The Ethics of Thinking

Ethics usually focuses on actions, with thinking or unthinking only having significance insofar as they lead to good or bad behavior. Heidegger and Levinas, however, argue that thinking in certain ways, or not thinking in general, is ethical or unethical on its own rather than just by having good or bad consequences. Heidegger’s early work makes unthinking conformity (regardless of to what) an important part of inauthenticity, while his later work turns the thinking of being into our central “ethical” task, intentionally blurring the distinction between thinking and acting. Levinas makes thinking about humans in a certain way – namely as thinkable, as fitting into and exhausted by comprehensible categories – itself an act of conceptual violence, regardless of what deeds follow from it. We conclude with Kierkegaard who criticized humanity’s tendency to sleepwalk through their own lives, only waking up by confronting something unthinkable. This thought can be seen as a common source for both Heidegger and Levinas, as well as a way to keep the two in a continuously off-balance strife with each other.

Heidegger’s Endoxic Method

I argue that Heidegger’s methodological breakthrough in the early 1920s, the development of hermeneutic phenomenology, and the structure of Being and Time are the result of Heidegger’s appropriation of Aristotle’s philosophical method in his Physics and Nicomachean Ethics. In part one, I explain the general structure of Aristotle’s method and demonstrate the distinction between scientific and philo­sophical investigations. In part two, I show how formal indication and phenomenological destruction are the product of Heidegger’s reading of Aristotle’s method by demonstrating their affinity in approach, content, and criteria for success. Lastly, in part three, I show how aspects of Being and Time, specifically das Man and the destruction of history, become more intelligible when framed in terms of an Aristotelian investigation into endoxa.

Responsible for Destiny

Historizing is the way Dasein takes up possibilities and roles to project itself into the future. It is why we experience continuity throughout our lives, and it is the basis for historicality – our sense of a more general continuity of “history.” In Being and Time, Heidegger identifies both inauthentic and authentic modes of historizing that give rise, respectively, to inauthentic and authentic modes of histori­cality. He focuses on historizing at the individual level but gestures at a communal form of historizing. In this paper, I develop the concept of co-historizing in both its authentic and inauthentic modes. I argue that Heidegger’s unarticulated concept of inauthentic co-historizing is what necessitated the planned (but unfinished) second half of Being and Time – the “phenomenological destruction of the history of ontology.” I consider what it means to take responsibility for our destiny as a people and specifically as a community of philosophers.