THE ESSENCE OF TRUTH
a place which is free from trees, which gives free access for going through and looking through. Lighting up therefore means making-free, giving-free. Light lights up, makes-free, provides a way through. The dark bars the way, does not allow things to show themselves, conceals them. That the dark becomes lit up means: it goes over into light, the dark is made to give-free.
The light lights up. Thus to see in light means to comport myself in advance to what gives-free. What gives-free is the freeing, free-making. To see in light means to become free for what makes-free, to which I comport myself. In this comportment I am able to be authentically free, i.e. I can acquire power by binding myself to what lets-through. Such binding is not loss of power, but a taking into one's possession. This explains the interrelation between light and freedom.
§ 8. Freedom and Beings. The Illuminating View as Projection of Being (Exemplified by Nature, History, Art and Poetry)
Now to the third question: what is the interrelation between freedom and being?
Becoming free means binding oneself to what is genuinely illuminating, to what makes-free and lets-through, 'the light'. But the light symbolizes the idea. The idea contains and gives being. Seeing the ideas means understanding the what-being and how-being, the being of beings. Becoming free for the light means to let a light come on,13 to understand being and essence, and thus to experience beings as such. The understanding of being gives-free beings themselves as such; only in this understanding can beings be beings. Beings in any possible region can only be encountered, can only come closer or recede, because of the freedom that gives-free. Therefore the essence of freedom, briefly stated, is the illuminating view: to allow, in advance, a light to come on, and to bind oneself to this. Only from and in freedom (its essence understood as we have developed it) do beings become more beingful, because being this or that. Becoming free means understanding being as such, which understanding first of all lets beings as beings be. Whether beings become more beingful or less beingful is therefore up to the freedom of man.14 Freedom is measured according to the primordiality, breadth, and decisiveness of the binding, i.e. this individual grasping himself as being-there [Da-sein], set back