Ethics after Heidegger

I took my first class in philosophy because a professor, who had asked me what I intended to do if I was drafted for the Vietnam War, told me about Plato’s Crito and how Socrates spoke with the laws of Athens about resistance and law. That conversation led me to take two philosophy classes the next semester: one on Plato, the other on Heidegger and Sartre. (I was told, for reasons I no longer remember, that those were the courses that the “radical” students were taking, and I followed suit.) The Vietnam War and the Civil Rights movement were powerfully present events in my student life, and my own turn to philosophy was indelibly coupled with real questions of justice, of law, of the good, and of ethical life. The texts we read as students—especially Heidegger, Plato, Sartre, Hegel, and Nietzsche—never seemed abstract and always seemed to lead back to the passions of a young student in turbulent times. (I say “we” because another feature of this moment was its sense of being shared and a matter for discussion.) Chance conversations and contingent choices for silly reasons combined to form a decisive moment in my life, and the strange alchemy of history and facticity gave birth to a conviction that I still struggle to understand: from the beginning, my sense has always been that somehow reading Heidegger has helped me understand something of how to respond to the urgent questions of a life. Heidegger was never alone in having such a place and being so coupled with a concern with justice and ethical choice, but he always stood out. My youthful enthusiasms are much more tempered—whether I have been worn down by life and become jaded or understood more clearly and grown wiser is still to be determined—but my conviction that reading Heidegger can contribute to thinking about the difficulties of ethical life still remains.