Freedom in the Thought of Martin Heidegger

Abstract

The question of freedom occupies a central yet profoundly transformative position within the philosophical project of Martin Heidegger, undergoing radical reconceptualization across the trajectory of his thinking. While the Western metaphysical tradition has predominantly understood freedom as a property of the will, a capacity for choice, or a political right belonging to the human subject, Heidegger's lifelong engagement with the question of Being systematically dismantles these conventional frameworks and repositions freedom as the very condition for the disclosure of Being itself. This article traces the evolution of Heidegger's conception of freedom through three major phases of his thought, examining how the existential analytic of Being and Time reveals freedom as authentic self-choice in the face of finitude, how the middle period ontologizes freedom as the essence of truth and the ground of transcendence, and how the later thinking conceives freedom as releasement and correspondence to the event of appropriation. The central research question guiding this investigation concerns the inner coherence and transformation of Heidegger's understanding of freedom across these phases, as well as the troubling relation between his profound philosophical meditations on freedom and his political entanglement with National Socialism. The analysis demonstrates that despite significant shifts in terminology and emphasis, Heidegger's thinking remains faithful to the insight that freedom is not a human possession but the event of openness within which human existence first becomes possible. This conception challenges the modern project of technological mastery and opens the possibility of a more originary mode of dwelling that lets beings be. The article concludes by considering the implications of Heidegger's radical rethinking of freedom for contemporary philosophical debates concerning agency, technology, and the relation between human existence and the self-concealing ground of Being.