ABSTRACT
This paper attempts to examine Martin Heidegger’s analysis of the question of freedom in his lecture course on The Essence of Human Freedom. Taking Heidegger’s deconstructive reading of Kant as point of departure, this paper in a Heideggerian manner attempts to think freedom in a more originary manner: not as man’s property, but the unconditional opening, or the possibility of existence itself as such. In this sense freedom is the very event of the possibility of existence itself which breaks through in the mortal being. The human grounded in this manner in freedom is open to the ground of his own existence in so far as he is the most finite of all beings. Finitude is thus not an impossibility of freedom but the very possibility of existence itself. Freedom is no longer thought here as the human’s will to determine itself on its own ground, but freedom as the very groundless site of history’s inauguration and is thus irreducible to any causality, whether transcendental causality or practical causality of Kantian type. As the very groundless condition of the mortal’s event of existence, freedom is not one question of amongst others but the very question of finitude itself out of which existence erupts. This event of freedom, thus understood, is the event of leap from the grounding principle of reason, even if it is practical reason and the principle of causality to the un-groundable event of inauguration of finite history itself.
