Heidegger in Translation

Book Reviews

The Essence of Human Freedom and The Essence of Truth

Martin Heidegger

translated by Ted Sadler

London: Athlone Press, 2002

Several times during his career Heidegger said that he had originally

planned to add a section on the history of metaphysics to his

magnum opus Being and Time

Although he never did this, these two volumes

give us an idea of what such a section would have looked like,

which is why they are such a welcome addition to the Heidegger texts

that we have in English. These lectures were delivered at a pivotal time

in Heidegger’s career; he had published

Being and Time a few years earlier

and was about to begin both his ill-fated attempt at political engagement

and a change in his thinking that transformed him from a

philosopher of Being into a philosopher of poetic thinking. These two

volumes are translated from a series of lectures that Heidegger delivered

at the University of Freiburg between 1930 and 1932 and they deal

with many of the thinkers who were most important to the development

of Western metaphysics. Heidegger’s style in these lectures is more

like the standard philosophical inquiry that he did in

Being and Time

and

The Essence of Reasons than the more poetic work that he did in later

texts like

Poetry, Language and Thought. The first volume, The Essence

Freedom

, which was originally published in German as Volume 31 of his

Gesamtausgabe

, focuses on the meaning of Being in Aristotle’s Metaphysics

and on the development of the concept of freedom in the work of

Kant with special emphasis on his

Critique of Pure Reason and Critique of

Practical Reason

. The second volume, The Essence of Truth, which was

originally published in German as Volume 34 of Heidegger’s

Gesamtausgabe

focuses on two truly foundational works of Western metaphysics,

the Cave Allegory from Plato’s

Republic and Plato’s Theaetetus.

The translator is Ted Sadler who is the author of

Heidegger and Aristotle:

The Question of Being

and Nietzsche: Truth and Redemption. The translation

as a whole is excellent, especially since these are essentially lecture

notes and Heidegger’s prose is normally dense and full of wordplay. My

only criticism is that Sadler rarely includes the original German vocabulary

of important Heideggerrean terms such as

Wesen for essence or

Entborgenheit

for reconciling. He does, however, include an excellent

glossary of both Greek and German terms.

Heidegger begins the

Essence of Human Freedom by introducing

the contradictory nature of human freedom: it is at once a “freedom

from” (p.4) and a “freedom for” (p. 16). Rather than trying to resolve

this contradiction immediately, Heidegger is content to let it play itself

out through his discussion of Kant and Aristotle’s work because it leads

him to the root of the question of freedom, which is ultimately the

question of being itself, since freedom is a “way of being” (p.28).

Heidegger spends much of the second chapter in a lengthy discussion

of the concept of being [

ousia] in Aristotle’s Metaphysics. At first this

looks like a lengthy digression, but it allows Heidegger to lay the groundwork

for a discussion of freedom and causality in Kant’s work. For the

Greeks, being was understood as constant presence (p.78), so any discussion

of freedom (or being-free) must also include a discussion of

freedom as a process that unfolds through time.

Heidegger takes up this definition of freedom in the second part of

the book, which is a lengthy discussion of causality and freedom in

Kant’s work. The importance of causality to Kant’s discussion of freedom

reveals the temporal natural of freedom as a constantly unfolding

process (a being-free) which really must be discussed in terms of being

and time. But, as Heidegger points out, Kant’s idea of causation is

problematic because he had not properly surveyed the ground of freedom,

which is being itself (p.140). This makes it difficult for Kant to

unify his two ways of freedom (the possibility and the actuality of freedom),

since his discussion of causality is never able to get beyond causality

itself. Therefore Kant is unable to focus on the “first cause” which,

as Heidegger pointed out in

The Essence of Reasons, is being. As

Heidegger frames the problem of freedom in Chapter 3, freedom is not

a thing or a property of man, but man is the possibility of freedom

(p.93). Kant’s overemphasis on causality leads him to see freedom as a

thing that is separate from man and is produced through external causes,

so it is not the ground or essence of humanity.

In

The Essence of Truth Heidegger deals with the problem of freedom

on a much more fundamental level through his discussion of

Theaetetus

and The Allegory of the Cave in Plato’s The Republic. This

is one of Heidegger’s most clearly written and accessible works and I am

surprised that it has not been fully translated until now, particularly

since it anticipates so much of Heidegger’s later work. The book opens

with a short discussion of truth as correspondence, which, Heidegger

argues, is a notion that is so self-evident that it actually stands in the

way of our getting to the truth of truth (p.5). Instead, Heidegger argues

we need to go back to the more originary idea of truth as

aletheia or

truth as “unhiddenness.” which we find in the Greeks. After a short

discussion of

aletheia in the Pre-Socratics, Heidegger begins a detailed

reading of this concept as it is developed through the Allegory of the

Cave in Book VII of Plato’s

The Republic. In this discussion Heidegger

points out the essential similarity of the revelation of truth through

poetry and Plato’s presentation of truth as “unconcealing” which became

extremely important for Heidegger’s later work. He also finishes

the inquiry into the essence of freedom that he began in his discussion

of Kant.

Aletheia is both a “freedom from” delusion and a “freedom

for” the truth. (p.43). However, Heidegger finds Plato’s discussion of

“hiddeness” insufficient, so in the second part of the book he turns to

the discussion of knowledge [

episteme] in Plato’s Theaetetus.

Knowledge, like freedom, is not a thing but a comportment or way

of doing things. Thus knowledge is vital to human

Dasein (p114).

Heidegger refines this notion of

Dasein in an uncharacteristic move by

showing the relationship between knowledge as perception and the body.

We perceive things through our sense organs as sensual impressions that

are dispersed throughout the body, but it is the soul which brings these

individual sense perceptions together. Thus, knowledge and human

Dasein are dependent upon a working together of body and soul. Ted

Sadler has done English-speaking Heidegger scholars a great favor by

translating these two volumes. They present Heidegger at a pivotal

point in his career when he was refining many of his ideas about being

and time and developing new ideas which would lead to his turn to

poetic thinking a few years later.

Reviewed by Jonathan Derr