Ethics As Second Philosophy, Or the Traces of the Pre-Ethical in Heidegger's Being and Time/Etika Kaip Antroji Filosofija, Arba Iki-Etines Filosofijos Uzuomazgos Heideggerio Veikale Butis Ir Laikas (Report)

In what follows, I would like to suggest that phenomenology's unique contribution to the ethical problematic consists in disclosing ethics as second philosophy. By this I mean that for phenomenology, the real challenge consists in exploring those experiential domains which, while not being ethical themselves, motivate the emergence of morality and ethics. Just as for phenomenology there is the problem of the origins of judgment and of the origins of knowledge, so similarly, phenomenology's distinctive contribution to ethics should lie in its ability to pose and pursue the question of the origins of ethics. It is paradoxical, yet also telling, that phenomenology abandons this distinctive task at the very moment it places ethical themes at the center and origin of its descriptive field, i.e., when it claims that ethics is first philosophy (1). To once again raise the question of the origins of ethics is possible only if one acknowledges that ethics is second philosophy. Here I will address one phenomenological inquiry into the pre-ethical. I will build my case on Heidegger's analysis of conscience in Being and Time. This choice might appear surprising: as far as the phenomenological approach to ethics is concerned, Being and Time is only a blueprint, i.e., it only hints at a phenomenological engagement in the origins of ethics, but does not disclose it in all the necessary detail. Yet the preliminary nature of Heidegger's analysis notwithstanding, his inquiry into the relation between fundamental ontology and ethics makes it patently clear that our understanding of subjectivity will remain constricted for as long as we do not inquire into those dimensions of experience that are not yet ethical.