Individuation, responsiveness, translation

Heidegger's ethics

Eric S. Nelson

pp. 269-290

in: Frank Schalow (ed), Heidegger, translation, and the task of thinking, Berlin, Springer, 2011

Abstract

Heidegger's Being and Time has been criticized for ignoring the social and ethical dimensions of human existence. After discussing the possibility of an "ethics of individuation," it is argued that Heidegger is not concerned with developing a social or moral philosophy as such but with the question of how individuation (Vereinzelung), within the horizon of the question of being (Sein), is possible given the predominance of the social and the fallenness of the public sphere. The priority of the question concerning the individuation of Dasein – and its explication through the alterity of uncanniness, facticity, and death in relation to the identity of tradition and the "they" – provides a basis for rethinking the significance of the ethical in Being and Time, particularly in light of Heidegger's project of a hermeneutics of facticity. Insofar as Heidegger unfolds the finitude and facticity of the ethical, as a question to which ethical thinking must respond, Heidegger intimates an ethics of facticity.

Cited authors

Heidegger Martin