Abstract
The essay recapitulates the decisive steps in Heidegger’s development of the problem of human freedom. The interpretation is set in the context of a general matrix for how freedom is treated in the tradition, as both a theoretical ontological problem, and as practical appeal. According to some readers, Heidegger’s thinking is a philosophy of freedom throughout; according to others his “turning” implies abandoning the idea of human freedom as a metaphysical remnant. The essay seeks an intermediate path, by following his explicit attempts to develop an ontology based on the concept of freedom in the earlier writings, showing how this is the central theme in his confrontation and also his final break with German idealism, with Kant and with Schelling in particular, and with the prospects for a system of freedom. However, this break does not terminate his preoccupation with the problem of freedom, which is then transformed into the idea of thinking as a practice of freedom, as a way of reaching into “the free”.
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Notes
Sartre (1946, p. 25 (my translation)).
Kant (1968a, p. 16).
Kant (1968b).
Heidegger (1927/1979, p. 188).
Figal (1988, p. 275).
Heidegger (1967, p. 162).
Ibid., p. 139.
Ibid., p. 163.
Ibid., p. 165.
Ibid., p. 174.
Figal (1988, p. 364 (my translation)).
Heidegger (1967, p. 170).
Heidegger (1967, p. 186).
Ibid., p. 188.
Heidegger ( 1982/1994).
Ibid., p. 29.
Ibid., p. 134.
Ibid., p. 199.
Ibid., p. 275.
Ibid., p. 287.
Ibid., p. 296.
Ibid., p. 303 (my translation).
Ibid., p. 303.
Heidegger (1971b/1995, p. 11). This work was later also published in the Gesamtausgabe as vol. 42, but the page references here are to the original version.
Ibid., p. 12.
Ibid., p. 57.
Cf. also Heidegger’s further remarks on the system on p. 109f.
Ibid., p. 25.
Ibid., p. 26.
Ibid., p. 79.
The full quotation reads: “Im Menschen ist die ganze Macht des finstern Prinzips und in eben demselben zugleich die ganze Kraft des Lichts. In ihm ist der tiefste Abgrund und der höchste Himmel, oder beide Centra. Der Wille des Menschen ist der in der ewigen Sehnsucht verborgene Keim des nur noch im Grunde vorhandenen Gottes; der in der Tiefe verschlossene göttliche Lebensblick, den Gott ersah, als er den Willen zur Natur faßte”, ibid. p. 65, on p. 35 in Schelling (1997).
Heidegger (1971b/1995, p. 73).
Ibid., p. 106.
Ibid., p. 114 (quotation from Schelling (1997, p. 350)).
Ibid., p. 115.
Ibid., p. 195.
Ibid., p. 196. The full quotation reads: “Dieses Wissen der Freiheit wird seiner höchsten Notwendigkeit gewiß, weil es allein jene Aufnahmestellung ermöglicht, in der stehend der Mensch imstande ist, als ein Geschichtlicher einem Schicksal zu begegnen, es auf sich zu nehmen und über sich hinweg zu tragen.”
Heidegger (1991, p. 187).
Ibid., p. 189.
Heidegger (1967, p. 360).
Schürmann (1987, p. 247). I will here refer to the revised English version of the original Le principe d’anarchie: Heidegger et la question de l’agir (Paris: Seuil, 1982).
Heidegger (1961, p. 482).
For an analysis of the destinal in Heidegger, which unites the theme of Schicksal with the earlier analysis of historicity in SZ, and which also shows how Heidegger’s understanding of destiny is by no means “fatalistic”, see Ruin (2007, pp. 15–34).
Habermas (1953).
Davis (2007, p. 207).
For a more detailed analysis of the specific theme of “Besinnung,” see Ruin (2005b).
Heidegger (1967, p. 358).
Heidegger (1966, p. 8).
Heidegger (1971a, p. 158).
Heidegger (1971b/1995, p. 5).
Bret Davis expresses a similar point when he writes, “were modern man to be wholly and seamlessly confined to his historical essence of willful subjectivity, the ‘will’ to non-willing would forever reduplicate the problem it aims to ‘overcome’”, Davis (2007, p. 214).
Heidegger (1969/1988).
Heidegger (1959/1992).
Beauvoir (1947).
Heidegger (1984, p. 203).
Ibid., p. 206.
References
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