Dialogue with Heidegger on Values: Ethics for Times of Crisis

The author’s dialogue with Heidegger leads to the positing of his thesis: Heidegger’s Sein und Zeit and his Vom Wesen des Grundes (The Essence of Reason) contain a philosophical anthropology whose essential feature is the rehabilitation of the senses as means of knowing. Indeed, Heidegger’s method would then lead to the same sort of conceptualization he himself condemns, if Dasein does not see the meanings of entities in the concrete. Such seeing is the seeing of the degrees of meaning of an individual entity. Meaning then becomes the measure of values manifested in the World’s Worlding. The author calls this turning of Heidegger to the ontological realm for the standard of values, rather than to the ontic realm of science, the Third Copernican Revolution.