Abstract

Heidegger believes that transcendence, the possibility of the experience of beings, should be understood as a kind of freedom. Heidegger wants to provide a new conception of freedom that, unlike Kant's account of the moral freedom, which is a negative explanation, is positive. Heidegger intends to consider freedom as an essential element in transcendence itself. In order to affirm this freedom, Heidegger stresses the power of imagination as a unitary source for our receptivity (finitude) and our spontaneity (freedom). Heidegger attempts to show that our faculties, which underlie truth, logic, and science, are founded in a radical freedom. According to Heidegger, Dasein is transcendence, and transcendence is the same as freedom, i.e. self-commitment or self-binding to what-is. Here, this last sentence must not be understood as a kind of ethical realism or resigning ourselves to present realities. Here what-is refers to Being as the origin of truth and objectivity.