Martin Heidegger’s Ethics in the Other Beginning

Abstract

This article is about Heidegger’s ethics as can be gathered from his understanding of being. Its purpose is to elucidate the following points: 1) To account for the reasons that take Heidegger to refuse writing an ethics. 2) To show that even though Heidegger did not write an ethics, his thought does contain an ethical dimension. 3) To demonstrate how his ethical approach can be reconstructed under the notion of “originary ethics”, a term Heidegger coins in The Letter on Humanism and which refers to a conception prior to metaphysical ethics. 4) Since Heidegger considers the present ethos as dominated by nihilism, his thinking can be seen as an effort to contribute to the advent of a new sending of being (Seinsgeschick) which would bring about, in its turn, a new ethos, the ethos in the Other Beginning.