One of Heidegger’s great disappointments in the immediate aftermath of the publication of Being and Time (BT), and something he bemoans frequently to the end of his life, are the myriad ways in which his early masterpiece was misread. Heidegger’s 1927 text was misinterpreted variously as a kind of existentialism, as being nihilistic, preoccupied with the bleak nature of an absurd human condition in the face of an inevitable death, a contribution to philosophical anthropology, psychology, humanism, subjectivism—the list goes on and on. In some ways then, this paper is a modest attempt at a bit of housekeeping on Heidegger’s behalf by returning to the question of the role of moods in BT as part of what has been a general strategy of mine in previous work, namely, to forestall or undermine readings of Heidegger in the literature which begin from the hermeneutic presupposition that the later Heidegger exists only at the expense of the Heidegger that writes BT. ¹ As Heidegger writes in his 1949 “Introduction to ‘What Is Metaphysics?’”:

If, as we unfold the question concerning the truth of Being, we speak of overcoming metaphysics, this means: recalling Being itself. Such recalling goes beyond the traditional failure to think the ground of the root of philosophy. The thinking attempted in Being and Time sets out on the way to prepare an overcoming of metaphysics, so understood. (PM 279)

In a 1943 “Postscript to ‘What Is Metaphysics?’” Heidegger suggests that his basic question “springs from a thinking that has already entered into the overcoming of metaphysics” (PM 231). Heidegger further argues (as he will again, famously, in “Letter on Humanism” ² —though in a way that has been routinely misinterpreted) that any such attempts to overcome “must continue to speak the language of that which they help overcome” (PM 231). Furthermore, Heidegger, in returning to some of the key ideas animating BT, while re-assessing a lecture first delivered two years after he published that text, reminds his readers that his key question is related to the Leibnizian question. ³ He famously revisits the Leibnizian question in his 1935 lecture course, Introduction to Metaphysics (IM), (where he has routinely been thought to have effected a turn away from BT) identifying it as the fundamental question for Western metaphysics (which he has by now diagnosed as a metaphysics of presence)—a metaphysics that he wants to overcome. As he writes in another 1940s retrospective on the 1929 lecture:

Metaphysics does not ask this question [the Being question/Seinsfrage] because it thinks Being only by representing being as beings. It means beings as a whole, although it speaks of Being. It names Being and means beings as beings. From its beginning to its completion, the propositions of metaphysics have been strangely involved in a persistent confusion of beings and Being. (Introduction to “What Is Metaphysics?” in PM 281)

In the 1929 lecture, Heidegger anticipates much of what he will discuss in his famous 1935 lecture course concerning the question of the nothing and the related ways that he attempts to put pressure on the tradition. He dismisses again what he takes to be stock objections which rely on the principle of non-contradiction since that approach, for Heidegger, has already conflated being with presence and has made a decision about the meaning of being, unwitting or otherwise, which he wishes to call into question. In the 1935 lecture course where Heidegger began to try and unfold many of the motivating ideas and themes behind BT, ⁴ be begins with Leibniz’s famous question:

Why are there beings at all instead of nothing? That is the question…this is obviously the first of all questions. Of course, it is not the first question in the chronological sense. Individuals as well as peoples ask many questions in the course of their historical passage through time. They explore, investigate, and test many sorts of things before they run into the question ‘Why are there beings at all instead of nothing?’ Many never run into this question at all, if running into the question means not only hearing and reading the interrogative sentence as uttered, but asking the question, that is, taking a stand on it, posing it, compelling oneself into the state of this questioning.

Heidegger is asking, when we pose this question of being and non-being or nothing, whether we have an adequate sense of ‘being’? What do we mean by this word ‘being’—what does this verb so commonly invoked bring to the party? Of course, the obvious answer is ‘presence’ and, for this reason, Leibniz’s own question focuses on the simple issue of presence versus absence. As Heidegger says in one of the later reflections on his famous inaugural lecture (“What Is Metaphysics?”):

Is it perhaps from this that the as yet unshaken presumption has entered all metaphysics that an understanding of ‘Being’ may simply be taken for granted and that the Nothing can therefore be dealt with more easily than beings? That is indeed the situation regarding Being and Nothing. If it were different, then Leibniz could not have said in the same place by way of an explanation: ‘Car le rien est plus simple et plus facile que quelque chose [For the nothing is simpler and easier than any thing].’ (“Introduction to ‘What Is Metaphysics?’” PM 190)

Heidegger notes something that he considers both non-trivial and which he thinks the tradition has not adequately dealt with. We say of many things that they ‘are’ in various ways when it is not clear that that means that they exist as fully present or actualized before us. For example, if I say that I see a clearing in the forest, or a gap in the hedge—I say that there ‘is’ a gap. But what does it mean to say that there is a ‘gap’, literally an absence of trees in one instance or foliage on the side of the road on the other? Someone might try to counter that that is just a trick of language; that all we mean is that there is a space where no trees are growing or no hedge is growing. But, think of how else we might express this—‘there are no trees in that part of the forest’ or ‘there is nothing between those two pieces of hedge’. ⁵ What do we mean with this verb ‘being’—what does the term itself actually mean? One might be tempted to go the route of First Order logic here and suggest that if we rewrite the sentences using existential quantifiers that this kind of problem dissolves but Heidegger believes that that is because the logician has already assumed that being means presence (understood here as continuous presence) and that any talk of ‘the nothing’ as somehow ‘being’ is literally nonsense. For the logician then, they might try to rewrite similar kinds of sentences by translating them into other sentences that appear to have the same meaning, which can, in turn, be translated using existential quantifiers. And, using something like this approach, one can say that there is no problem and that one does not have to posit the presence of absence in an ideal language in order to understand the statement that there is a gap or clearing in the forest. However, Heidegger is unsatisfied with this kind of approach and anticipates it and rejects it in IM as well as in his 1940s retrospectives on his 1929 essay (“What Is Metaphysics”) which was famously attacked by Carnap in a 1932 paper (see Carnap 1932). ⁶ It is worth bearing in mind here that Heidegger had spent some time studying mathematics and logic and described himself as an ‘ahistorical mathematician’ before his breakthroughs in the 1920s. Of course, that is not to suggest that Heidegger was fully au fait with the latest developments in the philosophical logic of his day. ⁷ But neither is this the perversely vainglorious innumeracy or ill-informed prejudice of some literary crank with no real facility for mathematics or logic.

In his 1935 lecture course, in order to illustrate his point with respect to the role of the nothing in terms of what it means for anything ‘to be’, Heidegger takes an immediate example from the lecture hall—a piece of chalk:

The piece of chalk here is an extended, relatively stable, definitely formed, grayish-white thing, and furthermore, a thing for writing. As certainly as it belongs precisely to this thing to lie here, the capacity not to be here and not to be so big also belongs to it. The possibility of being drawn along the blackboard and used up is not something that we merely add onto the thing with our thought. The chalk itself, as this being, is in this possibility; otherwise it would not be chalk as a writing implement. Every being, in turn, has this Possible in it, in a different way in each case. This possible belongs to the chalk. (IM 32)

In other words, so Heidegger wants to say, what the chalk means, what we take it to mean when we say that the chalk ‘is’ in various ways, amounts to more than simply stating that the chalk is ‘present’ or ‘actual’. Of course it is present in various ways, but it can also be understood in all manner of possible ways that involve more than what is actually present at any given moment. Moreover, this is a fundamental part of what it means for things to be. For Heidegger, the logician will be tempted to respond that when anyone says of the chalk that ‘the chalk is’ that this is adequately represented by the propositional form ∃xCx—there exists some entity/x such that that entity/x is a piece of chalk. Heidegger very clearly has Carnap and the logical positivists in mind here and explicitly targets the principle of non-contradiction:

Whoever talks about Nothing does not know what he is doing. In speaking about Nothing, he makes it into a something. By speaking this way, he speaks against what he means. He contra-dicts himself. But self-contradictory speech is an offense against the fundamental rule of speech ( logos ), against ‘logic.’ Talking about Nothing is illogical. Whoever talks and thinks illogically is an unscientific person. Now whoever goes so far as to talk about Nothing within philosophy, which after all is the home of logic, deserves all the more to be accused of offending against the fundamental rule of all thinking. Such talk about Nothing consists in utterly senseless propositions. Moreover, whoever takes Nothing seriously takes the side of nullity. He obviously promotes the spirit of negation and serves disintegration. Talking about Nothing is not only completely contrary to thought, but it undermines all culture and faith. Whatever both disregards the fundamental law of thinking and also destroys faith and the will to construct is pure nihilism. (IM 25–26)

The obvious suggestion here is that one should perhaps simply ignore the question or issue of the Nothing. However, Heidegger notes that we already began with this question as a question that we received from the tradition and he further notes that the question of being was always posed in conjunction with the question of Nothingness from that same tradition:

Our introduction of talk about Nothing here is not a careless and overly enthusiastic manner of speaking, nor our own invention, but merely strict respect for the originary tradition regarding the sense of the fundamental question. (IM 26)

And yet, as Heidegger suggests, it may well be the case that the belief that this notion of ‘Nothing’ and/or any discussion of it as being tantamount to nihilism or a confounding of the fundamental and immutable laws of thinking rests on a misunderstanding. He reiterates then his opposition to the idea that rules of logic such as the principle of non-contradiction necessarily operate as the rules upon which any understanding of anything whatsoever must be based since this thinking itself rests upon a misunderstanding when it comes to the being question:

For it cannot be decided so readily whether logic and its fundamental rules can provide any measure for the question about beings as such. It could be the other way around, that the whole logic that we know and that we treat like a gift from heaven is grounded in a very definite answer to the question about beings, and that consequently any thinking that simply follows the laws of thought of established logic is intrinsically incapable of even beginning to understand the question about beings, much less of actually unfolding it and leading toward an answer. In truth, it is only an illusion of rigor and scientificity when one appeals to the principle of contradiction, and to logic in general, in order to prove that all thinking and all talk about Nothing is contradictory and therefore senseless. ‘Logic’ is then taken as a tribunal, secure for all eternity, and it goes without saying that no rational human being will call into doubt its authority as the first and last court of appeal. Whoever speaks against logic is suspected, implicitly or explicitly, of arbitrariness. The mere suspicion already counts as an argument and an objection, and one takes oneself to be exempted from further, authentic reflection. (IM 27)

The question of nothingness has always, in our philosophical tradition, gone hand in hand with the question of being. We normally begin with ‘beings’ and, beings of course ‘are’:

They are given to us, they are in front of us and can thus be found before us at any time, and are also known to us within certain domains. Now the beings given to us in this way are immediately interrogated as to their ground. The question advances directly toward a ground. Such a method just broadens and enlarges, as it were, a procedure that is practised every day. Somewhere in the vineyard, for example, an infestation turns up, something indisputably present at h...