ABSTRACT
Nearly all of the literature dealing with the relationship between Heidegger and Kierkegaard has tended to focus on the presence of Kierkegaardian elements in the period of Heidegger's philosophical development centred on Being and Time. Heidegger himself alludes to the relevance of Kierkegaard for the anthropological perspective within which the metaphysical problematic of Being and Time is formulated, even if he does so grudgingly, insisting that where Kierkegaard's horizons are limited to the psychological, the merely ontic, and the existentiell, his own work aims at the ontological and existential - that is,, at the uncovering of the fundamental structures that determine the Being of all beings qua beings (even if he does not anywhere presume to have definitively achieved this goal). Insofar as one can talk of a major shift in Heidegger's thinking, away from the 'philosophy of existence' and towards a kind of poetic-meditative thinking of the history of Being, this shift can plausibly be seen as a move away from Kierkegaard and everything that Kierkegaard stood for in the context of German philosophy in the 1920s and 1930s, and towards a paradigm for which the Pre-Socratics and the German poet Friedrich Holderlin provided the main sources of inspiration. Gone is the angst-ridden individual, who heroically takes upon himself the guilt and nothingness of his own death in the moment of decision and thereby breaks free from the fallen mediocrity of the crowd with its incessant chatter. In his place we have the wanderer on forest paths, pondering the mysterious being of the German landscape and rivers, patiently and in the spirit of detachment that Heidegger called Gelassenheit meditating upon the primal words of poets and archaic thinkers and waiting upon a new revelation of Being that is to inaugurate a new post-technological 'second beginning' of philosophy.
