Abstract

My dissertation examines the problem of freedom in the work of Martin Heidegger. Focusing on the development and interruptions which this topic undergoes in his work, I clarify the stakes in Heidegger's confrontation with transcendental philosophy and post-Kantian Idealisms. Accordingly, the dissertation is organized around the following questions: What is the relationship between freedom and the question of being? Why does Heidegger eventually abandon the vocabulary of freedom? and What sort of alternative to idealism does Heidegger gesture at in his ostensibly idiosyncratic conception of "truth as freedom"? ;For Heidegger, the guiding question of philosophy, the question of being, has its ground in the fundamental question of freedom. But the term Freiheit virtually disappears from Heidegger's corpus in the 1940's when freedom is rejected as too subjectivist a notion. ;Heidegger rejects "metaphysical" freedom. The first chapter elucidates the central features of what Heidegger calls "metaphysical freedom" and explains why a transcendental account of freedom is also metaphysical. Chapter Two traces the origins of Heidegger's concept of freedom to his considerations of the relationship between logic and ontology in his Habilitationsschrift. Chapter Three examines his interpretation as given in Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics. The focus is establishing the question of freedom in relationship to the ontological question and examination of his claim that the transcendence of Dasein and freedom are identical. This chapter demonstrates the centrality of temporality for Heidegger's early thought on freedom. Chapter Four explains how Fichte's notion of facticity is taken up by Heidegger. Chapter Five begins the analysis of freedom in relation to finitude by giving an analysis of the freedom of Dasein in Being and Time. In Chapter Six, I discuss Heidegger's claim that fundamental ontology must "turn over" into "Metontology"--a turn motivated by the rejection of freedom thought transcendentally. This stage of the analysis attempts to think "the Open" in relation to Heidegger's notion that the strife of earth and world is constitutive of freedom