Debate
Carnap, Heidegger and the Nothing
1932 · Can the logical analysis of language show that metaphysical questions such as Heidegger’s question of the nothing are meaningless – or does it presuppose what it ought first to examine?
In his inaugural lecture at Freiburg on 24 July 1929, “What Is Metaphysics?”, Heidegger asked about the nothing that, he argued, reveals itself in anxiety. Rudolf Carnap of the Vienna Circle, who had met Heidegger at Davos a few months before, took sentences from this lecture as his main examples in “The Elimination of Metaphysics Through Logical Analysis of Language” (Erkenntnis 2, 1931/32). The exchange became a reference point for the later division between analytic and continental philosophy and for the question of what philosophy can meaningfully say.
Positions
Pseudo-statements
Carnap argues that a sentence has meaning only if it can be said under what conditions it is true – how it could be verified; the alleged sentences of metaphysics are therefore not false but meaningless, “pseudo-statements”. In “The nothing itself nothings” (Das Nichts selbst nichtet) the word “nothing”, which in a logically correct language only negates a claim of existence, is used as the name of an object, and the verb “to nothing” has no meaning at all. Yet Carnap did not dismiss what such sentences express: metaphysics, he wrote, serves to express an attitude towards life (Lebensgefühl), which art expresses adequately – metaphysicians are “musicians without musical ability”.
Held by
- Rudolf Carnap1891–1970
Logic does not decide the question
Heidegger had anticipated the objection in the lecture itself: by the rules of logic the question of the nothing seems absurd, since it treats the nothing as something that “is”. But if the nothing is more original than negation, the intellect cannot decide about it: “The idea of ‘logic’ itself disintegrates in the turbulence of a more original questioning.” Heidegger published no direct reply to Carnap at the time. In the Postscript of 1943 he rejected the charge that the lecture opposes “logic” in favour of mere feeling: exact thinking, he wrote, is never the most rigorous thinking. In his lecture course Introduction to Metaphysics (1935) and in notes of 1964 he treated Carnap’s position as the extreme opposite of his own.
Held by
- Martin Heidegger1889–1976
After the verification principle
Carnap’s criterion of meaning did not survive in its strict form. Popper (Logik der Forschung, 1934) objected that universal laws of nature cannot be verified either, and proposed falsifiability as a criterion separating science from non-science, not sense from nonsense: metaphysical ideas can be meaningful and even fruitful. Carnap himself soon weakened the criterion to partial testability, and Quine (“Two Dogmas of Empiricism”, 1951) attacked the analytic–synthetic distinction on which the programme relied. Where Michael Friedman (2000) sees a serious exchange between two heirs of neo-Kantianism, Christian Damböck (2022) stresses its political side: both shared Weber’s view that values lie beyond scientific justification, but Carnap’s anti-metaphysics served a scientific world-conception meant to permeate all of life, Heidegger’s metaphysics a “metapolitics” hostile to it.
Held by
- Karl Popper1902–1994
- W. V. O. Quine1908–2000
Read more
- Rudolf Carnap: Überwindung der Metaphysik durch logische Analyse der Sprache, Erkenntnis 2 (1931) (in German)
- Vienna Circle (Stanford Encyclopedia of Philosophy)
- Christian Damböck: Carnap and Heidegger – Political Antimetaphysics versus Metaphysics as Metapolitics (Geltung 2, 2022)
- Sam Dresser: Heidegger v Carnap – how logic took issue with metaphysics (Aeon, 2020)
As of 10/2026. Summaries for orientation – the sources give the full arguments. · How Agora is made