FREEDOM TO FAIL: HEIDEGGER’S ANARCHY
to set an example. He sets the example of being “independent of state and society,”34 thus of freedom. Is it an accident that the example of the philosophical life is freedom? No, for the philosophical life is nothing other than the free life, than the life of freedom. To be a philosopher means to be free.
With the question of freedom, the question of morality and ethics is also at stake. Freedom is considered to be the condition of ethics or to be ethics itself. All action, if it is to be ascribed to an agent, is free. Only in this way can we be responsible, become guilty, forgive and ask for forgiveness in order to become guilty again. Free will is the pivot on which all action turns.
Acting and action have an ethical character. Yet not much is said by this. One can assess the action of an individual according to moral criteria, consider it in normative terms as the instantiation of the moral law. One can understand it as the depiction, as the history of a life, in order to acknowledge it as exemplary or reject it as without significance. In the first case we are relating to freedom as the criterion of a moral action, in the second to freedom as a play-space,35
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