Caring for the World

Abstract

In the twentieth century, the concept of the will appears in bad daylight. Martin Heideg-ger for instance criticizes the will as a movement of reducing otherness to sameness, dif-ference to identity. Since his diagnosis of the will, the releasement from a wilful manner of thinking and the exploration of the possibility of non-willing has become a prevalent issue in contemporary philosophy. This article questions whether this quietism is still possible in our times, were we are confronted with climate change and the future of mankind is fundamentally threatened. On the one hand, the human will to 'master‘ and 'exploit‘ the natural world can be seen as the root of the ecological crisis, as Heidegger observed. On the other hand, its current urgency forces us to evaluate the releasement of the will in contemporary philosophy. Because also Heidegger himself attempted to develop a proper concept of the will in the onset of the thirties, we start our inquiry with Heidegger‘s phenomenology of the will in the thirties. Although Heidegger was very critical about the concept of the will later on, we are not inclined to reject the concept of the will as he did eventually. In this article we show that Heidegger's criticism of the will is not phenomenologically motivated, and we will develop a proper post-Heideggerian concept of willing. Finally the question will be answerd whether this proper concept of willing can help us to find a solution for the ecological crisis.