Being and Freedom

If Heidegger was correct that the meaning of Being is time, then,

since time is the self-created freedom of every individual intelligence, 

the meaning of Being is the freedom of every individual intelligence.

Concerning the Second Premise: Creativity and Time

In the brute actuality of nature, the past does not exist and neither does futurity. However, the only way that an intelligence can engage with nature is by acts of primal creativity, namely by constructing internally-to-itself some orientation including bearings to an accumulating non-actual past and a rich mutable future full of possibilities and with some continuity with its constructed past and with nature. Every individual does that individually. Please see below, posting 54, February 6, 2013, Freedom and Time, especially paragraph three.

Concerning the First Premise

Although I am very far from being an authority on Heidegger, or even a disciple, reading Being and Time left permanent course alterations in my thinking about philosophy and about being an embodied intelligence in a life in the world.

Being and Time (Sein und Zeit), written by Martin Heidegger, Translated from German by John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson, Published by Harper & Row (1962), Library of Congress Catalog Card Number: 62-7289.

My specific source for “the meaning of being is time” as an interpretation of Being and Time is the great Rudiger Safranski:

Martin Heidegger: Between Good and Evil, written by Rudiger Safranski, translated from German by Ewald Osers, published by Harvard University Press (1999), ISBN 0-674-38710-4. See page 148 for “the meaning of Being is time”.

Taking this opportunity for a more general homage to Safranski: Reading these books, especially the translations by Ewald Osers, has been a high philosophical adventure. As Safranski documents, there have been wild years of philosophy, and there could be more.

Schopenhauer and the Wild Years of Philosophy, written by Rudiger Safranski, translated by Ewald Osers, Published by Harvard University Press (1991), ISBN-10: 0674792769, ISBN-13: 978-0674792760. This is history of philosophy at its most engaging and enlightening.

Nietzsche, A Philosophical Biography, written by Rudiger Safranski, translated by Shelley Frisch, published by W.W. Norton & Company Inc. (2002), ISBN 0-393-05008-4.

Copyright © 2014 Sandy MacDonald.