“Thatness,” Freedom, and Possibility in Being and Time and “The Origin of the Work of Art”

Abstract

This essay focuses on Heidegger’s formula “that it is” (daß es ist) Being and Time and “The Origin of the Work of Art.” In spite of the substantial shift in philosophical vocabulary and subject matter (associated with the so-called “turn” in Heidegger’s philosophy) between the two works, the daß-formula is to be found (at important junctures) in both. In this essay I will show that the expression reveals not only a hitherto unthematized continuity between the two works but also Heidegger’s abiding philosophical concern that remain unaffected by the “turn”: to rethink possibility (potentiality) as no longer subordinate to actuality, to rethink possibility as freedom, whether in the human Dasein or in a work of art. For Heidegger it is only when we can say no more of Dasein (or the artwork) than that it is that freedom and possibility can be thought.