Recent interpretations of Contributions to Philosophy, Heidegger’s most significant Nachlaß, follow his hermeneutic trajectory of leaving from Dasein to the history of being as the fundamental feature of the difficult notion of Ereignis. Yet every leap is essentially a earth-sky-earth trajectory – with earth as the ground of the leap and of being itself. This is the case even if earth opens up as abyss (Abgrund) (“the staying away of ground”) in Heidegger’s diagnosis of his times as “abandonment of being” in Contributions to Philosophy.

Moving away from Heidegger and tapping into the ancient streams of esoteric understanding in all major spiritual traditions, we can invoke the famous hermetic principle of “As above, so below”. The leap of Contributions to Philosophy needs the ground of Being and Time – these two great moments in Heidegger’s thinking are not separated from, let alone opposed to, each other.

The fundamental phenomenon of care (Pflege) in nursing, in its attunement of the Dasein of the ailing other, provides a link in nursing theory between Being and Time and Contributions to Philosophy. Nursing thus becomes a guiding mode of being that grounds the leap: a total openness to the futurity of being in, say, caring for someone who may not have a full life span on earth. In this care, essential thinking about being awaits recognition and cultivation in the existential openness of aletheia. Being is incarnated in the care that one Dasein has for another – which in nursing is secured, expected and anticipated with no deviation.