McNeill: Dimensão ontológica do ético

Chapter 2 [The Time of Life], "Care for the Self: Originary Ethics in Heidegger and Foucault  ," attempts, by way of a dialogue between Heidegger and Foucault, to open up the ontological dimension of the ethical in the work of both philosophers in terms of the ontological relation to self, shifting our understanding of "ethics" away from a set of theoretically constructed norms, principles, or rules governing practice, and [xiii] toward an understanding of the ethical in terms of our concrete ways of Being in the world, our ethos  . The realm of ethos, the chapter tries to show, is that of "originary" praxis  , of a pre-theoretical and pre-philosophical dimension of worldly dwelling that exceeds, and indeed is prior to, the traditional theory/practice distinction in which theory is understood in advance as severed from practice, yet in such a way that it can and should be subsequently "applied" to ethical and political practice. In this traditional understanding, philosophy or theory is, implicitly or explicitly, understood as non-worldly, detached from the world — and thus from its own original grounds as itself a praxis, a concrete way of Being of the one philosophizing. By contrast, the philosophical cultivation of ethos that this chapter discerns in both Foucault and Heidegger remains attentive to the singularity, the concrete uniqueness, of a particular existence, seeking to dwell in that very dimension otherwise eclipsed by our scientific understanding of the world, which from Aristotle   on began to take hold of philosophy itself. In this second chapter, we attempt to approach this originary dimension of the ethical, or of ethos, by bringing into view a constellation of issues that will be developed further in the remaining chapters. One’s ethos is not   something permanent and unchanging: it is never entirely reducible to what Hans-Georg Gadamer   has fittingly called "a living network of common convictions, habits, and values" transmitted by one’s historical community and world.2 Rather, it is constantly in transition, a manner of dwelling in being underway, and as such names a way of Being and dwelling in the world that can — and from a philosophical point of view must — be interrogated, understood, and transformed through various practices of the self. The Being of the self, as primarily an ontological relation to self for both Heidegger and Foucault, is not a theoretical abstraction from the ontic or concrete, but is, the present chapter tries to show, the concrete happening of an originary freedom that is never reducible to what one is or has been. The philosophical and "protoethical" task of care for the self (Foucault) or of authentic existence (Heidegger), a task that expressly takes up and engages this freedom in the knowing, questioning cultivation of one’s ethos, demands an understanding of selfhood in terms of the temporality of action, the phenomenon of world, and the historical determination of one’s worldly Being.

It is these three moments that, taken together, articulate Heidegger’s understanding of ethos, an understanding that in many respects is indebted to Aristotle’s account of phronesis   (practical wisdom, or excellence in deliberation pertaining to praxis). In Aristotelian ethics, we may recall, one’s ethos is determined by the ethical virtues [xiv] that dispose us to act with courage, self-restraint, justice, etc.; by the deliberative virtue of phronesis that enables us to deliberate well in the particular situation   of action; and by our theoria   or contemplation of the world afforded by sophia  , or philosophical wisdom. Yet Heidegger, despite his admiration for Aristotle’s account of phronesis (as presented in Book Six of the Nicomachean Ethics), does not simply adopt Aristotle’s understanding of human ethos.