哲学中的虚无和自由

The far more common approach to [a house or a table] is through using them and for that they are always ready to hand…Even what I change, rework, add to, or adjust about a thing is just a response to something a thing asks for, what it itself somehow “wants,” what it lacks, what needs to be added or deleted and so forth.  In ordinary use it is as if thing themselves asked for what we do with them, as if they were asking to be cared for, an achievement that has its own melody, its own characteristic course and results which lead on to further tasks…Every use, being an activity, aims at some goal of which, however, we are for the most part also not consciously aware as being the product and the work of a decision.  Goals, too, seem to be somehow given, the day’s program bears us along, prescribing for us, and even on those rare occasions when a decision intervenes, it is determined by traditions, customs, generally speaking by possibilities which are already present and which force on us what we do.  In that sense, doing is a progression along a pregiven track. (Husserl’s Phenomenology, 4-5)

In a ready-to-hand world, the nature of the entity provokes the nature of the act.  Man’s “doing” cannot escape the dictates of the world’s things.  And since “doing”, for Heidegger, is Being, man’s Being cannot be free.  In Heidegger’s own words, “Existing is always factical.  Existentiality is essentially determined by facticity” (236).

Yet, Heidegger does refer to man as “free”.  What, then, can he mean by that label?  For Heidegger, man is not free from the order of the world or free to change Being.  He is, instead, free to seize his authentic Being, which is obscured by the everyday, inauthentic interpretation of the world that the “they” provides.  The mood of “anxiety”, in Heidegger, provides an effective lens through which to understand what Heidegger means by freedom and nothingness.

“Anxiety,” for Heidegger, contrasts with “fear” in that one is afraid in the face of something, of some entity, while one is anxious in the face of nothing:

The obstinacy of the ‘nothing and nowhere within-the-world’ means as a phenomenon that the world as such is that in the face of which one has anxiety…What oppresses us is not this or that, nor is it the summation of everything present-at-hand; it is rather the possibility of the ready-to-hand in general; that is to say, it is the world itself…Ontologically, however, the world belongs essentially to Dasein’s Being as Being-in-the-world.  So if the ‘nothing’—that is, the world as such—exhibits itself as that in the face of which one has anxiety, this means that Being-in-the-world itself is that in the face of which anxiety is anxious. (BT, 231-232)

It is Nothingness that provokes anxiety, and Nothingness is Being-in-the-world.  Heidegger’s description of Nothingness remains amorphous, though (as is fitting for the concept).  It can be best characterized, I believe, by two absences or lacks that an awareness of Being-in-the-world makes manifest.  First, as we have established in our discussion of the intimate relation that Heidegger posits between Dasein and the world, the “possibility of the ready-to-hand in general” means that neither the “subject” nor the “object” can be defined without reference to the other.  They lack boundaries, they lack concreteness, and they lack self-contained existence.  Second, in the everyday interpretation of the world provided to the individual Dasein by the “they”, Dasein is not aware of this authentic, ready-to-hand relation of Being-in-the-world described above.  The “they’s” everyday conception of the world is a calming one intended to obscure the first type of Nothingness (above), to explain Being and make it feel manageable, to place it within the grip of the individual: “This downward plunge into and within the groundlessness of the inauthentic Being of the ‘they’, has a kind of motion which constantly tears the understanding away from the projecting of authentic possibilities, and into the tranquilized supposition that it possesses everything, or that everything is within its reach” (BT, 223).  When authentic Being-in-the-world is recognized, the “tranquilized supposition” granted by the “they” becomes absent.  The understanding of and justification for Being that was previously held (inauthentically) by Dasein is now lacking.

This concept of Nothingness leads to Heidegger’s understanding of freedom.  Anxiety, in provoking a recognition of Nothingness, frees Dasein to embrace that Nothingness.  Dasein is free to withdraw from its absorption in the “they” and to seize its own Being by grasping the authentic structure of the world as Being-in-the-world:

Anxiety…takes away from Dasein the possibility of understanding itself, as it falls, in terms of the ‘world’ and the way things have been publicly interpreted.  Anxiety throws Dasein back upon that which it is anxious about—its authentic potentiality-for-Being-in-the-world…Anxiety makes manifest in Dasein its Being towards its ownmost potentiality-for-Being—that is, its Being-free for the freedom of choosing it and taking hold of itself.  Anxiety brings Dasein face to face with its Being-free for the authenticity of its Being. (BT, 232)

Thus, Being-free is, in Heidegger, an important structure of Being, but it refers to a movement that is fundamentally distinct from Being-free in Sartre.  Heidegger describes the “freedom” to escape from the “they” into which it is “fallen”, to recognize our authentic relationship with the world, and to choose authenticity over inauthenticity.  Sartre will assume that freedom and take a further, entirely independent step.  That authentic relationship with the world, he says, is that the subject is unconstrained by the world, independent in thought, action, and judgment from the world.  That step, with which Heidegger would profoundly disagree, is what Sartre labels “freedom”.  Heidegger’s freedom lays the groundwork for Sartre’s, but Sartre’s freedom is a radical construction over and above that foundation, not the logical extension of Heidegger’s thought.  While Sartrean freedom requires Heideggerian freedom, Heideggerian freedom in no way necessitates the leap to Sartrean freedom.

Patocka effectively summarizes Heidegger’s understanding in The Beginning of History: “Heidegger is a philosopher of the primacy of freedom…However, he does not understand freedom either as a liberum arbitrium or as a laxness in the realization of duty, but in the first place as a freedom of letting being be what it is, not distorting being.  This presupposes…a shaking of what at first and for the most part is taken for being in naïve everydayness…Freedom, in the end, is freedom for truth, in the form of the uncovering of being itself, of its truth” (49).  Sartre, in contrast, is indeed a believer in liberum arbitrium, or “free will”.

Ultimately, consistent with their divergent theories about the link between human Being and the world, Heidegger’s freedom pushes Dasein closer to the world as such, while Sartre’s freedom drives the human subject further from the world.  Recall Sartre’s initial definition of freedom: “Descartes following the Stoics has given a name to this possibility which human reality has to secrete a nothingness which isolates it—it is freedom” (BN, 60).  In contrast, Heidegger explains that:

Anxiety individualizes Dasein and thus discloses it as ‘solus ipse’.  But this existential ‘solipsism’ is so far from the displacement of putting an isolated subject-Thing into the innocuous emptiness of a worldless occurring, that in an extreme sense what it does is precisely to bring Dasein face to face with its world as world, and thus bring it face to face with itself as Being-in-the-world…As Dasein falls, anxiety brings it back from its absorption in the ‘world’.  Everyday familiarity collapses.  Dasein has been individualized, but individualized as Being-in-the-world. (BT 233)

Whereas as for Sartre the “isolation” that results from freedom is a severing of man’s relationship to the entities in the world, for Heidegger the “individualization” that results from freedom is a seizing of the “I” out of the “they”.  While Dasein does sever its ties with the world of “everyday familiarity”, as proximally handed to it by the “they”, this severing allows it to come “face to face with its world as world”.  The effect of freedom is not an “isolation” from the world, but rather a union with it.

The interpretation so far developed of the contrasting “subject”/“object” relationship, meaning of nothingness, and meaning of freedom in Heidegger and Sartre is exemplified by a comparison of the mood of “anxiety” in Heidegger and the feeling of “nausea” in Sartre.  Both anxiety and nausea have already been mentioned in support of the above interpretations, but it is telling to examine their parallel structures and their divergent outcomes.

Anxiety and nausea each function as a sort of non-cognitive revelation about Being and the world.  They are prompted by a sub-conscious awareness of the true structure of Being and an intuitive understanding that the way man commonly perceives and understands Being is an artificial veil meant to mask the disconcerting truth.  This creates a feeling of profound discomfort, which Heidegger calls anxiety and Sartre calls nausea.  That discomfort constitutes the first, most fundamental step in the leap away from the “they” that is necessary if man is to see below the surface of Being.

There the similarities end.  When authentic Being is unmasked, it exposes for Heidegger Being-in-the-world and for Sartre Being-free-from-the-world.  It reveals for Heidegger our fundamental ontological relationship with the world and for Sartre our fundamental ontological isolation from it.