Heidegger’s Turn Toward Home

Abstract

Is Dasein primordially-that is, the very core of its being-at home or not home in Being? One of the more overlooked or understated issues in Heidegger studies is how Heidegger, over the course of a lifetime of thinking, transformed his answer to such a question about Dasein's fundamental relation to Being. In several important texts of the 1920s and 1930s, History of the Concept of Time, Being and Time, and Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger maintained the position that Dasein is primordially unheimlich, unsettled, and thus also unheimisch,unhomely, the core of its being. Yet, we discover a significant turning in his thinking toward home, especially in the early 1940s. 1942 commentary on Holderlin's poem The stands out as a bridge text between the early and later Heidegger on this issue; in particular, we find a striking and significant difference in his reading of Sophocles'Antigone compared with the more well-known reading in the 1935 Introduction to Metaphysics. In the Ister commentary, Heidegger engaged both Sophocles and Holderlin to work out the motif-so prominent in his later work-that human beings are primordially at home in Being, the sheltering source and origin of all beings. We also find a further development in his thinking in the 1950s and 1960s. In all, I propose that the middle Heidegger of the early 1940s offers the most satisfying phenomenological account of being human.