The Heideggerian Metamorphoses of the Spirit: A Virtue Ethics Consideration of Culture

The tripartite model of the soul is no novel notion. Philosophers from Plato to Freud have posited made contributions to this paradigm – at either end of the timeline, the normative urge is this: one ought to set into harmony the multifarious modes of being. When Nietzsche takes to positing his own tripartite model of the soul, he prefigures change and brings in a further dimension: time. This he calls the three metamorphoses of the spirit and they carry normative-descriptive weight. Nietzsche’s Zarathustra spake in The Pied Cow of how the spirit may become a child from a lion, and a lion from a camel. Consulting the etymology of this location we may glean that the metamorphoses - the individual’s goal-oriented changing of their nature across time and as a in the midst of others – occur in a (Pied) “miscellany” or a “mass jumbled together” and (Cow) “oppressive” and “that which is easily herded” and “that which chews the cud.” This situation implies the possibility of transformation of the individual within a chaotic multiplicity. In this work I use Nietzsche's Zarathustra myth as a conduit for thought regarding Heidegger's normative considerations of dasein that remain generally subtextual in his work. Heidegger's work has the virtue of impressing the agent-arena relationship such that culture comes to the fore, dasein, for Heidegger, can never step outside of its world, it is only ever able to achieve - in the upper threshold - mastery resoluteness such that it can spontaneously be-in-the-world. I explicate that this threshold is compatible with that of "post-turn" Heidegger at which point he heralds the gods to come; those who can expand everyday dasein's understanding of being.&nbsp