Heidegger's Homeric Struggle

In his recent book, Heidegger and Homecoming, Robert Mugerauer offers an insightful reading of Heidegger's struggle to overcome his Western philosophical addiction to metaphysics and learn to see the world afresh and find his own place within it. Had he been able, he would have become Germany's Homer.

Mugerauer does not say this, but the chief obstacle in Heidegger's path to the poet's laurel was Goethe's Faust. In principle, this would not be an insurmountable obstacle since times had changed, Germany had changed, and the epic form no longer fit the times or the place into which Heidegger had found himself thrown.

The real problem for Heidegger was that, despite overweening ambition, he lacked the gift of song. So he did the best he could with the talent that he had: he adopted an oracular style and offered original readings of modern German poets and ancient Greek philosophers and Tolstoy--let us not forget Tolstoy--who, with War and Peace (his Iliad) and Anna Karenina (his Odyssey) had become the Russian Homer.

In the end, I suspect that Heidegger's work belongs on the shelf next to Bonhoeffer's prison musings on a "non-religious interpretation of biblical concepts"--juxtaposed to Thomas Wolfe's posthumously published You Can't Go Home Again.