As I stand on this mountaintop, pressed to consider Nature and Truth and two hot wars and a cold one, Karl Popper's wartime damnation of German philosophy in The Open Society and Its Enemies comes to mind. Popper attacked Idealism from Plato to Hegel as being essentially undemocratic. Heidegger attacked that same tradition almost contemporaneously and concurred that what led to untruth was subjectivity, or the old German habit of inwardness. Against the German grain, he wanted to privilege the world outside. That Heidegger tried to relieve the German tradition of the burden of metaphysics and endow it with a new empiricism is a fact obscured by his oblique style. It's why the most interesting work being done on him today is in connection with the pragmatic Wittgenstein. 

The little poem displayed on Board Three expresses Heidegger's feeling, however, that a German empiricism could never go deep enough if it didn't supplement technical language with poetry. So, with language, one finds him on the way back to that inwardness he disowned. Utterances like "Wind Dwells" have reminded generations of Heideggerians of Rainer Maria Rilke. The comparison irritated Heidegger, for Rilke surely embodied the old inwardness. Exactly. 

The achievement then, and what the poet and philosopher shared, is that they occupied common ground in their love of things. As he sat in Todtnauberg, Heidegger enumerated all the things around him and through the window: "The stone on the path and the clod of ploughed earth, the jug...And the well and the cloud in the sky and the thistle in the field, the leaf in the autumn wind and the hawk over the wood...The hammer...The shoe, the axe and the clock." Any future metaphysics, wrote the English poet Gerard Manley Hopkins in 1871, must get away from Aristotle-Aquinas, and above all Hegel, and defer to the haecceity — the thisness — of things. Religious empiricism might name that aim. It's surely no coincidence that Hopkins and Heidegger 50 years later struggled with their faith and shared a love of the medieval mystic Duns Scotus, who rejected other-worldliness in favour of haecceity, a word he coined. 

Evidence of that spirit of religious thisness can be found in work of Heidegger's recommended on the next panels as having been written up here. The Contributions to Philosophy, 1938-9, are hard work but anyone can appreciate the meditations on place in The Experience of Thinking. These volumes, and another, Speeches, from the Collected Works, can be borrowed from the
local library while you're here on holiday. That's Germany for you. I always admire the seriousness when I meet it. Meanwhile, the tip to read Speeches quietly steers the reader enthusiastic for thisness back to the infamy of the pro-Nazi Rectoral Address of May 1933, and there's honesty in that. It means, I think, that to try to understand, and accept, Heidegger is a constant balancing act and a hovering mystery.

Great men came to visit him after the war in Todtnauberg, including the theologian Rudolf Bultmann, the novelist Ernst Jünger, the physicist Werner Heisenberg and the poet of the Holocaust Paul Celan. Heidegger couldn't say the right things directly to Celan either. With his ban from teaching for five years after the war, he became famous as his activity shifted from academic to guru. Since he hated academic life and despised the triviality of "life down there" at the university, he ought to have been less rattled but he had a nervous breakdown. Then, as a sui generis philosopher whose fame had spread abroad, from the late 1950s, he was happier again.