Thinking What Is Strange and Dangerous: Heidegger, Tragedy, and Original Ethics

ABSTRACT This paper returns to one of Heidegger’s pivotal references to ethics – his remarks in the “Letter on Humanism” – and attempts to follow up on a line of thinking in those remarks that Heidegger himself did not expand upon, namely, the link between ethics and Sophoclean tragedy. Reading Heidegger’s analysis of Heraclitus’s Fragment 119 on ἤθος with reference to Sophoclean tragedy and in conjunction with Heidegger’s thinking and his comments elsewhere on ethics and tragedy, the paper seeks to clarify how the thinking of being is, as Heidegger called it, an “original ethics” and what that means for ethical thinking following Heidegger.