FREEDOM TO FAIL: HEIDEGGER’S ANARCHY
Even the human being of tragedy is free, for he acts within the open. The plot42 of tragedy does not present a moral, yet it does present an ethics – an “originary ethics” even.43 That is what Heidegger emphasizes in his way in the “Letter on ‘Humanism.’ ” What ἦθος means would be shown not so much by “Aristotle’s lectures on ‘ethics’ ” as by the “tragedies of Sophocles.”44 What they “say” is in this respect “more inceptual”; certainly also – though not only – because tragedy does not speak about ethics, but is ethics in word and deed.
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For Heidegger, freedom is the “letting-be of beings,”45 which goes out beyond beings. A free action and thought is a “letting oneself engage” “with the open and its openness in which every being comes to a stand.” The open, however, is precisely truth itself, “unconcealment,” ἀλήθεια. The narrative of the history of being is contained in this thought and with it the story of Heidegger’s thinking and life.
Unconcealment is not mere openness or pure light. The metaphorics of light, of which Heidegger here and there avails himself, in any case
42 [The German is Handlung, which we have also translated as “action” and “deed.”]
43 Martin Heidegger, “Brief über den ‘Humanismus,’ ” in Wegmarken (GA 9), ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann, 2nd edn (Frankfurt am Main: Klostermann, 1996), 356; “Letter on ‘Humanism,’ ” trans. Frank A. Capuzzi, in Pathmarks, ed. William McNeill (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1998), 271 [trans. mod.]. Cf. also Jean-Luc Nancy, La pensée dérobée (Paris: Galilée, 2001), 85–114.
44 Heidegger, “Brief über den ‘Humanismus,’ ” 354; “Letter on ‘Humanism,’ ” 269.
45 Martin Heidegger, “Vom Wesen der Wahrheit,” in Wegmarken (GA 9), 188; “On the Essence of Truth,” in Pathmarks, 144 [trans. mod.].
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