Cont Philos Rev (2008) 41:277299

DOI 10.1007/s11007-008-9087-4

The destiny of freedom: in Heidegger

Hans Ruin

Published online: 11 September 2008

Springer Science+Business Media B.V. 2008

Abstract The essay recapitulates the decisive steps in Heideggers 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, Heideggers 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.
Keywords

Heidegger
Kant
Schelling
Freedom
The free
Schurmann

Die Leitfrage der Metaphysik grundet auf der Frage nach dem Wesen der
Freiheit (GA 31: 134).
Modern philosophical thinking is inaugurated as a discourse on freedom and its
place in nature. The stage of this constellation is set in the Meditations on first
philosophy, where Descartes, establishes the distinction between material and
spiritual substance, between extension and thought, by means of a demonstration of
the autonomy of critical doubt. Thinking is essentially free, as opposed to nature
which is bound by causal laws. In an introduction to Descartes from 1946, Sartre
insists on how the Cartesian doubt and the subsequent definition of man as thought,
H. Ruin (&)
Sodertorn University College, 141 89 Huddinge, Sweden
e-mail: hans.ruin@sh.se

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places freedomliberteat the center of being, as the very condition of an

apparition of a world. Eventually, Sartre writes, Descartes will accredit only God
with the absolute freedom to constitute a world, but this is only a testimony to the
time bound aspect of his thinking. What Descartes is said to have revealed to us,
long before Heidegger in Vom Wesen des Grundes, is the foundation of a
humanism, in the sense that man is the being whose very apparition makes a
world exist and that the unique ground of being is freedom.1 The legitimacy of
this Cartesian-existentialist appropriation of Heidegger is a problem in itself which I
hall return to. For now Sartres remark can stand simply as an illustration of a
certain continuity within modern philosophy, from Descartes to Existential
phenomenology.
From its Cartesian inception we can also see how this question of freedom is
structured along what can be identified as two intersecting paths, that which
concerns what I will here speak of as, on the one hand the nature of freedom, and on
the other hand, that which concerns the demand of freedom, or simply freedom as a
demand, as appeal. I want to insist from the start on this distinction. For the question
of freedom always implies both of these aspects, even though it is not always
recognized as such. This can be elucidated as follows. When we think of the nature
of freedom we raise the metaphysical question concerning the what of freedom. In
Cartesian terms, this is the question of the essence of the human, which is what
leads him to posit a cognizing substance, which is free in the sense of not being
bound by the causal laws of nature. In this way, spirit is equated with freedom, as a
domain separated, if yet correlated with a non-free nature. But freedom is also, from
the very start of Descartes explorations, fixed as a demand on man and his thinking.
This is brought out very clearly in the opening statement of the First meditation,
where the necessity of abandoning the inherited views, at least once in a life, is
stated. In the Discourse on method, first part, he speaks likewise of the need of
freeing oneself from the mistakes and misconceptions that impede the natural light
of our reason. In this discourse the connection is thus established between freedom,
reason, and truth; only by freely practicing ones rational capacity can man reach the
truth of being. Reason, as a natural, inborn light, does not automatically reach its
potential. Only by being cultivated freely, as a voluntary act, which wills its own
fulfillment, can freedom reach into its own, namely into the adequate comprehension of that which is. In this way, the Cartesian discourse on freedom is both a
definition of the essence of man and a demand that man seeks the completion of his
essence through his own choice, which is most dramatically exemplified in the
universal doubt, which leads to the constitution of a universal and free human self.
The duality of the question of freedom, as set up in this schematic way through
Descartes, is repeated with an even greater emphasis in Kant. Indeedand as has
often been repeatedit can be said to organize the very structure of his thought.
Freedom as spontaneity is the very definition of thought and of understanding,
which organizes a passively received material of experience. As such it also belongs
to what is transcendental, in other words what marks the condition of possibility of
knowledge. Yet, as a fact of nature freedom cannot be localized, for nature appears
1

Sartre (1946, p. 25 (my translation)).

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as a system of grounded, explicable, processes, in which freedom does not appear as

such. As the third antinomy in the Critique of pure reason seeks to demonstrate, we
can prove both the existence and the inexistence of absolute freedom or spontaneity,
and thus neither of them definitively. Even though the fact of freedom can never be
proven by ordinary rational argument, a transcendental freedom, i.e., the principal
possibility of absolute spontaneity, nevertheless functions as the supreme concept
on which the critical philosophy rests. And in the introduction to the Second
Critique Kant affirms that the reality of the concept of freedom is the corner stone in
the whole construction of the system of pure and speculative reason.2
Kants practical philosophy can be read as an investigation into what this fact of
freedom implies, a quest which culminates in the idea of a rational, grounded
morality of absolute universalizability, manifested in the categorical imperative. In
this way we can see how the problematic fact of freedom is developed into a
concept of freedom which calls upon and demands from the subject to become its
own lawgiver. The whole tension is contained in the definition of the free will as
autonomy, as self-rule, what Kant also speaks of as positive freedom, as opposed
to the negative sense of freedom as simply being unaffected. The point about this
causality is, however, that unlike the unconditional law of nature, it must be fulfilled
and brought about by the individual human subject. The antipode of this potential
autonomy, as something to be achieved, is heteronomy, the law of another. In the
1784 essay on Enlightenment, this situation is brought out with a strong rhetorical
emphasis, captured in the concept of Mundighet, of maturity.3 To become
enlightened is to leave immaturity, as the enslavement of ones own reason; it is
to realize in full the freedom in oneself, and to become what one was meant to
become. Thus, in Kant the subject is essentially free, and at the same time, always at
risk of losing this freedom, which in order to be what it is, must be enacted and
achieved. Freedom defines the nature of subjectivity, and at the same time it
constitutes its task, always to be assumed anew.

1 I
Against this introductory background, I would now like to formulate the following
question: in what way and to what extent can the phenomenon of freedom in its binary
matrix be said to surface also in Heideggers writings? Let me first direct this question
in regard to SZ. The whole work is animated by a sense of crisis. From its inception, the
question which it seeks to answer has already been lost, and is in need of being
reawakened. In this process, thinking has to struggle against the inborn tendency of
man to lose himself to the world, to become absorbed by it in a way that produces
interpretations of his own mode of existence which blocks the very access to its central
concern, i.e., the meaning of being, or simply to fall prey to previously established
patterns of thinking. The possibility of falling, of inauthenticity, manifests itself both
with regard to history and tradition, and to the present. Only by practicing a stepwise
2

Kant (1968a, p. 16).

Kant (1968b).

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critical destruction of inherited patterns of thought can thinking bring about the
confrontation with what is to be thought, the disclosure, Erschlossenheit, Lichtung, or
simply the truth of Dasein, as the opening toward being in a temporalizing movement.
This precarious space of meaning is at once the ground of Dasein, its essential
determination, and yet it can become available to this Dasein only under certain
circumstances, namely that it assumes authentically its own finite and thrown
existence. In SZ the privileged mood or attunement of authentic disclosure is that of
anxiety. Partly following the analysis of Kierkegaard in The Concept of Anxiety,
Heidegger here describes anxiety as revealing Dasein to itself as a possibility to exist,
which in other terms is its being free for the freedom of choosing and grasping
itself.Freisein fur die Freiheit des Sich-selbst-wahlens und -ergreifens. But this
again is equivalent to choosing the world in which it is.4 The freedom outlined here is
thus essentially a freedom for, not a freedom from. It is a freedom for a world, in which
Dasein always already finds itself, as something it can assume, but it is also something
from which it can fall away or shun. And precisely due to its tendency to fall, Dasein
will be tempted to interpret its situation as grounded in the world, and not the other
way around, as itself the futural temporalizing disclosure in and through which the
world is manifested, or simply through which it worlds, weltet.
The concept of freedom outlined here is both near and distant from that of Kant.
Here the question is not with autonomy, as a unique form of causality distinct from the
causality of nature. Yet on another level it marks the continuation of the CartesianKantian problematic, as it tries in its own way to circumscribe the nature of life so as to
understand how it can have an experience of a world, and of its truth, that which
Heidegger in his Kantbuch will explore as the finite temporality of the self. But to
what extent is it reasonable to say that Heideggers thinking is also and genuinely a
philosophy of freedom? In his important study from 1988, Martin Heidegger.
Phanomenologie der Freiheit, Gunter Figal responded in a definitive manner to this
question. He stated there that Heideggers thought remains to the end a thought of
freedom just as it is a thought of time.5 For Figal the entire analysis of Dasein as
disclosedness and eventually as truth can be reinterpreted as a way of understanding
what it means for Dasein to be free, and thus freedom can inversely be described as
Heideggers most fundamental concern.
Figals analysis remains convincing in many ways, and it brings to light a
dimension of Heideggers work which had not really been seen and understood as such
previously. Yet it does so at the cost of certain distinctions, which deserved to be raised
and discussed initially. The matter can be put in the following way. First we have the
question to what extent Heidegger explicitly seeks to elaborate something like a
philosophy of freedom, literally evoking this word and its particular implications.
Secondly we have the question to what extent Heideggers work can also be
interpreted and described as a philosophy of freedom, in other words, to what extent
freedom could be used as a heuristic concept in the course of an interpretation of
Heideggers work as a whole. It is the second question which Figal develops with such
good results, but at the expense of a more detailed exploration of the first question.
4

Heidegger (1927/1979, p. 188).

Figal (1988, p. 275).

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What I want to do here, therefore, and as a development of Figals analysis, is to

direct our eyes more specifically to the when and how, in the course of Heideggers
work, that the specific concept and problem of freedom emerges as an explicit
concern. What we find then, and this is my interpretational hypothesis, is that there
is indeed a phase in the course of Heideggers path of thinking during which he tries
to ground his entire philosophical aspiration on an understanding of freedom in a
qualified sense, but that he also abandons this attempt. This phase is manifested
primarily by two texts in particular, the essays Vom Wesen des Grundes and
Vom Wesen der Wahrheit, both from 1929. This attempt, as well as its eclipse, is
intimately linked to his intense engagement with German idealism in general, and
with Kant and Schelling in particular, a confrontation which follows upon the
completion of SZ. More specifically it begins with the 1929 lectures on Kant and the
question of Freedom, over the 1936 lecture course on Schelling, culminating with
the 1942 course on German idealism. Yetand this is my subsequent point, which I
develop in the second part of this essayeven though Heidegger at a certain point
abandons the attempt to found the quest for the meaning of being literally on
freedom, the problem of freedom does not disappear from his horizon. Instead it can
be said to emerge as the hidden ethos of his thought, but as something that cannot be
adequately conceptualized as a theoretically expressed foundation, but which
remains in a qualified sense an appeal, to open thinking for the free, das Freie.
Some years before Figals study, Reiner Schurmann had published his magistral
study original Le principe danarchie: Heidegger et la question de lagir, in which he
elaborates the thought of the later Heidegger in the direction of showing how the very
idea of a human will and willing, is abandoned with the later thinking of the sending of
being. In recent years, and indeed all throughout the renewed discussion of the
philosophical implications of Heideggers political engagements in the thirties,
precisely this question of a certain philosophical anti-liberalism has become again a
central issue, not only among Heideggers categorical critics, but also for example in
the work of Lacou-Labarthe and Nancy. In a recent study, Bret Davis impressive
monograph Heidegger and the Will. On the Way to Gelassenheit, this thread is picked
up again, but here from the perspective of the question not primarily of freedom, but of
the will. Davis shows, in great detail, how the problem of willing is transformed
throughout the work of the thirties from the decision of Dasein toward the historical
decisions of being. But he also tries to go beyond Schurmann in pointing toward not an
eclipse of the individual will in favor of an impersonal sending of being, but toward a
transformed understanding of willing itself. My own analyses in part trace the same
trajectory as the study of Davis, but I follow more closely the precise transformation of
his understanding of freedom, and the genealogy of this question, in order to show in
what way Heidegger should indeed be read as a philosopher of freedom.

2 II
The 1929 essay Vom Wesen des Grundes, together with the subsequent essay,
Vom Wesen der Wahrheit are the two most important texts for a discussion of
Heideggers explicit approach to the problem of freedom, and also the first echo of

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his confrontation with the Freiheitsschrift of Schelling. Indeed we could perhaps

speak of this text as the most schellingian of all of Heideggers writings. Here, more
than in any other of his writings, freedom emerges as a key operative term, around
which the argument is built. Vom Wesen des Grundes is to some extent an
extension and an appendix to the lecture course from the preceding year on the
metaphysical foundation of logic, in which the Leibnizian principle of ground, as a
principle of universal explicability is explored in its hidden presuppositions. It also
continues immediately the question raised in the 1928 inaugural lecture Was ist
Metaphysik?. In the essay on the essence of ground, Heidegger moves from the
question of ground or reason to that of world, showing that the very positing of a
ground and the having of a world is founded on the transcendence of Dasein, its
going beyond and over in the direction of the world so as to disclose it, to let it
appear. In the inaugural lecture this movement has been defined as the hinaussein
uber das seiende, a being-beyond beings, and also as a holding oneself in the
nothingness, in das Nicht. In SZ Sorge is defined in terms of its always ahead of
itself, of being toward beings. And Dasein is described as essentially an
understanding of being, in a pre-ontological mode. When the essay on the ground
speaks of transcendence it describes what the main work analyses in terms of
Daseins futural projection toward possibilities. In an important footnote to the text,
Heidegger even says that the entire first part of SZ is in fact nothing but a concrete
uncovering of transcendence.6 That Dasein transcends means that it has always
already engaged itself in beings. Transcendence in this sense is not a qualification
that belongs to Dasein, Heidegger writes, it is not something that can be appended to
it or not, but it is what constitutes selfhood, just as the being-in-the-world, with
which it is at one point equated.7
It is in the continued elaboration of his theme that Heidegger reaches a point
where freedom is suddenly introduced as yet another name for the phenomenon of
transcendence. Taken together with the previous statement, that SZ was in fact a
meditation on transcendence, it implies that at least at this point he was prepared to
see SZ as one long elaboration of the problem freedom. He writes: that which
according to its essence accomplishes something like this concern is what we call
freedom. The stepping overUberstiegtoward the world is freedom itself.8
Freedom is not, he insists, to be thought of as a different kind of ground, but the
origin of ground in general. Freedom is a freedom for the ground.9 This is also
described in terms of enabling a responsibility, for oneself and for the world, and for
being. But what kind of ground is the ground of freedom? On the very last page of
the essay, Heideggers reading of Schelling surfaces explicitly as he states: that this
freedom is the abyssthe Abgrundof Dasein.10 This means that it does not
support or explain Dasein, but it is what places Dasein before itself in its possibility
for being and thus before its finite choice. This situation is what he here also equates
6

Heidegger (1967, p. 162).

Ibid., p. 139.

Ibid., p. 163.

Ibid., p. 165.

10

Ibid., p. 174.

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with the fate of Dasein, its Schicksal. As a ground, freedom withdraws in favor of
that towards which Dasein will have to project itself.
In the later editions of this text we have also Heideggers subsequent remarks,
many of which are explicitly self-critical. In a remark to the above passage he notes,
e.g., that here again we have the vain attempt to think Dasein in neglect of the truth
of being in its turning. And in a final note he writes that freedom has nothing to do
with grounds, little less with causes and causings. From the perspective of his later
thinking we can see why many of his formulations in this text will appear
problematic. When Sartre in his Cartesian-existentialist reading of the text
mentioned earlier, summarizes it to be saying that the freedom of man is the only
ground of being, he brings out precisely one such aspect of the text, which to
Heidegger would be unacceptable, since it would seem to posit the freedom or
subjectivity as an ontological foundation. But it all hinges of course on how this
grounding is understood, and in this respect we can also say that Heidegger is
somewhat unfair to his earlier attempt, as he is also to some extent unfair in his
complete disavowal of existentialism in his subsequent writings (notably the Letter
on Humanism). If freedom is understood as a foundation, if yet in its abysmal
character, then we recognize a repetition of the aspirations of German idealism, to
create a system of freedom, where freedom functions as a first principle. But
Heideggers aspiration already at this point should be read as directed elsewhere,
toward freedom as the opening toward that which is, what Figal speaks of as the
opening of thought which escapes thought die sich dem Denken entziehende
Offenheit des Denkens selbst.11 It is tempting to speak of it as a transcendental
freedom, a principle underlying all manifestations of being. But this conceptual
detour does not really bring us closer to its reality, but simply places it in a
convenient and established conceptual paradigm. The abyssal freedom as the
transcending opening toward the world is not a philosophical principle in any
conventional sense. It is something lived and experienced, which at the same time in
itself withdraws from a conceptual grasp. For it is an attempt to indicate the very
happening of experience as at the same time a task to assume. Freedom, Heidegger
writes here, is a freedom for the ground, and transcendence is explicitly described as
a happening of transcendence (Geschehen) as a configurationsichbildenof a
space where the factical Dasein can emerge in the midst of beings, an
einbruchspielraum fur das jeweilige faktische sichhalten des faktischen Dasein
inmitten des Seienden im Ganzen.12 From this formulation alone it is clear that what
is sought, already in this text, is an understanding of freedom not as a foundation for
being, in the sense of its ultimate explicability, but rather as the neutral event
through which Dasein is situated before and amongst beings. Still, as it stands,
freedom is here the thinkers last word, which is not questioned and critically
interpreted in terms of some more fundamental notion. At least in this sense, it
emerges here as a ground, as an ultimate logos.
In the following year 1929 Heidegger composes the essay Vom Wesen der
Wahrheit. Up to a certain point this text also recapitulates the analysis from Sect. 44
11

Figal (1988, p. 364 (my translation)).

12

Heidegger (1967, p. 170).

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of SZ, in which truth as correspondence and correctness is led back to a more originary
openness, more fundamental than that of the statement. But instead of leading this
openness back to Daseins disclosedness, as is the case in SZ, this opening of oneself
to what is binding is here described as a being-free, a freisein, which furthermore is
said to point toward the hitherto non-comprehended essence of freedom.13 And
hereafter he concludes that the essence of truth as correctness is indeed the freedom of
man.
In a central section of the text he also develops what he understands by freedom.
The analysis follows closely what has already been established in the previous
essay, but it also adds important elements. Freedom as openness is what lets the
present being be what it is. Thus freedom reveals itself as a letting-be, a Sein-lassen,
not, he says, as a neglect, but as a letting oneself be engaged by, a sicheinlassen auf
das seiende. And in a marginal note from 1943 he adds: not negatively, but as a
preserving, gewahren, Wahrniss, and not as an ontically directed effecting of
something, but rather a heeding, Achten.14 To let be in this sense of freedom is to
expose oneself, as a stepping into the disclosure of beings. Deeper than the common
distinction between a negative and positive freedom, i.e., a freedom from and
freedom for, it signifies the involvement in and with the disclosure of beings. This is
also what Heidegger wants to understand by existence, not a moral concern with
oneself, but precisely this exposure to the disclosure, Entborgenheit des Seienden.
Unlike the common understanding of freedom as a possession of man, in virtue of
which he can make his choices, freedom in this sense is rather what possesses man.
And in a movement which implicitly recapitulates another theme from Schelling,
Heidegger insists that the possibility of falsehood, and of neglect to let beings be, is
likewise grounded in freedom. It should not be regarded as simply the neglect of
man in regard to original truth.
These two essays together constitute what could be described as Heideggers
explicit attempt to construct an ontology of freedom, wherein it shines forth as itself
the root of all shining, of all appearance of beings. For a time thus, the phenomenon
of freedom does indeed stand at the focal point of his philosophical aspirations.
How should we view this attempt in retrospect? Is freedom just another and
transitory word for what is and should be designated otherwise? Or is it the other
way around? Is freedom the truth of this event, of truth itself? In other words, does
Heideggers philosophy justly constitute a phenomenology of freedom, up until the
end, as suggested by Figal? I do not think that we should expect that this question
has a definitive answer, as if there was a correctness to be achieved here, and if the
continued sequence of basic words for being constitute a rational chain of grounded
groundings. What we can explore, however, is the continued elaboration of the
problem of freedom as it takes the form of historical confrontations with the work of
Kant and Schelling. From these philosophical encounters we can learn where a
critical ontological interpretation of freedom can lead. In the end it can also help us
understand why freedom, like so many other fundamental concepts along
Heideggers path, is eventually abandoned.
13

Heidegger (1967, p. 186).

14

Ibid., p. 188.

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3 III
The essay on the Essence of truth is composed parallel to the ambitious lecture
series on The Essence of human freedom.15 As the title of this lecture course
indicates, it is clear that at least during this stage of his life, Heideggers
philosophical focus is directed toward the hidden resources and implications of
freedom, in order to reach some kind of decision concerning its ontological
potential. Initially the question is posed whether or not freedom can be said to
constitute a particular concern within the totality of philosophy. And as a response it
is stated, that freedom is indeed a concept that leads to and implies the problem of
philosophy as a whole. Heideggers approach is here very systematic, discussing to
begin with the inherited distinction between a negative and a positive freedom. It is
Kant who is said to bring the question of freedom to its full metaphysical
significance. From him we have the distinction between negative and positive
freedom, and also between positive freedom in the cosmological and practical sense,
and in their interdependency. Both of these definitions of freedom, Heidegger
argues, fall back on a notion of cause. In Kant, freedom will be explored in the
perspective of Ursachesein.16 Thus we are invited, Heidegger, concludes, to explore
the metaphysical tradition, which permits beings to shine forth as causes. What then
is the being of the causal? This remark opens a hundred page long exploration into
the metaphysical tradition, centered around the basic Aristotelian concepts of being,
as ousia, energeia, and dynamis and back to the analysis of being as time in SZ. The
interpretative movement implies that the question of freedom cannot be separated
from the context of metaphysics. It belongs in this context, both as independency
and as spontaneity, and can therefore only be elucidated within a more general
consideration of the question of the meaning of being. We can thus note a difference
in his reference to this concept in regard to the contemporary 1929 essays on the
essence of ground and truth respectively, where freedom is simply deployed as an
operative concept, in order to found from anew the these two fundamental questions
of metaphysics. In the lecture course he works instead from two directions; on the
one hand showing how freedom is connected to, and intertwined with, the general
conceptual framework of metaphysics as a whole; on the other hand, also using it as
a critical lever to upheave this entire tradition.
The second strategy is introduced suddenly. After having established the
conceptual connections to the tradition, Heidegger states with emphasis, that
freedom is no longer to be seen only as a way that leads to the guiding question of
metaphysics as a whole, but instead, that this guiding question is indeed founded on
the question of the essence of freedom.17 And at this point he writes, close to the
argument in the essay on truth: that when we seek freedom as the ground of
possibility of man, then freedom is more original than man. Man is only the keeper,
Verwalter, of freedom. Thus freedom should no longer be thought of as the property
(Eigenschaft) of man, but man as the possibility of freedom. For man is the being in
15

Heidegger (1982/1994).

16

Ibid., p. 29.

17

Ibid., p. 134.

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which the understanding of being happens, and thus the possibility of truth. At this
moment, he can thus turn the Kantian question around, and ask if the problem of
causality is not indeed the problem of freedom, instead of the other way around
(a question which the previous essay on the essence of ground had essentially
already answered in the positive).
From here on, the reading of Kant amounts to a detailed critical engagement which
seeks to show how and why Kant is unable to grasp freedom in its full radicality. To
begin with, Kant is unable to reach a full understanding of causality, for he lacks an
understanding of Dasein and of temporality. The very notion of causality is bound to
the being of present-at-hand (Vorhandensein), and thus the being of man is displaced
and betrayed, ins Gegenteil verkehrt. That Kant speaks of a different kind of causality
does not solve the issue, for he nevertheless lacks the proper ontological ground for
pursuing the problem of freedom. The same conclusion is then drawn from an
examination of how Kant understands action, Handlung, which is ultimately
subsumed under the concept of producing an effect, a Wirken which shows the limited
ontological horizon of the problem of freedom in Kant.18
In the last part of his extensive analysis, Heidegger traces what he calls the
second route to freedom in the Kantian system, i.e., the practical concept of
freedom. Its premise is an understanding of man as rational animal and as person,
with a responsibility for himself. The reality of this practical freedom is a fact, and
yet it can never be demonstrated by reason alone. This is the somewhat paradoxical
situation, which for Kant is solved by stating that the objective reality of freedom is
secured through the practical laws of reason. Thus practical freedom will emerge as
the existence of a will, understood as a capacity to act according to a principle.19
But as Heidegger shows, in a somewhat ironic tone of voice, the principle of the
categorical imperative, which according to Kant should somehow be self-evident,
and as such a proof that pure reason can also be practical, in fact lacks all selfevidence, and recoils back as a question of how it can manifest itself as a fact.20 The
answer is not, as Kant sometimes pretends, that it is evident to anyone, but that it
lies in the telos of a genuine will that wills itself as will that it should also require
this principle. The essence of the practical freedom thus becomes: self-legislation,
pure will, autonomy, self-responsibility as the essence of the person and as the
human in man.21
So the final verdict becomes that what is never discovered by Kant is freedom as
the condition of possibility of the disclosure of being of beings, understanding of
being.22 Yet, such a thesis cannotthus Heidegger ends the coursebe the matter
of a theoretical-scientific treatise. Instead it implies an understanding in concepts
which always and necessarily in advance includes (einbegreift) the one who
understands, ihn in der wurzel seines daseins in anspruch nehmen, i.e., which claims
and appeals to man in the root of his existence. This is a claim to become more
18

Ibid., p. 199.

19

Ibid., p. 275.

20

Ibid., p. 287.

21

Ibid., p. 296.

22

Ibid., p. 303 (my translation).

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essential in the genuine will of his existence. Why?, he asks. For no less and no
greater as for: to become essential in the real willing of ones own essence (Wofur?
Fur nichts geringeres und nicht hoheres als dafur: wesentlich zu werden im
wirklichen wollen des eigenen Wesens).23 This is a remarkable statement in several
respects. Most importantly, from the perspective of our own initial question
concerning the relation between freedom as ontological problem versus freedom as
appeal, we can see how it emphatically establishes freedom as essentially a demand,
but a demand so radical that it in the end even sets a limit for the very possibility of
its theoretical representation.

4 IV
In the introduction to the essay on The essence of ground, Heidegger mentions
Schellings famous Freiheitsschrift from 1809 as an important contribution to the
question of the ground, and towards the end of that text we saw the echo of his
reading of Schelling in the reference to the abysmal (Ab-grund) nature of freedom.
Likewise in the essay on truth, the idea of a common and indifferent evanescent
origin of truth and falsity could be seen to reproduce in different terms the
speculative core of Schellings text. Six years later, in the summer of 1936,
Heidegger finally takes on this text in full, in his masterful critical exposition,
resulting eventually in the volume Schellings Abhandlung uber das Wesen der
Menschlichen Freiheit (1809), published as a book by Niemeyer in 1971, with the
lecture manuscript edited by Hildegaard Feick in collaboration with Heidegger
himself. This exposition is also an attempt to come to an Auseinandersetzung with
Schelling and with German idealism as an historical epoch, whose speculative force,
in Heideggers view, reaches its apex in this particular text.
Unlike the discussion with Kant 6 years earlier, Heidegger is here closer to his
interlocutor. At least initially he mirrors Schellings own aspirations, also when
Schelling would seem to be more far removed than Kant from a contemporary
philosophical concern, in particular in view of his understanding of the divine and
the role of pantheism, which reverberates throughout the whole treatise. To some
extent this greater proximity issues from a greater interpretative violence, whereby
the text of Schelling is made to speak to the concern defined by Heidegger himself.
But I think we could perhaps also see it as an effect of Schellings lesser
philosophical weight in the present, which, like in the case of Holderlin, permits a
freer reading and appropriation on Heideggers part. This greater proximity can be
illustrated quite clearly from the outset, when Heidegger states that Schellings text
has nothing to do with the common concern with freedom, as the freedom of the will
of man. For here he says, freedom does not appear as a property of man, but the
other way around, that man is the property of freedom. The essence of man is
grounded in freedom, as itself a fundamental determination of being.24 Through this
23

Ibid., p. 303.

24

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.

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speculative turn, which is nowhere articulated as such by Schelling, Heidegger has

already from the start brought the text literally into the philosophical space which he
claimed it was impossible to recover from a reading of Kant.
On the next page he makes another very important point, which also reinstates
the significance of freedom as demand, in that he states that philosophy itself is only
possible as freedom, and that its very accomplishment constitutes a highest act of
freedom.25 Both of these propositions respond to the aspiration encoded in
Schellings text, namely to think the totality from the point of view of freedom, as
itself a culmination of that freedom. But whereas this is articulated by Schelling in
terms of the divine kernel in nature, which operates its teleological development in
and through the spirit of man, Heidegger here recovers it in an ontological and
atheistic, or rather a non-theistic discourse. For Heidegger, Schellings constant
reference to the divine, as well as the theological framework of his whole discourse,
is not something he leaves aside or seeks to discard as a time bound aspect of the
treatise. Instead he insists that all philosophy is essentially theology. Why? Because
it seeks to understandto grasp in logosthe totality of beings in its ground, and
that it knows this ground: as god, theos. This, he says, is even the case with
Nietzsche. In asking for the totality of beings, philosophy speaks the language of
theology. Indeed, it is and has always been an onto-theology. Schellings treatise,
precisely when it speaks of the divine in nature, locates itself at the center of the
metaphysical question, and we should therefore read it as an attempt to speak to the
question: What is the totality of beings in its ground? This is a condensed and
forceful interpretation, which at once does violence to, and makes available
Schellings question from the highest possibility of our present philosophical
situation.
Much commentary is then devoted to the problem of system, in German idealism
in general, and in Schelling in particular. Kants legacy appears as the need to find
and construct a system in which man, god and world can be comprehended in a
synthetic unity, as a discourse on the totality of beings, within which man stands, as
its highest articulation. The means to accomplish this in Schelling is the intellectual
intuition, which Heidegger insists, is no unrealistic romantic fantasy, but the name
for the actual work of the spirit on itself, so as to bring its place within the totality of
beings to transparency.26 If freedom is the fundamental name for being, then the
system of the totality of beings must be a system of freedom. This is Schellings
great aspiration, which occupies him for the greater part of his life, just as it is the
inner aspiration of German idealism as a whole.27 Heidegger quotes a passage from
Schellings Munich lectures from 1827 in which he says: A system of freedom, in
great lines, in the same simplicity, and yet as a total counter image to the
spinozisticthat would really be the highest.28 But this aspiration is also what is
doomed to fail, Heidegger says. Indeed, Schelling himself has already anticipated
this life long failure when he in the Freiheitsschrift says that according to an old
25

Ibid., p. 12.

26

Ibid., p. 57.

27

Cf. also Heideggers further remarks on the system on p. 109f.

28

Ibid., p. 25.

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saying the concept of freedom should be incompatible with that of a system. The
reason for this, Heidegger adds, is that Freedom excludes the recourse to a
grounding. The system on the other hand demands a completed grounding.29 Seen
in this way, freedom is precisely that which cannot, indeed which is essentially
incapable of, serving as a ground for a system. And later on in the course Heidegger
also insists that ontology in his sense is not a system, as a discipline or a piece of
learning, but that it constitutes the question for the truth and ground of being, and
theology for us, he continues, is the question of the being of this very ground.30
How then does Schelling try to solve the problem, how does he attempt to
inscribe freedom into a system so as not to obliterate it in this very attempt? It is at
this point that the theological turn of the text occurs, when Schelling argues that
there must be such a system, such a perspective on the totality, if not elsewhere, then
in divine reason. From this point the treatise takes the perspective of the divine. It
begins to think the totality as divinity, but not as distinct from man, but on the
contrary as a way of conceptualizing from the highest possible point the position of
man in nature. One particular passage, Heidegger says, captures in poetic density
the entire movement of the treatise, where Schelling speaks of man as both the
principle of darkness and of light, and of his will as the in eternal longing hidden
kernel of god, of a God who once conceived will as nature.31 God is in us and we
are in God, and God becomes known through us. This pantheistic position
Heidegger also affirms in his own way, as he writes that we can only see what we
are, and that we are that to which we also belong. But this belonging is only
actualized to the extent that we confirm it (bezeugen), which is what happens in
Dasein. The connection here is clear to a theme which is central in Beitrage, on
which he is working at the same time, namely that only in belonging (zuhoren) to
being can being become present to us, precisely in its happening as an event of
belonging.32
Despite the inner failure to construct a system of freedom, what Schelling is
said to have rightly seen is the necessity to move beyond the separation of nature
as necessity and man as freedom. This is not a theme which should be treated as
a problem to be solved by philosophy (in the way perhaps Kant struggles with
it). Instead it should be recognized as the center of philosophy itself, from within
which it thinks. In Kant we stop before the two regions and their possible
mediation. For Schelling the task is to see how freedom runs through all domains
of being, only to reach a particular acuteness in man.33 His defense of pantheism
in this respect is consistent, Heidegger says, and there is no contradiction
29

Ibid., p. 26.

30

Ibid., p. 79.

31

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 hochste 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 gottliche Lebensblick, den Gott
ersah, als er den Willen zur Natur fate, ibid. p. 65, on p. 35 in Schelling (1997).
32
Cf., e.g., Heidegger (1989, p. 421) passim. For a more detailed analysis of Beitrage and the problem of
belonging as an historical-ontological category, see Ruin (2005a), and also Chapter 8 in Ruin (1994).
33

Heidegger (1971b/1995, p. 73).

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H. Ruin

between pantheism and freedom, as was intensively debated at the time,

following Jacobis famous attack on Lessing in 1785 for spinozism (which
later also led him to criticize Schelling). For the genuine feeling for freedom
(Gefuhl) demands the belonging of man to the totality of beings, which is
another word for pantheism, and indeed the rightly understood pantheism even
presupposes human freedom.34 Schelling is the first to have tried to move beyond
a conception of nature as that which has to be overcome in order for freedom to
develop, and to try to bring freedom and nature together. This complete and
general concept of freedom is Schellings genuine contribution, over Kant and
Fichte, in Heideggers view.
Butand this but is the point where Heideggers whole discussion turns
around and leaves the violent but genuinely sympathetic reconstruction, and
begins to take its distancebut, in doing so Schelling also displays his
indebtedness to Leibniz, and the Monadology in a way that eventually points to
the incapacity of his thinking to provide a genuine alternative to the previous
tradition. The critical argument goes as follows: Schellings philosophy of nature
issues from the attempt to incorporate nature into freedom, and to think the
totality of beings from its perspective. From this ambition he is led to posit the
original determination of being as Wollen, as will. Will is original being,
according to Schelling, Wollen ist Ursein.35 In this he continues the Leibnizian
monadology, which is also echoed in Hegel, when the idea is placed at the peak
of his logic. Wollen ist das ursprungliche Wesen des Seins, willing is the original
essence of being, according to Schelling.36 It is with this statement that all is
suddenly decided. To put it somewhat drastically: here Heidegger parts ways, not
only with Schelling, but with German idealism as a whole, which in this
conception has revealed its interiority, as an apotheosis of the will. In this form, a
system of freedom becomes possible, once original being had been conceived as
will. And even though Schelling is presented by Heidegger as someone who
through his discourse on good and evil also wants to move beyond this purely
formal concept of freedom as original willing, it does not suffice.
In his concluding remarks, Heidegger states that the real importance of
Schellings treatise lies in its introduction and the first four sections, which discuss
the problem of the system and the basic comportment to philosophy. But in the end
Schelling does not reach much further than Kant in his understanding of freedom,
which remains unbegreiflich.37 And this has to do with the fact that freedom places
us in an actualization of being, not simply its representation. This enactment of
being, however, is not a blind process, but a wissendes Innestehen im Seienden im
Ganzen, das es auszustehen gilt, a knowing standing within beings in totality, so as
to endure it. And Heidegger continues to state that this awareness of freedom will
become certain of its own highest necessity, because it alone is what makes
possible that man can encounter a destiny, so as to take it upon himself, and carry it
34

Ibid., p. 106.

35

Ibid., p. 114 (quotation from Schelling (1997, p. 350)).

36

Ibid., p. 115.

37

Ibid., p. 195.

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291

beyond himself.38 In other words, as Heidegger reaches the end of this

monumental confrontation, he returns to essentially the same point as at the end
of his reading of Kant, namely that freedom is that which is understood to the extent
that we expose ourselves to its reality, which is the reality of standing historically
before the totality of being as destiny. But his sense of freedom is not only
something which neither Kant, nor Schelling, was able to articulate, but also
something which they could not articulate as such, since it necessarily withdraws
from a proper philosophical and conceptual grasp.
Heideggers genuine and explicit engagement with freedom as a fundamental
philosophical concept and theme coincides with his Auseinandersetzung with
German idealism during the thirties, a work which is also carried over into the
lectures on Nietzsche and Holderlin. When he returns again to Schellings essay and
to the epoch of German idealism in a 1941 lecture course on The metaphysics of
German Idealism, his confrontation with Nietzsche has already led him to posit this
whole epoch as a figure within the overall transformation of being. Our
confrontation with Schelling, he writes there, has shown that being is here posited
as presence and in modern terms as subjectivity, and as will. Furthermore, this is not
something unique to Schelling, but a testimony to the presenting of being itself.39
But through the questioning from the other beginning (what is there understood as
equivalent to the leaping into the truth of being), he writes, that all of this is
superceded, uberwunden.40 Also in the Letter on Humanism, his treatment of Hegel
and Schelling in conjunction is likewise sharp and definitive. They are both said to
think being as a will that wills itself, as knowledge and love, And in this will the
will to power is already hiding.41 Period. Here the verdict has fallen. It is to some
extent a curious verdict. What was once conceived as the great promise of this
movement and its inheritance, is thereby definitively transformed into a fixed period
and a culmination of a fate.
What conclusion should we draw from this summary reading of Heideggers
confrontation with German idealism when it comes to the role of freedom in
Heideggers own thinking? This is now our question. One possible answer could be:
since the preoccupation with freedom in the previous tradition has led precisely to a
metaphysics of the will, then freedom also, and its illusions of autonomy and
subjectivity, can henceforth be discarded. The fact that Heidegger never again
returns to the problem, and hardly even refers to very concept of freedom in his
subsequent texts, could be interpreted to support such a claim. Yet from my
concluding remarks on his interpretations of Kant and Schelling, we could also
and indeed, I think we shoulddraw a different conclusion. For what was stated at
the end of each of these interpretations was not that freedom was not fundamental,
38

Ibid., p. 196. The full quotation reads: Dieses Wissen der Freiheit wird seiner hochsten
Notwendigkeit gewi, weil es allein jene Aufnahmestellung ermoglicht, in der stehend der Mensch
imstande ist, als ein Geschichtlicher einem Schicksal zu begegnen, es auf sich zu nehmen und uber sich
hinweg zu tragen.

39

Heidegger (1991, p. 187).

40

Ibid., p. 189.

41

Heidegger (1967, p. 360).

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H. Ruin

but that the nature of this foundation was such that it could only be understood on
the condition that the subject is somehow drawn into its demand as something to
endure, rather than simply understand. In other words, we were left with freedom as
the name for that which not only withdraws from a representational mode of
thought, but which must refuse this representation in order to be and appear as what
it is. This refusal is something which somehow remains to be enacted also in
ourselves, whereby we refuse to be captured by the will to conceptually dominate
our own fundamental existential predicament. From this perspective, the failures of
German idealism would not be that it sought to build a philosophy on and around
the phenomenon of freedom, but that its representatives were all ultimately led to
posit this ground as a founding will, and thus to betray what was perhaps also their
own deepest philosophical motive.

5 V
In Reiner Schurmanns important study Heidegger on Being and Acting: from
principles to anarchy, which was mentioned above, there is a chapter on how we
should view the transformation of the problem of the will in Heidegger. He starts
out from the established opinion, that we find in SZ a partly voluntaristic discourse,
centered on decision, on becoming a self through an act of will, a discourse which,
following the turning (understood as a gradual transformation during the first half of
the thirties), is replaced by its opposite, a refusal of the will, a will not to will,
manifested instead in the comportment of letting-be, Gelassenheit. But this account,
he continues, needs to be complemented by a more sustained meditation on the
problem of decision, Entscheidung. Referring to the essay on The Origin of the
Work of Art, and also to the Nietzsche interpretation, Schurmann recalls how the
fundamental words for being are presented by Heidegger precisely as decisive
events. The history of metaphysics itself can be followed as a series of such
decisions, taken by no one in particular, but as result of which things are then
necessarily thought of in new ways. Schurmann speaks of these decisions as
economic decisions, separating them from anything that can or could be willed
by individuals. Just as thrownness precedes every project, so an essential,
disjunctive, historical-destinal, economic, aletheiological, non-human, systematic
decision precedes all human or voluntary decisions, all comportment.42
The question then arises how to comport oneself with regard to these decisions
already taken in and by being so to speak. For Schurmann, in his reading of
Heidegger, it can only mean to follow the context-setting will in its epochal
decline, to dismiss it as the last metaphysical stamp, as the being of entities, as the
mark of our age. Citing Arendt, he says that the will acts like a kind of coup
detat, as a force which seeks to establish the self as permanent and time as
lasting. In action it manifests itself as principal acting, which is the very
manifestation of the hubris of modernity. For Schurmann, Heidegger presents a
42
Schurmann (1987, p. 247). I will here refer to the revised English version of the original Le principe
danarchie: Heidegger et la question de lagir (Paris: Seuil, 1982).

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response to the question of acting and what is do be done, in insisting, as he does in

the 1955 text on Gelassenheit, that we will non-willing. Heidegger urges, he writes,
the downthrow of epochal principles that are already foundering, a downthrow that
must be understood otherwise than willful, decisive, resolute or efficacious. This
kind of non-willing and releasement, are more subversive today than any project of
the will. Outlining and presenting this alternative is also the whole point behind the
title of the book, from principles to anarchy.
In this program for a willing the non-willing, the problem of freedom first seems
to be absent. Schurmann does not address it, and Heidegger, in his later writings
does not openly invite such a discussion. On the contrary, it would seem natural to
assume that the very idea of freedom as autonomy, and as principled self-regulation,
belongs to the manifestation of a certain age, in which being shines forth precisely
as will and as a ground to be given, as explicability and mastery. If the principal
decisions and epochal transformations have always already been taken, if the very
figure of man, of humanity and its humanisms, are conceived in advance, beyond
any possible individual human decision, then the very idea of man as free, as
essentially free, and even as called upon to become more and more free, would
obtain an almost ludicrous appearance, as simply the ideological effect of an age,
which thus demonstrates its incapacity to think its own predicament. What remains
for thinking to contemplate is not to continue to dream the dream of freedom but to
learn instead to understand the historical structures that have produced its
phantasms. It is to engage in an investigation of the conceptual transformations
of being and its epochs, and to comply in thinking with its sending, its fate.
In the final section of Nietzsche II, Heidegger would seem to confirm such a
conclusion when he writes: The recollection in the history of being thinks this
history as the always distant arrival of a settling (Austrag) of the essence of truth, in
which the essence of being itself inceptually happens (ereignet). Here being is
conveyed as that which gives itself for reflection, and as the possessor of what is
most proper to the thinker, and even as having itself a freedom, in virtue of which
it gives itself.43 From the perspective of the discovery of a history of being, as a
series of sendings, of Geschick, the possible autonomy of man would seem to loose
its interest. Is this, then, the truth of the fate of freedom in Heidegger, that in the end
freedom is fate, a fate with which Dasein must simply comply?44
Heideggers later work contributed, on the one hand, to a more general suspicion
with regard to the relevance and pertinence of freedom, as demonstrated in the
suspicion vis-a`-vis existentialism in structuralist thought, and in various forms of
anti- and a-humanisms which emerged during the sixties. Politically it carried with
it a suspicion with regard to the discourse of liberalism in general, which relies as its
foundation, on the primacy of the autonomous individual. On the other hand, and
starting already with Habermas early critical confrontation in 1953, precisely this
aspect of his thinking has generated a strong critical reactions among many of his
43

Heidegger (1961, p. 482).

44

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 Heideggers understanding of destiny is by no
means fatalistic, see Ruin (2007, pp. 1534).

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contemporary readers (and non-readers!).45 It has been argued in different ways that
it is precisely this anti-liberal aspect of his thinking which led to his inability to
reflect critically on the emergence of European fascism, as well as his inability to
reconsider in retrospect his misguided political orientation. I will not try to rehearse
this debate here, but the point of my argument has a bearing on its outcome, since it
is concerned with exploring a certain sense of what I would dare to call an original
liberalism in Heideggers thinking.
If there is indeed a risk implied by Heideggers thinking in this respect today, it is
not a political risk, but rather a philosophical risk, which manifests itself in regard to
the reading of his own work, which always risks falling back into a kind of
doctrinary systematics. In its doctrinary form, the history of being becomes a system
of history, indeed a strange kind of post-idealistic system of freedom, as the system
of the freedom of beings itself, in the form of a history of its consecutive
manifestations, which is then repeated as a body of historical knowledge. More
generally, it leads to the temptation of a mode of thinking, which finds its highest
goal in a distanced categorization of its own present in terms of specific historical
sendings, and thus approaches the point of a kind of melancholic fatalism, in which
the fate of the West has already been fulfilled in the state of technological nihilism.
Then when this melancholy revolts against its own pathos and turns around
perhaps in an explicit anti-heideggerianismin a gesture of absolute affirmation of
precisely the same situation, it often simply ceases to think, and loses itself to the
present and its transitory concerns, in a superficial post-modernist posture.
The risk inherent in Heideggers attempts to develop a post-metaphysical
reflection coincides with its highest speculative expressions. This is clearly the case
with Beitrage, where he speaks of the so called inceptual thinking as a thinking in
which the very notion of self must be understood not as the result of a voluntary
action of an ego, but as the enownment of belonging to the call (Sect. 30), to
quote the English translation. In this and numerous formulations the attempt is made
to call Dasein back to a reflection, in which it can recognize itself as ungrounded,
handed over to itself by being itself. At this highest speculative point of Heideggers
discourse, the risk is run, and must perhaps be run, that the subject piously bends
down before the reality of its non-autonomy, and that it in its philosophical practice
satisfies itself with recapitulating the historical steps whereby it has been
constituted.
How and to what extent can such a thinking nevertheless still be spoken of as a
form of resistance and of action? Schurmann is right in pointing out the
subversiveness of Heideggers later thinking, also in its most apparently fatalistic
formulations. But the nature of this subversiveness needs to be articulated more
sharply, or perhaps one should rather say, that it need to articulated always anew, in
order ultimately to free Heideggers own discourse from sinking down into yet
another ossified system of thought. And for this purpose I think it is important to
continue to explore his mode of reflection precisely as a peculiar form of praxis, as a
form of action, and to see more specifically in what way this continues to be guided
by a notion of freedom, also after this specific word has ceased to function as an
45

Habermas (1953).

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explicit and guiding theme in its own right. We remain responsible in the face of a
tradition, also when our relation to this tradition is reformulated in terms of a
response to its sending and its address. As Bret Davis writes in relation to how the
question of the will is formulated by Schurmann: where would the impetus to
voluntary renunciation of volition come from?46 Similarly, the question of
freedom and individual responsibility does not simply disappear just by transposing
the event of decision concerning the meaning of being from Dasein to being itself.

6 VI
What then is the guiding motive of the kind of reflection, this besinnende Denken,
which Heidegger seeks to practice in his continued meditations on thinkers and
themes from Beitrage onwards?47 Does this question have one answer? Is not the
very question suspicious, as it signals the search for an effect, or a result, from that
thinking which explicitlyif we are to take seriously what he declares in the Letter
on Humanism, that this thinking is without effect, that es hat keine Wirkung.48 But
also in the same paragraph he adds that this thinking has a sachhaltiger
verbindlichkeit, a stronger connection to the matter, than the validity of science,
for it is freer, freier, as it lets being be. In other words, that which accomplishes
nothing can still be recognized as a work of freedom, as an accomplishment of
freedom itself, indeed it finds its very legitimacy precisely in being more free than
that which has a result. This is an extraordinary statement in view of the problem
which concerns us here. The same point is made in the lecture on What is
philosophy? Which Heidegger presented at the seminar in Cerisy-la-Salle in 1955,
where he speaks of the tradition of philosophy, as a free direction of a path, on
which we can ask: what is thatphilosophy? The tradition does not appear in the
form of a compulsion, for to transmit (uberliefern), delivrer, is a freeing, namely in
the freedom of the dialogue with what has been.49 Later on in the same lecture
Heidegger states that to take up this tradition is essentially to respond to it, and to
assume the tradition in this way is what in SZ is designated by the term
destruction. By this term, he says, I did not intend a dispersal or obliteration of
the past, but a dismantling and placing to the side the only historical statements of
philosophy. Destruction means: to open our ear, to be freefreimachenfor that
which speaks to us as the being of beings in the tradition.
This remark I read as the indication of a fundamental ethos of Heideggers
thinking, and it is therefore so much more noteworthy, that it insists precisely on the
liberating force of philosophical thought. If we begin to look further into the
statements in which he, so to speak, motivates his whole endeavor it is striking to
what extent one particular formulation returns again and again in the later texts:
namely that the task of thinking is to lead us to the Free, ins Freie. In Sect. 204 of
46

Davis (2007, p. 207).

47

For a more detailed analysis of the specific theme of Besinnung, see Ruin (2005b).

48

Heidegger (1967, p. 358).

49

Heidegger (1966, p. 8).

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Beitrage he speaks of a need that should bring about that the second beginning leads
the first into the freeins Freieso as to overcome it. In the subsequent section
the free is described in terms of openness, and a keenness of creating, as well as
what is unprotected, an exposure which brings things to the fore. From the same
year as the lecture on What is Philosophy?, dates the lecture series Der Satz vom
Grund in which the question from 1929 is raised again, 25 years later. Here he
writes of the sending of being (Geschick des Seins) as an address from out of which
all human discourse emanates. Spruch, he says, is in latin Fatum, but what is meant
here is no fatalism, because as this word reaches us it carries with it the free of the
Zeit-spiel-raum, and only thereby frees man into the free of his fated possibilities.50 Already in the lectures on Schellings Freiheitsschrift analyzed above, he
had said in the introduction, that through the interpretation of a historical textin
this case Schellings essaywhen we begin to understand, it departs from us and
into the movement of the happening (Geschehnis) of the philosophy of German
idealism, and reveals its inner law, which is what we have to grasp in order to reach
into the free.51 Immediately after this he also added that we do not overcome or
become free from history only by turning our backs on it. What is essential turns
back, and the question is rather if a time is prepared for it and strong enough for it.
Together these passageswhich are only a few examples of this often repeated
tropepoint toward a conception of philosophical work which remains guided by a
certain understanding of freedom, not primarily as agency or independence, i.e., not
as classifiable according to a standard distinction between a positive and a negative
freedom, but as a kind of responsive openness to what is.52 To reach the free as an
interpretative goal, as in the Schelling book, is obviously not to liberate oneself
from the matter of the past, but to reach a point where one is able to encounter it.
But what is the nature of this free encounter, as opposed to a supposedly bound
encounter, guided by prejudices or misconceptions? From a traditional point of view
we know what the answer is, namely truth or correctness. Freedom is freedom for
truth, and truth is also whatideallysets us free. But a traditional concept of truth
as correctness is discharged from the very beginning here. And yet it is in an
exposure to the event of disclosure that this openness finds its telos also for
Heidegger. But this disclosure or event does not have, indeed it cannot have the
character of a fixed and certain belief, for then it collapses again into an objectifying
posture. Instead it can only be understood as the ability to prevail in the exposure to
the gift of disclosure, indeed to the gift of time itself, to the Es gibt envoked in the
lecture Zeit und Sein from 1962.53 Ultimately, this is what marks and constitutes
the work of freedom. To step into the free is to step into the exposed and uncertain
possibility of an experience, in which ones previous conceptions, including those of
oneself, is placed at risk. This is also the inner, and not always apparent ethos of
50

Heidegger (1971a, p. 158).

51

Heidegger (1971b/1995, p. 5).

52

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).
53

Heidegger (1969/1988).

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297

Heideggers thinking and writing: to bring reflection to a point where it can permit
things to be, and to stand open for the secret, as the two basic aspects of
philosophical comportments are described in the seminal text on Gelassenheit.54 In
the course of such a meditation we place ourselves at risk, in the sense that we open
our ears to what speaks from tradition, and from being itself. As it exposes itself to
the force of the address of being, thinking will have to renounce its beliefs in
mastery of itself and its own fate, and instead release itself for the destiny inherent
in its own finite situation. But this kind of reflection is not the abandonment of
freedom as such, only of its illusion in the form of a completed autonomy. Instead it
is the work of a freedom always to be achieved anew, in the practicing of
philosophical questioning as the interminable dialogue with what is. In this sense,
Heideggers thought can rightly be called a philosophy of freedom, a philosophy of
freedom not in the subjective genitive as a philosophy about freedom, but rather in
the objective; as a philosophy from freedom, as an attempt to respond to its difficult
and evanescent demand.

7 VII
Freedom is never entirely lost, nor can it once and for all be achieved. It remains
always the task of the individual and the community, to have the courage to expose
itself to the evanescent ground which can never be fixed and mastered, but which
only manifests itself in and through a destructive, releasing dialogue, which can
permit it to appear as an already there, in its freedom, as the free, and precisely
therefore in its fate, as a given space of decision. Only by freeing ourselves for the
situation in which we already stand can we genuinely act, and not simply reproduce
a grip which already holds us. This is the truth of the thought of Gelassenheit, as it
also seeks to place us in the free. This kind of meditation may appear
fundamentally a-political, in the sense of being defaitistic, yielding or compliant.
But it is also essentially political, for it releases man from his belief in fixed
individuality and of its freedom as a fixed property, and brings him before a
community and its historical situation. In its implication, if not stated as such by
Heidegger, it marks an openness to the other, not simply as acceptance, but as to the
possibility of a dialogue, as a wakefulness to what may show itself as binding. To
will freedom is to will the disclosure of being, but also to will the freedom of the
other, as Simone de Beauvoir writes in her essay Pour un morale de lambiguite
from 1947, a text which could be read as response to the Letter on Humanism. It is a
text which takes up several of its themes, refusing also to display an ethics in the
sense of a given set of rules or principles, and insisting on the connection between
ethics and the opening of existence toward being, thus offering a more fruitful
appropriating response to Heidegger than Sartres neo-cartesianism.55
Freedom must be continuously questioned, as a phantasm and illusion of
modernity, but this questioning will have to continue to be performed precisely in
54

Heidegger (1959/1992).

55

Beauvoir (1947).

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H. Ruin

the name offreedom. At the end of his lecture course on Der Ister, from 1942,
Heidegger summarizes his reading of Holderlin by stating that in the Stromdichtung
we should not listen for symbols of something else, nor for the expression of an
individual, but that Holderlin thinks and poetizes in a vein which is hardly audible
for the present preoccupation with subjectivity.56 In order to hear this poetry, and
the domain, the Ort, from which it speaks, we must leave behind all attempts to
connect or correlate it to specific realities, in orderagainto reach into the free,
das Freie, in whose domain the poetic is. Holderlin asks Giebt es auf Erden ein
Maas? Is there a measure on earth? And he responds Es giebt keinesthere is none.
Heidegger reads this as saying that there is no fixed measure to simply rely on, no
principle of control. For all attempts to fix and operate the measure will inevitably
lead to a total destruction of measure, and to nothingness, Nichtigkeit. On the other
hand, if we remain in thoughtless and without the wakefulness of a prufende
Ahnens, an experimenting anticipation, then no measure will present itself. We need
therefore a certain strength in order to be struck by what is conveyed in the poetry.
The poet himself follows this law, Heidegger writes, and quotes a strophe from Die
Wanderung: Zum Traume wirds ihm, will es Einer/Beschleichen und straft den,
der/Ihm gleichen will mit Gewalt./Oft uberrascht es den, Der eben kaum es gedacht
hat.57 It becomes a dream, it veils and punishes the one who wants to control it with
violenceand often it surprises the one who has hardly even thought about it. This
law of the wandering poet, who does not believe that the measure is there to
establish, but who seeks it out, in his thinking and writing, and thus in his action, to
permit the measure to shine forth, this law could also be read as the demand of
freedom. It carries with it the courage to be surprised, and to be exposed to oneself
as another.
We have followed here how Heidegger in the texts immediately following upon
SZ strives to create a phenomenological ontology on the basis of human freedom as
transcendence, in close if yet critical proximity to German idealism, and to
Schelling in particular. This period is one in which his thinking can justly and noncontroversially be described as a philosophy of freedom in the sense given to it,
e.g., by Figal. But the more debatable issue is how the emergence of the nonvoluntaristic schema of the later writings is to be understood, and what the
implications of the history or sending of being are for to the sense of human
freedom. Here I have shown how this later constellation grows, stepwise through the
detailed critical engagement with the writings of Kant and Schelling in particular.
More specifically it became clear that the decisive point of disagreement is not
human freedom as such, but the inevitable failure of trying to construe an
ontological freedom as a foundation. For what this attempt implies is not
automatically a forgetfulness of being, but also a forgetfulness of freedom itself,
in the sense of its more original manifestation as demand and appeal. When the nonfoundational freedom is made into a foundation it inevitably lead to a metaphysics
of the will. But the solution to this aporia is not to abandon will and freedom, but to
think them in their character of what it means to stand open for the event of being
56

Heidegger (1984, p. 203).

57

Ibid., p. 206.

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299

and of truth. As such the phenomenon of human freedom and transcendence is

handed over by Heidegger, not simply as a discarded illusion, nor as a higher order
possession, now secured within the movement of the history of being, but as a task,
as the highest task, indeed the most difficult, but also the most joyful.

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