As we noted in Chapter 3, Heidegger never completed the envisaged work of Being and Time. There was a turning (Kehre) in his thinking in the 1930s, and philosophers have come to speak of the “later” Heidegger to indicate his different path of thinking. For our discussion of hermeneutics in contemporary philosophy, we shall consider only four points from the later Heidegger. First, we shall briefly examine Heidegger's remarks concerning Being and Time and his new point of departure. Then, we shall discuss his remarks on why he has dropped the term “hermeneutics.” Next, we shall consider the central place language has in Heidegger's later philosophy by examining his essay “The Way to Language”. In what sense is a hermeneutics still involved in understanding language? Finally, we shall briefly ponder Heidegger's hermeneutic praxis in his interpretation of poetry and compare it to the traditional sense of hermeneutics.

Beyond Being and Time

In the middle of the “Letter on Humanism (1947)”, Heidegger explains why “Time and Being”, the continuation of Being and Time, was not published. It was held back, he writes, “because thinking failed in the adequate saying of this turning and did not succeed with the help of the language of metaphysics” (LH: 231). Thinking failed because the method of phenomenological hermeneutics, the fundamental ontology of Dasein, was still caught in the language and method of metaphysics.