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Introduction
- State University of New York Press
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Introduction The present study seeks to explore Heidegger’s understanding ofªthos—of the originary dimension of the ethical and of human action —conceived in terms of the time of life and the temporality of human existence. Ēthos for Heidegger means our dwelling, understood temporally as a way of Being, yet such dwelling must be understood , on the one hand, in terms of our stance and conduct in the moment of action—the way in which we are held and hold ourselves, and thus “dwell,” in the presence of the moment—and on the other hand, in terms of our more enduring way of Being that is brought about temporally in and throughout the unfolding of human experience . The essays that comprise this volume examine various dimensions of this tension between the moment of presence and the temporalizing of that moment as brought about and attuned by the antecedent claims of a greater whole. The first chapter considers the phenomenon of life—of the Being of living beings—in relation to time and temporality by following Heidegger’s phenomenological explorations of human and animal life in his Freiburg lecture course of 1929–30 entitled “The Fundamental Concepts of Metaphysics: World, Finitude, Solitude.” The question of the relation between animal and human life is for Heidegger ultimately a question of world, of what “world” is and of what it means to “have” a world and to be “in” a world. However we understand the status of animals and of different modes of animal life, we always and inevitably do so in terms of an understanding of world. To be in the manner of human beings does not mean, on Heidegger’s account, to be an entity of a certain species, with certain specifiable features and abilities (a conception that Heidegger views as a form of scientific reductionism that elides the very openness and indeterminability of our Being). It means, rather, nothing other than to be subject to, and addressed by, this antecedent claim of a historically determined world. The distinctive self-relation of human life, the ability to be (to dwell in) a relation to one’s own Being, presupposes an “ekstatic” Being-outside-itself of our xi very Being, an ekstasis that is possible only as a relation to the phenomenon of world. Heidegger’s investigation suggests, however, that world—understood as the open manifestness of beings as such and as a whole—is neither a purely ontological nor a transcendental phenomenon , but is temporalized historically in and as the unfolding of human existence. The poietic event of “world-formation” is, on this interpretation, not something that the human being accomplishes in and through his or her actions; rather, it first enables our very Being, our self-understanding and ability to relate to ourselves as beings that are already manifest. Indeed, the primary disclosure of world, Heidegger argues, is not at all an accomplishment of the already existent human being, nor, therefore, of human self-understanding or intellect. It is, rather, accomplished by the phenomenon of attunement, through which we are first disclosed to ourselves as being in this way or that, in the midst of beings as a whole. Attunement, as Heidegger had already argued in his 1927 work Being and Time, is primary in enabling our very dwelling, our ªthos. Even if such ªthos can subsequently be modified by understanding, by logos and by deliberation, such understanding nevertheless always remains responsive to an attunement and way of Being that is already given and situated, localized in a particular locale or site of dwelling. That logos (whether as language, thought, or understanding) neither originates nor coincides with the primary disclosure of our own Being is, however, on the positive side, our having always already departed from where we have been, our ekstatic Being-outside-ourselves as a being underway, a departure that is precisely able to leave be, to let be (Seinlassen)—in a letting that enables our very dwelling. A withdrawal from the site of presence, a dwelling in such withdrawal, enables our very return, our emergence into presence, even though such return is always bound to the moment. In the case of those beings we recognize and acknowledge as animals, their dwelling place, by contrast, coincides with a habitual haunt or environment, a habitat (and this is indeed an early root meaning from which ªthos derives).1 The haunt of the human being, such dwelling in concealment, marks the human being as an exceptional site of...