Detachment and Affectivity as Structures of Openness: Meister Eckhart’s Contribution to Situated Ethics Read in the Light of the Young Heidegger

Abstract

Contemporary ethical reflection is undergoing a crisis of its traditional normative foundations, which have proven difficult to reconcile with the affective, vulnerable and situated nature of moral experience. In this context, this article examines Meister Eckhart’s thought in light of Martin Heidegger’s early phenomenology–hermeneutics in order to reconsider the place of affectivity in ethics. It is argued that Eckhart’s notion of abegescheidenheit (detachment) and Heidegger’s analysis of factual life and Befindlichkeit allow us to understand affectivity not as a psychological state, but as an ontological disposition of openness. Based on a hermeneutic–phenomenological analysis of key texts by both authors, it is shown that, without identifying or homologating them, their approaches question the figure of the self-sufficient moral human being and shift ethical reflection towards lived experience. The article concludes that this perspective offers conceptual foundations for a situated, relational ethics attentive to vulnerability, based on affective openness and the responsibility that emerges from concrete existence.