QuestionsWhy is there something rather than nothing?The first of all questions: why beings rather than nothing?
Why is there something rather than nothing?The first mystery

The first of all questions: why beings rather than nothing?

The fundamental question of metaphysics; "why is there something rather than nothing?"

Martin Heidegger 1889 · 1976What is Being? We have forgotten the question.
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What it claims

The right attitude is not to answer with a cause but to ask the question to the end: "Philosophizing means asking: why are there beings at all instead of nothing?"

Why

It is the widest, deepest and most original of questions; answering it in advance with a doctrine means ceasing to ask it.

The same idea through history
Gottfried Wilhelm Leibniz1714Leibniz asks the same question in 1714 ("Why is there something rather than nothing?") but to answer it with a necessary being. Heidegger keeps the question and refuses that kind of answer. This comparison is our own.
Martin Heidegger1929In the lecture "What Is Metaphysics?" the question is the last sentence: it is brought by the study of nothing, and the text presents it as the one that "nothing itself forces".
Martin Heidegger1935In the introductory lecture course given at Freiburg, the question opens the whole discussion: first in rank (the broadest, the deepest, the most originary), not first in time.
Martin Heidegger1929The study of nothing in dread is the path by which the 1929 lecture reaches this question: see the argument on nothing and dread.
In short

"The first of all questions: why beings rather than nothing?" is an argument by Martin Heidegger (Introduction to Metaphysics, 1935 (published 1953), ch. 1; What Is Metaphysics?, 1929, 1929) on the question "Why is there something rather than nothing?" (answer: the first mystery). Its claim: The right attitude is not to answer with a cause but to ask the question to the end: "Philosophizing means asking: why are there beings at all instead of nothing?". According to AskPhilosophy's logic check (Z3 solver), the argument is valid only if one grants a premise the author leaves unstated (P4). AskPhilosophy presents 2 objections, 1 of them with a documented reply, and the original text behind each premise, checked word for word.

Introduction to Metaphysics, 1935 (published 1953), ch. 1; What Is Metaphysics?, 1929
Valid with an implicit premise

One can answer "why is there something rather than nothing?" with God, with a first cause, or with "because". For Heidegger, all these answers miss the point. This question is, he says, "the first of all questions": not in time, but in rank, because it is the broadest (it embraces everything that is), the deepest and the most originary. It does not ask for one more cause: it asks us to be struck by the strangeness that there are beings at all. Here the question is an answer in itself: to philosophize is to ask it truly, to the end.

P1The question "Why are there beings at all instead of nothing?" is the first of all, by rank: the broadest (it stops at no being), the deepest (it seeks the ground) and the most originary.
P2Answering in advance with a doctrine, for example "God created everything that is", is not asking the question: someone who already has the answer "cannot authentically question without giving himself up as a believer".
P3Asking the question truly requires being struck by the strangeness of beings: wonder is what makes the "why?" spring up, and the question puts the questioner into question.
P4 · implicit premiseThe broadest and deepest question cannot be exhausted by an answer that points to a being (God, a cause): that being would itself fall under the question.
Therefore the right attitude is not to answer with a cause but to ask the question to the end: "Philosophizing means asking: why are there beings at all instead of nothing?"

click a premise to reject it

If you accept every premise, logic forces you to accept the conclusion. So the debate is about the premises.
Checked by a logic solver: the premises cannot all be true while the conclusion is false.
Without the implicit premise: Without P4, one can accept that the question is first in rank, that faith spares one from asking it, and yet hold that a cosmological explanation gives the answer: the question would be first and solved. P4 rules this out by excluding any answer that starts from a being.
The argument is valid with the hidden premise P4. P1 says the question is first in rank; P2 that answering with a doctrine does not ask it; P4 that, being the broadest, no being can close it; the conclusion follows: it must be asked without closing it. The point under discussion is P4: why could the broadest question not have an answer, even one that does not name a being, such as an explanation from physics?
Analogy. When a child looks at the starry sky and says "But why is all that there?", they are not waiting for the name of a culprit. If we answer "the Big Bang" or "God", the child often says "Yes, but before that?" or "But why him?". The child keeps the question open. Heidegger says this child is already doing philosophy, and that the philosopher's job is not to answer too quickly.

Objections

2

Each objection is a conversation: click to see who replies and where the debate stands.

Rudolf Carnap 1932 · attacks premise 3

In "The Elimination of Metaphysics through Logical Analysis of Language", Carnap targets Heidegger's talk about nothing ("What Is Metaphysics?"), including the sentence "nothing noths". According to him, "nothing" is treated there as a name, while it is a way of negating; the sentence is therefore a pseudo-proposition, grammatically correct and empty of meaning. What Heidegger takes for an experience, wonder before nothing, can only be expressed with meaningless sentences.

Heidegger replies
Martin Heidegger 1929 · Anticipated reply (1929)
Heidegger foresees this objection in the lecture itself: logic dismisses the question of nothing, because thinking nothing would work against the nature of thought. But he immediately asks whether the rule of "logic" can be challenged, and whether the intellect is really lord and master in this question.
The debate goes on (our summary) Heidegger asks the question without answering it, and the lecture gives no criterion of meaning to replace that of logic. Carnap would reply that if that criterion is dropped, a deep sentence can no longer be told from nonsense; Heidegger, that the criterion itself is in question. Both are talking about what "understanding" means.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Core disagreement about what makes a sentence meaningful. Each side rejects the other's criterion; no widely accepted answer.
Henri Bergson 1907 · attacks premise 1

Bergson holds that the question "why does something exist?" is meaningless: setting existence against nothing is setting the full against the full, because absolute nothing is a pseudo-idea that can be neither imagined nor conceived. If this is true, the question is not "the deepest"; it rests on an illusion.

no reply
see the argument
We have not yet found a direct reply by Heidegger in the texts.
The debate goes on (our summary) Heidegger did not answer Bergson (the 1907 text is older and he does not discuss it). A Heideggerian would say that Bergson refutes nothing as a representation, whereas Heidegger does not try to represent it: he describes the effect of the strangeness of beings. A Bergsonian would reply that this strangeness is a feeling, not a reason to call the question deep.
Where the debate stands (our summary)Open point: is the question a well-founded wonder, or an illusion of language? Each side treats the other's argument as being about something else.