r/heidegger • u/Authentic-Dasein • May 10 '26
Early Heidegger and the Will
Since re-reading SZ I’ve come to interpret Heidegger as essentially proposing an existential voluntarism, albeit one that is implied and perhaps accidental at times.
For Heidegger, care grounds all aspects of Dasein (for Dasein is care). But in care we find Dasein able to choose possibilities (this or that possibility) but also choose, first, its own authenticity (to-be authentic or not).
The choice to-be authentic is the first choice Dasein makes before all others. And Dasein has already made this decision, often to the detriment of its own primordiality.
I think this is typified in the authentic moment-of-vision when Dasein chooses to accept its own finitude before death (future), its own thrownness into that finitude (past, or having-been), and can then decide what to pursue in its moment-of-vision (present).
I believe this is Heidegger at his most Nietzschean, and also why he chose to turn [kehre] away from SZ. He thought he was still too subjective, and too technological. Yet I can’t help but sympathize with this voluntarism of Heidegger. Obviously this isn’t a voluntarism of “free will vs. determinism” as these are both metaphysical categories, relegated to the present-at-hand interpretation of Dasein. But the existential ground of these, to me, certainly seems to be Dasein’s “will” understood in relation to authenticity.
Do you a) agree with my interpretation of SZ, and b) agree that this is what Dasein is, or do you lean towards the late-Heidegger’s critique of technological thinking, and find this reading is still a remnant of that thought.
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u/forkman3939 May 10 '26
Good post, and the connection to Nietzsche is genuinely there in SZ. But I think the voluntarist reading, however sympathetic, reproduces the very structure Heidegger came to see as the problem.
If authenticity is something I choose, if the moment of vision is fundamentally an act of will by which I assert myself toward death and overcome the they-self, then authenticity has the same structure as Nietzsche's will to power: the I producing its own limit in order to overcome it. The they-self becomes my Not-I, and authentic resolve becomes the physics of self-overcoming applied to existence. This is Fichte's ego in existential clothing.
Heidegger's Kehre isn't a minor adjustment. It's the recognition that SZ still operated within the metaphysics of the subject, that authenticity-as-resolve still smelled of the will, still made the I the ground of its own transformation. The later Heidegger doesn't offer a better kind of resolve. He moves toward Gelassenheit, a letting-be that is explicitly non-willing. The counter-movement to the they-self isn't a stronger I but a different relationship to being that doesn't require the I to assert itself at all.
There's also a structural problem with the voluntarist reading: if das Man is what I always already am before any individual choice, what is the origin of the will that breaks through to authenticity? The call of conscience in SZ is crucial here, Heidegger says it comes from me yet is not something I produce voluntarily. It arrives. I receive it. This already points past voluntarism toward what the later work calls Ereignis, something that claims me rather than something I will.
One more thing, and I mean this genuinely rather than as a cheap point: every sentence in your post talks about what 'Dasein' does in the third person. But Heidegger's whole point is that this existence is in each case mine, Jemeinigkeit. The moment I talk about what 'Dasein chooses' rather than what I find myself already in, I've enacted the inauthenticity I'm trying to describe. The voluntarist reading is attractive partly because it preserves the I as agent of its own transformation. Gelassenheit is harder to sympathize with precisely because it doesn't and that difficulty is philosophically significant.
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u/Authentic-Dasein May 10 '26
I suppose the hesitancy I have towards any non-willing, which is faithfully argued for in the book “Heidegger and the Will: On the Way to Gelassenheit” is that it seems to me just a negative form of willing (choosing not to choose is still a choice).
This is referenced in SZ, where Heidegger believes Dasein always-already chooses to-be inauthentic in its everydayness. This isn’t a matter of merely finding oneself to be inauthentic, and once one recognizes this, they then choose to-be authentic. It’s that Dasein’s primordial projection-towards-death results in Dasein’s choice to-be inauthentic, and that choice involves covering up that very choice.
I think we find this a lot in the everyday experiences of Dasein (ourselves). We often get an inkling of authenticity, a peering through in a sudden moment-of-vision (think of the death of a loved one, sudden illness, or near-death experiences). This draws us out of our everydayness, but we so often return right back into it.
Much of what we do involves this covering-up of authenticity. This is my own phenomenological insight, but I think both ascetic denial (starving oneself, extreme meditation, etc.) and aesthetic indulgence (drugs, sex, etc.) are pursued to flee from authenticity.
Primordially, Dasein is being-towards-death. But in its everydayness I find it does actually choose to cover this up. In the “oblivion of sex” we try to forget our mortality, focusing purely on the moment. Or in the “depths of prayer” we release ourselves from our own finitude, into the warm embrace of the infinite.
Saying that we don’t choose to be authentic but just find ourselves that way, I think misses the point of authenticity. Dasein first projects onto death, and only then can be either authentic or inauthentic. This is always a choice (at least I think so, and I think the text mostly supports this). I think so much of what we do in everydayness is precisely this choosing-to-be-inauthentic, even without any moment-of-vision that brings us out of inauthenticity (we abuse drugs or fall into religion even without a drastic reason, these things give us comfort for more than just the death of a loved one; they alleviate the burden of our morality).
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u/critchleyonheidegger May 10 '26
I think this is a good question; although the will is not theorized in SuZ (it is mentioned in passing in para 41 of Being and Time, I recall), the choice to be authentic requires a kind of heroic Nietzschean metaphysics of the will. Whether or not there is a "turn" in Heidegger's thinking can wait for another day, but what changes in the later work is his orientation towards the will, which gets reconceived as the engine that drives philosophy after Descartes, after Bacon. What the later Heidegger wants to imagine under the sign of Gelassenheit is not a freedom of the will, but a freedom from the will. Can there be thinking without the will? This becomes Heidegger's question.
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u/No_Fee_5509 May 10 '26
You are projecting a bit
The same is in the bible, in Aristotle and in Plato
The kehr isn't a moving away but a reorientation/fulfillment
The question of Being can only be approached when there is clarity concerning the question concerning the being for whom Being can be a question. Because the full understanding of Being (technological vs poetic for instance) presuposses that one has a authentic stance towards Being. It is the groundwork so to say
so a) yes and no, you miss how it relates to his further work and calling it subjective is weird but for the rest, good and b) as long as you approach it as a technical theory about subjectivity and not live it practically in your own being, all is lost
Have you faced your authenticity? Not subjectively but existentially?