Possessed
Email from a friend expressing feelings of revulsion at political “leadership.” I felt his pain. Feelings are like the weather. The “weather” of feelings are the swirling impact of feeling upon feeling. Feelings come and go. Feelings pass for “news” in some sectors of the media. Feelings are not news. Feelings pass for “truth” at the highest levels of our government. Feelings are not “truth.” Feelings most likely are the very opposite.
Thoughts were in the background of my mind as I reviewed these words of Martin Heidegger. More than a single reading will be necessary to know the meaning of these words. Pondering the text is a worthwhile effort.
Freedom
is not merely what common sense
is content to let pass under this name:
the caprice, turning up occasionally
in our choosing,
of inclining to this or that direction.
Freedom is not mere absence of constraint
with respect to what we can or cannot do.
Nor is it on the other hand
mere readiness for what is required
or necessary (and so somehow a being).
Prior to all this (“negative” and positive “freedom”),
freedom is engagement in the disclosure of beings as such.
Disclosedness itself is conserved
in ek-sistent engagement,
through which the openness of the open region,
i.e., the “there” [“Da”],
is what it is.….But if ek-sistent Da-sein,
which lets beings be,
sets man free for his “freedom”
by first offering to his choice something possible
(a being) and by imposing on him something necessary
(a being), human caprice does not then
have freedom at its disposal.
Man does not possess freedom as a property.
At best, the converse holds:
freedom, ek-sistent, disclosive Da-sein,
possesses man.
excerpt On The Essence Of Truth p. 126 and 127
by Martin Heidegger
