This thesis aims to show that Martin Heidegger’s notion of fundamental ontology can serve as the foundation for a new approach to environmental ethics. The thesis begins with a brief introduction to the traditional approaches of environmental thought and a description of how Heidegger’s interpretation of human existence as Dasein provides a new perspective from which to approach questions of the fitting relation between human beings and the nonhuman world. While traditional environmental thought approaches nature primarily as the object of modern science and technology, Heidegger’s thought allows nature to become meaningful for human beings as an important part of their everyday lives. The first chapter begins with an examination of the wilderness and environmental justice debates and argues that Anglo-American environmental thought has yet to understand and define the natural environment in a way that encompasses the needs of both human and nonhuman life. Heidegger’s existential analytic of Dasein describes human existence in a way that demonstrates its interconnectedness with the nonhuman world and can be used to rethink the fitting place of human existence within the natural environment. The second chapter demonstrates that Heidegger’s critique of the metaphysical foundations of modern science and technology clears the way for a renewed understanding of the interconnectedness of human and nonhuman life. Heidegger’s critique demonstrates that an authentic understanding of human existence necessarily entails a new approach to interpreting being. The final chapter of the thesis analyses Heidegger’s retrieval of the early Greek understanding of being as phusis together with Heidegger’s notion of poetic dwelling in order to provide a new perspective for interpreting the scope of a fitting relation between human beings and natural environment. Heidegger’s thought demonstrates that the natural environment must be understood as an essential condition of human existence and can thereby allow human beings to interpret the nonhuman world in a way that would encompass the needs of both human and nonhuman life.

This essay examines the concept of meaning in Sein und Zeit. By identifying a paradox in the question constituting the outset of Heidegger’s ontology, i.e. the question of the meaning of Being, the need of a clarification of the concept of meaning unfolds. According to Heidegger, namely, we have been asking the question of Being without even knowing what we mean; we have forgotten to ask the question of the meaning of Being. At the same time, since the actual question of Being necessarily is a question of the meaning of Being, i.e. since we, as human beings and as the sole origin of the question of Being, necessarily mean something with the questions we ask, we have been asking exactly the question we have forgotten to ask. What then, I ask, is this element, that we have been asking for but forgotten to address? What is meaning? Asking this question on the basis of Sein und Zeit, I argue, is necessarily to explore the Being of meaning, since meaning is something found in the constitution of Dasein, the human being, and since the explication of Dasein evolving in Sein und Zeit concerns exactly its Being. After clarifying this question, the study proceeds in three chapters, the first concerning the basic structure of Dasein, the second the understanding, as the knowing of this structure, and the third the explication, in which we finally find the constitutive elements of meaning, i.e. it’s Being. In dialogue with secondary sources, I then aim to discuss the implication of this Being, epistemic as well as political and ethical. Subsequently, I ask what this Being implies for the paradox initially noted.