linguistic:paraphrasing, quality:corruption, linguistic:voice_change, quality:correction
Influences

Friedrich Nietzsche and Friedrich Hölderlin were both important influences on Heidegger, and many of his lecture courses were devoted to one or the other, especially in the 1930s and 1940s. The lectures on Nietzsche focused on fragments posthumously published under the title The Will to Power, rather than on Nietzsche's published works. Heidegger reads The Will to Power as the culminating expression of Western metaphysics, and the lectures are a kind of dialogue between the two thinkers.

Michael Allen Gillespie says that Heidegger's theoretical acceptance of "destiny" has much in common with the millenarianism of Marxism. But Marxists believe Heidegger's "theoretical acceptance is antagonistic to practical political activity and implies fascism". Gillespie, however, says "the real danger" from Heidegger isn't quietism but fanaticism. Modernity has cast mankind toward a new goal "on the brink of profound nihilism " that is "so alien it requires the construction of a new tradition to make it comprehensible."

Gillespie extrapolates from Heidegger's writings that humankind may degenerate into "scientists, workers, and brutes". According to Gillespie, Heidegger envisaged this abyss to be the greatest event in the history of the West because it might enable humanity to comprehend being more profoundly and primordially than the Presocratics.

The poetry of Friedrich Hölderlin became an increasingly central focus of Heidegger's later work and thought. Heidegger grants Hölderlin a singular place within the history of being and the history of Germany, as a herald whose thought is yet to be "heard" in Germany or the West more generally. Many of Heidegger's works from the 1930s onwards include meditations on lines from Hölderlin's poetry, and several of the lecture courses are devoted to the reading of a single poem; for example, Hölderlin's Hymn "The Ister".