Educational Philosophy of Martin Heidegger

There is today significant interest in Heidegger as an educational philosopher worldwide. Some reasons for this can be discerned. New Heideggerian material in English is being published; new interpretations are appearing; and there are those who seek to tease out the implications of Heideggerian thought in the practical world (; ; ; ; ). The new interpretation of Being and Time by Stambaugh reads differently from the Macquarrie Robinson translation from its very first sentence (). There is also a developing literature that seeks to relate Heidegger’s writing to his lived life and circumstances. This has provided new perspectives regarding the theory (; ; ). In addition, the hermeneutic philosophy of science is drawing upon and developing Heidegger’s ideas (; ; ; ).

There is a debate about the potential of Heidegger’s work to inform educational thinking and practice (). “Although Heidegger’s work has influenced scholarship in numerous fields, little to no influence has found its way into education” ().

Heidegger might initially appear to be a strange candidate for the role of educational reformer because he was as an author said “ultraconservative” and was fond of repeating Hölderlin’s maxim “As you begin, so you shall remain” (). Gur-Ze’ev notes “… Heidegger makes no effort to contribute to normalizing education or to scientific thinking … nor can he contribute, as some scholars would suggest, to the improvement of schooling” (). T. E. Peterson () writes about Heidegger’s authoritarian pedagogy, his autocratic approach to university administration, and the relationship of these things to Weimar Germany.

Cooper argues that Heidegger’s philosophy as a whole can assist our understanding of education. He says that educationalists should be helpfully informed by Heidegger’s “way of looking at the world” and his philosophy as a whole, both as a perspective in itself and also because of the more full understanding of specific ideas that such a perspective may bring (). Cooper focuses on the nature of truth and the status of science, which are relevant to schooling. Hogan elaborates on where to find the potential of Heidegger to inform education. For him it is in Heidegger’s difference from “what the dominant modes and tempers in Western philosophy have furnished for thought and action” ().

There are intellectual disciplines and sectors of education where people have sought to make use of Heidegger’s work. Cooper cites examples of Heidegger’s thought in several disciplines, Lambeir considers information technology in schools, and Thomson considers how Heidegger might provide a “positive vision for the future of higher education” by understanding our educational crisis “ontohistorically” (; ; ). Gur-Ze’ev suggests that the “philosophy of Martin Heidegger is of much relevance for the elaboration of an attempt to open the gate to counter-education as an open possibility” (). Bonnett explores how Heidegger contributes to our understanding of learning and a “full educational relationship between learner and teacher” (). Bonnett and Morris have attempted to speak directly to teachers about the use of existentialism in practice (; ; ).

There are also papers that take some aspect of Heidegger and relate that to some disciplinary area of education. Examples are relatively common in nursing education (; ), and there is Irwin’s paper on Heidegger and Nietzsche in relation to values education (). There are also specifically curriculum oriented papers, for example there is one that uses Heidegger’s work to draw conclusions about the teaching of English () and I have developed a science distance education pedagogy drawing on Heidegger (). Greene has related the teaching of literature to Merleau-Ponty, Camus and Heidegger (). By reading Moby Dick, she says, students can gain self-understanding through the experience of having things revealed or unconcealed. She cites Poetry Language and Thought as supportive of this view (). All these papers make use of things Heidegger wrote and probably gain authority from the citation. However, they do not strongly relate curriculum or subject areas to the core of Heidegger’s work. They do not take being/truth and link that whole phenomenon to their curriculum interest. Perhaps those who write about Heidegger and the arts curriculum (widely interpreted) are the exception to this generalisation.

The latter Heidegger wrote a great deal about art, and he related this to truth and being in a direct way (). Consequently, those concerned with the arts in education were led naturally to consider what I have called the “core” of Heidegger’s thesis. One example is the work of Mansfield in the field of music education. She cites evidence of the extent to which music education is defined by an implicit but little understood ground of , relates a music curriculum directly to the value of technology, and relates being and disclosure to art (; ). Grierson has also provided an account of art, technology and a close reading of Heidegger ().

The core of Heidegger’s work is his concern with Being which he describes as the “matter of thinking” () and Being constitutes the “hidden essence of truth” (). Whilst there is interest in Heidegger’s work in relation to education, there does not appear to be much on the very critical matter of truth and its direct involvement in thinking about education. No one seems to have asked how Heidegger’s ontological concept of truth might be of use in our engagement with contemporary pedagogical concerns.

I have suggested that recent debates in education that draw upon Heidegger are not closely associated with Heideggerian being/truth. As recent commentators said “… further work needs to be done in order to demonstrate the relationship shared by Heidegger’s theory of ontology and learning environments” ().

However, there is some work by “existential phenomenologists” (the term Donald Vandenberg uses to describe himself) that may be heading towards the Heideggerian core. Vandenberg brought into English the work of Continental writers who are concerned with schooling and phenomenology.

Because of their potential relevance to thinking about the development of horizons of disclosure, I want to record two of the contributions by the existentialist phenomenologists: the “being-in-the-law” idea and the existential model of human development.

The idea of “being-in-the-law” is an extension of Heidegger’s terminology into a practical and intellectual discipline. It heralds a discussion about a new horizon. Vandenberg sets out the base concept clearly: “The designation being-in-the-law concerns the externalization of one’s projection in accordance to the space of law in the generic sense, which means into the space disclosed by particular laws that are absolutely just, but to none other” ().

“That is, laws do not exist in books, courts or out in social space: they become grounded ontologically only in individual existence through the individual’s projection into the space they define. … He who does not see that the laws are to be ‘obeyed’ needs not legal instruction but an existential conversion from being-in-the-world to being-in-the-law that is not unlike the conversion from being-in-the-world to being in the truth” (, who acknowledged his debt to Maihofer).

Kierkegaard and Gardini hypothesis existential “life-phases” based upon events such as conception, birth, pubescence, societal entrance, levelling off, retirement, and dependence. Kierkegaard’s phases are the:

#Esthetic phase (resolution of crises of experience)
#Ethical phase (idealism, hedonistic resolution)
#Teleological phase (synthesis of the earlier phases).

Gardini’s life phases are:

#Pre natal life
#Childhood
#Youth
#Young adulthood
#Mature adulthood
#Old age
#Senility.

Gardini’s life phases—which, he says, are not clearly separate one from the other in practice—are hypothesised as “ontologically distinct forms of existence”. In this way, he introduces the possibility of developing the concept of Dasein and the possibility of relating horizons (and thus truth) to Dasein in a more comprehensive manner. We might consider the Child-Dasein, Dasein, and Elderly-Dasein, each with different forms or ways of being.

One purpose of Vandenberg’s book Being and Education is to develop a phenomenological account of the development of Dasein through stages (). Examining stage theories is beyond the scope of the present theses, however the ideas that they relate to are of interest because the notion of pedagogy involves change in the student and we may discover something helpful if we consider ontological and phenomenological accounts of Dasein that relate to change.

My conclusion about Heidegger and education generally is that there is extensive interest in his work and its potential to inform education. However, there is little focus on how the core of Heidegger’s thinking, which is the being/truth concept (that entails the notion of horizon). It is this concept that might be the base of a systematic pedagogy. Some scholars have produced works relevant to aspects of this theme, including the educational phenomenologists. However, I have been unable to identify anyone who has directly addressed the question of Heideggerian truth and pedagogy.

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