6 Reasons Why Heidegger Left Being and Time Behind

He wrote a masterpiece. Then he dropped it. Like a bad habit. Like an ex-wife. Like a philosopher who realized he was chasing the wrong ghost.

Heidegger was onto something big. Then he walked away. Was he lost?

Did he get bored?

Did he realize he’d been sniffing his own tail this whole time?

Let’s talk about why he left his magnum opus in the dust.

1. He Couldn’t Get Past Dasein

Being and Time starts with Dasein. The problem? It was a box, and Heidegger locked himself inside.

Dasein—our way of being, our existence, our whole deal.

It was a brilliant start. A sharp knife. But every time he tried to carve out something bigger, the knife turned in his hands.

He bled. Because here’s the thing—he wasn’t after Dasein.

He was after Being itself. The whole show. The deep hum at the core of existence.

But how do you talk about Being without dragging humans into it?

Every road he walked led back to Dasein. Every attempt to go beyond turned into another meditation on human experience.

He was stuck in his own shadow, like a man trying to study the wind but only seeing the leaves move.

It’s like standing at the edge of the ocean, trying to describe its vastness by staring at a single fish.

You can study that fish for years. You can measure its scales, watch its movements, write books about how it swims.

But in the end, it’s just one fish.

The ocean is something else entirely. At some point, you realize—you need a bigger net. Or maybe no net at all.

2. Language Was a Cage

Words are a joke. A cruel, stupid joke. You reach for something real, something raw, and by the time the words leave your mouth, they’ve already betrayed you.

They turn what was alive into something dead. Heidegger saw that. He felt it in his bones.

He tried to pin down Being with language. He tried hard. Pages and pages of meticulous German, twisting and turning, pushing language to its limits.

But every time he got close—every time it felt like he might finally get his hands around Being itself—language slipped away. It was always just beyond his grasp.

So he had to change tactics.

Less theory, more poetry. Less rigid, mechanical philosophy, more mystical murmuring about truth and destiny.

By the time Der Spiegel interviewed him decades later, he all but admitted it—language was both the problem and the way out.

A trap and a key. A locked door and a whisper through the crack.

And maybe that’s why he left Being and Time behind. Maybe he saw that words could only take him so far.

The real thing, the real Being, wasn’t something you explained. It was something you let speak for itself.

3. The Davos Debate Smacked Him Upside the Head

In 1929, he had a showdown with Cassirer in Davos. Two philosophers enter, one philosopher leaves.

Cassirer, the neo-Kantian, pushed back hard. He didn’t buy Heidegger’s obsession with Being.

Heidegger tried to say Kant was on his side. But deep down, he must have known—Kant was a metaphysical cop, and Heidegger was trying to pull off a jailbreak.

After Davos, his work started shifting. Less Kant, more cryptic nonsense about poetry and technology.

4. The Second Half of Being and Time Was a Dead End

He planned a sequel. A second half. It never came.

Why? Because he realized he was walking into a philosophical brick wall.

He wanted to show how time gave rise to Being. But he got tangled up in his own categories. He ran into the limits of his own method. And instead of forcing it, he walked away.

Sometimes, the best move is to fold your cards and find a new table.

5. He Got Distracted by Nazism (Yeah, That Happened)

Let’s not ignore the ugly part. In the 1930s, Heidegger started cozying up to the Nazis.

He thought they were bringing some kind of authentic revolution. He was dead wrong. By the time he realized it, it was too late.

His philosophy shifted. Less Dasein, more critique of modernity.

Less talk about individual existence, more about technology, poetry, and destiny.

Maybe Being and Time started to feel too small for the storm he saw coming.

6. Poetry, Baby. Poetry.

By the time he was done with Being and Time, Heidegger wasn’t building philosophical systems anymore—he was listening for whispers in the wind.

He started sounding less like a philosopher and more like a poet who had stared at the sky too long and seen something the rest of us had missed.

He turned to Hölderlin, to Rilke, to the mad German poets who saw divinity in rivers and ruins.

They weren’t dissecting existence like some old professor hunched over a desk.

They were letting it speak. Heidegger realized maybe that was the way.

Maybe Being wasn’t something you captured with neat, logical arguments.

Maybe it wasn’t a problem to be solved but a voice to be heard.

So he abandoned the scaffolding.

He let go of the neat categories and carefully measured concepts.

He walked away from the blueprint and picked up something messier—intuition, metaphor, silence.

Because sometimes, a single poem can crack open the world in a way a thousand pages of cold analysis never could.

Sometimes, a line of verse hits like a hammer where reason only scratches at the surface.

And maybe that’s why he left Being and Time behind.

He realized Being doesn’t sit still long enough to be pinned down. It sings.

It flickers. It slips through your fingers.

And if you want to catch even a glimpse of it, you don’t build a theory—you listen.

Pros AND Cons Of Ditching Being & Time

Pros	Cons
Allowed him to explore deeper ideas.	Left Being and Time feeling incomplete.
Avoided getting stuck in Dasein.	Confused the hell out of his readers.
Led to groundbreaking later work.	Made his philosophy even harder to understand.
Inspired new ways of thinking about language.	Some think he abandoned a masterpiece for nonsense.

Conclusion

Heidegger didn’t quit Being and Time. He outgrew it.

Like a man who wakes up one day and realizes his whole life has been a bad dream, he turned away and started fresh.

Was he right? Was he wrong? Who knows.