Tuesday, April 14, 2015

It, too, is lacking

In a parallel way, in Chapter 3, I contend that the contract formulation of encounters, emanating as it did from the seventeenth-century political philosophy, tempts us to conceive of human encounters which are not mutually dependent and equally willed by both parties as in some way lacking. This leads in turn to our missing the significance of what Heidegger termed the Geworfenheit or essential fortuitousness of life—the fact that in the first instance we are ‘thrown into’ an encounter in which we are fully dependent upon the other party.—Ethics at the Beginning of Life, page xiii

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