Abstract
It is often stated that the German twentieth-century philosopher Martin Heidegger never wrote an ethics while undertaking his critique and deconstruction of the Western tradition of metaphysics. It is, therefore, difficult to know what manner of normative ethics, if any, is consistent with his “hermeneutic of Dasein” such as articulated in his Being and Time. However, in his “Letter on Humanism,” Heidegger refers to the tragedies of Sophocles as “preserving the ēthos” more originally, thus better, than does Aristotle’s ethics. Hence, one may examine Sophocles’s tragedies guided by the hermeneutic Heidegger provides, especially through the concepts of authenticity and authentic selfhood. Doing so, it is argued here that Sophocles’s Philoctetes presents one such opportunity for moral understanding in the interplay of authenticity and inauthenticity, in particular through a study of the moral dilemma that Neoptolemus must resolve as he moves from a situation of inauthenticity to a display of authentic resolve.
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Notes
Some may argue that Heidegger’s own actions during the rule of National Socialism exemplify a problematic feature of Heidegger’s Dasein analytic. For my own thoughts on the early and more recent debate about “l’affaire Heidegger,” see my Heidegger’s Entscheidung: “Decision” between “Fate” and “Destiny” (Swazo, 2020b) and two articles referenced therein.
I use the concept here from Schrader (1972).
MacIntyre writes (p. 350): “The conclusion to which the argument so far has led is not only that it is out of the debates, conflicts, and enquiry of socially embodied, historically contingent traditions that contentions regarding practical rationality and justice are advanced, modified, abandoned, or replaced, but that there is no other way to engage in the formulation, elaboration, rational justification, and criticism of accounts of practical rationality and justice except from within some one particular tradition in conversation, cooperation, and conflict with those who inhabit the same tradition. There is no standing ground, no place for enquiry, no way to engage in the practices of advancing, evaluating, accepting, and rejecting reasoned argument apart from that which is provided by some particular tradition or other.”.
See here Swanson (1992).
‘Anthropological’ here, given Heidegger’s remarks later in the Letter, includes nationalism, for Heidegger says, “Every nationalism is metaphysically an anthropologism, and as such subjectivism. Nationalism is not overcome through mere internationalism.” These remarks render any communitarian ethics questionable so long as the metaphysical basis of such normativity is not recognized.
The expression ‘truth of being’ such as Heidegger intends it has yet to be clarified in his intended reference to the Greek alētheia. However, ‘truth’ here has to be interpreted not in terms of the “epistemological” concept of adaequatio, which is grounded in a subject-object dichotomy and associated ontology, but in terms of the human manner of disclosing potentialities consistent with human ek-static ek-sistence. These potentialities are either authentic or inauthentic and unavoidably determine whether an individual finds, achieves, and affirms his/her authentic being rather than being lost in the dominion of the anonymous, average, and everyday “they-self”.
For one example of interpretation in this way, see Swazo (2006).
I say here ‘exemplification’ consistent with Heidegger’s concept of phenomenological “showing.” I acknowledge, however, an important question raised by an anonymous reviewer, viz., whether “exemplification” is the same as “retrieval.” One considers here that retrieval involves, as Heidegger says in Being and Time, returning to the possibilities of the Dasein who “has been there,” in this case returning to Sophocles for a reading of a text, but more so for appreciating the significance of a poetic thinking Sophocles has provided us, such that we “think anew” what has been vouchsafed to us therein. It is only through such reading that one may retrieve and repeat a poetic thinking with a view to understanding its significance in the present, thus as a living text and not merely as some anachronism of classical literature. It is in this sense that the reading is productive in Hans-Georg Gadamer’s sense of a “fusion of horizons of understanding.”.
I shall be citing text hereafter from Sophocles, Seven Tragedies of Sophocles: Philoctetes, trans. Robin Bond, (2014), http://hdl.handle.net/10092/10504. The cited passages referenced in parentheses are as numbered in this translation.
See here Liddell Scott Lexicon, lexicon entry “γενναῖος,” http://www.perseus.tufts.edu.
Heidegger says: “Anticipation lets Dasein understand that it has to take over solely from itself the potentiality-of-being in which it is concerned absolutely about its ownmost being.” See here Heidegger (1927, in Stambaugh 2003).
Heidegger, An Introduction to Metaphysics, pp. 111-112. This is what Sophocles exhibits in his tragic dramas. Heidegger illustrates this similarly in his comments on Sophocles’s Oedipus Rex, pp. 112 ff. For further commentary, see Campbell (2017).
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Swazo, N.K. Heidegger and the “Situation” of Ethics. ZEMO 3, 241–262 (2020). https://doi.org/10.1007/s42048-020-00073-5
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/s42048-020-00073-5