Heidegger Reading Thomas Aquinas: The Good, the Highest Good – and Why It Still Matters

I am currently reading Volume 23 of Martin Heidegger’s Gesamtausgabe. The book traces the development of philosophy from Thomas Aquinas to Immanuel Kant. When Aquinas appears in these lectures, something important happens. We do not merely meet a medieval theologian surrounded by old concepts. We meet a thinker asking a question that remains fully alive:

What is the good—and is there a highest good capable of orienting human life?

This is not an outdated question. It lives in homes, politics, healthcare, education, aging, love, grief, and in our private moral struggles. Whenever we ask, What should I do? What is right? What gives life direction?—we are still standing in the shadow of Thomas Aquinas.

And when Martin Heidegger reads Aquinas, he does more than explain intellectual history. He tries to uncover how Western thought itself came to understand being, value, and the human person.

Thomas Aquinas and the Question of the Good

In Summa Theologiae, Question 5 – De bono in communi (“On the Good in General”) – Thomas Aquinas asks what “the good” means in its broadest sense. His central claim is both simple and profound:

The good is that which all things desire.

This idea comes partly from Aristotle. Every being seeks its fulfillment. A seed seeks to become a tree. A child seeks maturity. Human beings seek truth, love, meaning, and happiness.

For Aquinas, the good is not first of all a moral label. It is connected to being, flourishing, and the completion of something according to its nature.

A good eye sees.
A good friendship endures.
A good society promotes justice.
A good human life matures in truth and love.

There is wisdom here that modern life often forgets. We tend to reduce the good to preference, lifestyle, ideology, or opinion. But for Aquinas, the good has structure. It is linked to what something is, and what it can become when it flourishes.

Heidegger Sees More Than Theology

When Martin Heidegger reads medieval thinkers, he is not only searching for religious doctrines. He is looking for how Western metaphysics developed.

For him, Thomas Aquinas is decisive because he joins Christian theology with Greek philosophy, especially Aristotle. The result is a grand vision of reality as ordered, meaningful, and purposive.

Things have essences.
Human beings have ends.
Morality has foundations.
God is the highest good.

For Heidegger, this is both a great achievement and the beginning of a problem. A great achievement because it seeks wholeness. A problem because being gradually becomes understood as something fixed, present, and available for conceptual control.

We move from wonder that things are, toward systems explaining what things are.

That movement continues into modernity.

The Highest Good – Summum Bonum

For Thomas Aquinas there are many goods, but also a highest good—summum bonum. Lesser goods point beyond themselves.

Money is not enough.
Pleasure is not enough.
Recognition is not enough.
Power is not enough.

Human beings seek something more complete and enduring. For Aquinas, this fulfillment is union with God, where truth and love reach their completion.

Many modern people would not frame the matter religiously. Yet the question remains:

What is the greatest good in a human life?

Is it freedom?
Love?
Dignity?
Inner peace?
Service to something larger than oneself?

We often live as if the question does not exist. But our choices reveal what we truly believe.

Practical philosophy begins here

For me, practical philosophy is not primarily theory. It is the art of living more consciously—of choosing and taking responsibility for the good.

That is why Thomas Aquinas remains so relevant.

When a person asks:

Should I tell the truth or protect someone?
Should I leave work that is draining my soul?
How do I meet a suffering child?
What do I owe aging parents?
How do I live with regret?
What is a good life when the body weakens?

Slogans are of little help. We need a deeper understanding of goods, their order, and human maturity.

That is exactly the terrain Aquinas explores.

When Goods Collide

One of the greatest problems of modern life is not lack of choices, but too many choices without an order of importance.

We value:

efficiency
freedom
security
pleasure
self-realization
loyalty
care
wealth
truth
community

All of these may be genuine goods. But they often conflict.

Should the nurse spend more time with the patient or keep to the schedule?
Should the teacher be kind or demanding?
Should the parent protect or let go?
Should the researcher stay silent for career safety or speak honestly?

Thomas Aquinas reminds us that not all goods are equally fundamental. Some are means. Others are ends.

This is a precious insight in an age where everything easily becomes confused.

Heidegger Would Ask More Deeply

Yet Heidegger would not stop there. He would ask:

What kind of being is the human person, such that the question of the good can arise at all?

For Heidegger, the human being stands open to being itself, thrown into time, mortality, responsibility, and uncertainty. We are not merely creatures pursuing goals. We are beings capable of losing ourselves, hiding from ourselves, and living inauthentically.

Where Aquinas emphasizes order, Heidegger emphasizes unrest.
Where Aquinas speaks of nature, Heidegger speaks of existence.
Where Aquinas points upward, Heidegger often points inward and forward.

Both are needed.

Without order, life becomes chaos.
Without existential seriousness, order becomes empty.

The Good in Healthcare and Caregiving

Let us come down to earth.

An elderly man with dementia refuses to shower. The staff are under time pressure.

What is the good here?

Efficiency says: get it done.
Procedure says: follow the routine.
Care says: meet the fear first.
Dignity says: he is not an object.

Here we need practical judgment—what Aristotle called phronesis.

Thomas Aquinas continues this tradition: the good is not merely abstract; it must be wisely enacted in concrete situations.

And Heidegger reminds us that the person before us is a being with a world, a history, anxieties, and vulnerability.

This is practical philosophy in working clothes.

The Good in Social Work and Child Protection

I know how difficult this field can be. Goods collide there every day.

The child’s safety.
Parental rights.
Uncertain truth.
Time pressure.
Legal demands.
Human pain.

Anyone who thinks such realities can be governed by manuals alone has not stood in real life.

Aquinas helps because he reminds us that human life has inherent dignity and purpose. A child is not a case file. A family is not paperwork.

Heidegger helps because he reminds us how systems can conceal the concrete reality of the human person.

The good must always be rediscovered in the encounter.

Consumer Society and the Smaller Goods

Our age offers countless smaller goods while hiding the greater ones.

More entertainment.
More scrolling.
More purchasing power.
More stimulation.

Yet people may own more and possess less meaning. We may be connected to everything and estranged from ourselves.

Thomas Aquinas would say we confuse means with ends.
Heidegger would say we are trapped in what he later calls Gestell—a framework in which everything becomes a resource, including ourselves.

We optimize sleep, productivity, bodies, and networks—yet forget to ask why.

That is a dangerous loss.

The Highest Good Without Religious Language?

Must one believe in God to learn from Aquinas?

Not necessarily.

One may read him in a secular way as a reminder that human life needs an orienting center. A “highest good” can mean that which gives unity and direction.

For some, that is God.
For others, truth.
For others, love of neighbor.
For others, responsibility.
For others, living honestly.

The central question is not what you call it. The question is whether you live without anything higher than momentary appetite.

Heidegger and the Call of Conscience

In Being and Time, Heidegger writes of the call of conscience—not as moral scolding, but as a quiet summons back to a more authentic life.

This becomes interesting when read beside Aquinas.

In Aquinas there is order and purpose.
In Heidegger there is calling and awakening.

Perhaps our age needs both:

a language of the good
a summons to live it

When Life Breaks Apart

What happens when illness, grief, or loss makes “the good life” seem impossible?

This is where every philosophy is tested.

A widow loses her partner.
A man receives a cancer diagnosis.
A child dies.
An old woman lives in loneliness.

At such moments, theories grow small.

Yet something may still remain:

goodness in presence
faithfulness
truth without decoration
courage to carry the day

Perhaps the highest good is sometimes not triumph, but love that remains standing in the dark.

Here Aquinas and existential thought meet more closely than many assume.

What Can We Learn Today?

From Thomas Aquinas:

The good is more than preference.
Human life has direction and purpose.
Not all goods are equally important.
Character and virtue matter.

From Heidegger:

Human beings live in time and vulnerability.
Systems can hide what matters most.
We can lose ourselves in everydayness.
Awakening is necessary.

From practical philosophy:

Thought must become life.
The good is often decided in small actions.
Judgment matters more than slogans.
Responsibility cannot be outsourced.

A Personal Reflection

Reading these older texts, I am struck by how modern we are—and how poor our thinking often becomes.

We have data about everything, but wisdom about little.
We measure well-being, but do not understand the soul.
We debate values, but rarely the good.

Perhaps we need not less philosophy, but more. Not more academic decoration, but more life-oriented thinking.

To read Heidegger reading Thomas Aquinas is therefore not antiquarian work. It is to recover questions we still live from.

Closing

What is the good?

The question returns when we least expect it: beside a hospital bed, in divorce, in parenting, in silence after harsh words, in the dawn when a person senses life must be lived more truthfully.

Thomas Aquinas reminds us that human beings seek fulfillment.
Heidegger reminds us that we can lose our way.

Practical philosophy begins when we take both truths seriously.

Not by speaking most about the good.
But by choosing it.
In small things.
In difficult things.
Today.