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December 18, 2004
Tis a common relationship for those scholars have spent time working through the texts of the early Heidegger, but it is not a well known one. Many do not see Heidegger as having a practical philosophy, let alone one about the ethics of practical life.
It is explored by Stuart Elden (see Works in Progress) in a paper called, 'There must be some Architectonic: Heidegger and Aristotle on the Politics of Phronesis.' Eldens text is a very detailed reading that shows how closely Heidegger read the Greek texts, and the way he uncovered the sedimentation of the philosophical tradition (scholasticism) on these Aristotlean texts.
Gadamer, who was a participant in this destruction, says in his Philosophical Hermeneutics, (pp.201-2) that what was uncovered was phronesis as a form of practical ethical knowledge that is distinct from the theoretical knowledge of science. This is the habit of deliberating well and making non-ruled governed practical and political judgements in concrete situations. It is a form of ethical knowing based on experience.
Heidegger sides with Aristotle's critique of Plato's understanding of ethics and the good life, then deploys this Aristotlean critique against the neo-Kantian value philosophy in 20th century Germany.
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Gadamer describes the word hermeneutics as meaning, in ancient Greece, both a personnal quality of the god Hermes (or of any earthly hermeneus)and a "techne" (Kunstlehre, in German). What is not clear for me is to what field of human knowledge Gadamer's (and Heidegger's)philosophy transfers hermeneutics: to phronesis, to episteme or to sophia.