The distinctive contribution of Heidegger and the Will: On the Way to Gelassenheit is to relocate the will—willing, deferred willing, covert willing, and the possibility of non-willing—at the very center of Heidegger’s path of thought, and to do so by reconstructing the movement of that path from within Heidegger’s own texts. It shows that the question of the will, first left implicit and then thematized in unstable ways, eventually becomes the axis of a mature critique of the technological “will to will,” while also exposing persisting residues that test the coherence of the proposed releasement. The scholarly stake is a comprehensive, immanent account of how Gelassenheit gathers, transforms, and sometimes fails to transfigure prior determinations of will along Heidegger’s Denkweg—from Being and Time to “Time and Being.”
The book opens by declaring a lacuna in the secondary literature: despite the proliferation of monographs on Heidegger, no study had followed the problem of the will in a sustained way across the whole path from the early analyses to the late meditations. The author frames his task as a close, critical reading that “explicates the very movement (Bewegung) of [Heidegger’s] Denkweg,” arguing that the topic is not restricted to the late critique of the technological will but is coextensive with the question of the relation between being and the human as such. The dual sense of the problematic—both a theme Heidegger interrogates and a temptation to which his thought at times succumbs—motivates a method of immanent critique that follows the tensions of the texts themselves.
The outer frame of the study is signaled in its architecture. The introductory exposition on Gelassenheit situates the book’s horizon; preliminary determinations of key terms and distinctions set the conceptual scene; then come a sequence of investigations that track the will as it becomes ambiguous in Being and Time, intensifies into a mid-thirties embrace, is reinterpreted through encounters with Schelling and Eckhart, and is then subjected to an explicit critique that searches for ways of non-willing; this culminates in a sustained engagement with persistent residues—eschatological, historical-systematic, and theological—that complicate releasement. The table of contents itself mirrors this movement from “The Will, Non-Willing, and the Domain of the Will” through “The Ambiguous Role of the Will in Being and Time,” “The Turn Through an Embrace of the Will,” the Eckhart excursus, “The Mature Critique of the Will,” “Twisting Free of the Domain of the Will,” “Intimations of Being in the Region of Non-Willing,” “Residues of Will,” and, finally, “The Persistence of Ur-Willing, the Dissonant Excess of Evil, and the Enigma of Human Freedom.” The whole is framed by an introduction that names Gelassenheit as a task rather than an achieved resting place.
From the outset the book’s central claim is precise: the problem of the will traverses Heidegger’s work in three phases—initially unthematized, then thematized without adequate problematization, and finally criticized with increasing explicitness. The implication is methodological: to understand the Seinsfrage one must explicate the dynamics of the will that shape the basic attunements of the thinking that asks that question. The argument thus refuses to displace the question of being; it insists that the Seinsfrage is bound up with the will’s forms and deformations, and that the relation of being and human being is grasped most sharply when the will’s role in that relation is exposed, constrained, and, where possible, transfigured.
The initial movement treats Gelassenheit as an old word transformed. Without confusing Heidegger’s usage with its historical baggage, the book clarifies how Gelassenheit functions as a name for a comportment beyond the duality of activity and passivity, a releasement that “lets beings be” in a sense prior to control and refusal alike. The interpretive labor here is to distinguish this thinking from theological deferential models of surrender, while acknowledging semantic proximities to medieval sources and to post-Stoic vocabularies of calm or detachment. The study shows Heidegger explicitly distancing his thought from mystically framed will-negations by treating him as attempting a post-metaphysical sense of releasement that answers to the history of being rather than to the will of a highest being.
With these stakes clarified, the book enters the first decisive knot: the “unsaid” of Being and Time. The thesis is exacting: Being and Time exhibits a fundamental, largely implicit ambiguity regarding the will, an ambiguity that helps explain both a subsequent voluntarist detour and later resources for non-willing. The text is nearly silent about willing as ontologically decisive, yet its central figure of resoluteness can be read in deeply different keys—either as a primacy of decisive willing or as an interruption in which a more originary letting shows through. The author rehearses the now familiar tensions of the Dasein-analysis—thrownness and projection, futural appropriation and anticipatory resoluteness—but insists that the will’s status within this weave is insufficiently clarified by the text and thus becomes a lever point for divergent developments.
A pivotal exegetical moment is the explication of early “letting-be” in the analysis of readiness-to-hand. On one side, the encounter with equipment is said to require a prior freeing that lets beings be discovered as what they are, suggesting that willing presupposes a non-willful opening. On the other, what is “let” in that discovery is the equipmental relevance-structure oriented by Dasein’s for-the-sake-of-which, a horizon that makes beings available “ready-for-willing.” The book brings these strands together to show the deep ambivalence: a proto-Gelassenheit seems to ground all comportment, yet the teleology of involvement tends toward a practical horizon in which willing claims priority in all that matters. The ambiguity is thus constitutive rather than merely rhetorical.
This ambiguity becomes historically fateful in the next sequence, where the locus of authenticity migrates from the singular Dasein toward communal destiny. The book reconstructs the textual relay by which individual fate is re-inscribed within the destiny of a people, and then shows how this relocation facilitates a political rhetoric in which sacrifice of one’s will becomes the authentic assertion of “the one great will of the state,” unified in the leader. The documentation is unflinching: the speeches during the rectorate are adduced as the “absolute zero point” of thinking with respect to the problem of the will—invocations of the “towering willing of our Führer” and of a single resolve that welds the people to the state’s will. The analysis is not merely archival; it displays how self-assertion, sacrifice, destiny, and leadership align into a single voluntarist field.
Yet the composition sequence is not a simple slide from philosophy to politics and back again. The careful claim is that the embrace of willing begins before 1933 and lingers after it, even as the path turns. By situating the rectoral texts within a longer “turn through an embrace of the will,” the book makes clear that the later rigor against will has a biographical and conceptual necessity: only after the decisive exposure to willing’s disguises does the critique achieve its sharpness. Thus the work’s middle chapters do not disown the early analyses; they reread them as propaedeutic—precisely the site where the necessity of interrupting willing becomes thinkable.
The interpretive hinge is the multi-faceted analysis of “the domain of the will.” The author refuses a thin faculty-psychology and instead reconstructs will as a fundamental attunement that underlies modern subjectivity and its representational comportment. Within this domain he distinguishes explicit willing, not-willing as reactive refusal, deferred willing as deference to a higher will, and covert willing as the hidden self-assertion that persists in gestures of abnegation. What this typology accomplishes is an internal map of Heidegger’s own oscillations: it becomes possible to show, for example, how a call to relinquish private will in the name of the people’s will is a transformation within the same domain; and likewise, how an ascetic “not-willing” risks remaining essentially willful by negation. This terminological work, laid down at the beginning, makes the later immanent criticism precise rather than merely moralizing.
The engagement with Meister Eckhart is exemplary of the book’s method. The excursus does not reduce Heidegger’s releasement to Eckhart’s detachment, nor does it assimilate Eckhart to a simple theology of surrender. Instead, it follows Heidegger’s cautious appropriation: acknowledgment of Eckhart’s depth, refusal to be bound by the medieval horizon, and a re-articulation of Gelassenheit beyond the will of God and the passivity of quietism. By also tracking how Eckhart’s own later sermons press beyond deferential models toward a more radical detachment, the book clarifies both the inspiration and the limit of theological analogies for non-willing. Gelassenheit is thereby presented as a tripartite movement—release from willful subjectivity, opening to what lets human being be, and return into engaged comportment that lets beings be—without collapsing into either passivity or heteronomous obedience.
The analysis of the mature critique of will is anchored in the exposure of the technological “will to will,” the enframing that orders beings as resources and even “wills” human beings without their experiencing the essence of that will. Against this horizon, the author’s claim is that the later thinking does not call for retreat from technology but calls for a comportment that lets devices enter daily life while also leaving them outside—an “engaged releasement” that neither masters nor resigns. The book underscores how the later Heidegger speaks of releasement as a higher activity rather than a mere suspension of action, and how he binds the possibility of non-willing to a different hearing of being’s address. What emerges is an account in which the most profound meaning of being has the character of letting, and freedom shows itself as a letting-be that precedes and grounds all willing.
At this point the composition sequence loops back to the beginning. The preliminary distinctions prepared the reading of Being and Time; the political detour and Schelling-Eckhart arc prepared the later critique; now the book undertakes what it calls “twisting free of the domain of the will.” The argument is not that the will is simply banished; rather, the search is for an other beginning in which thinking, dwelling, and building proceed without the representational and compulsive traits of willful subjectivity. The discussion of letting-be as an originary form of freedom, the insistence on thinking as a higher activity, and the care taken to avoid reinstalling a hidden voluntarism together serve to depict non-willing as a rigorous comportment rather than a vacancy.
A striking strength of the book is its refusal to stop with this constructive account. The penultimate and final chapters dwell on “residues of will” that persist even in the thinking of non-willing. Three critical sites structure the argument: first, the risk that human beings end up deferring their will to being and that this deference reproduces the logic of the domain of will in another key; second, the danger that “the history of being” functions as a covert will to unity or system, re-gathering epochs into a single line that happens to lead to the thinker who narrates it; third, the persistence of eschatological structures—the will to finality in the idea of an “other beginning”—that reintroduce a goal-setting posture into a discourse of releasement. The book neither caricatures the late thought nor excuses these residues; it reads them as sites of unresolved tension that demand further work if releasement is to avoid becoming will by other means.
The most delicate of these residues concerns eschatology. In Contributions to Philosophy there remains a language of seeking that “sets goals,” a unique historical goal bound to the emergence of a new beginning. The analysis acknowledges how this “seeking” is defined as caretaking and preservation rather than domination; nevertheless, the very grammar of setting and singularity risks reinscribing finality, especially when coupled with claims about the privileged role of the few and rare. The book neither collapses Heidegger into Hegel nor dismisses the difference; instead, it shows how the late insistence on the finitude of thinking and the provisionality of paths works against the grain of any totalizing recollection, even as the temptation toward univocity remains visible. The result is a portrait of a thinking that repeatedly wipes away the residues it itself raises.
Equally searching is the treatment of covert willing in the narration of “the history of being.” The study notes the structural risk that a discourse of destiny may mask a will to gather and center, and it tests this risk by following lines that privilege Greek inception, German retrieval, and the thinker’s own position within the sequence. The pressure here is not polemical but diagnostic: a call to vigilance lest any history that intimates releasement rely on the very desire for unity that belongs to the domain it aims to exceed. The suggested corrective is not fragmentation for its own sake, but a patient attention to plurality in the sendings of being and to the finitude of every itinerary—including Heidegger’s.
What, then, is the comprehensive picture that emerges from the whole composition? First, the book justifies its initial claim that the problem of the will is “the problem of problems” along Heidegger’s path. By uncovering the will’s implicit status in Being and Time, tracking its mid-period intensifications and theological entanglements, and then exhibiting its late exposure and partial transfiguration, the argument secures the thesis that one cannot understand the later discourse of Gelassenheit without this itinerary. Second, the book’s immanent method shows its force: rather than importing external categories, it lets Heidegger’s own terms become the sites of critique and transformation—resoluteness, self-assertion, destiny, letting-be, and releasement each undergo reinterpretation as the path advances. Third, the book clarifies the political and ethical stakes: the seductions of will—self-assertive, sacrificial, and systemic—are intelligible only when the domain of the will is laid bare; likewise, the possibility of a higher activity beyond willing appears only when the history of those seductions is confronted in detail.
Finally, the study closes by refusing a false peace. If Gelassenheit names a way, then being “on the way” belongs to the very essence of the proposal. The author therefore ends by reopening questions: whether any transition beyond the metaphysics of will can be complete; how the recalcitrant facticity of evil and the enigma of human freedom enter the picture; and whether non-willing can sustain concrete forms of action without relapse into compulsion or quietism. These are not afterthoughts; they sharpen the book’s central insight that releasement is a disciplined, enacted attunement—an attentive letting-be—whose integrity depends on the ongoing exposure of every residue of will that would secretly reassert itself under the name of destiny, history, or ultimate goal. In this sense the book remains faithful to its frame: we are still, at best, on the way to Gelassenheit, and the way requires both conceptual clarity and an unflagging readiness to interrogate the will’s disguises whenever, and wherever, they reappear.
If the present account has emphasized difficulties, it has done so in the spirit of the book’s own method: to follow the inner logic of Heidegger’s struggles so that what is most promising in the late thought—Gelassenheit as a higher activity beyond the horizon of the will—can be distinguished from the ambiguities that surround it. By making that distinction rigorous across the whole path, this study changes how one reads both the politics and the philosophy: it returns the will to the center as the very question through which releasement becomes thinkable, and it keeps that question open so that thinking may remain released to what lets it be.
Simon Gros 
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