The Fateful Releasement into World-Time: On the Temporality of Freedom in Heidegger, 1927-1937

Abstract

Heidegger’s notion of freedom depends on an original temporality more fundamental than world-time (the time of determinism). This paper asks whether freedom means a withdrawal from world-time or a releasement into it. Being and Time discloses Dasein’s drifting-along in world-time as inauthentic. In this way, it secures freedom from determinism, but also gives the impression that authenticity, as a resoluteness, entails a withdrawal from world-time. The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics shows that Heidegger is well aware of the problem of withdrawal. He focuses on the attunement of boredom, which delivers Dasein back into world-time. The tension of the authentic moment of vision is too intense to endure, therefore Dasein has to remove this tension and thus to release itself into world-time. “The Origin of the Work of Art” extends the boredom of Dasein to a metaphysical boredom of Being in general. The earth, the undifferentiated ground of Being, cannot be given at once in totality. Instead, it bears an impulse toward the work, in which Being is individuated in world-time. “The Eternal Recurrence of the Same” refigures this tension in Nietzsche’s metaphysics between creative Becoming and fixated Being and concludes that Becoming, in order to create or subsist at all, has to be “infected” by Being, thus entering world-time. Freedom is better understood as a releasement into world-time. This is a tragic event, but it is also the only way freedom may overcome the bondage of world-time: by incorporating the latter as a transient stage of its own.