ABSTRACT
Readers who move from Kierkegaard to Heidegger frequently come away feeling certain that Kierkegaard has been a significant influence on Heidegger’s thought, especially in Being and Time and the period leading up to it. There are so many parallels, so many shared terms and categories that there must be something to it, one feels, and modern scholars have increasingly detected and deciphered multiple Kierkegaardian sources. Some, convinced that Heidegger must have had specific well-thumbed Kierkegaard texts virtually at his side as he composed sections of Being and Time,1 have worked out in detail the connections and the presumed borrowings. Heidegger never explicitly acknowledges a direct or significant Kierkegaardian influence on Being and Time, and he is grudging, at best, in crediting Kierkegaard with a role in his intellectual development. As John van Buren put it in his study of Heidegger’s development:
[T]he later Heidegger was, as has been well documented, often puzzlingly reluctant to acknowledge his profound indebtedness to those philosophical traditions that originally helped to put him on the way of the being question in his early Freiburg period, such as the young Luther, Kierkegaard, Jaspers, Aristotle’s practical writings, Husserl’s Sixth Investigation, and Dilthey.2
