Nostalgia of Mind and Heart: Metaphysics of Province by M. Heidegger

The article analyzes M. Heidegger's conception of Province. This subject plays a particularly signifi cant role in Germany, although it is also important in the rest of Europe. Heidegger is keeping on the original Latin semantics: he opposes the Parent State, or Metropolis (patria major) and Province (outer space connected to the Parent State only by statute). This kind of opposition contains some very important aspects of Heidegger's philosophy, namely: primary nature and secondary nature, interiority (as identity) and exteriority (as formality), ability to move and to be moved, human conditions and state conditions. Especially important is for Heidegger's thinking such a phenomenon as “Parent State ness”/”Nativeness”. He thinks over this subject through the prism oh the German Romantics and stresses such points as the fi eld of spiritual nearness (Heimat) which should make the soil for the Patria as the Land of the Ancestors (Vaterland).