Abstract

The purpose of this paper is to determine the ethical implications of the structure of Dasein as a social being. By beginning with some suggestions proposed by Emmanuel Lévinas—who accused Heidegger of omitting, on his philosophical path, any serious ethical investigations—I put forth the claim that Heidegger is not foreign to the question, and he is able to put, at its core, an ethical understanding of the issue. Although this question runs through all of Heidegger’s works, I will focus only on works from the 1920s and, more specifically, on certain parts of Being and Time. In the early period of his philosophical investigations, one may find two levels of reflection pertaining to the problem of ethics: phenomenological reflection and ontological reflection. I thus divided my analysis into these two parts accordingly, in order to show how these levels referred to two different domains. Indeed, if the former is an attempt to describe the mere factual conditions of Dasein’s existence, then the second set of reflections aim at grounding this existence on its specific characteristics. At the very least, I will show how these two levels of analysis—which are typical of all the reflections found within Being and Time—are made possible by the particular nature of Dasein.