Language, Truth, and Logic Heidegger on the Practical and Historical Grounds of Abstract Thought

chapter 3 Language, Truth, and Logic Heidegger on the Practical and Historical Grounds of Abstract Thought Aaron James Wendland 1 Introduction The idea of ‘logic’ itself disintegrates in the turbulence of a more original questioning. —martin heidegger, “What is Metaphysics?” In an essay entitled “The Elimination of Metaphysics Through the Logical Analysis of Language,” Rudolf Carnap takes Heidegger to task for the produc- tion of “philosophical nonsense.”1 Specifically, Carnap examines several ques- tions and assertions from Heidegger’s “What is Metaphysics?”— including, “What about this Nothing?” “Anxiety reveals the Nothing” “The Nothing noth- ings” “The Nothing exists”—and argues that they amount to “meaningless metaphysical pseudo-statements.” Carnap’s criterion for classifying Heidegger’s assertions as nonsense is rooted in what his friend and colleague, A.J. Ayer, calls the “principle of verification.” According to this principle, “a sentence has literal meaning if and only if the proposition it expresses is either analytic or empirically verifiable.”2 The tautology “All bachelors are unmarried men” is analytically true if its predicate, ‘unmarried men’, is contained within its subject, ‘bachelors’. Similarly, the contradiction, “All bachelors are married men” is analytically false (or absurd) since its predicate, “married men,” is negated by its subject, “bachelors.” For Carnap and Ayer, all analytic judgments (whether they be tautologies or contradictions) are true or false in virtue of their form. And whilst they tell us nothing about the world, analytic judgments are meaningful insofar as we can verify the various logical relations between the subject and predicate of a specific sentence. On Carnap and Ayer’s account, the only 1 Rudolf Carnap, “The Elimination of Metaphysics through the Logical Analysis of Language,” in Heidegger and Modern Philosophy: Critical Essays, ed. Michael Murray (New Haven: Yale University Press, 1978), 23–34. 2 A.J. Ayer, Language, Truth and Logic (London: Penguin, 2001), 171. © koninklijke brill nv, leiden, ��4 | doi ��.��63/9789004�70�83_��5 52 wendland other meaningful propositions apart from analytic judgments are those with empirical content. Following the early Wittgenstein, Carnap and Ayer thought that all complex states of affairs or empirical occurrences could be reduced to and thus captured by elementary propositions that reflected a given set of facts. And if simple propositions were able to reflect certain facts, then their truth or falsity could be verified by the facts. For example, observing drops of water falling from the sky confirms the truth of the proposition “It’s raining.” And insofar as empirical propositions are verifiable they too are meaningful. When, however, the principle of verification is applied to assertions like “Anxiety reveals the Nothing,” we see that this statement is neither logically verifiable, because it is neither a tautology nor a contradiction, nor is it empirically verifiable, since “the Nothing” is not a fact like rain. And therefore Carnap dismisses Heidegger’s writing as metaphysical nonsense that needs to be elim- inated from our philosophical vocabulary. Perhaps the most obvious (or ironic) criticism of Carnap’s and Ayer’s principle of verification is the extent to which it is meaningless on its own terms,3 but from a Heideggerian point of view the most fruitful critique of the verification principle comes from W.V.O. Quine and Wilfird Sellars: namely, that Carnap and Ayer assume words and sentences have a direct relation to a given reality without explaining how that reality is given.4 Like Quine and Sellars, Heidegger is concerned with the conditions through which reality is presented to human beings such that our signs can correspond to it. And when he says “the idea of ‘logic’ itself disintegrates in the turbulence of a more original questioning,”5 Heidegger’s point is not, as Carnap would have it, that human inquiry should violate the laws of logic; but rather that the intelligibility of logic is itself grounded in the essence of human beings: i.e., the being whose being 3 As noted in the text, propositions are meaningful if and only if they are empirically observable or tautologies. But the verification principle doesn’t seem to be observable in the same way that rain is. And insofar as the verification principle is that through which empirical statements acquire meaning, it cannot itself be an empirical statement, since that through which observation is made possible cannot itself be observed without the introduction of an infinite regress or some sort of circular argument. Yet the verification principle cannot be tautology either, for although it is not a fact it has a relation to the facts insofar as it is the criterion through which facts are judged. And if the verification principle is neither a fact nor a tautology, it is a performative self-contradiction or nonsense on its own terms. 4 See W.V.O. Quine, From a Logical Point of View (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1980) and Wilfrid Sellars, Empiricism and the Philosophy of Mind (Cambridge: Harvard University Press, 1997). 5 Martin Heidegger, “What is Metaphysics?,” in Basic Writings, ed. Krell (New York: Harper Collins, 1993) 105..

Load more