Being, narrative, and ethics: A hermeneutical-phenomenological inquiry into the ontology of ethics

In Being and Time, Heidegger articulates his understanding of the ontological difference and the Being of the human-like entity, or Dasein. Dasein’s Being, as existential, consists in the care structures of projection, thrownness, and fallenness, the unitary meaning of which is grounded in the ecstatical temporalizing modes of future, Present, and having-been. However, despite his deeply insightful ontological analysis of human Being, Heidegger rejects ontical ethical manifestations of the human as constitutive of Dasein. We claim that this neglect is the result of his initial focus on fallenness as one of Dasein’s constitutive ontological structures. Thus, we seek to re-Interpret Heidegger’s ontological conception of Dasein via the human’s constitutive projection and thrownness in such a way as makes accessible genuinely ethical phenomena. We thereupon conclude that human Being is constituted by projection-continuums whose meaning is grounded in the ecstases of future going-towards, Past being-brought-here- and-attested-to, and present Being-oriented. These projections, as existentiell, we call ‘narrative [lines],’ which are the concrete manifestations of existential-Narrative-Being. These narrative lines are each constituted by a fundamental projection that automatically entails various contingent projections. In moving on to the analysis of ethics as constitutive of Narrative-Being, we consider phenomenal ‘immorality’ via its modes of antagonism and underminingness. The former consists in an Interpretation of conscience as imperativizing the human towards her existentially optimal Narrative fulfillment; the latter consists in an analysis of evil as prospectively annihilating the human’s fundamental projections, thus revealing her world as conditionally-held-open-to her optimal Narrative fulfillment. Thus, these two structures, as unitarily holding-open-and-holding-me-to-my Narrative fulfillment, constitute ontological ethos