Heidegger Circle Proceedings

Heidegger’s critique of ethics has been interpreted as an abolition of the ethical that nihilistically precludes the possibility of ethics. Yet Heidegger questioned ethics as systematizing discourses about hierarchies of values, prescriptions, norms, and axioms cut off from their worldly and factical contexts. I argue that this questioning of rule-based ethics does not necessarily entail a denial of the ethical, since it has its own ethical preoccupations in the sense of reflection on practical activity (praxis) and the formal indication of how Dasein factically exists. This reading is supported by Heidegger’s later depiction of the ethical as the ethos of an originary dwelling. Further, Heidegger’s practice of thinking indicates and enacts the ethical as confrontation and responsive encounter: (1) even if he did not formulate an ethical system, a universal prescriptive principle, or a moral code; and (2) despite his own undeniable ethical failures. This promising yet underdeveloped ethical dimension is visible both in the style, method, and event of his philosophizing and in his attention to the issue of individuation in the context of the Dasein’s conformity to the power of everydayness and the social. Individuation, a primary issue of Being and Time and other works of the 1920’s, occurs through the attuned comportment and understanding that Dasein each time is, yet as individuation it takes place in being-with others. The identity and difference of human existence is formed in social comportment and understanding—in addressing and being addressed, in the interdependent and interpretive setting apart of encountering and being encountered, in the responsive confrontation, differentiation, and separation of Auseinandersetzung.

Hubert L. Dreyfus’ interpretation of Heidegger’s existential analytic of Dasein results in a communitarian understanding of human sociality, ethics, and politics. My contention is that, despite Dreyfus’ own best intentions for a communal toleration based on an ontological relativism and openness, his reading of social practices as embedded and therefore beyond reason must result in a fundamental division between cultures that cannot be bridged by rational means. According to my own interpretation of Heidegger’s politics, this conclusion is disturbing, because it echoes — albeit unintentionally —Heidegger’s attack on Enlightenment liberalism and his support for a politics of finite situatedness, a politics characterized by polemos, that is, confrontation and the harsh differentiation of one community from another. I contend that Dreyfus’ ontological communitarianism undermines the view that reason in ethics and politics can allow us to transcend our finitude and resolve our differences through a rational process, and that therefore an actual politics based on his principles will end up destroying the very openness he supports. I conclude by suggesting that we need to reconcile reason with finitude in a nuanced dialectic.

This paper examines the significance of Aristotelian desire (orexis) for the onto-genesis of Dasein as care (Sorge). In an early Marburg lecture course devoted to Aristotle, Grundbegriffe der aristotelischen Philosophie, Heidegger claims that Dasein is determined by two fundamental possibilities of movement; flight (phug!) and pursuit (airesis). Both possibilities reflect Aristotle’s exposition of orexis in De Anima and become appropriated by Heidegger to orient the primordial relation of Dasein to its thrown facticity. As the origin of movement in living beings, orexis sufficiently problematizes the ontological caesura separating Dasein from animality.

Since the publication of Heidegger’s 1936-38 collection of reflections titled Beiträge zur Philosophie (Vom Ereignis) in 1989, there has been a trend in Heidegger studies to overstate the significance of the notion of das Ereignis in his thought. To be sure, Heidegger considered that his arrival at the name Ereignis was an important event in his thinking and that this particular word had a special power and nuance to make manifest die Sache selbst, the fundamental matter for thought. Even so, there is neither sufficient nor convincing textual evidence to maintain that he ever considered Ereignis as a more fundamental matter for thought than das Sein, that is, Being thought in an originary and fundamental way as the finite and negatived unconcealing of beings (das Seiende) in their beingness (die Seiendheit) as made manifest meaningfully by Dasein in language. (Note that I retain the convention of writing Being (with a capital B) for this usage only.) In fact, to the contrary, he was clear and emphatic right to the end of his life that the single, defining concern of his path of thinking was about the originary, fundamental, unifying meaning of Being, named by him over the many years Beyng (das Seyn), Being itself (das Sein selbst), Being as such (das Sein als solches), and Being as Being (das Sein als Sein). Certainly, there is no denying the importance of the notion of Ereignis in his thought, but its significance has been overworked and overstated by several Heidegger scholars in recent years. In other words, I think that if we examine Heidegger’s words carefully, we find that he understood Ereignis to be (only) another name for Being itself.