“Paths not works” was the motto Martin Heidegger chose for the collected edition of his writings, and he elsewhere remarked that “paths of thought bear in them the mystery that we can walk them forward and backward – indeed the way backward alone leads forward.” The path of Heidegger’s own life was certainly a complicated one. Born the son of a sexton at the local Catholic church in the small town of Messkirch in southern Germany, he was destined for the priesthood, and his theological orientation as a young man was of a very traditionalist stripe; in one of his earliest publications he denounced the “straying paths” and “deceptive dazzle” of Catholic modernism. But while at Freiburg University he switched from theology to philos