The Essence of Human Freedom: An Introduction to Philosophy (review)

Of the recently translated volumes comprising Heidegger's Gesamtausgabe, perhaps the volume whose importance is most underestimated contains his lectures from the summer semester of 1930 (Vom Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit), which now appears in English under the title On the Essence of Human Freedom. In this work, Heidegger complements his other attempts to retrieve Kant's transcendental philosophy—which primarily focused on reinterpreting the Critique of Pure Reason—by offering the fullest treatment of practical reason to be found in the Gesamtausgabe. As such, this translation of Band 31 of the Gesamtausgabe proves invaluable because it (1) provides another side to Heidegger's critical exchange (Auseinandersetzung) with Kant (198) and (2) yields some tantalizing clues as to a vestige of a Heideggerian ethic which can be developed by examining human freedom.

In a lecture course from the winter semester of 1925-26 (Logik: Die Frage nach der Wahrheit), Heidegger turned to Kant's doctrine of schematism in order to distinguish finitude as the key dimension of temporality. From that point until the publication of "Kants These über das Sein" (1961), the importance of retrieving transcendental philosophy surfaces at strategic places in Heidegger's thought, although he devotes most of his attention to unraveling the issue of temporality couched in the Transcendental Analytic of the first Critique. What sets The Essence of Human Freedom apart, however, is that it identifies freedom as a new locus from which to address the possibility of being's disclosure through time, which remains unthought in the Greek concept of ousia as "permanent presence": "The question of human freedom is the fundamental question of philosophy, in which is rooted even the question of being" (203). Human freedom, and the questioning of its finite origin in human existence (Dasein), thereby yields a wider topography within which to re-ask the question of being in light of its connection to time. The topography takes this form: the traditional, or "leading question of philosophy" (what are beings as such?), gives way to the "fundamental question of philosophy" (why is being disclosed through time?), which can be developed only by addressing freedom as the ground of human existence (23).

In Part I of The Essence of Human Freedom, Heidegger shows how Kant's modern effort to define freedom epistemically as a form of causation must be recast in light of the ontological concern of the ancients to define movement as a determination of the dynamism of being. In Part II, Heidegger outlines Kant's attempt to establish the possibility of freedom in the Transcendental Dialectic, the enigma of how two apparently incompatible forms of causation—the determinism of nature and the spontaneity of will—can stand in a "double relation to the same effect" (172). Heidegger offers his own resolution of the third antinomy. He argues that the apparent incompatibility of the preceding causalities can be resolved when reason reconciles itself with its own finitude: leaving open its possibility of serving as a spontaneous cause in the intelligible realm of morality, while restricting the scope of natural causality to the sensible realm of appearances. The need to establish the possibility of freedom must then give way to establishing its actuality as the self-legislative power of the will in the practical domain. "Pure willing is the willing of one's own essence as will. . . . Thus the fundamental law of a finite pure willing, i.e., of a pure practical reason, is a categorical imperative (190-1). Having then distinguished the occurrence of freedom in its practical domain, Heidegger identifies ethical praxis as the source of actuality for the spontaneous causality of a will, the self-legislation of the categorical imperative. "The factuality corresponding to the idea of freedom is that of praxis" (185). In one of the strongest statements to be found anywhere in his writings in...