Über die Autorin bzw. den Autor

Richard Polt is Professor of Philosophy at Xavier University, Cincinnati. He is the author of The Emergency of Being: On Heidegger's Contributions to Philosophy, also from Cornell.

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Heidegger

Cornell University Press

Chapter One

The Question

Celebration ... is self-restraint, is attentiveness, is questioning, is meditating, is awaiting, is the step over into the more wakeful glimpse of the wonder -- the wonder that a world is worlding around us at all, that there are beings rather than nothing, that things are and we ourselves are in their midst, that we ourselves are and yet barely know who we are, and barely know that we do not know all this.

--Martin Heidegger

Why is there something rather than nothing? Strange as this question is, it seemsoddly familiar. Puzzling though it is, it has a certain unique simplicity.

    This is not to say that it can be answered in the way we might answer thequestion, "Why do birds migrate to the same place every winter?" or "Why isthere more crime in the United States than in Japan?" These questions stand achance of being resolved by scientific research. But no scientific investigationcan tell us why there is something rather than nothing. Science describes thethings we find around us, and it explains how some of these things are causedby others, but it cannot say why the whole exists. The Big Bang theory may becorrect -- but it does not answer why there was a Big Bang rather than' nothing.We might say that God made the Big Bang. But then, why is there God? PerhapsGod exists by necessity. However, few thinkers these days accept theidea of a necessary being whose existence we can know and prove. Mostwould agree that whatever we may propose as the cause of everything is itselfsomething whose existence stands in need of explanation. It looks very muchas if our question, "Why is there something rather than nothing?" reachesbeyond the power of human reason. It is beginning to seem that our questionsimply cannot be answered at all.

    Does this imply that it is meaningless? Some philosophers think so. Wecan construct arguments to show that the question never signified anythingto begin with. We can argue that the word "nothing" in our question meansprecisely that -- it means nothing at all. But when the arguments are done, thequestion sneaks back and seems significant after all. As cosmologist StephenHawking writes, once science has described how everything works, we willstill want to ask: "What is it that breathes fire into the equations and makes auniverse for them to describe ... Why does the universe go to all the botherof existing?"

    For Heidegger, our question is deeply meaningful. He ends his 1929 essay"What is Metaphysics?" with it, and it opens his lecture course Introduction toMetaphysics (1935). More precisely, Heidegger asks: "Why are there beings atall, and not rather nothing?"

    The term "beings" translates das Seiende, more literally "that which is"."Beings", and its synonym "entities", refer to anything at all that has existenceof some sort. Clearly atoms and molecules are beings. Humans and dogs arebeings, as are their properties and activities. Mathematical objects -- hexagons,numbers, equations -- are beings of some kind, although philosophers disagreeon whether these beings exist apart from human thought or behavior. Evendragons are connected to beings -- they themselves do not exist, but we cantalk about dragons only because myths, images and concepts of dragons doexist, as do dragonlike animals, such as lizards. In fact, it seems that anythingwe can think about, speak about, or deal with involves beings in some way.

    But if the question of why there are beings rather than nothing cannot beanswered by pointing to any particular being as a cause, then how can it haveany meaning? Maybe its meaning comes from the special character of its "why".Maybe the "why" in this question is not a search for a cause, but an act ofcelebration. When we ask the question, we celebrate the fact that anythingexists at all. We notice this amazing fact. Normally the existence of things is sofamiliar to us that we take it for granted. But at certain moments, this mostfamiliar of facts can become surprising. Ludwig Wittgenstein describes theexperience this way: "I wonder at the existence of the world. And I am theninclined to use such phrases as `how extraordinary that anything should exist'or `how extraordinary that the world should exist'."

    Once we have noticed and celebrated the fact that beings are, we can takea step further -- and everything depends on this step. We can ask: what does this"are" mean? What is it to be? Now we are asking what makes a being countas a being, instead of as nothing: on what basis do we understand beings asbeings? Now we are asking not about beings, but about Being.

    "Being" is our counterpart to the German expression das Sein, literally "theto-be". In English, the word being can refer either to something that is (an entity)or to the to-be (what it means for entities to exist). So, like many translators ofHeidegger, I will capitalize "Being" in order to distinguish Being clearly from abeing. (This is not Heidegger's practice, for in German, all nouns are capitalized-- and one should beware of confusing Being with the supreme being, God.)

    Being is not a being at all; it is what marks beings out as beings rather thannonbeings -- what makes the difference, so to speak, between something andnothing. Another, similar phrase may serve just as well: Being is the differenceit makes that there is something rather than nothing. Even if we cannot find acause for the totality of beings, we can investigate the meaning of Being, for itdoes make a difference that there are beings rather than nothing. We can payattention to this difference and describe it.

    However, this question of the meaning of Being looks deceptively simple:to say that something "is" just seems to mean that it is there, given, on hand.In short, it is present instead of absent. Being is simply presence. Presenceappears to be a very straightforward fact, so it may seem that the Being of athing has next to no content, and is quite uninteresting.

    But is the difference between presence and absence so trivial? If my houseburns down, its absence is overwhelming. At the death of those we love, theirabsence attacks and gnaws at us. Are these just "subjective" responses that havenothing to do with the "objective" question of Being -- or are they moments inwhich we realize that there are, in fact, crucial and rich distinctions betweensomething and nothing?

    We can also ask whether all the sorts of beings we have mentioned exist inthe same way. Is a dog present in the same way as the dog's act of running ispresent? Is a myth present just as an atom is present, or a number is present?The particular difference it makes that there is a being rather than nothing maydepend on what sort of being is in question. Presence begins to look complex-- and puzzling.

    And maybe some beings are not present at all. For instance, we constantlyrelate to possibilities -- whenever we think of what we might do, consider whatmay happen to us or see where we can go. A possibility is something in thefuture, something that is not yet present and may...