The early Heidegger's concept of freedom

Feas Perez, Xoana (2023) The early Heidegger's concept of freedom. Masters thesis, Memorial University of Newfoundland.

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Abstract

In this dissertation, I read Being and Time (1927) together with some course lectures that Heidegger taught between 1928 and 1930 in order to clarify Heidegger’s early account of freedom. Although the conception of freedom of Being and Time is different from his later account, I argue that they must be understood in terms of one another. In particular, the idea of “transcendental freedom” that Heidegger developed for the first time in 1928, can provide a richer interpretation of his earlier work. In the first two chapters, I explore this account of transcendental freedom. This is, I claim, an ontological account, for it goes beyond the anthropological analysis of Dasein and concerns the ontological question of the meaning of being. In this sense, I argue in the first chapter that freedom, understood as the “freeing” or “opening” of the groundless possibility in terms of which Dasein understands both its own self and the world, is the transcendental condition of our understanding of being and, consequently, the condition of our own self-understanding. In the second chapter, I explore another character of transcendental freedom, namely the withdrawal from alternative possibilities that in each case occurs in freeing one possibility. I claim that for Heidegger it is only by virtue of this withdrawal that Dasein can exist as a particular and constant being. In the final chapter, I explore the idea of freedom presented in Being and Time in the light of the account of transcendental freedom. I argue that, in becoming authentic, Dasein “appropriates” the groundless, null project of transcendental freedom, and it is in this appropriation of the possibilities that it has not chosen that Dasein can “become free.”

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