According to Hans Ruin, there are two ways to approach the examination of freedom in Heidegger’s writings: One can use the notion of freedom as a heuristic concept to interpret the entirety of Heidegger’s work as a philosophy of freedom, which was famously done by Günter Figal, or one can reconstruct Heidegger’s actual use of the notion of freedom. In my paper I’ll focus on the second approach and show that although “freedom” or, rather, “being-free” can already be found in Being and Time, his more elaborate concept of freedom as transcendence is developed in the years 1928-1930. These years are part of a time period in which Heidegger tried to develop his own positive concept of metaphysics. The main texts which show this development are the lecture course The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic and the essay On the Essence of Ground. Based on Aristotle’s twofold metaphysics—consisting of ontology and philosophical theology—Heidegger sketches his own concept of metaphysics. The fundamental ontology which plays the role of ontology is complemented by his cosmological interpretation of theology: metontology. Together, they form Heidegger’s novel notion of metaphysics: the metaphysics of Dasein. Whereas fundamental ontology is concerned with the question of Being, the main subject of metontology is world as beings as a whole. Heidegger develops his concept of transcendence, i.e., metontological freedom, which describes the connection between freedom and world, on the basis of the terms world-projection (Weltentwurf), world-view (Weltanschauung), and world-formation (Weltbildung), each describing an aspect of transcendence.

If we are to understand the conditions in which human existence or Dasein might be free, we must understand the conditions in which it is not free, that is, the nature of the conditions whereby Dasein’s freedom is constricted. In this paper I explore the idea that at best Heidegger’s ontology might support a picture of freedom somewhat akin to Spinozan freedom: in the right conditions we might to a greater or lesser degree act in a way aligned with our own being. In the post-Kehre Heidegger of the 1930s and early 40s, this would take the form of existing in a way properly grounded in – or rather, aligned with our ground in – beyng (Seyn) as event (Ereignis). If this is the case, to understand the conditions whereby we are not free – at least at an ontological level – means to understand the nature of our alienation from our ground in beyng as event. In this paper, I examine Heidegger’s account of the nature of this alienation in Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis). In that text, this alienation is described in terms of our condition within an alienated configuration or ‘epoch’ of history – that of metaphysics – a configuration defined by ‘Seinsverlassenheit’ (‘abandonment by being’), expressed in terms of ‘Machenschaft’ (machination), ‘Vor-stellung’ (representation), and ‘Erlebnis’ (lived experience).

This paper is about my latest book on Heidegger’s non-public writings on the event. It begins with a discussion of Contributions to Philosophy (Of the Event) and ends with The Event, spanning roughly the years 1936 to 1941. I pay primary attention to shift of attunements, concepts, and movement of thought in these volumes. Thereby a narrative emerges that traces a shift from a more Nietzschean pathos emphasizing the power of beyng to a more mystical approach in which Heidegger thinks “the beingless,” “what is without power,” and speaks of originary thinking as a thanking rather than a questioning. The shift begins to happen in 1939, the year World War II broke out but becomes clearly visible in 1940 in the volume On Inception (GA 70). Heidegger’s path of thinking is one of downgoing into the most concealed dimension of the truth of beyng and an attempt at thinking more radically without primacy of the human being. Among the many questions my book engages, I am focusing especially on the articulation of both the difference and simultaneity of beyng and beings in relation to attunement, body, history, and Heidegger’s errancies.

Heidegger’s 1936 essay “The Origin of the Work of Art” is notoriously dense and difficult. In part this is because it appears to come almost from nowhere, given that Heidegger has relatively little to say about art in his earlier work. Yet the essay can only be adequately understood, I would argue, in concert with Heidegger’s essay on Hölderlin from the same year, “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetizing.” Without the Hölderlin essay, for instance, the central claim of “The Origin of the Work of Art” to the effect that all art is in essence poetizing, Dichtung, can hardly be appreciated in its philosophical significance without the discussions of both essence and poetizing that appear in the Hölderlin essay. This is true of other concepts also. The central concept of the rift (Riß)—the fissure or tear—that appears in “The Origin of the Work of Art” might readily be assumed to be adopted from Albrecht Dürer, whose use of the term Heidegger cites at a key point in the 1936 essay. Here, however, I argue that the real source of the concept for Heidegger is Hölderlin, and that the Riß is, moreover—quite literally—an inscription of originary, ekstatic temporality; that is, of temporality as the “origin” of Being and as the poetic or poetizing essence of art. I do so, first, by briefly considering Heidegger’s references to Dürer in “The Origin of the Work of Art” and other texts from the period, as well as his understanding of the Riß and of the tearing of the Riß in that essay and in its two earlier versions. I then turn to Heidegger’s 1936 Rome lecture “Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetizing,” in order to show the Hölderlinian origins of this concept for Heidegger.

This essay focuses on Heidegger’s formula “that it is” (daß es ist) Being and Time and “The Origin of the Work of Art.” In spite of the substantial shift in philosophical vocabulary and subject matter (associated with the so-called “turn” in Heidegger’s philosophy) between the two works, the daß-formula is to be found (at important junctures) in both. In this essay I will show that the expression reveals not only a hitherto unthematized continuity between the two works but also Heidegger’s abiding philosophical concern that remain unaffected by the “turn”: to rethink possibility (potentiality) as no longer subordinate to actuality, to rethink possibility as freedom, whether in the human Dasein or in a work of art. For Heidegger it is only when we can say no more of Dasein (or the artwork) than that it is that freedom and possibility can be thought.

Heidegger’s notion of freedom depends on an original temporality more fundamental than world-time (the time of determinism). This paper asks whether freedom means a withdrawal from world-time or a releasement into it. Being and Time discloses Dasein’s drifting-along in world-time as inauthentic. In this way, it secures freedom from determinism, but also gives the impression that authenticity, as a resoluteness, entails a withdrawal from world-time. The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics shows that Heidegger is well aware of the problem of withdrawal. He focuses on the attunement of boredom, which delivers Dasein back into world-time. The tension of the authentic moment of vision is too intense to endure, therefore Dasein has to remove this tension and thus to release itself into world-time. “The Origin of the Work of Art” extends the boredom of Dasein to a metaphysical boredom of Being in general. The earth, the undifferentiated ground of Being, cannot be given at once in totality. Instead, it bears an impulse toward the work, in which Being is individuated in world-time. “The Eternal Recurrence of the Same” refigures this tension in Nietzsche’s metaphysics between creative Becoming and fixated Being and concludes that Becoming, in order to create or subsist at all, has to be “infected” by Being, thus entering world-time. Freedom is better understood as a releasement into world-time. This is a tragic event, but it is also the only way freedom may overcome the bondage of world-time: by incorporating the latter as a transient stage of its own.

In the Introduction to Being and Nothingness, Sartre provides what he calls an “ontological proof” that purports to undermine Heidegger’s idealist view that the existence of objects is constitutively dependent on our characteristically human mode of existence. In this paper, I introduce an interpretation of Heidegger’s idealism, develop Sartre’s criticism of Heidegger, and explore a promising way Heidegger might respond. It will emerge that Heidegger’s idealism, if understood correctly as embracing a modal commitment central to Kantian idealism, survives Sartre’s ontological proof.