ETHICS DISCLOSED: A POETIC REDEMPTION OF MARTIN HEIDEGGER'S GUILT IN BEING AND TIME

Abstract

This thesis considers the existing ethical lacunae within the expansive philosophical ouvre of Martin Heidegger, and proposes a redemptive rereading of guilt and conscience may offer the body of work a reprieve through the poetic. While it considers a range of his works that represent varying — and indeed, morphing — facets of Heidegger’s philosophical positions, the scope of this project demands a selectivity, and brevity where it is possible. This thesis shall thus assess Being and Time (1927) as representing his early philosophy centering on Dasein and phenomenology, and Letter on Humanism (1947) and The Origin of the Work of Art (1950) as representing his later work on poetics as that which best elucidated being. In tracing Heidegger’s basic structure of care, on which his idiosyncratic and peculiar position on Dasein’s ontological guilt is founded, this thesis asserts the ethical fragility and insufficiency of Heidegger’s early views on the conscience, guilt, and an indebtedness-to-the-Other –– specifically, in his assertion that an existential, “equiprimordial” (Being and Time 332) debt to existential contemplation and self-realization is essential to being human, whilst notions of moral and ethical obligation are superficial, social distractions from one’s duty of actualisation. In other words, guilt that is essential in any ontological sense is an indebtedness-to-the-Self, not an indebtedness-to-the-Other. Then, after delineating Heidegger’s approach in eliciting worlds, reality, truth and a sense of being in the disclosive potential of poetic language, this thesis mobilises Timothy Clark’s interpretation of Heideggerian reading of poetry in attempting a non-exhaustive reading of the “unthought” (Martin Heidegger 30) in John Milton’s Paradise Lost, a poem this thesis argues is richly disclosive in what it means to be. Finally, the thesis proposes that a redemptive rereading of guilt in Heideggerian philosophy can plausibly exist through Clark’s poetic reading.