numbers, let alone use them to count ordinary spatiotemporal beings.3 A tempting response is to identify our grasp of mathematical “objects” with our grasp of the contents of mathematical judgments. These mathematical contents are a species of logical contents of judgments, and thus may be treated accordingly: to grasp a mathematical content is just to recognize the logical possibility of a certain affair complex. However, this response falls short. For intuitively, the contents of mathematical judgments (e.g., that 2 + 2 = 4; that 3 + 6 = 14) aren’t merely logically possible but logically necessary: either necessarily true or necessarily false. Hence, we are left with the problem of explaining the necessity of mathematical contents without postulating an epistemically inaccessible realm of abstract beings whose properties and relations not only are what they are but also somehow must be what they are. The plan of this chapter is to probe both the problem of mathematical truth itself and some proposed solutions to it. After noting several views that might be attributed to Heidegger based on his remarks in the Habilitationsschrift, I will raise a question about the manner in which the problem of mathematical truth is usually formulated. This will enable me to set aside one fashionable contemporary solution, as well as to articulate the initially more plausible view that can be extracted from Heidegger’s Habilitationsschrift. Proceeding dialectically, we will see that middle Heidegger’s reflections on nothingness

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undermine the initially plausible view while pointing the way toward the correct view.

More on Heidegger’s discussion of number in the Habilitationsschrift Following Scotus, Heidegger distinguishes between pure numbers and the counting of sensory beings, and he claims that pure numbers are necessary for counting.4 Like sensory beings, each pure number possesses unity or uniqueness as contrariety to other numbers; yet unlike sensory beings, such as spots in a meadow, the contrariety of pure numbers is well-ordered by arithmetical relations like =, >,