Editing Martin Heidegger (section)

==Philosophy==
{{See also|Heideggerian terminology}}
[[File:Heideggerrundweg0013.JPG|thumb|left|View from Heidegger's vacation chalet in Todtnauberg. Heidegger wrote most of ''Being and Time'' there.]]

=== Fundamental ontology ===
{{See also|Fundamental ontology}}

According to scholar [[Taylor Carman]], traditional ontology asks "Why is there anything?", whereas Heidegger's [[fundamental ontology]] asks "What does it mean for something to be?" Heidegger's ontology "is fundamental relative to traditional ontology in that it concerns what any understanding of entities necessarily presupposes, namely, our understanding of that by virtue of which entities are entities".{{sfn|Carman|2003|pages=8-52}}

This line of inquiry is "central to Heidegger's philosophy". He accuses the Western philosophical tradition of mistakenly trying to understand ''being as such'' as if it were an ultimate entity.{{sfn|Dahlstrom|2004}} Heidegger modifies traditional ontology by focusing instead on the ''meaning of being''. This kind of ontological inquiry, he claims, is required to understand the basis of our understanding, scientific and otherwise.{{sfn|Heidegger|1962|loc=§3}}

In short, before asking what exists, Heidegger contends that people must first examine what "to exist" even means.{{sfn|Wheeler|2020|loc=§2.2.1}}

===''Being and Time''===
{{See also|Being and Time}}
In his first major work, ''Being and Time'', Heidegger pursues this ontological inquiry by way of an analysis of the kind of being that people have, namely, that humans are the sort of beings able to pose the question of the meaning of being. According to Canadian philosopher [[Sean McGrath (philosopher)|Sean McGrath]], Heidegger was probably influenced by Scotus in this approach.<ref>{{cite journal |last=McGrath |first=Sean J. |author-link=Sean McGrath (philosopher) |title=Heidegger and Duns Scotus on Truth and Language |journal=[[The Review of Metaphysics]] |volume=57 |number=2 |year=2003 |pages=339–358 |jstor=20131978 |url=https://www.jstor.org/stable/20131978 |access-date=28 November 2023 |archive-date=1 December 2023 |archive-url=https://web.archive.org/web/20231201195241/https://www.jstor.org/stable/20131978 |url-status=live }}</ref> His term for us, in this phenomenological context, is [[Dasein]].{{sfn|Sandkühler|2010}}

[[File:Being and Time (German edition).jpg|thumb|right|Title page of first edition of ''Being and Time'']]

This procedure works because Dasein's ''pre-ontological'' understanding of being shapes experience. Dasein's ordinary and even mundane experience of "being-in-the-world" provides "access to the meaning" or "sense of being"; that is, the terms in which "something becomes intelligible as something."{{sfn|Heidegger|1962|page=151}} Heidegger proposes that this ordinary "prescientific" understanding precedes abstract ways of knowing, such as logic or theory.{{sfn|Heidegger|1962|page=12}} ''Being and Time'' is designed to show how this implicit understanding can be made progressively explicit through [[Phenomenology (philosophy)|phenomenology]] and [[Hermeneutics#Heidegger (1889–1976)|hermeneutics]].{{sfn|Heidegger|1962|pages=1–27}}{{sfn|Whittingham|2018}}{{sfn|Inwood|1999}}

====Being-in-the-world====
Heidegger introduces the term [[Dasein]] to denote a "living being" through its activity of "being there".{{sfn|Horrigan-Kelly|Millar|Dowling|2016}} Understood as a unitary phenomenon rather than a contingent, additive combination, it is characterized by Heidegger as "being-in-the-world".{{sfn|Wheeler|2020|loc=§2.2.3}}

Heidegger insists that the 'in' of Dasein's being-in-the-world is an 'in' of involvement or of engagement, not of objective, physical enclosedness. The sense in which Dasein is 'in' the world is the sense of "residing" or "dwelling" in the world.{{sfn|Heidegger|1962|page=54}} Heidegger provides a few examples: "having to do with something, producing something, attending to something and looking after it, making use of something".{{sfn|Heidegger|1962|page=56}}{{sfn|Polt|1999|pages=46–49}}

Just as 'being-in' does not denote objective, physical enclosedness, so 'world', as Heidegger uses the term, does not denote a universe of physical objects. The world, in Heidegger's sense, is to be understood according to our sense of our possibilities: things present themselves to people in terms of their projects, the uses to which they can put them. The 'sight' with which people grasp equipment is not a mentalistic intentionality, but what Heidegger calls 'circumspection'.{{sfn|Heidegger|1962|page=69}} This is to say that equipment reveals itself in terms of its 'towards-which,' in terms of the work it is good for. In the everyday world, people are absorbed within the equipmental totality of their work-world.{{sfn|Polt|1999|loc=pp. 46–61, esp. diagram on p.61}}{{sfn|Dreyfus|1991|pages=88–100}} Moreover, on Heidegger's analysis, this entails a radical holism.{{sfn|Wheeler|2020|loc=§2.2.3}} In his own words, "there 'is' no such thing as ''an'' equipment".{{sfn|Heidegger|1962|loc=p. 97, qtd. in translators' fn. 1}}

For example, when someone sits down to dinner and picks up their fork, they are not picking up an object with good stabbing properties: they are non-reflectively engaging an 'in-order-to-eat'. When it works as expected, equipment is transparent; when it is used, it is subsumed under the work toward which it is employed. Heidegger calls this structure of practically ordered reference relations the 'worldhood of the world'.{{sfn|Polt|1999|loc=pp. 46–61, esp. diagram on p.61}}{{sfn|Dreyfus|1991|pages=88–100}}

Heidegger calls the mode of being of such entities "ready-to-hand", for they are understood only in being handled.{{sfn|Polt|1999|page=50}} If the fork is made of plastic, however, and it snaps in the course of using it, then it assumes the mode of being that Heidegger calls "present-at-hand." For now the fork needs to be made the object of focal awareness, considering it in terms of its properties. Is it too broken to use? If so, could the diner possibly get by with another utensil or just with their fingers? This kind of equipmental breakdown is not the only way that objects become present-at-hand for us, but Heidegger considers it typical of the way that this shift occurs in the course of ordinary goings-on.{{sfn|Dreyfus|1991|pages=71-72}}

In this way, Heidegger creates a theoretical space for the categories of subject and object, while at the same time denying that they apply to our most basic way of moving about in the world, of which they are instead presented as derivative.{{sfn|Wheeler|2020|loc=§2.2.2}}

Heidegger presents three primary structural features of being-in-the-world: understanding, attunement, and discourse. He calls these features "existentiales" or "existentialia" (''Existenzialien'') to distinguish their ontological status, as distinct from the "categories" of metaphysics.{{sfn|Dreyfus|1991|pages=40–42}}{{sfn|Inwood|1999|pages=61–62}}

* ''Understanding'' is "our fundamental ability to be someone, to do things, to get around in the world". It is the basic "know-how" in terms of which Dasein goes about pursuing the usually humdrum tasks that make up daily life. Heidegger argues that this mode of understanding is more fundamental than theoretical understanding.{{sfn|Polt|1999|page=65}}
* ''Attunement'' is "our way of finding ourselves thrust into the world".{{sfn|Polt|1999|page=65}} It can also be translated as "disposition" or "affectedness". (The standard translation of Macquarrie and Robinson uses "state-of-mind", but this misleadingly suggests a private mental state.) There is no perfect equivalent for Heidegger's ''Befindlichkeit'', which is not even an ordinary German word.{{sfn|Heidegger|1996a|page=xv}}{{sfn|Dreyfus|1991|page=168}}{{sfn|Polt|1999|page=65}} What needs to be conveyed, however, is "being found in a situation where things and opinions already matter".{{sfn|Dreyfus|1991|page=168}}
* ''Discourse'' (sometimes: ''talk'' or ''telling'' [de:''Rede'']) is "the articulation of the world into recognizable, communicable patterns of meaning." It is implicated in both understanding attunement: "The world that is opened up by moods and grasped by understanding gets organized by discourse. Discourse makes language possible."{{sfn|Polt|1999|page=65}} According to Heidegger, "Discourse is the articulation of intelligibility."{{sfn|Heidegger|1962|page=161}} In its most basic form, this referential whole manifests itself in the way things are told apart just in the course of using them.{{sfn|Dreyfus|1991|page=214}}

Heidegger unifies these three existential features of Dasein in a composite structure he terms "care":{{efn|[[Michael Inwood]] provides a brief discussion of this term to illustrate Heidegger's use of language more generally: "The word 'care', which corresponds closely, if not exactly, to the German ''Sorge'', has a range of senses. We can see this from the adjectives it forms and the words they contrast with: 'careworn' and 'carefree'; 'careful' and 'careless'; 'caring' and 'uncaring'. These oppositions are not the same: one can be, for example, both careworn and careless. In ordinary usage not everyone is careworn, careful and caring all the time. Some of us are carefree, careless or uncaring. Heidegger makes two innovations. First, he uses 'care' in a broad sense which underlies its diversification into the careworn, the careful and the caring. Second, in this sense of 'care', he insists, everyone cares; no one is wholly carefree, careless or uncaring. It is only because everyone is, in this fundamental sense, care-ful, that we can ever be carefree, careless or uncaring in the ordinary, or as he has it, the 'ontical', senses of these words. In the 'ontological' sense of 'care', everyone cares. All human beings, again, are 'ahead of themselves' (''sich vorweg''), roughly 'up to something' or on the look out for what to do. What about those mired in hopeless despair? Even those, Heidegger insists, are 'ahead of themselves': 'Hopelessness does not tear Dasein away from its possibilities; it is only a particular mode of being toward these possibilities' (BT, 236)."{{sfn|Inwood|1999|pages=2–3}} }} "ahead-of-itself-being-already-in-(the-world) as being-amidst (entities encountered within-the-world)."{{sfn|Heidegger|1962|page=192}}{{sfn|Dreyfus|1991|pages=238–39}} What unifies this formula is ''temporality''. Understanding is oriented towards future possibilities, attunement is shaped by the past, and discourse discloses the present in those terms.{{sfn|Dreyfus|1991|pages=244–45}}{{sfn|Wheeler|2020|loc=§2.2.7}} In this way, the investigation into the being of Dasein leads to time. Much of Division II of ''Being and Time'' is devoted to a more fundamental reinterpretation of the findings of Division I in terms of Dasein's temporality.{{sfn|Polt|1999|page=85}}

====''Das Man''====
As implied in the analysis of both attunement and discourse, Dasein is "always already", or [[a priori]], a social being. In Heidegger's technical idiom, Dasein is "Dasein-with" (''Mitsein''), which he presents as equally primordial with "being-one's self" (''Selbstsein'').{{sfn|Inwood|1999|page=31}}

Heidegger's term for this existential feature of Dasein is ''das Man'', which is a German pronoun, ''man'', that Heidegger turns into a noun.{{sfn|Inwood|1999|page=212}} In English it is usually translated as either "the they" or "the one" (sometimes also capitalized); for, as Heidegger puts it, "By 'others' we do not mean everyone else but me.... They are rather those from whom for the most part, one does ''not'' distinguish oneself—those among whom one is too".{{sfn|Heidegger|1962|page=118}} Quite frequently the term is just left in the German.

According to philosopher [[Hubert Dreyfus]], part of Heidegger's aim is to show that, contrary to Husserl, individuals do not generate an intersubjective world from their separate activities; rather, "these activities ''presuppose'' the disclosure of one shared world." This is one way in which Heidegger breaks from the [[Cartesianism|Cartesian]] tradition of beginning from the perspective of individual subjectivity.{{sfn|Dreyfus|1991|page=142}}

Dreyfus argues that the chapter on ''das Man'' is "the most confused" in ''Being and Time'' and so is often misinterpreted. The problem, he says, is that Heidegger's presentation conflates two opposing influences. The first is Dilthey's account of the role that public and historical contexts have in the production of significance. The second is Kierkegaard's insistence that truth is never to be found in the crowd.{{sfn|Dreyfus|1991|page=143}}

The Diltheyian dimension of Heidegger's analysis positions ''das Man'' as ontologically existential in the same way as understanding, affectedness, and discourse. This dimension of Heidegger's analysis captures the way that a socio-historical "background" makes possible the specific significance that entities and activities can have.{{sfn|Dreyfus|1991|page=143}} Philosopher [[Charles Taylor (philosopher)|Charles Taylor]] expands upon the term: "It is that of which I am not simply unaware... but at the same time I cannot be said to be explicitly or focally aware of it, because that status is already occupied by what it is making intelligible".{{sfn|Taylor|1993|page=325}} For this reason, background non-representationally informs and enables engaged agency in the world, but is something that people can never make fully explicit to themselves.{{sfn|Taylor|1993|page=327}}

The Kierkegaardian influence on Heidegger's analysis introduces a more [[existentialist]] dimension to ''Being and Time''. ([[Existentialism]] is a broad philosophical movement largely defined by [[Jean-Paul Sartre]] and is not to be confused with Heidegger's technical analysis of the specific existential features of Dasein.) Its central notion is ''authenticity'', which emerges as a problem from the "publicness" built into the existential role of ''das Man''. In Heidegger's own words:

<blockquote>In this inconspicuousness and unascertainability, the real dictatorship of the 'they' is unfolded. We take pleasure and enjoy ourselves as ''they'' take pleasure; we read, see and judge about literature and art as ''they'' see and judge; likewise we shrink back from the 'great mass' as ''they'' shrink back; we find 'shocking' what they find shocking. The 'they', which is nothing definite, and which we all are, through not as the sum, prescribes the kind of being of everydayness.{{sfn|Heidegger|1962|pages=126–27}}</blockquote>

This "dictatorship of ''das Man''" threatens to undermine Heidegger's entire project of uncovering the meaning of being because it does not seem possible, from such a condition, to even raise the question of being that Heidegger claims to pursue. He responds to this challenge with his account of [[Authenticity (philosophy)|authenticity]].

====Authenticity====
Heidegger's term ''Eigentlichkeit'' is a neologism, in which Heidegger stresses the root ''eigen'', meaning "own." So this word, usually translated "authenticity", could just as well be translated "ownedness" or "being one's own".{{sfn|Varga|Guignon|2014|loc=§3.1}}{{sfn|Inwood|1999|pages=22–23}} Authenticity, according to Heidegger, is a matter of taking responsibility for being, that is, the stand that people take with respect to their ultimate projects. It is, in his terms, a matter of taking a properly "resolute" stand on "for-the-sake-of-which". Put differently, the "self" to which one is true in authenticity is not something just "there" to be discovered, but instead is a matter of "on-going narrative construction".{{sfn|Varga|Guignon|2014|loc=§3.1}}

Scholars Somogy Varga and [[Charles Guignon]] describe three ways by which Dasein might attain an authentic relation to itself from out of its "fallen" condition as "they"-self. First, a powerful mood such as [[Angst|anxiety]] can disclose Dasein to itself as an ultimately isolated individual. Second, direct confrontation with Dasein's "ownmost" potential for death can similarly disclose to Dasein its own irreducible finitude. Third, experiencing "the call of conscience" can disclose to Dasein its own "guilt" (''Schuld'') as the debt it has to itself in virtue of having taken over pre-given possibilities that it is now Dasein's own responsibility to maintain.{{sfn|Varga|Guignon|2014|loc=§3.1}}

Philosopher [[Michael E. Zimmerman]] describes authenticity as "resolving to accept the openness which, paradoxically, one already is".{{sfn|Zimmerman|1981|page=xx}} He emphasizes that this is a matter, not of "intellectual comprehension", but of "hard-won insight".{{sfn|Zimmerman|1981|page=xix}} Authenticity is ultimately a matter of allowing the ego to be "eclipsed by the manifestation of one's finitude".{{sfn|Zimmerman|1981|page=xxvii}}

Although the term "authenticity" disappears from Heidegger's writing after ''Being and Time'', Zimmerman argues that it is supplanted in his later thought by the less subjective or [[Voluntarism (philosophy)|voluntaristic]] notion of ''Ereignis''. This ordinary German term for "event" or "happening" is theorized by Heidegger as the appropriation of Dasein into a cosmic play of concealment and appearance.{{sfn|Zimmerman|1981|pages=xxiv–xxviii}}

===Later works: The Turn===
{{see also|Kehre}}
Heidegger's "Turn", which is sometimes referred to by the German ''die [[Kehre]]'', refers to a change in his work as early as 1930 that became clearly established by the 1940s, according to some commentators, who variously describe a shift of focus or a major change in outlook.{{sfn|Korab-Karpowicz|loc=§1}}{{sfn|Richardson|1963}}{{efn|"In a 1947 piece, in which Heidegger distances his views from Sartre's existentialism, he links the turn to his own failure to produce the missing divisions of ''Being and Time'' [i.e., "Time and Being"]. ... At root Heidegger's later philosophy shares the deep concerns of ''Being and Time'', in that it is driven by the same preoccupation with [[Being]] and our relationship with it that propelled the earlier work. ... [T]he later Heidegger does seem to think that his earlier focus on Dasein bears the stain of a [[subjectivity]] that ultimately blocks the path to an understanding of Being. This is not to say that the later thinking turns away altogether from the project of [[transcendental hermeneutic phenomenology]]. The project of illuminating the a priori conditions on the basis of which entities show up as intelligible to us is still at the heart of things."{{sfn|Wheeler|2020|loc=§3.1}} }}

Heidegger himself frequently used the term to refer to the shift announced at the end of ''Being and Time'' from "being and time" to "time and being". However, he rejected the existence of the "sharp 'about turn{{'"}} posited by some interpreters.{{sfn|Inwood|1999|page=8}} Scholar [[Michael Inwood]] also calls attention to the fact that many of the ideas from ''Being and Time'' are retained in a different vocabulary in his later work—and also that, in other cases, a word or expression common throughout his career comes to acquire a different meaning in the later works.{{sfn|Inwood|1999|page=8}}

This supposed shift—applied here to cover about 30 years of Heidegger's 40-year writing career—has been described by commentators from widely varied viewpoints, for instance, from ''dwelling'' (being) in the world to ''doing'' (temporality) in the world.{{sfn|Wheeler|2020|loc=§3.1}}{{sfn|Heidegger|2002}} This aspect, in particular the 1951 essay "Building Dwelling Thinking", has influenced several architectural theorists.{{sfn|Davies|2017}}

Other interpreters believe the Turn can be overstated or doesn't exist at all. For instance, [[Thomas Sheehan (philosopher)|Thomas Sheehan]] believes this supposed change is "far less dramatic than usually suggested", and entails merely a change in focus and method.{{sfn|Polt|Fried|2001|page=15}} [[Mark Wrathall]] argued that the Turn isn't found in Heidegger's writings, but is simply a misconception.{{sfn|Wrathall|2010}}

Some notable later works are "[[The Origin of the Work of Art]]" (1935), ''[[Contributions to Philosophy]]'' (1937), "[[Letter on Humanism]]" (1946), "Building Dwelling Thinking" (1951), "[[The Question Concerning Technology]]" (1954), and "[[What Is Called Thinking?]]" (1954).

===The history of being===
The idea of asking about being may be traced back via Aristotle to [[Parmenides]]. Heidegger claims to revive this question of being that had been largely forgotten by the [[Metaphysics|metaphysical]] tradition extending from [[Plato]] to [[Descartes]], a forgetfulness extending into the [[Age of Enlightenment]], as well as modern science and technology. In pursuit of the retrieval of the question, Heidegger spends considerable time reflecting on [[Greek philosophy|ancient Greek thought]], in particular on Plato, [[Parmenides]], [[Heraclitus]], and [[Anaximander]].

In his later philosophy, Heidegger attempts to reconstruct the "history of being" in order to show how the different epochs in the history of philosophy were dominated by different conceptions of being.{{sfn|Inwood|1999|loc= §History of being}} His goal is to retrieve the original experience of being present in the [[Pre-Socratic philosophy|early Greek thought]] that was covered up by later philosophers.{{sfn|Korab-Karpowicz|loc=§4}}

According to [[Wlodzimierz Julian Korab-Karpowicz|W. Julian Korab-Karpowicz]], Heidegger believed "the thinking of [[Heraclitus]] and [[Parmenides]], which lies at the origin of philosophy, was falsified and misinterpreted" by Plato and Aristotle, thus tainting all of subsequent Western philosophy.{{sfn|Korab-Karpowicz|2016|page=58}} In his ''[[Introduction to Metaphysics (Heidegger book)|Introduction to Metaphysics]]'', Heidegger states, "Among the most ancient Greek thinkers, it is Heraclitus who was subjected to the most fundamentally un-Greek misinterpretation in the course of Western history, and who nevertheless in more recent times has provided the strongest impulses toward redisclosing what is authentically Greek."{{sfn|Heidegger|2014}}

[[Charles Guignon]] writes that Heidegger aims to correct this misunderstanding by reviving Presocratic notions of being with an emphasis on "understanding the way beings show up in (and as) an unfolding ''happening or event''." Guignon adds that "we might call this alternative outlook 'event ontology.{{'"}}{{sfn|Polt|Fried|2001|page=36}}

===Language<!--'Language speaks' redirects here-->===
In ''Being and Time'', language is presented as logically secondary to Dasein's understanding of the world and its significance. On this conception of worldhood, language can develop from prelinguistic significance.{{sfn|Inwood|1999|p=208}}

Post-turn, Heidegger refines his position to present some basic words (e.g., ''phusis'', the Greek term that roughly translates to "nature") as world-disclosive, that is, as establishing the foundational parameters in terms of which Dasein's understanding can occur in the specific ways that it does. It is in this context that Heidegger proclaims that "Language is the house of being."{{sfn|Inwood|1999|p=209}}

In the present age, he says, the language of "technology", or instrumental reason, flatten the significance of our world. For salvation, he turns to poetry.{{sfn|Inwood|1999|p=209}}

Heidegger rejected the notion of language being purely a means of communication. Language construed us such, he believed, would form the basis of an age of technology, the digital thought processes of which would only use language to organise and communicate the coverage of that which exists. Thinking in terms of calculation and digital processing would put man at odds with language, at the centre of everything that exists. If man would believe that they would have language at their disposal, that they would be the one to use it, then, Heidegger believed, man would completely miss the core tenet of language itself:<ref>''Wegmarken.'' GA&nbsp;9, S.&nbsp;75.</ref> "It is language that speaks, not man. Man only speaks if they neatly correspond to language."<ref>''Der Satz vom Grund.'' GA&nbsp;10, S.&nbsp;143.</ref> In this way, Heidegger wanted to point out that man is only a ''participant'' of language that they have not themselves created. Man is bound within a sort of process of transfer and may only ''act'' with respect to anything the language conveys.

In this, however, Heidegger does not think in terms of [[philosophy of culture]]: The [[tautology (language)|tautology]] of the formulation "'''language speaks'''"<!--boldface per WP:R#PLA--> (originally in German "die Sprache spricht") is his way of trying to prevent the phenomenon of language to be used with respect to anything else than language itself. In line with his unique thinking, he is seeking to avoid having to justify the language by anything else. In this way, language could for instance never be explained by the sheer transmission of acoustic sounds, or speaking. According to Heidegger, language is rather difficult to fathom because we are too close to it, hence we need to speak about that which usually remains unmentioned because it is just to close to us. His work "Unterwegs zur Sprache" (''On the way to language'') is an attempt to reach "a place we already are in."<ref>''Unterwegs zur Sprache.'' GA&nbsp;12, S.&nbsp;199.</ref>

=== Influences ===
{{multiple image
| width             = 140
| image1            = Nietzsche187a.jpg
| alt1              = Friedrich Nietzsche
| image2            = FK Hiemer - Friedrich Hölderlin (Pastell 1792).jpg
| alt2              = Friedrich Hölderlin,
| footer            = Heidegger dedicated many of his lectures to both Nietzsche and Hölderlin.
}}

[[Friedrich Nietzsche]] and [[Friedrich Hölderlin]] were both important influences on Heidegger, and many of his lecture courses were devoted to one or the other, especially in the 1930s and 1940s.{{sfn|Raffoul|Nelson|2013|page=[https://books.google.com/books?id=eSZMAQAAQBAJ&pg=PT224&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false 224]}} The lectures on Nietzsche focused on fragments posthumously published under the title ''[[The Will to Power (manuscript)|The Will to Power]]'', rather than on Nietzsche's published works. Heidegger reads ''The Will to Power'' as the culminating expression of Western metaphysics, and the lectures are a kind of dialogue between the two thinkers.

[[Michael Allen Gillespie]] says that Heidegger's theoretical acceptance of "destiny" has much in common with the [[millenarianism]] of Marxism. But Marxists believe Heidegger's "theoretical acceptance is antagonistic to practical political activity and implies fascism". Gillespie, however, says "the real danger" from Heidegger isn't [[Quietism (philosophy)|quietism]] but [[fanaticism]]. Modernity has cast mankind toward a new goal "on the brink of profound [[nihilism]]" that is "so alien it requires the construction of a new tradition to make it comprehensible."{{sfn|Gillespie|1984|page=133}}

Gillespie extrapolates from Heidegger's writings that humankind may degenerate into "scientists, workers, and brutes".{{sfn|Gillespie|1984|page=[https://books.google.com/books?id=fApCCQAAQBAJ&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&printsec=frontcover&pg=PA148&hl=en&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false 148]}} According to Gillespie, Heidegger envisaged this abyss to be the greatest event in the history of the West because it might enable humanity to comprehend being more profoundly and primordially than the [[Presocratics]].{{sfn|Gillespie|1984|page=[https://books.google.com/books?id=fApCCQAAQBAJ&newbks=1&newbks_redir=0&printsec=frontcover&pg=PA151&hl=en&redir_esc=y#v=onepage&q&f=false 151]}}

The poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin became an increasingly central focus of Heidegger's later work and thought. Heidegger grants Hölderlin a singular place within the history of being and the history of Germany, as a herald whose thought is yet to be "heard" in Germany or the West more generally. Many of Heidegger's works from the 1930s onwards include meditations on lines from Hölderlin's poetry, and several of the lecture courses are devoted to the reading of a single poem; for example, ''[[Hölderlin's Hymn "The Ister"]]''.