This chapter examines Heidegger’s use of seemingly nonsensical sentences in his 1926 Logic lectures to illustrate the primacy of a kind of practical sense, which serves as a basis for a derivative logical-propositional sense. It contrasts Heidegger’s approach with a conception of nonsense emerging out of an “austere” reading of Wittgenstein’s Tractatus, according to which nonsense is never a function of what words mean but only a result of a failure to assign a meaning to one or more elements of a would-be proposition; according to this austere reading, there are thus no nonsensical propositions, but only strings of meaningless signs. Although Heidegger in certain respects hews to this austere conception, viz. in recognizing the interplay between bipolarity and something’s being a proposition at all, his use of nonsense nonetheless departs from the specifics of the austere reading. Doing so, the chapter argues, allows Heidegger to do a kind of phenomenological-ontological work, whose possibility the austere reading renders obscure (at best).

Availableness refers to the way or category of being of the entities Heidegger calls equipment (Zeug), also translated as useful things (Stambaugh) and even paraphernalia (see Haugeland 2013 and Blattner 2007). Different translations of Zuhandenheit, the German term translated here as “availableness,” are in circulation: Macquarrie and Robinson translate it as readiness-to-hand, while Stambaugh’s translation of Being and Time and Kisiel’s translation of GA20 use handiness; in this Lexicon, we follow the lead of Dreyfus (1990), who prefers availability.

Occurrentness designates one of three categories or ways of being that Heidegger deploys in Being and Time to refer to that which simply is or exists, devoid of context or practical significance (in contrast with availableness, Zuhandenheit) or self-understanding (in contrast with Dasein).

At §194 of the Philosophical Investigations, Wittgenstein writes the following about what tends to happen in philosophy: “When we do philosophy, we are like savages, primitive people, who hear the way in which civilized people talk, put a false interpretation on it, and then draw the oddest conclusions from this.”1 With just a bit of tweaking, Wittgenstein’s remark might be taken to be applicable to readers of his work: When we read Wittgenstein, we are like savages, primitive people, and so forth. At least, that is how some readers of his work must appear to other readers, given how polarized readings of his philosophy can be. Although Wittgenstein’s life extended only six years into the period of philosophy covered by this volume (as he died in 1951), his shadow – much like that of Nietzsche’s Buddha in The Gay Science – nonetheless looms over its entirety. One measure of this is the vast scholarship devoted to Wittgenstein’s work in the form of articles, anthologies, and monographs, which has grown so large as to be practically unsurveyable.2

As the title to his central work – Phenomenology of Perception – indicates, perceptual experience is a, if not the, central topic of Merleau-Ponty's philosophy. The title indicates additionally that his approach to that topic is phenomenological. Merleau-Ponty insists that a phenomenology of perception is absolutely vital for arriving at an understanding of perception's place in our overarching conception of ourselves and the world around us. Too often, he thinks, perceptual experience has been overlooked or mischaracterized so that its founding role has not been fully appreciated; too often, philosophers and scientists have tried to characterize perception in terms that are both descriptively inadequate and explanatorily inert. Such descriptions of experience tend to introduce notions – sensations, stimuli, judgements – that are not really present in our perceptual experience, and such explanations tend to appeal to processes that owe their sense to the prior workings of perception. Too often, in other words, the philosopher or the scientist describes perceptual experience “as one might describe the fauna of a distant land – without being aware that he himself perceives, that he is the perceiving subject and that perception as he lives it belies everything that he says of perception in general” (PP: 207).

Merleau-Ponty: life and works

A close contemporary of Sartre, Maurice Merleau-Ponty was born in 1908, in Rochefort-sur-Mer, France. His early education followed the expected trajectory of an academic: he entered the École Normale Supérieure in 1926, where he studied with the neo-Kantian Léon Brunschvicg and also became acquainted with Sartre and de Beauvoir. In the mid-1930s, after teaching and conducting research under the auspices of a fellowship from the Caisse Nationale de la Recherche Scientifique (CNRS), Merleau-Ponty returned to the École Normale to pursue a doctoral degree. He submitted his preliminary thesis, The Structure of Behaviour in 1938, although it was not published until 1942. In this work, Merleau-Ponty developed a critique of then-prevalent conceptions of the conditioned reflex as a purely physiological phenomenon, and he was highly critical as well of behaviourist theories in psychology. The orientation of these criticisms, to the effect that such quasi-mechanical views fail to account for the sense and significance of embodied movements and activity, foreshadowed his more mature phenomenological views.

Following the outbreak of the Second World War, Merleau-Ponty served in the infantry as a lieutenant. He returned to teaching after the demobilization, and began conducting the research that led to the completion of Phenomenology of Perception, which was published in 1945. Throughout the 1940s, Merleau-Ponty was closely allied with Sartre and other figures in the emerging existentialist school of thought.

Heidegger: life and works

Martin Heidegger was born 1889 in Messkirch, Germany. Heidegger's early education was with the Jesuit order, during which time he steeped himself in classical studies, especially Greek culture, language and philosophy. In his early years, Heidegger entered the Seminary of the Archdiocese of Freiburg with the intention of joining the priesthood. He briefly became a novice in the Jesuit order, but left after only two weeks for reasons of poor health. In 1907, Heidegger received a copy of Franz Brentano's On the Manifold Meaning of Being in Aristotle, a work that steered him in the direction of “the question of being” that would occupy him for the entirety of his philosophical career. However, it was not until after he left the seminary, following a brief period where he studied theology, that Heidegger devoted himself exclusively to philosophy. He received his PhD in 1913 and his Habilitation in 1915, at which time he became a lecturer at the University of Freiburg.

At Freiburg, Heidegger met Husserl (by then he had already made an extensive study of Husserl's phenomenology). Heidegger's relationship with Husserl, which included an assistantship from 1919 to 1923, had a profound effect on the shape of his philosophy, inaugurating what some have called his “phenomenological decade”. After a short stint as an associate professor at Marburg, Heidegger eventually succeeded Husserl as professor of philosophy at Freiburg when Husserl retired in 1928. Husserl had hand-picked Heidegger as his successor, viewing him as the means by which his phenomenological investigations might be continued in his eventual absence.