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276 10 The Persistence of Ur-Willing, the Dissonant Excess of Evil, and the Enigma of Human Freedom Philosophy is always completed when its end becomes and remains what its beginning is, the question. (SA 118/98) If you want to honor a philosopher, you must catch him where he has not yet gone forth to the consequences, in his fundamental thought; (in the thought) from out of which he proceeds. —F. W. J. Schelling1 For every great thinker always thinks one leap more originally than he directly speaks. Our interpretation must therefore try to say what is unsaid by him. (N1 158/134) Heidegger’s Denkweg, which began by stepping back to the most fundamental questions of philosophy, moves forward as a thinking that keeps itself open to question(ing). As readers of Heidegger, we too are called into question(ing). His being-historical thinking demonstrates that a step back through the history of philosophy is a prerequisite for venturing a genuine step forward in thought; and correlatively, an attentive reading of a past thinker always already entails transgressing his text toward a present and future possibility for thinking. My own “faithful transgressions” of Heidegger’s text began with the interpretive decision (a decision made in the chiasmic exchange between reading and writing) to thematically focus on the problem of the will and the possibility of non-willing. After having followed this problematic through the course of Heidegger’s Denkweg, and after having critically examined —largely by way of “immanent critique”—the residues of will that remain still in its later phases, we have been brought to the question of how to understand the “other beginning” with regard to the problem of the will. In this departing chapter, I shall attempt to interpretively elucidate some of the more radical implications of Heidegger’s thought with respect to this question, a question that in fact necessitates readdressing two of the most difficult issues for philosophical thinking: the problem of evil and the enigma of human freedom. It will be necessary to situate my interpretations now more than ever at the ambiguous limits of reading Heidegger after Heidegger. While here too I shall attempt to keep any interpretive transgressions of the letter of Heidegger’s text more or less faithful to the direction of its most radical indications, I shall leave the question open as to whether and to what extent I have in places managed to give Heidegger cause to “bow to the necessity of later being understood differently than he thought he understood himself” (GA 9:ix/xiii). The Problem of the Possibility of Non-Willing Yanyang asked Zhaozhou: How about when one arrives carrying not a single thing [i.e., having let go of all attachments]? Zhaozhou responded: Cast that down [i.e., let go of your attachment to the idea of having let go of all attachments]! —Congronglu (Shōyōroku)2 In the very will to protect oneself against “x” one is more exposed to the danger of reproducing “x” than when one tries to think contamination. —Jacques Derrida3 In the beginning of this study I noted that the reach of “the problem” in the phrase, “the problem of the will and the possibility of non-willing,” should be understood to extend not only to “the will” but also to “the possibility of non-willing.” Hence, during the course of this inquiry we have been concerned not only with “the problem of the will” but also with “the problem of the possibility of non-willing.” The problem of the possibility of non-willing is not only the dilemma of how to make the transition to non-willing, but also the question of whether there could ever be nonwilling , whether this possibility could ever be actualized, or in what sense non-willing is even a “possibility.” We need to keep a certain Nietzschean doubt in mind, namely, his suspicion that any attempt to wholly negate the will or to posit an other 277 T H E P E R S I S T E N C E O F U R - W I L L I N G , T H E D I S S O N A N T E X C E S S O F E V I L , A N D T H E E N I G M A O F H U M A N F R E E D O M [13.58.112.1] Project MUSE (2024-04-26...

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