What becomes the 'striving between earth and world' in Heidegger's subsequent work appears to have its roots in Schelling's "distinction between 'ground' and 'existence', where 'ground' means the dark, sheltered enclosure of beings (in their 'nature'), whereas 'existence' (as eksistence) means the elevation and revelation of beings into the open disclosure of truth". The immanence of freedom, and that which becomes the particular possibility of the human, is dynamically located in this process. Heidegger, however, found his normative foothold with respect to nature in then returning to Aristotle's understanding of physis as that whose essence is one of self-presencing (as opposed to being brought forth externally through techné). Heidegger, dropping further back to what he takes to be the even more primordial insights of the pre-Socratics, and finding his cue in a quote from Parmenides, re-conceived of 'the essence of thinking' as a form of 'surrendering' to the Being of that which self-presences. If 'truth' is not first of all about warranted claims of accurate representational correspondence but rather about that surrendering receptivity that allows nature to show itself, i.e., truth as aletheia, then (once again) it must be poetry, not traditional philosophy that should guide us - "poetry properly situates humans on this earth (and under heaven) and thus makes possible a genuine dwelling."

¶ 8:17 PM