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ABSTRACT
In The Essence of Human Freedom, Heidegger suggests that Kant’s idea of pure will and Heidegger’s own idea of resoluteness are rooted in the same experience of demand from our own essence. This experience can unfold, I argue, through twofold self-understanding: first, the primordial self-understanding on the existentiell level that results in the indefiniteness of pure will (or resoluteness), as Heidegger’s phenomenological reading of Kant (or his own existential analysis) presents; and second, the practical self-understanding on the rational level that results in the principle of morality, as Kant’s Groundwork of the Metaphysics of Morals demonstrates. Based on this approach, if we accept Heidegger’s phenomenological interpretation of pure will but do not follow his rejection of the categorical imperative formulas, we can achieve a Heideggerian revision of Kant’s original justification of morality while avoiding Kant’s problematic assumption that the authentic self belongs to the intelligible realm.
KEYWORDS:
Notes
* The first draft of this paper was presented at the international conference “Phenomenology in Cross-cultural Perspective: From Affection to Ethics,” held at National Tsing Hua University in Hsinchu, Taiwan on June 22-23, 2018.
1 Kant’s writings are cited from Immanuel Kants gesammelten Schriften, Ausgabe der königlich preußischen Akademie der Wissenschaften. Roman numerals indicate the volume and Arabic numerals the page numbers in this edition. References to Kritik der reinen Vernunft are to the standard A and B pagination of the first and second editions.
2 This kind of freedom, which does not guarantee morality, has been considered in different ways. See Tugendhat, Vorlesungen über Ethik, 159–60; Williams, Ethics and the Limits of Philosophy, 63–4; Brandt, “Der Zirkel im dritten Anschnitt von Kants Grundlegung zur Metaphysik der Sitten”, 185.
3 See Section 3.
4 See Allison, Kant’s Groundwork, 335; Schönecker and Wood, Immanuel Kant’s Groundwork, 214; Guyer, “Problems with Freedom”, 178.
5 It comments on § 30 of KPM, “transcendental imagination and practical reason”.
6 Sherover, Heidegger, Kant and Time, 159, 170.
7 Sherover, Heidegger, Kant and Time, 166.
8 Sherover, “Founding an Existential Ethic”.
9 Schalow, “Toward a Concrete Ontology of Practical Reason”, 155.
10 Schalow, “Toward a Concrete Ontology of Practical Reason”, 159, author’s parenthesis.
11 Schalow, “Freedom, Finitude, and the Practical Self”, 35, author’s parenthesis.
12 Schalow, “Toward a Concrete Ontology of Practical Reason”, 162, author’s emphasis.
13 Heidegger, Being and Time, 332.
14 Dahlstrom, “Seinsvergessenheit oder moralphilosophische Naivität?”.
15 For the most acute critiques of Heidegger in this regard, see Tugendhat, Selbstbewusstsein und Selbstbestimmung, 225–44; Gethmann, “Heideggers Konzeption des Handelns”.
16 There are some other noteworthy studies based on EHF. See Esposito, “Kausalität als Freiheit” and Webb, “The Contingency of Freedom”. Esposito gives an extensive and exact commentary, but, focusing solely on Heidegger’s interest in the question of being, does not consider Kant’s ethical problematic. Webb’s interesting article address the question of contingency, but touches on ethical issues only marginally.
17 Heidegger, Vom Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit, 168.
18 Heidegger, Vom Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit, 292.
19 For a comprehensive study of Heidegger’s development of the problem of freedom, see Ruin, “The Destiny of Freedom”.
20 Heidegger, Vom Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit, 302.
21 There are already numerous studies on the topic of Heidegger and ethics; most seem to start from this broad sense of the ethical. Probably the most extensive bibliography is found in Aurenque, Ethosdenken, 13–4.
22 See Figal, Martin Heidegger, 77–271 and Guignon, “Heidegger’s Concept of Freedom, 1927–1930”, 79–91.
23 “The essence of Dasein lies in existence” Heidegger, Being and Time, 67.
24 For a detailed analysis of this path, see Esposito, “Kausalität als Freiheit”, 102–14.
25 Heidegger, EHF, 16. See originally A 533/B 561.
26 Heidegger, EHF, 16. See originally A 533/B 561.
27 See IV, 446f.
28 Heidegger, Vom Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit, 150, author’s emphasis.
29 Heidegger, Vom Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit, 243.
30 Heidegger, EHF, 171.
31 Heidegger, EHF, 173.
32 Heidegger, Vom Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit, 254.
33 Heidegger, Vom Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit, 254.
34 Heidegger, EHF, 187.
35 Heidegger, Vom Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit, 274–5; IV, 427.
36 Heidegger, EHF, 187.
37 Heidegger, EHF, 188.
38 See IV, 393–7.
39 Heidegger, Vom Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit, 280, author’s emphasis.
40 In his 1924 lecture course, Heidegger elucidates Aristotle’s concept of goodness [agathon] in this ontological way. Heidegger, Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophie, 65ff.
41 Heidegger, Being and Time, 334.
42 Heidegger, EHF, 200.
43 Heidegger, EHF, 197.
44 Heidegger, EHF, 197.
45 Heidegger, EHF, 199f.
46 Heidegger, EHF, 197.
47 Heidegger, Being and Time, 69.
48 A similar idea seems to be found in Webb’s comments on EHF. See Section 6 of his above-mentioned essay.
49 See IV, 457–8, 461. See also A 492/B 520. That Kant and Heidegger similarly conceive the authenticity and inauthenticity of human beings was previously demonstrated by Arifuku, “Heidegger und Kant”, without reference to EHF.
50 Heidegger, Die Grundprobleme der Phänomenologie, 194.
51 Heidegger, KPM, 165.
52 “In understanding the call, Dasein lets its ownmost Self take action in itself [in sich handeln] in terms of that potentiality-for-Being which it has chosen. Only so can it be answerable [verantwortlich]”. Heidegger, Being and Time, 334.
53 Heidegger, Vom Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit, 293, author’s emphasis.
54 Heidegger, Vom Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit, 196. Emphasis in original.
55 Heidegger, Being and Time, 345.
56 In this paragraph, I loosely rely on the following commentaries: Allison, Kant’s Groundwork, 335; Schönecker and Wood, Immanuel Kant’s Groundwork, 214; Guyer, “Problems with Freedom”, 178.
57 Heidegger, Being and Time, 51.
58 Heidegger, EHF, 185.
59 Heidegger, EHF, 197, author’s emphasis.
60 Heidegger, EHF, 199, author’s emphasis.
61 One could say that providing the “formally indicative” concepts to the public, as Heidegger did, is a philosophical type of authentic being-with-others, in which one (philosopher) lets the others (readers) be authentic. For authentic being-with-others see Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 395.
62 Heidegger, Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik, 429.
63 Heidegger, Die Grundbegriffe der Metaphysik, 429–30.
64 Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 294.
65 Heidegger, Vom Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit, 293.
66 See Heidegger, Sein und Zeit, 506. For commentary on Heidegger’s historical approach to determining the action, see Guignon, “Existential Ethics”, 84–6.
67 For the problems with the Heideggerian historical approach, see Vogel, The Fragile “We”, 59–68.
68 See IV, 402, 433.
69 See Heidegger, Vom Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit, 291. “[T]he formula is only one among many possible philosophical interpretations; in fact we find a number of different interpretations in Kant himself. But irrespectively of the possible diversity of formulas and directions of interpretation, they all refer to one essential and decisive thing about the facticity of the fact of man in the authenticity of his essence. It is this alone that concerns us here.” Heidegger, EHF, 198.
70 “What is crucial for understanding moral law, therefore, is not that we come to know any formula, or that some value is held up before us. It is not matter of a table of values hovering over us, as if individual human beings were only realizers of the law in the same way that individual tables realize the essence of the tablehood. It is not a formula and rule that we come to understand, but the character of the specific actuality of action, i.e. what is and becomes actual in and as action.” Heidegger, EHF, 199.