The Threshold Question

Rarely asked and answered except, perhaps, in the breach: What does it mean to be human?

Heidegger offered an answer to this question with a poem by Holderlin in his essay, "...Poetically Man Dwells..."

Martin had much to answer for; late in his life, impoverished shepherd of being that he was, he offered what little he could. Heideggerian "meagerness," however, was far richer than anything his epigones have yet to produce. His peculiar genius defies imitation. He thought his way through the history of Western philosophy until, eventually, like Wittgenstein and Rorty, he "threw away the ladder."

Husserl taught him to embrace phenomenology and Heidegger returned the favor by showing his teacher the radical potential of phenomenological witness.