For those of us who see Heideggerian Phenomenology as a way to bypass Western philosophy’s “pendulum swinging between dogmatism and skepticism,” as Rorty put it, we have usually been left a bit dumbstruck on issues of ethics, of values, of “oughts.” Phenomenologically, any question of what I should do is revealed as wrongheaded when I am being-in the phenomenon, so to speak; I do not appeal to deontological rules or analyze cost-benefit utility. I simply do. And any sense of normativity, if it shows up at all, arrives later when I may reflectively sift through the detritus of what I have done.

So, is that the end of “oughts” altogether? Does the Husserlian return “to the things themselves” just lead to a perceptual mode of being-in-the-world that sees the whole field of metaethics as a conceptual minefield of pseudo-problems?

If so, maybe the detractors of Heidegger who would ad hominem him out of the canon have a point: By adopting a way of thinking that neglects what he once called “the muddy waters of ethics,” he not only set up a useless philosophy but also set up himself for fascism. This would annihilate the matter quite simply—but only so long as we think of ethics as the domain of “should.”

However, a semantic reconsideration may revivify not only Heideggerian Phenomenology, but also the field of ethics itself which still struggles to adequately respond to Hume’s old challenge that “One cannot get an ‘ought’ from an ‘is’.”

If by “ethics” we mean a way of thinking that tells us what we should do, then Heideggerian thought does not just have nothing to say—it has a refusal to speak. The Existentialist current in his work avoids such dictates out of hand as a symptom of inauthentic falling; e.g. I appeal to the sociocultural conventions of Das Man in those anxious moments when I have the potential to be most my own. In other words, looking for external guidance during ethical dilemmas is merely a way to make oneself un-free.

But what if we think of the “ought” of ethics not as “shoulds” but as “coulds”? That is, perhaps our very understanding of the ethical realm as a set of behavioral guidelines is part of the mistaken path of traditional Western philosophy.

Heidegger’s initial criticism of the Western intellectual tradition was fairly simple: It has come to ignore our immediate experience of the world we find ourselves in, detach ourselves from it, and claim that what really matters are the dispassionate concepts we have about it. Plato’s ideal forms, Descartes’s cogito, even science’s eliminative materialism are all to be rejected in Heidegger’s thinking as the keys to truth because they are expressions of our errant will to power over Being rather than an embrace of the primordial unconcealment of Being. Put another way, our attempts at objectivity pave over our wondrous perceptions in favor of reductive conceptions.

The bulk of this phenomenological analysis, of course, is about “is”: fact, truth, Being.

But part of our existential structure, Heidegger implies, hinges on “coulds”: potentials, contingencies, imaginings.

The phenomenon of a moral conundrum is an immediate feeling of one’s own “coulds” at odds. Thus, perhaps to speak of ethics is not to speak of right and wrong but rather a breakdown in our perceptual mode of being. It is at that juncture that we step back, so to speak, behind our active moment and become reflective. The problem of Western thought is not this step-back itself (though Heidegger throws so much loathing on it, one might think otherwise) but treating this secondary event of detachment as if it were not just primary but some kind of key to Being itself. It seems quite clear that he was on to something here: a life well-lived would not contain appeals to logical reflection while playing soccer with friends, marveling at a vista, or having sex. Our most meaningful moments are those we are in, not those we step back from.

So then when is that step-back appropriate, useful, or—dare we dream—moral?

Imagine after a tiresome day of work you are picking up takeout you’ve been craving all day, but as you hastily pull into the lot’s last parking spot you see an elderly lady is about to do the same. The stakes may be low, but it is undoubtedly a moral dilemma; indeed, because the resolution to the problem seems so obvious hopefully it clarifies how morality itself occurs phenomenologically.

So, your perceptual ready-to-hand possibility of an egg-roll is hustling you into the parking spot, until your activities breakdown as they are confronted with another possibility, one in which you could give up the spot. Take a moment to consider what this dilemma is not: The immediate phenomenon you feel is not an experience of “shoulds”; what you phenomenologically feel in this scenario has nothing to do with traditional respect or your inalienable rights or selfish genes or cost-benefit measurements—each of which, if true, gives us a “should.” But you experience none of those. At most, they are all conceptual rationalizations you may use later to justify your actions. But in the moment it is not just that they are unimportant; they don’t even show up.

Okay, so if our conventional ethical frameworks are not part of the immediate experience, then what is? There is the “could” of you getting the food asap and the “could” of you giving up the spot—each with its own trajectories, meanings, values, etc. Such facts have no adjudicative power to determine “should.” But yet we feel bad if we take the spot, if we choose the egg roll over the elderly lady. Why?

Perhaps because to choose is to kill possible selves. A “could” shows up as a potential “you” and the moral competition of coulds crowds us with imagined selves and sets them in opposition. To be in a moral choice is to obliterate one and reify another. Any ethical queasiness of taking the parking spot is not a product of choosing what you “shouldn’t have” but of literally realizing one regrettable version of yourself.

If “the possible ranks higher than the actual,” as Heidegger says, morality is that realm of being-in-the-world in which we step back and watch one become the other. An ethical doing is the site at which we are most aware of how we own our becoming.

Strange as the language may feel, there is little in this that is radical. It is always already a moral device in our zeitlichkeit approach to morality: the parent does not give the child a list of commandments or an info-dump of cost-benefit procedures, but rather says to the child, “Ah-ah! You sure you want to do that?” The moralizing within such a comment has naught to do with “should” and everything to do with “could.” The phenomenology of remarks like this need not be regarded Nietzscheanly as mere herd mentalities replicating themselves over generations, but rather an attunement—a drawing of attention toward a recognition of alternate possibilities. It is, then, the question rather than the answer that is moral.

To step-back is to be in the act of evaluation, but this ethical distinguishing does not happen from some neutral vantage point; as Heidegger says, “Understanding is never free-floating but always self-finding.” This is because to be in the step-back is to throw ourselves toward different futures; things show up differently to our perceptions after we are attuned to competing coulds. It is not that stepping back shows us the “right,” the “valuable,” or the “should” but that it makes us attend to our being conscientiously.

Admittedly, the danger here is to overemphasize the import of stepping back—as Heidegger himself guarded against. But if there is any way to criticize Heidegger’s fascist choices on his own phenomenological grounds it is on these: his aversion to the West’s obsession with step-back as an approach to Being led him to ignore potential moral moments writ large. As Hannah Arendt would sagely put it later, “Most evil is done by men who never make up their minds to be good or evil.” Her credo may be terminologically problematic to the phenomenologist, but her underlying meaning is revelatory: To ignore moral moments may seem “authentic” but it paves over possible selves granted by Being. Those possibilities arise when we allow ourselves to be removed from our perceptual goings-on. We step back not to objectively deduce what we should do, but attune to the revelation of who we could be.

The point is not to say “We should all step back more” but merely to recognize what it is we are doing when we step back. If we incline to extinguish that moment—to zoom into the parking spot, so to speak—we are not necessarily being selfish, immoral, or evil. Instead, we are paving over the chance to recognize the contingency that Being is aletheia: unconcealing, disclosing, revealing. If authenticity is “choosing to choose,” as Heidegger says, then riding roughshod over such choices is its own kind of inauthentic existence. An authentic ethos would be one capable in reveling in the coulds that Being reveals.

---

Featured Download: CLICK HERE to unlock the methods for preparing your life for creative inspiration and visionary change.