Guilt, Ground, and Truth: Authenticity as Freedom

The fifth and final chapter brings together the texts that have caused the most confusion in the secondary literature in order to explain Heidegger’s conception of freedom in a unified and clear way. This chapter provides the conception of freedom in full, but has required the contextualisation of the previous chapters in order to make it possible. The ultimate argument is that Dasein is literally able to not be itself and that this state is unfree. Freedom is when Dasein is able to choose to be the sort of being that it is: a being that has no predetermined nature, is only a possibility, and has no future other than the one it chooses to create.