Il primato della contingenza e la premessa politica del discorso etico: riflessioni sulla filosofia del giovane Heidegger

Abstract

More than trying to make explicit an ethical discourse that – for whichever reason – would have remained only implicit in Heidegger’s philosophy, the aim of this article is to trace, in Heidegger’s work, the eventual presence of the structural premises for such a discourse. Premises which, in our perspective, can be brought back to the following two elements: first of all, to the character of contingency of experience and absence of ontological foundation, which only makes ethics a genuine discourse of responsibility and not a simple application of pre-given rules; and, second (given such lack of ontological foundation), to the unavoidable political institution of this same discourse. Now, the pivotal point of this article is that such premises, in Heidegger’s work, far from being traceable in Being and Time or in his later works, are to be rather found in his previous texts, and precisely in his early Freiburg lectures (from 1919 to 1923), in which his thought appears to be still not so much seduced by an ontological drive.