Philosophy at a crossroads. Karnap, Cassirer and Heidegger

One of the central events of the intellectual life of the 20th century was a fundamental discrepancy or a split between the “analytical” philosophical tradition that dominated the English -language world, and the “continental” philosophical tradition that dominated the European stage. The first of them, in the eyes of many, seems to be eliminated from great spiritual problems that excite every thinking person: the meaning of life, human nature, the nature of fair societies - and turned out to be obsessed with specific technical problems in the logical or linguistic analysis of the language. Here, philosophy appropriated attributes of scientific discipline, characterized by the clarity of the method and joint cumulative progress in the formulation and development of “results”, but at the cost of refusing close contact with central philosophical problems, which are truly universal interest outside the narrow circle of narrow specialists. Thus, the understanding of the traditionally central problems of philosophy was left at the discretion of the continental thinkers, but their work, in the eyes of thinkers more inclined to analytics, seemed to discard some concern for the clarity of the method and joint cumulative progress in favor of intentional and almost intentional ambiguity, more characteristic of the poetic use of language than for supposedly logical argumentative discourse. Thus, the discrepancy between the analytical and continental traditions has become another manifestation, now in the world of professional philosophy, a much more general split that C.P. Snow made famous, identifying it with a difference in opposite (and mutually incomprehensible) “two cultures” - Cultures of scientifically thinking people and the culture of literary intellectuals.
In the early 1930s, this fundamental intellectual discrepancy was crystallized for a short time in the notorious polemic attack, directed against “metaphysical pseudo-offers”, the author of which was Rudolph Carnap, the leader of the Vienna circle of logical empirics, one of the most militant supporters of the new scientific approach To philosophy, clearly tuned to a radical break with a great metaphysical tradition. In his article “overcoming metaphysics through a logical analysis of the language” [uberwindung der metaphysik durch Logische Analyse der sprache], Karnap specially distinguishes Martin Heidegger as a representative of modern metaphysics, and then focuses on Heidegger’s notorious sentence “nothing” [DAS NICHTS ”[DAS NICHTS , taken as a paradigmal metaphysical pseudo -expenses. For Karnap, this typically Heidegger sentence is meaningless, since it violates the correctly understood logical structure of the language. From the point of view of Heidegger himself, on the contrary, such a diagnosis arising from inappropriate obsession with logic, characteristic of what will subsequently become known as an analytical tradition, of course, misses the essence of his approach