[I'd put this in an open thread, but those don’t seem to happen these days, and while this is a quote it isn't a Rationality Quote.]
You know, one of the really weird things about us human beings […] is that we have somehow created for ourselves languages that are just a bit too flexible and expressive for our brains to handle. We have managed to build languages in which arbitrarily deep nesting of negation and quantification is possible, when we ourselves have major difficulties handling the semantics of anything beyond about depth 1 or 2. That is so weird. But that's how we are: semantic over-achievers, trying to use languages that are quite a bit beyond our intellectual powers.
— Geoffrey K. Pullum, Language Log, “Never fails: semantic over-achievers”, December 1, 2011
This seems like it might lead to something interesting to say about the design of minds and the usefulness of generalization/abstraction, or perhaps just a good sound bite.
Ok, so the statement is made as part of a mission to say something intelligent about noumenon. In other words, Heidegger is trying to say something about what things are, totally independent of our perception of them. As I alluded above, I think trying to grapple with perception-independent-thingness is . . . not a good use of one's time.
Anyway, Heidegger does lots of deep thinking about this problem, and ultimately says that there is "Nothing" as the basic characteristic of objects. To me, that's a plausible response to it's turtles all the way down. At this point, Heidegger needs to explain how to get back from this to objects as we experience them. The answer is that the "Nothing" nothings. To me, that's like saying the "Nothing" verbs. There's no other word we could use, because (by hypothesis) all there is . . . is Nothing. If you pull in something else to act on Nothing, then it's the problem of Cain's wife all over again.
That's quite counter-intuitive. But so is the assertion that there is a set that contains only the set that contains no elements. Or worse, the set that contains (the set that contains only the set that contains no elements) AND the set that contains no elements.
So, Heidegger may be wasting his time (my view). He said something quite counter-intuitive. It could easily be wrong. But I assert that it is not incoherent. That is, it makes an assertion with some content.