Heidegger's Moral Ontology by James D. Reid (review)
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In this lucid and engaging book focusing on the early Heidegger, James Reid argues that Heidegger sets the foundations for a "phronetic ethics" (22). As Reid later says, "Sein und Zeit could be said to make substantial contributions to 'meta-ethical' reflection on the source of our sense of why, on what basis, we take ourselves to be bound by one thing rather than another" (103). Reid's early Heidegger provides the hermeneutical tools for an ontological meta-ethics that can illuminate "normative questions and questions about the status of normativity as such" (2).
Gleaning a meta-ethics from Heidegger depends on arguing that the existential analytic of Dasein proceeds from what Reid calls Heidegger's "ethical criticism" of conventional epistemology. Heidegger's phenomenology as "a science of everyday life" (28) critiques an epistemological stance that makes theory and detached observation the paradigmatic way of knowing, and that perniciously colonizes other domains of life. Reid's Heidegger begins from the "I am," the situated existence of life as lived and therefore not indifferent (35). Such life "is driven by an interest that has at first nothing to do with scientific cognition" (43). This interest, Heidegger's care as an "existentiale" of Dasein, is what makes imperative [End Page 626] an ethical critique of detached epistemologies and nihilistic scientism. Reid's Heidegger also offers an ethical critique of the opposite pole: overly saturated immersion in the historical world, "the complacency, conformity, and rigor mortis of everyday prescientific life" (54). The meta-ethical stance allows us each "to participate in an ongoing conversation about my life and the world that surrounds me" (59), not as a reified object, but as what matters in care.
Reid recognizes this "phenomenology of ethical life offers no concrete norms and practical propositions" (61). Reid's meta-ethical claim is this: "Ontological questioning embraces the ethical from the very start" because not a detached inquiry but rather "a lifestance, and philosophy itself is a paradigmatic way of life," requiring the inquirer to "own up to what it means to be a human being" (62). That this cannot be calculated in advance by theory makes this a phronetic ethics. No two situations are equivalent, and no eidos would make them so without betraying the complexity of ethical life. Reid provides a reconstructive interpretation of the good in Heidegger as that which, through phronetic ethics, determines what matters to us, and what "projects are worthwhile" (98). The good life relies on the ontological account of care as what matters to us in the world (103). All defining of limits, both to things and to my own projects, "is necessarily evaluative" (107) and an implicit determination of the good, hence Reid's claim that Heidegger provides a meta-ethical grounding for normativity.
Reid makes a powerful claim about how Heidegger's debt to Kant in providing the inspiration for a transcendental hermeneutic of Dasein's existence demonstrates that "Heidegger's project includes additional resources" for developing an ethics (113). At stake here is Kant's ethical distinction between persons and things, which Heidegger takes up in distinguishing Dasein as a being for whom the question of Being is at issue. Reid makes a compelling Kantian case that in "fallenness" in Being and Time, we "treat ourselves as mere things (social roles, instrumental functions, and anything else with a clearly specified Wasgehalt [what-ness]" (127), whereas it is our responsibility as persons who, as authentic, must consider ourselves "free for normative claims, and so capable of responding, without (external, social) compulsion, to the space of practical reasons" (128). This is what Reid calls one "missed opportunity" among many in Heidegger that might have contributed to a developed ontological ethics, such as the treatment of the authentic concern for others in solicitude and how we might cultivate the affect of respect for other persons (136).
On the vexed question of Heidegger's politics, Reid argues that the missed opportunities for developing ethics from the early Heidegger do not necessarily lead to fascism...
