FREEDOM TO FAIL: HEIDEGGER’S ANARCHY
Heidegger can indeed say that “The hand acts [Die Hand handelt].”39 Yet that this is so lies in the word, in our relationship to language.
An-archic freedom primarily concerns thinking. Free action springs from the latter. For Heidegger there is no moral law from which human reason could proceed, beyond the appropriative event of truth and the experience of it in thinking. Thinking in an-archic freedom is, then, no longer identical with the ethics of a philosophy that unfolds systematically. That changes nothing about the fact that for Heidegger the human being who refuses the claim [Anspruch] of thinking likewise refuses the claim of freedom. Whoever closes himself off from the open in this way not only cannot think, he also cannot act. He follows the models of action of all those technical surrogates of freedom, both subtle and crude. What is convenient in all those patterns of modern life is that no one has to think. Yet that is precisely what we experience [erleben] as the greatest freedom.
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The example that a philosopher sets, if it is to contain Nietzsche’s enumeration of “bearing,
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