Dasein - Monoskop

182 PART III
Are its axioms empty? Or do the first principles mean something?
Mathematics thus cannot be the ideal for all sciences. 181
On the other hand, mathematics cannot be a model for philosophy
since mathematical knowledge is completely empty:
What does it mean to present philosophy with mathematical
knowledge as a measure of knowledge and as an ideal of truth?
It means nothing less than to make that knowledge which simply
does not bind us and which is most empty in its content, a
measure for the most binding and most complete knowledge,
i.e., the knowledge that strives for the whole. 182
Is it surprising then that in a letter to Lówith in 1922, Heidegger
offered to sell his copy of the first volume of the Principia
Mathematica for just "60% of the English price for a new copy"? 183
Heidegger's opposition to logic also emerges from his scarce remarks
on language and from his more extensive comments on the
notion of truth. I shall deal with each of these issues in turn.
In Being and Time, as well as in the other writings and lectures
from the twenties, Heidegger does not deal with language as explicitly
and extensively as we shall find him doing in his later writings.
For instance, of the four-hundred-odd pages of Being and Time, the
chapter on language comprises barely seven pages. 184 As the main
reason for dealing with language only briefly in Being and Time,
Heidegger himself mentions that language as "speech" (Rede) is not
one of the most basic structures of Dasein's Being-in-the-world, but
is rather rooted and founded in that implicit identification, acquaintance,
or "disclosedness" of the world that precedes speaking about
things within the world. 185 Speech is the articulation of the way
Dasein understands the world, others and itself 186 , that is to say,
as Heidegger puts it on another occasion 187 , speech (or language)
"makes manifest" what is already disclosed and uncovered. For Heidegger
this point seems so important that he includes in Being and
Time a whole paragraph ("§33. Assertion as a Derivative Mode of
Interpretation" 188 ) that is specifically meant to show how speech,
especially assertive speech, is rooted in the prepredicative doing and
seeing. According to the argument, all doing and seeing is already
interpretation. We use the hammer as a tool, we see something as