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Martin Heidegger: Main Page | Discuss existentialism and Martin Heidegger | Martin Heidegger Life and Times | Heidegger Considered Gloomy and Nihilistic | Heidegger Abandons Original Intention | Heidegger's Idiosyncratic Use of Language | Martin Heidegger : Books and Reviews | Katharena's Essential Heidegger, for the Mind on Fire!

• Meet Heidegger
• Realm of Existentialism
• Minds of Existentialism
• Basics of Existentialism
• Existential Quotes
• Theatre of the Absurd
• Existential-Speak
• Existential Think Tank
• 54 Existential Essentials
• Existential Divas!

Beginning in the mid-1930s, Heidegger's thought changed in several important respects. He thus abandoned his original intention to write a second part to the ontological inquiry that he began with Being and Time. His later works, however, may be considered this second part, because in them Heidegger works from the notion of being to the more familiar notion of human existence, reversing the direction of Being and Time, in which he moved from human experience to the nature of being. In his later works Heidegger stresses the decadence of the modern world, arguing that humanity has "fallen out of being."

He traces this fall back to Greek philosophy. In the thought of the pre-Socratics, particularly Parmenides, he finds the only real understanding of being. By the time of Aristotle, that understanding was lost in the emphasis on human beings as rational creatures. Heidegger placed particular emphasis on language as the vehicle through which human beings can reencounter being and on the special role poetry plays in the development and function of language. The importance he attaches to poetry can be seen in his respect for the work of the German poet Friedrich Holderlin and in his invention of words with multiple meanings derived from their etymological roots. -- by Thomas E. Wren