I'd written a rather longish post relating Heidegger's analysis of Kant in various places with Kant's compatibilism and especially Kant's notion of spontaneity which was frequently criticized by Heidegger. However, rereading it, I decided it meandered far too much and wasn't as clear as I wanted to be. So instead let me just make a few assertions of what I think Heidegger is saying. If you need me to justify them in Heidegger, I can try to do it for the places you think are problematic.
1. Primordial freedom is that which is wrested from its hiddenness and obscurity. This can be beings uncovered for Dasein or Dasein's own disclosedness of itself for itself. This is also how freedom and truth are related. Freedom is literally freeing "entities" from their veil and making them manifest. That which is unhidden or unveiled is true. Thus freedom is letting beings be. (Thus the parallel to Kant who sees spontaneity of knowing as letting beings be objects)
2. Primordial freedom is transcendence. This is the groundlessness of primordial grounding. Being and ground are the same. But because it is groundless it is an abyss. It is thus determined by nothing. But this is not being determined by nothing, such as one finds in Analytic philosophical analysis of freedom. Rather it is literally being determined by nothing. One must change the emphasis in the statement to see what Heidegger is saying. Being as primordial grounding is archē. Being, in its sending, thus doesn't have laws but is law. This is constrained by nothing outside itself.
3. Freedom for Dasein is freedom to be itself. That is to let the self be the self that it is. Dasein thus must choose to let itself be free. In Being and Time this freedom is free for being-to-death. That is free to accept its finitude.
4. Freedom is thus a choice between authenticity and inauthenticity. This choice is thus to be lost in "everydayness" or to allow the self to manifest itself as itself.
5. The choice in (4) does not require conscious choice. It does not require deliberation of reasons. It is not directed towards a being or an end (in the sense of a state of affairs present to ones mind). It thus can not be said to be a Libertarian choice. Rather it is simply leaving oneself in inauthenticity and unfreedom or to accept oneself and unveil it. The choice is thus merely accept ones self or reject oneself.
6. Choice or freedom in terms of spontaneity we will call Kantian freedom. Kantian freedom, beyond being trapped in terms of causality and a directedness towards beings, assumes that the agent is an already constituted self. (Whether in a grounded sense, as with the compatibilists, or an ungrounded sense, as with the Libertarians) For Heidegger choice achieves the self in authenticity. That is a huge difference.
7. Because when our selves are manifest we chose to manifest the self (freedom as truth) this imposes an obligation on the self. The fact we can be free and we can be free as we transcend. This can be seen as Heidegger taking a Kantian notion of freedom as the imposition of necessity on the self. This is thus a self-imposed necessity. (See Kant and the Problem of Metaphysics, 142) ". . . the submissive surrender to . . . is pure receptivity, the free imposition of the law upon oneself is pure spontaneity. . . " (ibid, 146)
All of this to me suggests that Libertarian freedom with its focus on things present to a determined constituted ego which are deliberated over with no future is impossible to line up with Heidegger's thought. Future is fundamental for existence in Heidegger and freedom is a kind of imposition of determination on a self of the self with no reference to beings.
It's late. I was going to go back to The Metaphysical Foundations of Logic tonight, but I'll probably save that for first thing in the morning.
Clark: You fail to deal with Kant's categorical freedom which is our noumenal freedom in a libertarian sense. "Freedom of spontaneity" is not true freedom for Kant of the kind demanded by the moral law. Indeed, as you acknowledge it assumes a form of determinism. Yet Kant was no compatiblist!
You are correct that for Kant our acts are directed by reason and duty as objects. However, what is essential to LFW to be incompatibilistic is not necessarily reasons directedness or deliberation but choice among options that are genuinely open -- and for Heidegger that is what the choice to be authentic or inauthentic achieves. There is an openness to this choice so that there are open alternatives -- and that is all that is needed to establish the argument for the incompatiblity of foreknoweldge and free will (which is where this discussion began -- remember?).
Moreover, it bears noting critically that the choice to be authentic or inauthentic is not the only choice. We still choose and deliberate and act for reasons -- and while the quality of these choices (i.e, whether inauthentic or authentic) is determined by a way of being, the specific choices are not. I can still choose to hit my neighbor in the face as either an authenic Dasein or inauthentic -- and it is a choice just the same.
Blake, that's because I'm dealing with it as Heidegger deals with it.
Sorry, I was going to type more than the above, but then a baby started crying.
I think that thinking of authentic or inauthentic as a quality perhaps isn't the best way to think about it. Certainly we can speak of non-primordial choices. But the point is that freedom as analyzed in the Libertarian fashion is as much an error as is the Kantian fashion.
With regards to openness, it is a mistake to equate the Libertarian sense of openness with the Heideggarian sense of openness.
Just as a link to anyone coming upon this page, half the discussion is in an earlier post.
Just to go back a few comments, you said Blake, "Indeed, as you acknowledge it assumes a form of determinism. Yet Kant was no compatiblist!" Exactly why do you say Kant isn't a compatibilist? Now I'll be the first to admit my limitations with respect to Kant. I find him terribly difficult to read (yet simultaneously always intriguing).
Let me say what I think Kant's position is and you can tell me where you think I'm incorrect.
There's a cahin of events external to the agent, related causally. They then enter the agent leading to motives, to will and then to actions of the agent. Kant argues that the causal chain is efficient causality when external to the agent. The causal chain between motive and will and thence to acts is spontaneously determined. (Thus Heidegger's critique of spontaneity) Now Kant thinks in his sponteneity he avoids all the normal problems against free will. But Kant can't say free choices are due to reason, since that would be efficient causality, which he's trying to avoid. Yet his spontaneity, while trying to avoid determinism, ends up falling prey to causality that is determined.
Usually when I've read about it (admittedly not extensively) it is called a compatibilism that tries to avoid compatibilism.
Just to add, where I think Kant and Heidegger agree is that freedom is grounded in the self (the noumenal self for Kant) that we are responsible for. That is responsibility comes out of our self being essential mine. Within the self causality does not apply (like in Heidegger's consideration of primordality "essentially prior to" the notion of "cause."). Thus freedom can't be seen to be possible, due to the way causality works in the world around us, but is there in the nouemenal world. This parallels Heidegger as I've tried to discuss Heidegger in the two threads.
Clark: I say that Kant is a libertarian and not a compatibilist because that is by far and away the interpretation of him given by Kantian scholars. For Kant the moral law and our ability to conform our will to the demands of moral duty require what he calls categorical freedom -- the ability to do otherwise (among other things). Kant realizes that when dealing with phenomena (things as they appear) we are dealing with a deterministic assumption. However, when we are dealing in the noumenal (things as they really are and in which we participate because we really are) categorical freedom is required. The notion of freedom is thus a priori -- it cannot be gained through mere phenomenal experience (which may be why a phenomenal analysis won't get us there). A good introduction to Kant's views on moral autonomy, obligation and free will is found in J. B. Schneewind's "Autonomy, obligation, and virtue: An overview of Kant's moral philosophy," in The Cambridge Companion to Kant, pp. 309-41. I have not looked at how Heidegger reads Kant on this issue, but if he saw him as a determinist he got him wrong.
The problem with this, as I understand it, is that this position of Kant's is intrinsically impossible unless he is a compatibilist. Either Kant is inconsistent and thus simply wrong, or else he is arguing that there are simply two views. The way I have heard Kant's position explained is that Kant is taking an approach somewhat like Davidson does at times. Simply that the language of actions and the language of physics can't be translated between each other. That is there is no law-like connection between action descriptions and physical descriptions.
The other way to take it, as I understand it, is that Kant doesn't claim we can ever know that it obtains. That is because freedom is noumenal we can't ever know it since we can't know the noumenal. Thus since we can't know if we are free Kant's position ends up being that if we need to presuppose we're free (for his ethics) then we must do so, even if it is logically incompatible with determinism.
Just to add, once again I'm no Kant expert, but I checked these claims and there definitely are many philosophers who assert this. His position seems to be more a pragmatic one. If you need to believe you are free you should believe you are free. This only makes sense if we have that Davidson-like dual language system.
Clark: Kant believed in the primacy of reason. He sees categorical freedom as a necessary postulate to make sense of our ability to deliberate and think rationally at all. We could not operate as rational creatures unless we operated under the idea of such categorical freedom. So I agree that it is a pragmatic view of the necessity of categorical freedom for us to be rational and deliberating creatures who operate under the moral law of duty. As you can tell, I agree with Kant that categorical freedom is a necessary condition for rationality and moral obligation; however, I also believe that our choosing among options is given as the very basis for experience in the ability to think this rather than that. I believe that it is given in experience that the will is perfectly active and that if we can will at all then we have the power of alternative willing. So I disagree with Kant that the phenomenal world leads us to a deterministic law-like world. But Kant lived in a Copernican and Newtonian world. I do not -- and with the advent of QM and chaos theories I believe that we can see that science doesn't (necessarily) presuppose determinism as a way of proceeding in method as Kant thought.
Just for the record I'm not agreeing with Kant, only Heidegger, who rethinks through Kant.
Just to clarify, now that I reread the comments a few years later. (Someone linked here from a New Cool Thang. It's certainly the case that when discussing freedom Kant talks as a Libertarian. The problem is that in terms of the outside Kant endorses Newtonian determinism. So in a sense he's a classic compatibilist only the way he tries to have it both ways is far more audacious than most compatiblists like Leibniz. At least Leibniz and others reject LFW. Kant endorses it but (from what I can see) doesn't see it being a problem with the mechanics he's exposed to.
I wish I could take back the Davidson analogy since I think Davidson is doing something quite different in his distinction between the mental and physical. There the issue is primarily normative laws. In a sense one can read that into Kant but I don't think it works in the same way since I think Kant wants there to be an authentic freedom that goes beyond normativity.