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2 The Ambiguous Role of the Will in Being and Time
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24 2 Being and Time is a way and not a lodging. Whoever cannot walk should not set himself down to rest in it. (SA 78/64)1 The “Unsaid” Problem of the Will For all genuine thoughts belonging to an essential thinking remain—and indeed for essential reasons—ambiguous [mehrdeutig ]. . . . Therefore we must seek out thinking and its thoughts always in the element of its ambiguity [Mehrdeutigkeit], or else everything will remain closed to us. (WhD 68/71) In this chapter I shall demonstrate that this claim of the later Heidegger is particularly true of that central concept—Entschlossenheit (resoluteness or resolute openness)—of his own first major publication. My thesis in this chapter is that there is a fundamental ambiguity to the role of the will in Being and Time, and that in this ambiguity are foreshadowed both Heidegger ’s embrace of the will in the first half of the 1930s and his later critique of the will beginning in the later part of that decade. Being and Time oscillates between embracing a resolute willing as the existentially decisive moment, and proposing that a shattering of the will is what is most proper to Dasein. The claim that there is an essential ambiguity at the heart of this text may not surprise readers who are accustomed to the ambivalences explicitly cultivated by Heidegger’s Dasein analysis: Dasein is both thrown into and projects its world. It discloses its past from out of its future. Its concrete possibilities for authentic living are appropriated by running forward in anticipation of its own death, as its ownmost possibility of no possibility at all. Intricately weaving such tensions together is undoubtedly a significant aspect of the book’s rigor and its genius. However, I shall argue The Ambiguous Role of the Will in Being and Time that a certain crucial and largely implicit ambiguity with regard to the will marks an unintended inconsistency of Being and Time, and ultimately a failure to disclose the problem of the will. It is this implicit ambiguity that left open both the door to an explicit embrace of the will—an embrace that led seven years later to Heidegger’s political speeches on behalf of Hitler’s “one great will of the state”—as well as the door to his radical critique of the will developed after the misadventure of his political involvement . In the reading given here, the possibility of both interpretative directions is traced back to a fundamental ambiguity in the text itself. As a negative symptom of this ambiguity, one can note that the text itself is silent to the point of avoidance on the question of the role of “the will.” When it does briefly consider “willing,” it is only to assure us that it is not a phenomenon of ontological significance. I shall argue that willing cannot be confined to the unessential ontical role it is given in the text, and that in fact it turns out to be a problem of critical ontological consequence . In his interpretations of previous philosophers, Heidegger often suggests that it is the “unsaid” (das Ungesagte)—i.e., the implicit problematic which determines a text without being explicitly articulated—that is most decisive.2 In a certain sense I shall read the problematic of the will as the “unsaid” in Being and Time. In order to bring this unsaid to the surface, I shall point out the inadequacy of restricting willing to the limited role it officially plays in the analytic of Dasein, and then demonstrate how a discourse on the will (re)appears in more or less implicit forms in decisive moments of the text. Having uncovered this unsaid problematic of the will, we shall discover both elements of a voluntarism and elements of a radical critique of the will. The direction Heidegger’s thought, and his politics, did in fact take in the years following the publication of Being and Time might encourage one to stress the voluntaristic aspects of the text. Or one might attempt to show that the flip-flopping between voluntarism (willing) and fatalism (not-willing), or deference to a higher sort of communal will (an active deference to the higher will of the spiritual Volk as opposed to a passive deference to the fallen das Man), had already begun in the later sections of the book. This is indeed a possible—and critically significant—interpretation (one to which I shall return in the following chapter); and yet it reveals only...