Ex nihilo nihil fit: Heidegger's Vacuuity and False Vacuum Decay

By Prof Rowan

There's no denying that Heidegger was a member of the National Socialist party. The controversy over Heidegger's association with the Nazis is now well-known and all too often used as an excuse, a shortcut, to dismiss his philosophy out of hand with the phrase “well, you know, he was a Nazi!” A recently published book (Heidegger: The Introduction of Nazism into Philosophy (2005), by Emmanuel Faye) has even made the utterly moronic argument that his philosophical work is so thoroughly contaminated by party ideology that his books ought not to be taught as philosophies but rather as “hate speech.” Look, I loathe Heidegger even more than I do Sartre, and I reject his philosophy as emphatically as anyone, but for various reasons and according to arguments more valid than merely calling him a Nazi. [1] The very existence of Godwin's law testifies to the fact that to do so amounts to little more than ad hominem and one that is widely taken to indicate the absence of a better argument, and in the case of Heidegger's “philosophy” there is no shortage of them.

The final section of the newly published English translation of Hans Blumenberg's Care Crosses The River (1987, English Translation 2010), “Dasein's Care,” contains several suggestive and compelling criticisms, including the following:

Perhaps no one has ever shuddered, as if before a yawning abyss, on being asked or asking themselves whether the world in which we live, experience, and gain knowledge really exists... In opposition to many opinions that want to view this question as the core of modern philosophy, it must be insisted that none of the imaginable answers had any consequences. In each case, everything remained the same. Indifference in the face of what looks to be such a hard problematic already sees that nothing will come of it, because nothing can come of it. (Blumenberg 141-2) [2]

Hans Blumenberg is Awesome

This refers, of course, primarily to Heidegger's lectures of the early to mid 1930s, “What is Metaphysics?” and even more to An Introduction to Metaphysics. In these lectures, Heidegger makes precisely the claim that the question “Why are there beings at all instead of nothing?” (Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics 1) is precisely the core of modern philosophy, concern for which differentiates it from science, for “the nothing is rejected precisely by science, given up as a nullity... The nothing – what else can it be fore science but an outrage and a phantasm? If science is right, then only one thing is sure: science wants to know nothing of the nothing.” (Heidegger, Pathmarks 84)