Towards ethics of precariousness: about the ethical trait of Being and time

Abstract

Heidegger did not dedicate his philosophical thinking to ethical questions and explicitly denied considering his major opus, Being and Time, as an ethical inquiry, a fact that has been interpreted by many critics as a symptom of a deep ethical failure at the heart of his ontological thinking. The recurrent criticism is that Heidegger's Being and Time avoids any ethical questioning by committing itself to the "existential solipsism" which isolates the authentically resolute self from the others, and by disregarding the requirement of a last foundation able to assure the ethical character of human actions in the world. This text argues that although Heidegger's Being and Time should not be viewed as an ethical treatise in the sense of metaphysics, it brings forth important ethical implications that may procure a post-metaphysical ethics, an ethics of precariousness. An ethics of precariousness does not depend on having access to first principles, foundations or inter-subjective proceedings aiming at transcendental criteria to evaluate and warrant the ethical character of one's actions in the world, since it is based on the acknowledgment of Dasein's essentially constitutive finitude. The consideration of "being-toward-death" as the most proper way of Dasein's being does not imply ethical irresponsibility toward others, but has as its positive consequence the liberation of friendship, understood as the proper mode of Dasein's ethical relation to otherness. Such a post-metaphysical ethics should inspire a cautious acting in the world as well as resistance against theoretical systems aiming at the foundation of absolute standards of morality. Keywords: Heidegger, Post-metaphysical ethics, Fundamental ontology, Otherness.