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The decision to translate Heidegger into English is in many respects a difficult one. Not simply because Heidegger’s thought remains irreducibly tied to language and to a certain artisanal craft of writing – a “Hand-werk der Schrift,” as he calls it in “The Letter on ‘Humanism’”¹ – but also because English, to all appearances, at least, was not a language Heidegger particularly esteemed. This would be philosophically irrelevant were it not for the utmost significance Heidegger himself ascribes to “the essential danger” that the “English-American” language poses, a threat to nothing less than the “shrine” of being in which “the essence of the human is held in store.”² It is difficult to overlook, then, a certain irony at the heart of any English translation of Heidegger, particularly of a Heidegger text, such as The Metaphysics of German Idealism, dating back to the early 1940s, when Heidegger’s most explicit condemnation of English takes place. Would it not be an ontological disaster to translate the thinker of this ontological disaster precisely into the language in which this disaster is supposed to unfold?

Yet we maintain that such an undertaking is nevertheless in keeping with another Heidegger, more open to a non-Greek other and capable of writing – in 1946 – that “in the most diverse ways, being speaks everywhere and always, through all language,” even, dare we say, the English language?³

Translated here in its entirety for the first time is volume forty-nine of Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe or “Collected Works,” a volume comprised of a lecture course delivered at the University of Freiburg in the first trimester of 1941 and of material for a seminar held there in the summer semester of that year. Previously, excerpts from this volume, occasionally revised, had appeared in the appendix to Heidegger’s first lecture course on Schelling from 1936, whose 1971 publication (English 1985) was overseen by Heidegger himself.⁴ As indicated by the title of the present volume, here Heidegger again takes up Schelling’s 1809 treatise on freedom, which, he argues, marks the peak of German Idealism. Only, this time, Heidegger more explicitly distinguishes his own thought from that of his German predecessor, whose work he situates within the continuum of Western metaphysics. Along the way, taking up Schelling’s important distinction between ground and existence, Heidegger provides an extensive history of the concepts of existence and ground, with detailed discussions of Jaspers, Kierkegaard, Hegel, and his own opus magnum Being and Time – including its unpublished third division.

The style of the present volume is uneven. Some of the material appears as fully worked-out prose. Other portions resemble notes. We have endeavored to remain faithful to the character of the text, at the expense of occasional inelegance or grammatical incompleteness.

The reader can consult the glossaries to see how we have typically rendered Heidegger’s terminology, but there are four sets of terms which we believe it will prove helpful to discuss in advance.

1. We have rendered the noun das Sein as “being” and the nominalized present participle das Seiende as “beings,” “the being,” or “that which is.” When it is unclear in the English which is meant, as in the phrases “the being {Sein} that human Dasein itself is” and “the proper being {Seiende} in itself,” we have, as here, inserted the German. Heidegger’s use of the archaic German spelling Seyn has been translated by the obsolete English beyng. Since, in Schelling’s time, Seyn, with a “y,” was standard, we have used “being” when translating authors from that period, although here too we have included the German. The abstract Seiendheit appears as “beingness.” Although, in Schelling’s later philosophy, which Heidegger occasionally references, Schelling does not use Sein and Seiendes in the same way Heidegger does, we thought it important to maintain terminological consistency. In cases where confusion might result, we have interpolated the German.

2. Heidegger uses numerous words for existence and for the human being in particular. In order to keep them apart, we have, with two exceptions, consistently rendered Existenz as “existence,” Ex-sistenz as “ex-sistence,” existenzial as “existential,” existenziell as “existentiell,” Mensch as “human,” and Menschsein as “the being of the human,” “human being” (no article), or, in one instance, “being-human.” (In two cases, in which we include the German, it seemed more appropriate to translate das Existenzielle in Schelling as “the existential.”) Unless indicated by a German interpolation, we have, as in point 1, left Dasein and Da-sein in the original. In § 11, θ, Heidegger claims this term is “untranslatable,” although he does provide – translating from within German, as it were – an explanation as to how one should understand it, which we reproduce here:

The word “Da” {there, here}, the “Da,” means precisely this clearing for Sein {being}. The essence of Da-sein is to be this “Da.” The human takes this on, namely, to be the Da, insofar as he exists {…}. What is meant is not “Dasein” in the sense of the presence of a thing or of the human that is here and there and “da”; rather, what is being thought is “Da-sein,” that the clearing for being in general essences and is (p. 47).

3. The verb essences translates the rare verb wesen, which, in its noun form, Wesen, means “essence.” Although Wesen can refer to a being, as in the term Lebewesen, “creature” or “living being,” we have either translated it as “essence” or, when not, supplied the German, since this is a crucial term for both Heidegger and Schelling. Heidegger occasionally accentuates the verbal character of the word with the noun Wesung, which we have translated by “essencing.” “Presencing” and “to presence” translate Anwesung and anwesen.

4. Heidegger exploits the etymology of numerous words built on the root verb stellen, “to place.” Darstellen appears as “presenting” or, when hyphenated, as “presenting forth”; Vorstellen appears as “representing” or, when hyphenated, as “re-presenting,” although one should bear in mind that it also has the literal spatial sense of “placing before”; Herstellen appears as “producing”; and Zustellen as “delivering.”

Since Heidegger uses both parentheses and square brackets, we have placed all of our notes and interpolations in curly brackets. We have also included, in the margins, the pagination of the original German.⁵ For foreign phrases that cannot readily be found in a lexicon, we have provided common translations in footnotes. For individual Greek and Latin words, we have supplied, at the end of the volume, a lexicon with typical translations. Readers consulting the lexicon should bear in mind that it is intended as a resource for beginning to work through Heidegger’s own use and interpretation of these words, not as a replacement or definitive rendering.

Following Anglophone conventions, we have italicized foreign words and phrases. When Heidegger himself emphasizes them, or when the words are already emphasized in material he is quoting, we have added underlining. In his citations of Leibniz, several words are written gesperrt, spaced out for emphasis. We have retained this spacing in order to distinguish it from other types of emphasis. Words appearing in Greek script have been transliterated.

We would like to thank Katie Chenoweth, Tobias Keiling, Richard Polt, Philipp Schwab, Tim Steinebach, and two anonymous reviewers for their helpful comments on the translation.

Ian Alexander Moore Rodrigo Therezo

1 1. Martin Heidegger, “Brief über den ‘Humanismus,’” in Wegmarken, Gesamtausgabe vol. 9, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1976), p. 344.

2 2. Heidegger, Hölderlins Hymne “Der Ister,” Gesamtausgabe vol. 53, ed. Walter Biemel (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1984), pp. 80–81.

3 3. Heidegger, “Der Spruch des Anaximander,” in Holzwege, Gesamtausgabe vol. 5, ed. Friedrich-Wilhelm von Herrmann (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 1977), p. 338 (emphasis added).

4 4. Martin Heidegger, Schellings Abhandlung über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit (1809), ed. Hildegard Feick (Tübingen: Max Niemeyer, 1971) / Schelling’s Treatise on the Essence of Human Freedom, trans. Joan Stambaugh (Athens: Ohio University Press, 1985).

5 5. Martin Heidegger, Die Metaphysik des deutschen Idealismus. Zur erneuten Auslegung von Schelling: Philosophische Untersuchungen über das Wesen der menschlichen Freiheit und die damit zusammenhängenden Gegenstände (1809), Gesamtausgabe vol. 49, ed. Günter Seubold, 2nd edn. (Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klostermann, 2006).