Heidegger's Concept of Philosophical Method by Vincent Blok;

Author:Vincent Blok;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: Taylor & Francis (CAM)
Published: 2020-09-15T00:00:00+00:00

In his 1930 lecture course, Heidegger is primarily interested in this second sense of willing. There is no external cause of this capacity of willing, meaning that the cause of willing is actual willing itself: “Pure willing is the willing of one’s own essence as will” (GA 31: 278/190). This willing is called pure, because only this type of willing is purely determined through itself.

Although it is not directly clear why pure willing is the point of departure for Heidegger’s conception of the will ‒ and not, for instance, the will as it is determined by the world as that which is willed (we return to this point in §18) ‒ we now closely follow Heidegger’s reasoning in his phenomenology of the will in his 1930 lecture course.

For Heidegger, there is no external cause of willing; this means that the cause of willing is the actual willing itself. This primacy of actual willing does not indicate an existential voluntarism, as Davis suggests. On the contrary, Heidegger asks what kind of will it is that purely wills itself. Following Kant, Heidegger argues that such a will unconditionally determines its own willing: “It cannot help but be in harmony with itself, its pure essence, i.e. it cannot but be good. And a will that cannot but be good is a perfectly good will, or as Kant says, a holy, divine will” (GA 31: 280/191). So, if anything, only a divine will can be seen as ‘existential voluntarist’; but, in the case of finite beings like humans, the will is not in harmony with itself because it is determined by other motives too, and by its sensibility. So, for Heidegger, the question remains as to what causes the pure willing of finite beings like humans, when it has no external cause.

Following Kant in his Critique of Practical Reason, Heidegger argues that the causality of something has to be understood as the law of the existence of something; it is the law according to which something comes into existence.6 If pure will is understood as self-causation, it has to be conceived as the law for the existence of the will: “When this [pure will] alone is determining, then the law of pure will is nothing else than the form of law-giving for a pure will” (GA 31: 278–279/190).7 Heidegger therefore concludes that the cause of finite pure willing is the law for the existence of the will. Moreover, for Heidegger, this law is actual pure willing itself. So, unlike the existential voluntarism of divine willing, finite pure willing is found in “the ought of pure willing” (GA 31: 280/191); the law-giving of finite pure willing has the character of an imperative, that is, of a ‘you ought’.

Here we reach the point where Heidegger’s destruction of Kant’s concept of the will commences. According to Heidegger, “the decisive point for the understanding of the whole problem” (GA 31: 285/194) resides in the question of the actuality of the law of finite pure willing. Kant did not

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