…every answer to this question is impossible from the start. For it necessarily assumes the form: the nothing “is” such and such. With regard to the nothing, question and answer are equally absurd…For thinking, which is always essentially thinking something, would, as thinking the nothing, have to act contrary to its own essence – Martin Heidegger
We do not commonly think of Martin Heidegger as a dualist, given his insightful deconstruction of the metaphysical dualism central to the philosophies of Descartes and Kant. Nevertheless, there can be no doubt that he was deeply preoccupied with the most important, yet most ignored, example of dualism, that of Being and Nothingness.
The truly philosophically minded person is, according to Heidegger and the ancient Greeks, not concerned with what things are, but that they are. The question tirelessly asked is – Why is there something, rather than nothing?
Taking his que from previous thinkers in the metaphysical tradition, Nietzsche attempted to obscure this question with noisy wrongheaded notions, such as that of Eternal Recurrence and the Will-to-Power. Heidegger did not fall into the trap and did not follow suit. He knew that the question concerning Nothingness is not reserved for the abstract metaphysical thinker. It comes crashing into our lives, on the most intimate level, when we sincerely confront the brevity of our existence. One day we will perish, and after doing so will never come again.
Heidegger’s preoccupation with Nothingness increases after Being and Time, although it is in this book that he deals with the concept in two primary manifestations – Thrownness and Death. We are literally, as beings, surrounded by an abyss of nothingness. We do not know where we came from and know nothing about what happens after we expire.
Finding ourselves thrown into the world against our will is deeply unnerving. It awakens within us a strong but repressed feeling of dread. No one takes birth without experiencing existential anxiety. Similarly, when one becomes aware of life’s brevity they are again confronted with yet more anxiety. Nothingness is Dasein’s beginning and nothingness is his end. It sounds bleak. Nevertheless, Heidegger takes a different tack. For him, Dasein cannot possibly live authentically until he is born-again – a process sure to occur when he sincerely and squarely faces the possibility of his mortality. In this sense, we are – as authentic Dasein – given our second birth by Death.
Earlier I mentioned the relationship between Being and Nothingness. The latter arises as a concept once Dasein returns to the present after experiencing the unsettling effects of protention. Dasein’s experience of the now is never the same. Although the present is relatively familiar and certain, future moments are not. On our tiny island of “now,” it is as if we are surrounded by darkness and nothingness. Life is apparently something salvaged from the abyss of death and nothingness.
Of course, we all question where we came from before being thrown into the world. It’s darkened because we’re blinded by the light of where we are – in a world of significance. Our ontic preoccupations work to prevent us rediscovering our origins in silence and darkness, experienced now as nothingness.
Central for Heidegger is the dread of death and ending of possibilities, the anxiety over non-being. It’s a dread that arises because of temporality and the nothingness that follows its end. Our will detests this reality but find no solution to the problem of mortality. As Rank argued, the only solution for the will is to crave “more life.” He elaborated on the way this is achieved. Sadly, we cannot explore his ideas on man’s fear and of life and death here, nor his ideas on the gymnastics by which the will tries to enhance the experience of living.
We see that Rank is quite correct on this Eros Instinct. After all, on a social level do we not shake our fists at finitude by “having more children?” It’s certainly one form of immortality, but in the end it doesn’t abate the mood of anxiety heaving underneath our daily activities.
We do not and cannot know what lies beyond the moment of death. It feels like standing on the edge of a dark precipice. The predicament is, as said, the cause of existential anxiety, or is at least the stimulus awakening the mood of anxiety which for a few contemplative types catalyzes the dramatic changes mentioned previously.
One need not look at anxiety negatively, given that it often precipitates a shift from mere subjecthood to Selfdom or Selfhood. Nevertheless, Dasein is always surrounded by the nothingness that defines him as Being-Toward-Death. It is this existential disorientation in the face of death that brought man to invent religion, replete as it is with themes of heavens, hells, supernatural gods, angels and the afterlife, etc.
In Heidegger, Nothingness is a presence within our own Being, always there, in the inner quaking that goes on beneath the calm surface of our preoccupation with things – William Barrett
