Abstract

Undoubtedly, in Being and Time, Dasein can achieve its authenticity only through an individualizing process, within a reticent solitude, in its own most intimate and “thrown” individuality, as in contrast with the dispersion which characterizes the public dimension. This kind of solipsism which pertains to Dasein has led Franco Volpi to talk of Heidegger’s “repressed ethics”; Heidegger, while being completely focused on the Seinsfrage, enacts a drastic process of ontologization of Aristotle’s ethics and, furthermore, he appears to forget that Dasein eminently belongs to the dimension of koinonia. The extent of the “repression” of the ethics in Being and Time, is even more evident especially if we look at Heidegger’s lectures Basic Concepts of Aristotelian Philosophy of 1924. In these lectures, echoing Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics and Rhetoric, the public ethics is considered not only as a “distinctive” dimension of Dasein and Mitsein, but it appears to be characterized by the relationship between care/government of the self and care/government of others. These are the same notions that find their most important analysis in the late Foucault’s studies, which are entirely dedicated to the phenomenon of ethics in the Hellenistic-Roman world.