One day my name will be tied to the memory of something tremendous and monstrous---a crisis without equal on earth, the most profound collision of conscience, a decision that was conjured up against all that had hitherto been believed, mandated, hallowed. I am no man, I am dynamite.--- … ---the truth speaks out of me.---But my truth is terrible; for up to now one has only called lies truth.---Transvaluation of all values: that is my formula for an act of supreme self-examination [Selbstbesinnung] on the part of humanity, become flesh and genius in me. It is my fate to have to be the first honest human being, to place myself in opposition to the mendaciousness of millennia … When truth enters into a fight with the lies of millennia, we shall have upheavals, a convulsion of earthquakes, a moving of mountains and valleys the likes of which have never been dreamt of. The concept of politics then merges completely with a war of spirits [Geisterkrieg], all the power structures of the old society having been exploded, since they are all based on lies: there will be wars as there never yet have been on earth. It is first with me that there is grand politics on the earth.

Heidegger’s reading of the essence of Technik is beset with a fatal ambiguity between technology and technique which can be traced back further to an ambiguity lodged in the heart of Aristotle’s metaphysical concept of power. This unresolved ambiguity, in turn, is intimately related to the historical cover-up of the twofold in the manifold of being between whatness (quiddity) and whoness (quissity). This cover-up is exposed using the example of the art of rhetoric. Ultimately the fog has to lift from the clearing to see, through adequate ontological concepts, that and how all beings are in estimating interplay with one another (the much neglected phenomenon of value) and above all, that human beings strive to be somewho in a free power play with each other.

The present paper remains modest in its scope: It seeks only to undertake some exploratory and preparatory investigations with a view to addressing a more difficult and far-reaching question. The issue, in brief, is the following: In the 1920s, Heidegger engages in an incisive and comprehensive critique of techn!, which I shall render here as “production” or “productive comportment,” arguing that it furnishes the foundation and horizon for Greek ontology, and by extension for the entire Western philosophical tradition, a horizon that is problematically reductive because the ontology it gives rise to understands the Being of beings in general in terms of independent presence-at-hand, the appropriate mode of access to which is theoretical apprehension. Not only philosophy and ontology, but science and its outgrowth, modern technicity—itself a monstrous transformation of techn!—would be an almost inexorable consequence of this fateful Greek beginning. The project of a “destructuring of the history of ontology” announced in Being and Time would seek to retrieve and to open up an entirely other dimension of Being, a dimension foreclosed by the Greek beginning and yet awaiting us precisely as the unthought of that beginning and the tradition to which it gave rise. The destructuring would take as its guiding thread an understanding of the Being of Dasein—designating the being that we ourselves in each case are—as radically temporal, never simply present-at-hand, and essentially inaccessible to theoretical apprehension. Yet the critical resource for this analytic of the Being of Dasein was, for the early Heidegger, itself provided by Greek philosophy: It was Aristotle’s insight into the Being of the human being as praxis, and its authentic mode of self-disclosure, phron!sis, that led Heidegger to see the radically different kind of temporality pertaining to human existence, by contrast with the theoretically ascertained time of nature as something present-at-hand, and provided a key insight into the essence of “truth” (aletheia) as unconcealment. Aristotle’s insight into this more primordial sense of aletheia or “truth” as the knowing self-disclosure of our radically temporal Being-in-the-world as praxis, as opposed to truth conceived as a property of logos, judgment, or theoretical knowledge, was a forgotten thread of Greek philosophy that could shed light upon the limits and foundations of the theoretical tradition that dominates the subsequent history of ontology.

I provide a close analysis of truth and freedom in Heidegger’s work of the Contributions to Philosophy (Beiträge zur Philosophie). The work of Friedrich Wilhelm Joseph von Schelling is shown to play a decisive role in this key text of Heidegger’s, leading him to an understanding of the self in terms of freedom, community, culture, and history that carries important implications for political philosophy In attempting to uncover a thoughtful and elucidating interpretation of the Beiträge zur Philosophie, one of the most promising portions of Heidegger’s canon to which one can turn for assistance in developing a reading is to the lecture courses of the surrounding period as they provide strong indications of Heidegger’s textual sources of the time, and one of the most often overlooked sources for studying the Beiträge is Heidegger’s 1936 lecture, Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom..2 William J. Richardson’s work has familiarly encouraged us to think of Heidegger’s thought in two markedly differing periods separated by a turn, a helpful and insightful approach to which Heidegger studies remains indebted, though this story will not entirely be my own preferred take on Heidegger’s work in the present project. These investigations are nonetheless indebted to Richardson in arguing that one can arrive at a better understanding of the relationship between the early and the late material such as to elucidate the Beiträge by drawing on his finding of a Kantian thematic in the early work, an interpretive move which is also well backed by Reiner Schürmann’s work.3 My proposal in this project is that bearing this in mind, the late Heideggerian corpus, particularly the Beiträge, can be understood through the lens of German Idealism and its relationship to a criticism of Kantian thought. By problematizing certain key elements of Heidegger’s late thought that are drawn from F. W. J. Schelling and establishing a hermeneutic between these concepts and Schelling’s writings, I will use a reading of Schelling to help us begin to understand the Beiträge as a somewhat fractured continuation and completion of the study of being that was earlier carried out primarily through an analytic of Dasein. Heidegger imports crucial concepts from Idealism and applies his method of destructive philosophical appropriation to develop his own notions of the history of being, the event of appropriation, and community, revolving around what I argue is a very original appropriation of Schellingian concepts of freedom, ground, and jointure in the Beiträge.