Liquefactionism

 

Plato's Republic is about justice - dikaiosynē, which is ambiguous in Greek - it can mean something like "moral righteousness," or it can mean something like "tradition" or "convention."  Plato's goal in the Republic is to disambiguate justice - to interrogate and ultimately destabilize the definition of justice as mere convention.  Plato associates this view of justice with the sophists, and he embodies it first in the figure of Thrasymachus, who argues angrily and unconvincingly for a purely relativistic, if not nihilistic, "might makes right" attitude.  Then the argument is picked up by Glaucon and Adeimantus, who offer a more subtle, sophisticated, genteel version of the debate.  If justice is mere convention, then however a city-state defines justice is equally justice - thus the relation between the signifier "justice" and its signified is fundamentally arbitrary.  But Plato attempts to argue that this is not so.  For Plato, justice is convention, yes, or at least it has a conventional side.  But convention is not arbitrary.  There is a reason that underlies convention. 

Hegel, too [the estates?] searches for the reason (Vernunft) that inheres in the phenomena of the modern world, and he does so by investigating history (The real is rational, the rational real)

Heidegger goes even deeper into this investigation.  The phenomena of convention are personified in the figure of Das Man.  Contrary to common misunderstandings of Heidegger, Das Man is not the villain of Being and Time.  On the contrary, Das Man fulfills vital and indeed absolutely necessary functions for the structure of experience.  Even so, Dasein is thrown into a fallen situation in which its own being is in question, and indeed, this question and our thrownness towards it is constitutive of the very being of Dasein.  And this in turn implies that Dasein must lay bare, or uncover, the fundamental structure of its own being in its average everydayness.  Heidegger is often misunderstood as a hyper-individualist, whose Dasein is a heroic misanthrope who defies all convention.  I see his work differently.  Perhaps it is not quite right to say that Heidegger is attempting to recover the reason behind convention, but, inasmuch as ontology implies logos as much as it does ontos, I think it's fair to say that Heidegger is very much "on the side of" convention and tradition.  (It is partly in this sense that he identifies as a "peasant".)  It is absolutely contrary to Heidegger's project to assert that convention and tradition are purely random or arbitrary.

Thus, while Heidegger may not explicitly use the word "justice," there is enough connecting Heidegger's argument back through Hegel all the way to Plato that I think Being and Time can reasonably be fruitfully investigated as a work on ethics and even on politics.  For Heidegger, as for Husserl, consciousness is consciousness of something, and therefore the individual consciousness cannot be thought in isolation from the world that it discloses.  Being means being-in-the-world, and this is a social and political world as much as it is anything else.