Heidegger and the Will: On the Way to Gelassenheit

Introduction: On Gelassenheit and Heidegger’s Path of Thought

Sich auf den Sinn einlassen, ist das Wesen der Besinnung. . . . Sie ist die Gelassenheit zum Fragwürdigen. (VA 64)1 Der Übergang aus dem Wollen in die Gelassenheit scheint mir das Schwierige zu sein. . . . Vollends dann, wenn uns das Wesen der Gelassenheit noch verborgen ist. (G 33) The topic of this study is the problem of the will and the possibility of nonwilling in the thought of Martin Heidegger. I attempt to show that this problematic lies at the very heart of his path of thought, and that following its development through a close examination of his texts involves nothing less than explicating the very movement (Bewegung) of his Denkweg . The topic is not just limited, then, to the later Heidegger’s explicit critique of the culmination of the history of metaphysics in the technological “will to will” (der Wille zum Willen), or to his explicit anticipations of a “releasement” from the will to a radically other way of being. Over the course of this study I shall show how the question of the will—at first remaining problematically unthematized (“unthought”), then explicitly thematized yet fatefully unproblematized, before finally becoming radically criticized—is crucially at issue in the various twists and turns of Heidegger ’s path of thought from beginning to end. The problem of the will is thus a problem “in Heidegger’s thought” in the dual sense of, on the one hand, a problem which his thought explicitly and painstakingly takes up as a theme for thoughtful questioning, and, on the other hand, a problem to which his thinking itself at times succumbs. The task of this study is to learn from both of these aspects, by explicating and interpreting the former, while critically exposing the latter . Only by way of a careful and critical reading of both aspects of the Introduction: On Gelassenheit and Heidegger’s Path of Thought xxiii problem of the will in his thought can we work towards disclosing a way of thinking the possibility of non-willing in and after Heidegger. I attempt in this study to think “after Heidegger” (nach Heidegger), to be sure in the sense of following in the wake of and carrying forward the way of his thought; but also in the sense of reflecting back from a certain critical distance—a distance that is itself gained largely, if not exclusively , by way of following the sense and direction (Sinn) of a path opened up in the movement of his thinking. This approach in no way then precludes a critical reading; it does, however, involve first and foremost a patient attempt to understand the movement and tensions at play in the texts themselves. A careful reading shall thus allow for an “immanent critique” of the problem of the will in Heidegger’s thought, above all a critique of the “embrace of the will” in his political misadventure during the early years of the Nazi regime. We shall find, however, that neither the problem nor the problematization of the will in Heidegger’s thought either began in 1933 or ended in 1934. His philosophical embrace of the will began a few years prior and lingered on for several years after his political voluntarism. Moreover, if anticipations of his later thought of Gelassenheit can already be found in his earliest phenomenological writings , and if a radical interruption of willing is one thread in the ambiguous text of Being and Time, it is also the case that certain residues of the will remain in his thought to the end. Nevertheless, at the midpoint of his career , around 1940, we do find a decisive “turn” in Heidegger’s thought toward an explicit and relentless problematization of the will in its various guises and disguises. Following the path of Heidegger’s thought, then, reveals both moments of a profound failure with regard to, and a profound search for a way of recovery from, the problem of the will. According to the later Heidegger ’s thought of “the history of being,” however, the search for a path of recovery is not simply Heidegger’s personal endeavor; it involves nothing less than the historical destiny of the West and indeed of the entire Westernizing world. Heidegger reads the history of metaphysics as a series of epochs linked together by a narrative of the rise of willful subjectivity, a story that culminates in the technological “will to will.” It is thought to be this will to will that drives today’s globalizing “world civilization,” displacing the various...