"The Greatest Living Philosopher"

---- by JLS
---------- for the GC

---- WHEN GRICE DELIVERED THE WILLIAM JAMES lectures at Harvard 'in the first part', as he says, of 1967 -- i.e., not Christmas -- (*) he said, and aloud too, "Heidegger is the greatest living philosopher" (WoW:8). He was, some say, joking. In any case, his audience laughed with him.

For Heidegger, as J. Kennedy, would say, is the 'philosopher' of nothingness, and nothing is the Anglo-Saxon Messenger's favourite word (**). Grice expanded on nothingness in his 'Vacuous Names' which, for one, he did not "articulate orally" (90% of his output is the result of some invitation to speak) but wrote for the festschrift (of sorts) for Quine (Words and Objections.

'Vacuous Names', which someone (later than sooner?) should reprint in Grice, Philosophical Papers (forthcoming, Clarendon) is so 'forbiddingly complex' (as Quine comments in 'Reply to my Critics') that it becomes a charmer. Grice is concerned with 'nothing'. The problem is 'nobody' really:

'I haven't sent the two Messengers, either,' said the King. 'They're both gone to the town. Just look along the road, and tell me if you can see either of them.'

`I see nobody on the road,' said Alice.

`I only wish I had such eyes,' the King remarked in a fretful tone. `To be able to see Nobody! And at that distance, too! Why, it's as much as I can do to see real people, by this light!' ...

`Who did you pass on the road?' the King asked the Messenger.

`Nobody,' said the Messenger.

`Quite right,' said the King: `this young lady saw him too. So of course Nobody walks slower than you.'

`I do my best,' the Messenger said in a sulky tone. `I'm sure nobody walks much faster than I do!'

`He can't do that,' said the King, `or else he'd have been here first.'

---

Grice and Heidegger on 'not'.

"Not" is a trick of a particle -- vide Horn, The Natural History of Negation. Cfr. French 'ne ... pas'. 'Pas' is a precieux thing: it means 'step'. Similarly, 'not' is short for 'ne' and 'aught'. The strict negative particle is plain 'ne' as in 'no-thing', no-body', etc.

----

Grice of course identifies 'ne' with the 'squiggly' of the logicians, " - ". Thus,


- p


means

"It is not raining".

When Grice was living in Harborne, he wrote on 'Negation'. This manuscript is preserved in the 14 cardboard boxes the Trustees of Grice desposited in the Bancroft Library at Berkeley. It is a vintage discussion of Plato. For Plato, to say that "it" is not raining, indicates that "it" must be doing something else ("Surely, to think of Arcadia as weatherless is obscene" -- Prot. 562aB)

In 1961, Grice resumes the topic of negation for a number of lectures given to his students at Oxford -- he was by then full University Lecturer with the University (or varsity leck, as he'd prefer). These are the Lectures on Negation which he cared to quote in the "List of Unpublications of H. P. Grice", in the Festschrift -- facing the "Publications of H. P. Grice". In this lectures, which predate the William James, he is explicit that " - " has to be 'ne', even if there may be an implicature (or too) which is on occasion dissimplicated in the conversational proceedings of saying 'no':

Jenny made her mind up when she was twelve
Into furrin languages she wold delve,
but at seventeen at Vassar it was quite a blow:
in twenty-four languages she couldn't say 'no'.

----

Grice's example is:

"He is not lighting a cigarette with a 5-dollar bill" (WoW:4). He was discussing "Heidegger [as] the greatest living philosopher". Grice comments (words): "Surely, to say that he (this man) is NOT doing that, i.e. lighting a cigarette with a 5-dollar bill implicates some idiot thought he was."

To negate, as Blanchot notes, is to be able to say 'nay' (nay-saying).

The topic had gathered its dose of opprobium (if not opium) in the Oxford circles of his day. When Heidegger gave his 1929 lectures, Wass ist Metaphysik? he wrote:

Das Nichts selbst nichtet

Rudolf Carnap wrote a demolishing critique of Heidegger's move as involving, not a "Meinongian jungle" as Grice will have it ("Vacuous Names") but as bad grammar ("Cicero is and"). Ayer (then back in Oxford after his Viennese sojourn as suggested by tutor G. Ryle, himself reviewer of Heidegger for Mind back in 1929) will dedicate a few pages of his second edition of his masterwork ("Language, Truth, and Logic") to Carnap and Heidegger's "Nothing noths" --. But the standard translation came from the Swiss philospher A. Pap when commissioned by Ayer to translate the full piece by Carnap for "Logical Positivism" ("The Elimination of Metaphysics by the Logical Analysis of Language").

Since then, pro-Heideggerians have tried to re-habilitate Heidegger (The Germans are obsessed with Habilitation, and they call their PhD dissertations 'Licensing' Things). It is clear that Heidegger did Know what he was talking about:

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"Das Nichts"

is The Nothingness. In German, 'nicht' is the equivalent, strict one, of "not"; i.e. it is a complex word (albeit short) incorporating Indo-European negation 'ne', and the 'acht' of the 'body' or entity (ens). The final -s is euphonic.

"nichten" is a neologism by Heidegger. There are no records in the German language before Heidegger. But that is neither here nor there. Carnap, who was from the North of Germany, was possibly objecting to Heidegger (both were neo-Kantians at the time) being creative with a national institution (as "Die Deutsche Sprache" was). But, as interpreters of Heidegger's thought have pointed out, 'benichten' IS a verb, and just means, 'to denegate', 'de-ny', or 'terminate'.

The apparently ejaculatory 'selbst' (which compares to other more guttural German particles like 'genau' and 'auch') is less otiose than it seems. It completes the 'truth-condition' of the sentence that Carnap could not grasp: Nothing annihilates itself.

Which is precisely Grice's point (***)

*** "Metaphysics has been but footnotes to Plato" (Whitehead)