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July 4, 2006
Robert Tulip in Chapter 5 of his The Place of Ethics in Heidegger's Ontology says that there is:
... a definite ethical undercurrent informing Heidegger’s work, but it is not made explicit and remains at the level of a hidden ‘elan’, an impulse giving direction and meaning to his ideas. That his ethics take the form of such an unsaid elan, rather than an explicit teaching, can be attributed both to his wish to re-establish thought on the foundations of existential ontology, and to his serious criticisms of the way ethics has functioned in philosophy in the past...The discussion in the Letter on Humanism about the relation of ontology to ethics provides the only direct exposition of an ethical dimension in Heidegger's thought, with its development of the existential analytic into the suggestion that ontology is itself the original ethics.
I've always worked with a sense of an ethical undercurrent in Heidegger, though I have been very unclear as to what the undercurrent is. Tulip says that:
One of the key arguments of the Letter on Humanismis a development of the thesis presented in the Introduction to Metaphysics that 'the ethical' has become the degraded modern moral counterpart of what the ancients understood as the 'ethos'. If our ethics are effectively to assist the understanding of truth and the improvement of the human situation, they cannot be only a matter of arbitrarily decided rules and norms, but must be anchored in the ground of our Being. .... For Heidegger, this primal subsistent basis is identified with the 'ethos'. He therefore suggests that ethos "denotes not mere norms, but 'mores' based on freely accepted obligations and traditions".
Ethos comes to mean whatever norms or rules prevail in a particular situation.
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