Heidegger and the Will: On the Way to Gelassenheit

3 The Turn Through an Embrace of the Will

60 3 [A] genuine and substantively necessary overturning is always a sign of inner continuity and thus can be grasped only from the whole problematic. (GA 31:267) In the woods are paths that mostly wind along until they end quite suddenly in an impassable thicket. . . . Each goes its peculiar way, but in the same forest. Often it seems as though one were identical to another. It only seems so. (GA 5:iv) In this chapter I consider the twistings and turnings of Heidegger’s thought-path during the transitional decade of the 1930s. In this decade Heidegger’s thought undergoes its much-remarked yet controversial “turn,” and our first task shall be to understand this turn in relation to the problem of the will. We shall find that it is necessary to speak of at least two interconnected yet distinguishable turns (or stages of the turn) in Heidegger’s thought, the second involving an explicit and radical critique of the will. Heidegger’s turn to non-willing, or more precisely stated, his turn to the task of thinking the problem of the will and the possibility of nonwilling , takes place only after wandering down the dead-end path of a disastrous embrace of the will. Yet this wandering cannot be simply written off as a disconnected aberration of Heidegger’s Denkweg; for, as we have seen, an ambivalence with regard to the will lay at the heart of his pre-turn thought. It is only by way of carefully working through the inflections of the will embedded in Heidegger’s thought at the time that we can understand both the continuity and the discontinuity—the immanent overturning and radical twisting free—at work in Heidegger’s turn through and from the will. The Turn Through an Embrace of the Will After an explication of the “turn(s)” in Heidegger’s thought in the first section of this chapter, in the second section I examine Heidegger’s voluntaristic interpretive appropriation of Kant’s practical philosophy, and then his infamous political “blunder” as a certain ground zero of the problem of the will in Heidegger’s thought-path. In the Rectoral Address and in political speeches during this brief but spirited involvement with the Nazi politics of assertion and sacrifice of will, the Heidegger of 1933–34 himself provides us with a foil for his later critique of the domain of the will. In the third section I consider Heidegger’s attempts to think a “proper will” in his works in the middle and latter years of this decade, in particular Introduction to Metaphysics and Contributions to Philosophy (From Enowning). In these works we see Heidegger’s first attempts to come to grips with his blunder of 1933–34, to resituate or rethink the philosophy of “will” he committed himself to embracing. Increasingly, however, particularly in the solitary meditations of Contributions, this “proper will” comes to signify a radical critique of the subjective will of self-assertion, a critique which eventually leads to his break with the language and thought of “will” altogether. With this break is inaugurated the “later Heidegger ” as concerns this study, the Heidegger after his turn to a radical critique of the will, the Heidegger on the way of twisting free towards an other-than-willing. The Problem of the Will in Heidegger’s Turn(s) The content and dating of Heidegger’s “turn” continues to be the subject of much debate. I shall argue that it is necessary to distinguish several distinct , though complexly interrelated, senses of the turn.1 Heidegger himself at times prefers to speak of the Kehre as belonging to the matter (Sachverhalt ) itself, in distinction from what he called “a change or turn in my thinking” (eine Wendung in meinem Denken) which would reflect his attempt to correspond to the turning of beyng or Ereignis.2 In his first published mention of the Kehre in the “Letter on Humanism,” Heidegger tells us that the third section of Being and Time, “Time and Being,” where “everything would be turned around [Hier kehrt sich das Ganze um],” was held back because “thinking failed in the adequate saying of this Kehre” (GA 9:328/ 250). Unable to free itself from “the language of metaphysics,” Being and Time ultimately failed in the “adequate understanding and cooperative carrying out [Nach- und Mit-vollzug] of this other thinking that abandons 61 T H E T U R N T H R O U G H A N E...