Martin Heidegger’s Thinking of The Ground of Ethics

Abstract

The paper focuses on Martin Heidegger’s ethics and axiology. Preliminary remarks present same problems concerning ethical issues in the thought of early and late Heidegger. The principally anti-axiological and somewhat anti-ethical attitude of the German existentialist turns out to contradict the concepts of ethics and of value theory, but not ethical data itself. Heidegger thinks of morality and ethics at the most fundamental level as foundational ethics, i.e. pre-ethics as the foundation for ethics. Here he sees a basic source of morality, which, in the first period of his philosophizing, he locates in the authenticity of being Dasein, and after Kehre – Being, the truth of Being. The article make a Heidegger’s insight precise by posing questions and showing various ethical and metaethical problems involved in such an attempt.