Bret W. Davis
The transition out of willing into Gelassenheit is what seems to me to be the genuine difficulty.
(GA 77: 109; see DT61 = G 33)
Gelassenheit, generally translated as “releasement”, is a key word of Heidegger’s later thought. Indeed, it names nothing less than the fundamental attunement (Grundstimmung) with which he says human beings are to authentically relate to other beings and to being itself. It contrasts with the fundamental attunement – or rather dis-attunement – of the will.1 In modern times, human being is essentially will-ful; the will, according to Heidegger, is the historical determination of the essence of modern humanity. In fact he claims that, in the epochs of modernity, the being of beings as such is revealed – albeit in the form of extreme self-concealment and even abandonment – as “will to power” and ultimately as the technological “will to will”.
By way of thoughtfully meditating on this historical determination of being and human being as will, Heidegger looks forward to, and attempts to prepare for, a turn in the history of being and a corresponding turn in the essence of humanity. It is crucial to bear in mind that this turn from will to Gelassenheit would not involve a mere reversal within what Heidegger calls “the domain of the will”, a turnabout, for instance, from will-ful assertion to passive submission. Rather, Heidegger’s thought calls for a twisting free of this entire domain of the will and a leap into a region of non-willing letting-be that is otherwise than both will-ful activity and will-less passivity. Moreover, this turn from the domain of the will to a region of non-willing is not just another historical transformation, for it involves a radical “step back”, a returning (Rückkehr) to enter into (Einkehr) a more originary relation to being and to beings. Paradoxically, Heidegger thinks, it is in the nihilistic abyss of our will-ful abandonment that we might undergo this conversion and first truly awaken to our most proper way of being.
One can see, then, how central this turn from the will to Gelassenheitis for the later Heidegger. But how did he come upon this problem of will and possibility of non-willing in the course of his path of thought? What does he mean by “will”? How would the transition out of its domain take place? And what, finally, is meant by non-willing and Gelassenheit? These are the questions that I shall attempt to address in this chapter. Let me begin here with some introductory comments on the term Gelassenheit.
Gelassenheit is generally translated into English as “releasement”. However, it should be kept in mind that it is a quite common German word that conveys a sense of “calm composure”. In colloquial language, “sei gelassen” means something like “remain calm” or even “stay cool”; a gelassener Typ is, we might say, a “laid-back guy”. More originally, and more pertinent in the present context, Gelassenheit refers to the state of mind attained by way of a profound existential or religious experience of letting go, being let, and letting be. As the nominal form of the perfect participle of lassen (to let), Gelassenheit has a long history in German thought (Ritter 2006: vol. 3, 220–24). It was coined in the thirteenth century by Meister Eckhart (Eckehart 1963: 91), and subsequently used by a number of mystics, theologians and philosophers. Heidegger too adopts the word Gelassenheit from the German mystical tradition, and yet he explicitly distances his use of the concept from a certain theological understanding.
In the context of Christianity, Gelassenheit is generally thought to entail a releasement from – a renunciation or abandonment (Ablassen) of – self-will, which enables a releasement over to – a deferral or leaving matters up to (Überlassen) – the Will of God. Heidegger certainly draws on this tradition. And yet, while he acknowledges that “many good things can be learned” from Eckhart, Heidegger clearly seeks to distinguish his notion of releasement from one that would lead merely to a deferential obedience to a divine Will (GA 77: 109; DT 62 = G 33–4).2 Such a conversion would remain squarely within the domain of the will rather than evincing a twisting free of this domain as such.
In order to understand why Heidegger is satisfied with neither humanistic (transcendental) nor theistic (transcendent) voluntarism, we need to understand the radical critique of the will that lies at the heart of his later thought. According to his history of being (see Chapter 11), the being of beings in the epochs of modernity is will. In accordance with this historical delimitation of being, not only are modern human beings essentially will-ful, but the Absolute itself is understood as Will.3 In anticipation of a turn to an “other inception” in the history of being, Heidegger speaks of Gelassenheit as a releasement from thinking as kind of willing, indeed from all modes of being as willing, and a releasement into a non-willing manner of being-in-the-world. But in order to understand the nature of Heidegger’s Gelassenheit and why it is central to his later thought, we need to first understand how, along the way of his own path of thought, he himself turned initially to and then subsequently away from the will.
Heidegger’s abiding concern is with the question of being. More specifically, it is with the question of the relation between being and human being, that is, the relation between being (Sein) and the being-there (Dasein) of human existence (see Introduction and Chapter 6). The often remarked “turn” in his thought-path in the 1930s can be understood as a shift in orientation within this relation, namely, from a focus on Dasein’s temporal projections of the meaning of its being to an emphasis on the event of the truth of being (or “beyng”) as determined though its historical “sendings”.4 Less remarked on but no less remarkable, Heidegger’s thought-path also underwent a “second turn” around 1940, a turn from a tendency to think the relation between being and human being in terms of will, and a turn to a sustained attempt to think this relation in terms of a non-willing letting-be (Seinlassen) and releasement (Gelassenheit).
In Being and Time (1927), Heidegger stressed the role of human Dasein in resolutely projecting the meaning of its being. Although humans are always “thrown” into given situations, they do not simply passively receive a meaningful world, or, when they do, they are inauthentically letting others (das Man) decide for them (SZ 193, 239). Faced with her own mortality, in “resoluteness” a human being must “choose” for herself her life-project, her “for-the-sake-of-which” (Umwillen) (see e.g. SZ 12, 84, 298), a choice that then gives teleologi-cal structure and meaning to the “equipment” she finds “ready-to-hand” in her “environment” (see SZ §§14–18). While the role of the will in Being and Time is largely implicit – and indeed extremely ambivalent, in so far as the anticipation of one’s own death and the “call of conscience” are occasions for the interruption of the will as much as they are for its resolute reassertion – in texts from 1928 and 1929 Heidegger explicitly claims that this world-forming decision is carried out by a kind of finite yet transcendental will. “World … is primarily defined by the for-the-sake-of-which. … But a for-the-sake-of-which, a purposive-ness [Umwillen], is only possible where there is a will [Willen]” (MFL 185 = GA 26: 238). This “will” is not an act in the world, but rather a prior determination of the very significance of the world, that is to say, this transcendental or “ontological” will opens up and establishes the context of meaningfully related entities within which any specific “ontic” act can take place (PM 126 = GA 9: 163).
In 1930, in an interpretive appropriation of Kant’s practical philosophy of autonomy (that is, of “giving the law to oneself”), Heidegger roots the question of being in the question of freedom, and he defines freedom as a finite yet “pure willing”, that is, as a concrete will that “actually wills willing and nothing else besides” (EHF 193 = GA 31: 285). Ironically, this willing that wills only its own willing in some ways prefigures “the will to will” that Heidegger later sees as the nihilistic abandonment of being into its modern determination as will, which he then says “was incipient in Kant’s concept of practical reason as pure will” (EP 101 = VA 85). Indeed, such a voluntaristic determination of the meaningful context of the world contrasts, not only generally with the later Heidegger’s concern with listening to and waiting upon being, but also sharply and specifically with his later understanding of freedom in terms of a “letting beings be” (PM 144 = GA 9: 188) that is “originally not connected with the will” (BW 330 = VA 28).
The most disturbing form of Heidegger’s middle-period philosophy of will appears during his brief but deeply troubling alliance with National Socialism (see Chapter 7). At that time he developed a political form of voluntarism, in which it is not the individual will but rather the will of the Volk that must be resolutely enacted. Near the close of his Rectorial Address of 1933, Heidegger proclaimed:
Whether such a thing [as the collapse of the “moribund pseudo-civilization” of the West] occurs or does not occur, this depends solely on whether we as a historico-spiritual Volk will ourselves …. But it is our will that our Volk fulfill its historical mission. … We will ourselves.
(SU38 =R 19; also see GA 38: 57)
Surely the darkest moments of Heidegger’s embrace of the will are found in his political speeches during this period, when he claims that “we are only following the towering willing of our Führer” (HC 60 = GA 16: 236), since: “There is only the one will to the full Dasein of the state. … The Führer has awakened this will in the entire Volk and has welded it into a single resolve [Entschluß]” (HC 49 = GA 16: 189). In subsequent years, Heidegger comes not only to deride Hitler in private as “the robber and criminal of the century” (Vietta 1989: 47), but also to criticize explicitly the idea that the will-ful egoism of the individual subject can and should be overcome by way of “inserting the I into the We”. Through this, Heidegger comes to recognize, will-ful “subjectivity only gains in power” (QCT 152 = GA 5: 111).
It was a few years after his entanglement with Nazism that Heidegger began to radically turn away from the will. In his close reading of Schell-ing in 1936(ST = SA) he reflected on the evil depths of egoistic self-will, and in Contributions to Philosophy (1936–8) what he calls “the most proper will” is neither that of the individual ego nor that of the Volk that wills itself, but rather that of those who think ahead into Dasein and who exercise restraint (Verhaltenheit) in order to open themselves to the appropriating event of beyng (CP 11 = GA 65: 15). Heidegger’s turn from the will takes place most clearly and decisively, however, over the course of his decade-long (1936–46) interpretation of and confrontation with Nietzsche’s philosophy of the “will to power”.5
While at first linking the notion of will that he found celebrated by Nietzsche with his own notion of “resoluteness” (N1 48 = NI 59), Heidegger’s interpretation of Nietzsche’s philosophy of the will to power became increasingly critical, until finally he writes: “For Nietzsche, will to power is the ultimate factum to which we come. What seems certain to Nietzsche is questionable to us” (N4 73 = NII 114). What Heidegger finds questionable is not the fact that being is determined as will to power in the historical epoch of modernity, but rather that this is the only possible or the most appropriate determination of being. He asks: “But the will to power itself – where does it originate.?” Heidegger’s answer is that in the epoch of modernity “being radiates its own essence as will to power” (N4 181 = NII 239). When being reveals itself as will, however, it does this only by concealing its most proper essence of letting-be. Being shows itself as will only in an extreme “epoch” (from the Greek epechein, meaning to keep in or hold back) of being’s withdrawal into self-concealment and hence abandonment of beings to nihilism (see N4 201ff., 239 = NII 338ff., 383).
The later Heidegger thus does not deny the historical determination of being and human being as will. But he does come to see this modern voluntarism as epochally problematic, indeed as the crux of what is amiss with the entire Western tradition and its descent into nihilism. “If being is ‘will’ … The essence of modern metaphysics can be presented by means of the complete unfolding of this hypothetical statement” (GA 67: 159). With Nietzsche’s utterance, “Life is will to power” (see Nietzsche 1967: §§1067, 685, 693; 2006: 271, 330), Western metaphysics is said to complete itself (N3 18–19 = NI 492). This completion is the end of a decline from the Greek beginning or “inception” (Anfang), an inception that is itself ambivalent, in so far as it both enabled a profound apprehension of being and yet also set the Western tradition on a metaphysical path of descent that culminates in nihilistic voluntarism and technological machination. Heidegger’s later thought is dedicated to preparing for an “other inception” of the history of being, and this entails not just carrying out a personal conversion but participating in a “being-historical” turn from the metaphysics of will to a thinking of non-willing or Gelassenheit.
For the later Heidegger, the will is deeply problematic. Indeed, he even suggests at one point that “in general the will itself is what is evil” (GA 77: 208). But what exactly does Heidegger mean by “will”? In his writings on Nietzsche, Heidegger comes to define the will as follows: willing as a “commanding” is “the fundamental attunement of one’s being superior” to others (N3 152 = NI 641). “To will is to will-to-be-master” (QCT 77 = GA 5: 234). In willing, one reaches out beyond oneself so as to increase the territory under one’s command; willing is, in short, “being-master-out-beyond-oneself [ Über-sich-hinaus-Herrsein]” (N1 63 = NI 76). Willing thus involves a dynamic movement of going out beyond oneself and conquering. I suggest that this can be understood as a circling movement of ecstatic-incorporation, in the sense that, in willing, one exceeds oneself only to bring this excess back into oneself. One stands outside oneself, but the aim of this ekstasis of willing is always to incorporate the other back into one’s own domain. The will’s movement of self-overcoming is always in the name of an expansion of the subject, an increase in its territory, its power.
The will to power is thus not a blind striving or a mere will to live; it is rather a will to increase as well as preserve the power of the subject (QCT 80 = GA 5: 237). Indeed, we could say that the subject of will itself gets constituted through this dynamic process of preservation and enhancement of power. “With the word ‘will’ I do not in fact mean a faculty of the soul, but rather that wherein the essence of the soul, mind, reason, love, and life is based according to a unanimous yet hardly thought through doctrine of occidental thinkers” (GA 77: 78). The fundamental (dis)attunement of the will underlies all these determinations and modes of subjectivity.
The will is thus not just one faculty alongside others, such as thinking, for thinking itself, “conceived of in the traditional manner as representing, is a willing” (GA 77: 106; DT 58 = G 29). From Leibniz’s conjunction of perceptio and appetitus through German idealism’s linkage of will and reason (GA 77: 53; VA 110 = NII 222–3; N3 222 = NII 299), thinking and knowing have been determined as willing, and this means first of all as subjective representation. Representation is a matter of willing in so far as it “inspects everything encountering it from out of itself and in reference to itself” (N3 219 = NII295). In representational thinking, one first strives to go out beyond things to delimit a horizon – a transcendental schema – through which and only through which things must show themselves as objects for subjects (GA 77: 98).
Yet the will of metaphysical representation and even the will to power do not yet, according to Heidegger, completely unveil the essence of the will. The will is fully unleashed as the technological “will to will”. “The basic form of appearance in which the will to will arranges and calculates itself in the unhistorical element of the world of completed metaphysics can be strictly called ‘technology’” (EP 93 = VA 76). Technology, Heidegger says, is a way of revealing things or, rather, a way of not letting them be revealed as “things” with their own integrity, or even any longer as “objects” (Gegenstände) standing over against representing subjects. In the technological worldview all beings are reduced to mere “standing-reserve” (Bestand), that is, to material and energy resources for the preservation and enhancement of the cybernetic system of the Ge-stell (see Chapter 13), the enframing of the world for no other purpose than an endless will to more of the same, more power, more will.
Through technology, nature is reduced to a resource from which energy is unlocked, transformed, stored up, distributed and switched about, ever at the beck and call of human will. Ultimately even human beings are threatened with reduction to “human resources”. In fact, says Heidegger, “self-assertive humans” were all along, “whether or not they know and will it as individuals, . the functionaries of technology” (PLT 113 = GA 5: 271, trans. mod.). The will, by which humans assert themselves over all that is, first by representationally objectifying the world and ultimately by reducing things to standing-reserve for their projects of mastery, does not originate in humans themselves. At one point Heidegger goes so far as to say: “The opinion arises that the human will is the origin of the will to will, while in fact humans are willed by the will to will without experiencing the essence of this willing“ (EP 101 = VA 85, trans. mod.).
And yet, Heidegger says elsewhere,
precisely because humans are challenged more originally than are the energies of nature, i.e., into the process of ordering, they are never transformed into mere standing-reserve. Since humans drive technology forward, they take part in ordering as a way of revealing.
(QCT 323 = VA 22, emphasis added)
Humans can never be wholly reduced to cogs in the wheel of the technological will to will. Heidegger suggests that the core of our essence radically precedes and exceeds the will (PLT 113–14 = GA 5: 293–4). That core is Gelassenheit, a non-willing fundamental attunement to and correspondence with being (GA 77: 145–6; DT 82–3 = G 61). The existence of this core also means that we are co-responsible for the fate of the world, in so far as we are called on to correspond to being, to engage in the determination of its historical sendings, and to take part in a historical turn to a way of being otherwise than the will (QCT39 = GA 79: 70).
What would it mean to turn away from the will, and by what means would this take place? It would seem that there can be no will-ful answer to the problem of the will, any more than there can be a technological answer to the problem of technology. The “will to overcome”, Heidegger tells us, is emblematic of the problem of nihilism, and thus cannot be its solution (see N4 243=NII 389). But how else can we undertake or undergo a transition out of the will? We need to disaccustom ourselves from the contradictory will to reach Gelassenheit, and yet this disaccustoming itself seems to require Gelassenheit. Evidently we need to somehow anticipate or “think out toward” that to which we are in transition in order to undertake/undergo the transition itself (see GA 77: 68, 108).
Yet how do we even thoughtfully anticipate non-willing; what would human “activity” be like if it were radically otherwise than willing? “Perhaps”, Heidegger says at one point, “we come to know what nonwilling is only once we have reached it” (GA 77: 76). But how might we begin to approach this realization? We at least know what non-willing is other than: the will. More fully thought, genuine non-willing would be otherwise than the entire “domain of the will”. After all, as Heidegger points out, even the expression “non-willing” (Nicht-Wollen) could be used to name a variety of comportments, and most of these remain squarely within the domain of the will. Most forms of negating and refusing willing are mere variations of the “will” (GA 77: 76–8). Since resignation and passivity signify a mere lack or deference of willing, they too would succeed only in manifesting privative modes within what Heidegger calls “the domain of the will”. And since mere opposition remains a slave to that which it opposes, and in so far as “revolutions” merely overturn something within a domain without altering the domain as such (see GA 77: 51; GA 54: 77), non-willing cannot be attained by a mere will-ful rebellion against willing.
Nevertheless, in order to “twist free” of the domain of the will, Heidegger does acknowledge that there is an indispensable role to be played by going through a paradoxical “willing non-willing” (GA 77: 51–2, 58–67). To that extent, Heidegger’s own notion of “non-willing” is itself explicitly and unavoidably ambiguous. He writes:
Non-willing still signifies, on the one hand, a willing, in that a No prevails in it, even if it is in the sense of a No that directs itself at willing itself and renounces it. Non-willing in this sense means: to will-fully renounce willing. And then, on the other hand, the expression non-willing also means: that which does not at all pertain to the will.
(GA 77: 106; see DT59 = G 30)
Heidegger goes on to suggest that a transitional “willing non-willing” should be understood as a renunciation of willing that prepares for letting oneself into an engagement in the essence of thinking, which is not a willing. In an analogous manner, he speaks of a movement through an initial to an authentic sense of Gelassenheit:
Gelassenheit, as releasing oneself from transcendental representing, is in fact a refraining from the willing of a horizon. This refraining also no longer comes from a willing, unless a trace of willing is required to occasion the letting-oneself-into a belonging to the open-region – a trace which, however, vanishes in the letting-oneself-into and is completely extinguished in authentic releasement.
(GA 77: 142–3; see DT 79–80 = G 57)
Heidegger thus tells us that “being-released” (Los-Gelassensein) from the will is only the first moment of Gelassenheit, and not its most proper sense (GA 77: 121). While non-willing as a radical negation of the (domain of the) will would enable this initial sense of Gelassenheit as being-released-from, the authentic sense of Gelassenheit, which we would be released-into, would correspond to the second and more radical sense of non-willing as “what remains absolutely outside any kind of will” (DT 59 = G 30).
How then does Heidegger characterize authentic non-willing or Gelassenheit? In a sense, all of his later texts – all of his meditations on building, dwelling, thinking, poetizing and so on – can be read as attempts to think non-willing(ly).
In Country Path Conversations (1944–5; CPC = GA 77), a key text for the topic of this chapter that I have been frequently citing, Heidegger identifies Gelassenheit with an authentic kind of “waiting” (GA 77: 115–17, 120–25, 216–21, 225–34). Rather than will-fully positing a transcendental schema that anthropocentrically determines how beings can show themselves, we are to engage in an attentive waiting upon the “open-region” that surrounds our limited horizons of perception and intelligibility and lets them be in the first place. The resolute openness of this “waiting upon” is contrasted with an “expecting” that represents – or will-fully projects – in advance what it then passively awaits. On the one hand, in contrast to a passive resignation that would abandon the search for knowledge, authentic thinking as Gelassenheit and waiting involves a courageous and mindful “surmising” (Vermuten) that enables a “coming-into-nearness to the far” (GA 77: 116, 148). On the other hand, in contrast to the aggressive interrogation that characterizes technology and the natural sciences, such thinking as attentive waiting that surmises would neither predetermine nor demand the full disclosure – the unbounded unconcealment – of that upon which it waits. Rather, Gelassenheit as attentive waiting is a thoughtful remembrance, a restrained comportment, an indwelling forbearance, which steadfastly stays within being (beyng) as the open-region or “abiding expanse” that requires our thoughtful participation for the appropriating events of its clearings of truth (GA 77: 147–8; see also Chapters 8 and 10).
In the “topology of beyng” (FS 41 = GA 15: 335) of Heidegger’s later thought, it is the open-region of being (beyng) that “enregions” humans and “bethings” things (GA 77: 139–40), bringing us back to where we essentially belong. Released (losgelassen) from will-ful representation and released over to (überlassen) a resting in the open-region, authentic Gelassenheit receives from the open-region its movement towards it (GA 77: 117, 122). But this relation should not be understood simply in terms of the “activity” of being as the open-region and the “passivity” of human being, in so far as these terms are rooted in the domain of the will. Heidegger clearly states that “Gelassenheit lies . outside the distinction between activity and passivity . because it does not belong to the domain of the will” (GA 77: 109; see DT 61 = G 33). He denies that it is a matter of “impotently letting things slide and drift along”. Gelassenheit is rather a kind of “higher activity”, namely that of “resolute openness” (Ent-schlossenheit) understood as a “self-opening for the open” (GA 77: 143–5; see DT 81 = G 59) and as a patiently enduring “standing within” it. This “indwelling [Inständigkeit] in releasement to the open-region” is said to be nothing less than “the genuine essence of the spontaneity of thinking” (GA 77: 145; see DT 82 = G 60).
Thus, when Heidegger says that in our destitute times “we are to do nothing but wait”, he also says that this is “not simply a matter of waiting until something occurs to humans”. Waiting as Gelassenheit is the essence of genuine thinking, and such thinking “is not inactivity but is itself the action which stands in dialogue with the world mission” (OG 110 = GA 16: 676). The play of the sending of being calls on humans to “play along” (PR 113 = SG 188). When “language speaks” (die Sprache spricht), it does not ask humans to just shut up and listen, but rather beckons them to “cor-respond” (ent-sprechen) so that through this “cor-responsive saying” thinking is able to “bring to language ever and again [an] advent of being” (PM 275 = GA 9: 363).
Moreover, Heidegger tells us that the “activities” of being as the open-region “can hardly be spoken of as will” (GA 77: 143). Being as the open-region “enregions” humans in a manner that requires (braucht) them in order to open up a world that lets beings truly be (see GA 77: 147). Heidegger attempts to step back from the dualistic subject-object grammar, which would determine the relation between being and humans in terms of activity and passivity. He thinks being (beyng) as a middle-voiced appropriating event of giving and requiring (Esgibt as Es brauchet); being requires human Dasein as the site of the gift of its arrival and withdrawal (WCT 189 = WhD 116).
Near the end of his career Heidegger stated, “the deepest meaning of being is letting [Lassen]” (FS 59 = GA 15: 363). In Gelassenheit, human being properly corresponds to, and participates in, this Seinlassen of being itself.
Gelassenheit names not only our authentic relation to being, but also our proper comportment to beings, to entities. When Heidegger speaks of “releasement toward things” (Gelassenheit zu den Dingen), on the one hand he is concerned with preserving the human essence and its relation to being from a tendency to “fall” into the ruination of “running around amidst beings” (Umtrieben an das Seiende) that characterizes the everyday life of the anonymous they-self (das Man) (PM 92 = GA 9: 116). There are clearly echoes of Eckhart’s “detachment” when Heidegger writes:
We can use technical devices, and yet with proper use also keep ourselves free of them, that we may let go of them at any time . as something which does not affect our inner and real core. … I would name this comportment toward technology, which expresses “yes” and at the same time “no”, with an old word, releasement toward things.
(DT 54 = G 23)
Yet Heidegger is also concerned with taking care of things by sparing and “properly using” them. Letting things be is not simply a matter of passively leaving them alone or abandoning them. We should note that in German lassen is used as a modal auxiliary not only in the sense of passively letting something happen or allowing someone to do something, but also in the sense of having something done (for example, having one’s car repaired). Moreover, sicheinlassen auf etwas, literally “to let oneself into something”, means “to get involved or to engage oneself in something”. Hence, while Seinlassen (letting-be) may be used in common speech to mean “to leave alone or stop doing”, Heidegger’s Sein-lassen entails rather a Sicheinlassen auf in the sense of a non-willing engagement that attentively lets beings be themselves. He writes in this regard:
Ordinarily we speak of letting be … in the negative sense of leaving something alone, of renouncing it, of indifference and even neglect. … However, the phrase required now – to let beings be – does not refer to neglect and indifference but rather the opposite. To let be is to engage oneself with beings [Sein-lassen ist das Sicheinlassen auf das Seiende].
(PM 144 = GA 9: 188)
Heidegger goes on to say that this engaged letting-be is not, to be sure, a will-ful or calculative manipulation of beings. The difficulty, once again, is how to twist free of the very domain of the will (passivity as well as activity) into a region of non-willing, where we are both open to the mystery of being (its withdrawal into concealment) and engaged in participating in its events of unconcealment. Such events would open a world wherein things can show themselves in meaningful ways without being wholly reduced to objects of subjective representation or standing-reserve for technological manipulation. As beings of releasement, we are called on in this manner to assist in letting other beings be.
Let me end by raising a question for those who wish to think not only with, but also after, Heidegger. Presumably, Gelassenheit also names our proper comportment to one another. This would undoubtedly involve attentively letting others be, rather than either passively neglecting or actively “leaping in” and taking over their existential concerns (SZ 122). Unfortunately, the later Heidegger had precious little to say about ethics, other than to say that the thinking of being could itself perhaps be thought of as “originary ethics” (PM 271 = GA 9: 356). After his errant involvement in the Nazi politics of communal self-assertion, he also had precious little to say about politics. Bringing Gelassenheit into the interpersonal dimension of ethics and politics thus requires us to think further down the road after Heidegger, beyond not only his vol-untaristic Volk-politics of the early 1930s, but also beyond his lingering suspicions of democracy. Of course, today’s democratic societies are not without their fundamental problems, and these problems are certainly not unrelated to Heidegger’s critique of the technological machinations of the will to will. But what might a “democracy to come” (Derrida) look like were it to be infused with an interpersonal attunement of Gelassenheit? Presumably, such a politics of non-willing would take the form of a democracy based on mutually attentive conversation rather than intersubjective litigation, a dialogical sharing of voices rather than procedural compromises between will-fully antagonistic subjectivities. But could such a political attunement be established? How could it, after all, be regulated, much less enforced? Perhaps, rather, we must continuously find ways to resolutely yet gently infuse the safety-net proceduralism of liberal democracy with a fundamental attunement of Gelassenheit through meditative thinking and practice, responsive education and responsible social critique, and the cultivation of forums for open-minded conversation between individuals and groups. A fully engaged Gelassenheit would in these ways be always on the way to carefully letting other humans, among other beings, be.
1. The aim of this chapter is to introduce and concisely explicate this topic of will and Gelassenheit in Heidegger’s thought. For a detailed and critical study, see Davis (2007).
2. In fact, Eckhart’s Gelassenheit and its relation to the Will of God (or the “God of Will”) is far more complex than Heidegger’s passing critique implies. See Schürmann (1978), Caputo (1990) and Davis (2007: ch. 5). For Heidegger’s complex and evolving relation to Christianity and his ideas of divinity, see Chapters 16 and 17.
3. Prior to Schopenhauer and Nietzsche, it is Schelling who first explicitly announces that “willing is primal being”. See Schelling (1987: 231); ST 170 = SA 207; GA 49: 84.
4. For Thomas Sheehan’s meticulous account of “the turn”, which stresses that the term Kehre in Heidegger’s thought most properly refers to the reciprocity between being and human being (Sein and Dasein), see Chapter 6. On the multiple senses of the turn or turning in the context of Heidegger’s thought, see also Davis (2007: 61–5).
5. Also noteworthy are Heidegger’s extensive notes on Ernst Jünger from the 1930s and after, in which he critically reflects on what is viewed as the contemporary legacy of Nietzsche’s metaphysics of the will to power in the technological reduction of humans to “workers” (see GA 90).
Caputo, J. D. 1990. The Mystical Element in Heidegger’s Thought, reprinted with corrections. New York: Fordham University Press.
Davis, B. W. 2007. Heidegger and the Will: On the Way to Gelassenheit. Evanston, IL: Northwestern University Press.
Eckehart, M. 1963. Deutsche Predigten und Traktate, J. Quint (ed. & trans.). Munich: Carl Hanser.
Nietzsche, F. 1967. The Will to Power, W. Kaufmann & R. J. Hollingdale (trans.). New York: Vintage Books.
Nietzsche, F. 2006. The Nietzsche Reader, K. A. Pearson & D. Large (eds). Malden, MA: Blackwell.
Ritter, J. (ed.) 2006. Historisches Wörterbuch der Philosophie. Basel/Stuttgart: Schwabe.
Schelling, F. W J. 1987. “Philosophical Investigations into the Essence of Human Freedom and Related Matters”, P. Hayden-Roy (trans.). In Philosophy of German Idealism, E. Behler (ed.), 217–84. New York: Continuum.
Schürmann, R. 1978. Meister Eckhart: Mystic and Philosopher. Bloomington, IN: Indiana University Press.
Vietta, S. 1989. Heideggers Kritik am Nationalsozialismus und an der Technik. Tübingen: Niemeyer.
See Heidegger’s Country Path Conversations; Discourse on Thinking; The Question Concerning Technology; Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom; Nietzsche: Volumes I and II (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1991); and Nietzsche: Volumes III and IV (San Francisco: Harper & Row, 1991).
See Caputo (1990); Davis (2007); A. Mitchell, “Praxis and Gelassenheit: The ‘Practice’ of the Limit”, in Raffoul & Pettigrew (2002), 317–38; and Schürmann (1987: 245–50). See also R. Ohashi, Ekstase und Gelassenheit: Zu Schelling und Heidegger (Munich: Wilhelm Fink, 1975).