I like him for the attention he pays to labour and work, subjects he passed on to Arendt and which, as craft, are busy resurfacing today. I dislike his anti-intellectualism. His formula for bringing together brains and brawn in an ideological crusade pinpoints exactly where the tramlines carrying Marxist-Leninism and Nazism to their destinations crossed over. Anti-intellectualism is also wretched as such. A better course for a thinker who despises thinking might be to give up, rather than pretend he is a craftsman in his workshop.

One goes back through one's own education, political and artistic, up here, with the soul of water running, gushing, spilling everywhere, 10cm of snow like wet sugar underfoot, icy air and the occasional convector blast of warm sunshine. I've come to Heidegger, who would have been 120 this year, warily and late, but I know I haven't wasted my time coming to Todtnauberg when, the Rundweg over, there's time enough to explore the church I so admired from the bus stop.

Built in 1967, "because the old one was too small for the burgeoning congregation", it seems to embrace just that spirit which the student of Heidegger's hut could not find in a lesser building. It has the steep roof of local style and an eye-grabbing clock tower in modern wrought iron. The placing of the two, in relation to the surrounding hills, and the rise of the main street, is perfect. Inside, the rounded space is lit through broad friezes of abstract stained glass in the pale green of grass, the grey-white of snow and mountains and the lightning-strike red of grace. The whole surface is crossed by tracks: ski-tracks, animal tracks, sled tracks, paths of the kind that so fascinated Heidegger he made them his dominant motif. To philosophise is to follow a path, even if finally it leads to a dead end. Lord, what beauty is in being here in St Jakobus, far more so than in nature outside. This is what human being, Heidegger's Dasein, can rise to.

I don't want to re-Christianise the philosopher who began as a Catholic theologian, only to put him back in his place. As Elfride wrote to their priest back in 1919, "My husband has lost his faith and I have failed to find mine." Not only is Heidegger, as a lapsed Catholic, more Duns Scotus than Aquinas, he was always more interested in a system of worship and an account of eternity, than he was a lover of Jesus. What destroyed the system for him was modern biology: Darwin at his broadest point of impact. The theme is taken up in Being and Time, that God didn't make the world, nor us. We are just thrown into being to make some sense of our passing occurrence in this place. We occur in it like the stone on the path and the thistle in the field, except that we are human beings, who have responses like anxiety and care and a sense of that truth that is so reluctant to show itself. Arendt called Heidegger the philosopher of our exposure to history, "ein Philosoph der Geschichtlichkeit". He taught that not only does the human individual die, but whole human worlds die down and die off too. How can that be bearable? 

Not surprisingly, for himself, he chose to dwell in a world, up here, that has changed very slowly since his day.