The Fragile We: Ethical Implications of Heidegger’s Being and Time

Critics have charged that Martin Heidegger’s account of authenticity is morally nihilistic, that his fundamental ontology is either egocentric or chauvinistic; and many see Heidegger’s turn to Nazism in 1933 as following logically from an indifference, and even hostility, to
otherness
in the premises of his early philosophy. In
The Fragile
We , ethical implications of Heidegger’s
being and time , Lawrence Vogel presents 3 interpretations of authentic existence - the existentialist, the historicist, and the cosmopolitan - each of which is a plausible version of the personal ideal depicted in
being and time.
He then draws parallels between these interpretations and three moments in the contemporary liberal-communitarian debate over the relationship of the
I
and the
We.
His book contributes both to a diagnosis of what there is about
Being and time
that invites moral nihilism and to a sense of how fundamental ontology might be recast so that
the other
is accorded an appropriate place in an account of human existence.