Gelassenheit, the Middle Voice, and the Unity of Heidegger’s Thought

It has been a common trope to characterize Heidegger’s development as a turn away from the active, voluntarist resoluteness of his early work to the passive, submissive releasement of his later works. However, the term Gelassenheit appears over a hundred times throughout Heidegger’s corpus. There are passages in his early period in which this term calls into question any univocal prioritization of activity, and passages in his later period in which it calls into question any univocal prioritization of passivity. For both the early and late Heidegger, Gelassenheit must be understood not in terms of the active or passive voices, but in terms of the middle voice. Heidegger’s work in this regard can contribute to efforts to twist free of metaphysical binaries like activity and passivity.