Reconstruction Vol. 14, No. 2
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Martin Heidegger and Philosophy of Education: Why His Thought Still Matters, and How We Can Put It to Use / Haroldo Fontaine
Abstract
The aim of the essay is to provide an entrance into possible educational uses of Heidergger's thought and philosophy, in this case especially early childhood education. It is argued that rather than asking the traditional epistemological questions that lead the students into living inauthentically, teachers should pose different kinds of questions, sometimes counter intuitive to tradition, which let students become independent interpreters. In other words, in order for students to learn how to live authentic lives, teachers must focus on the process leading to independent answers rather than focusing on the ready-made answers offered by Tradition.
Keywords: Heidegger, education, practice, early childhood education, authenticity, inauthenticity
Introduction
<1> I will do four things in this paper: a) express why Martin Heidegger's thought still matters in the 21st century; b) explain its educational significance; c) propose how we can put it to use; and d) address the objection that we cannot put it to use in early childhood education.
<2> For the purposes of this paper, I conceive of philosophy of education as an activity aimed at helping teachers to help their students exercise the rights and privileges of citizenship. This exercise includes developing their skills to debate social justice issues, which at bottom are moral issues. I will place most of this paper's emphasis on how parents and teachers can put Heidegger's thought to use in early childhood education, particularly within the well-known sub-genre of children's literature, the time-honored bed-time story.
Why Martin Heidegger's Thought Still Matters[i]
<3> In the 20th century, there was a decided change in the direction of philosophy-indeed, a revolution: epistemology, understood as the search for ultimate Truth, and which had largely ruled the day for the last 2,500 years, was abandoned. This quest came to be seen as pointless because it is impossible to complete. Kurt Godel, Ludwig Wittgenstein, and Martin Heidegger were the three principal authors of this revolution. Godel's work in the foundations of mathematical logic-specifically, his incompleteness theorems-ended the search for ultimate 'Truth'. Herein we find the significance of his work regarding epistemology. Though his work in said foundations is interesting, it is beyond the scope of this paper. [ii]
<4> Wittgenstein and Heidegger also insisted that the traditional epistemological concerns were misguided because they cannot be answered. In the analytical tradition, Wittgenstein insisted that we have been bewitched by the logic of our language and have been led down the wrong path, which has led us to ask the wrong questions. In the phenomenological tradition, Heidegger pointed to the impossibility of accomplishing the task set up by Husserl's phenomenological method. In the process of explaining why and how this is impossible, Heidegger made it clear that the epistemological questions that drove Husserl fade into the background, and other questions rise to the forefront.[iii]
<5> Prior to this revolution, the epistemological questions, "What do we know?" and "How do we know it?" ruled the day. These questions demanded answers that were absolutely certain. Looking back to the 20th century, we can see that many philosophers abandoned the search for absolute certainty, and turned toward pragmatism. Their turn notwithstanding, their questions generally remained the same, i.e., they did not stop asking epistemological questions. What changed were the standards of acceptable answers, as illustrated by Dewey's notion of warranted assertability. Because they did not stop asking epistemological questions, we understand their turn toward pragmatism as a mistake. We believe that the philosophic community specifically, and the rest of the intellectual community generally, has not appreciated the consequences of this revolution.
<6> Wittgenstein and Heidegger insisted that we cease to ask epistemological questions. What they advocated is not a turn toward pragmatism, but rather that we simply ask different questions. The kinds of questions that replace epistemological ones are: a) how does human consciousness develop? and b) how does it develop an understanding of its environment?" These are questions about education, and philosophers of education are in many ways uniquely suited to answer them. While Wittgenstein's work may be summarized as a reconceptualization of philosophy as a therapeutic practice with which to release oneself and others from having been trapped within the confines of a particular language game,[iv] explaining it and its relevance to educational practice any further is beyond the scope of this paper. [v] It is to discuss the educational significance of Heidegger's thought that I now turn.
The Educational Significance of Heidegger's Thought
<7> Being and Time[vi] is Heidegger's magnum opus. Its central problem is the problem of authenticity, which is the problem of how Dasein-Heidegger's term for those characteristics that all human beings have in common[vii]-becomes, or is kept from becoming the author of its choices, as the etymology suggests. [viii] As I attempt to demonstrate below, this is a problem of how human consciousness develops, or is kept from developing. As such, this is an educational problem, yet Heidegger never explored the educational aspects of this issue. I do.
<8> Dasein's nature lies along a continuum. On one end, we find inauthenticity; on the other end, we find authenticity. These points represent the extremes of human existential possibility. All human beings live somewhere in between them. According to Heidegger, the reason why some human beings live inauthentically is because Tradition[ix] confounds students when they try to move from inauthenticity towards authenticity. When students exist inauthentically, they exist without understanding the basis (or the ground) of Tradition. So, while they may live according to it as a matter of habit, they have not chosen to adopt it because they have not become conscious of its ground. When students exist authentically, on the other hand, they understand the basis of Tradition, and can thus choose whether, and if so the extent to which to adopt it. This basis is self-preservation[x]-i.e., human beings living a particular kind of life, in a particular place, and at a particular time, create Tradition to secure and perpetuate the conditions that preserve their particular mode of life. [xi] Hence, students exist authentically to the extent that they choose a mode of life that preserves their consciousness of 'self.' By engaging in a 'calculus of choosing,'[xii] students engage in re-valuating the moral rules they have been taught. In other words, students engage in the work that Heidegger (and Nietzsche) left teachers to do.
Putting Heidegger's Thought To Use<9> In Being and Time, Heidegger discussed the concept of solicitude, which he placed in the category of care. [xiii] Solicitude is the type of care shown to other human beings. At its best, education occurs in a relation of care between teachers and students. Thus, we may think of education as a form of solicitude. Teachers may demonstrate it in two ways: a) by leaping in for students, or b) by leaping ahead of them.[xiv] I will discuss each one in turn.
<10> When teachers leap in for students, they require students to memorize Tradition's answers to their moral questions. For example, if they ask if it is ever morally correct to kill another human being, the teacher replies, "You shall not kill," and then requires students to regurgitate that answer verbatim on a test to determine whether they have 'learned' it. Once students comply, teachers distribute grades according to the reproduction's accuracy, and the cycle begins anew with the next lesson. Such teachers assume the accuracy of students' reproduction is a proxy for how well they know the rule. I, on the other hand, maintain that they do not know it. Instead, by leaping in for students, teachers ensure that Tradition colonizes the 'ground' students are trying to build, i.e., such teachers prevent students from interpreting moral rules, and thus prevent them from understanding whether, and if so the extent to which they apply to a specific situation within a specific set of circumstances. By denying students the opportunity to interpret moral rules, which is to deny them the opportunity to discover their basis, teachers teach students that Tradition has answered their questions once and for all. Hence, students come to think of learning as having Tradition's representatives tell them what constitutes moral 'truth,' and recalling it verbatim when told to. In short, when teachers leap in for students, teachers prevent them from discovering the basis of Tradition, and thus discourage them from living authentically.
<11> When teachers leap ahead of their students, on the other hand, they acknowledge and respect the 'ground,' or the moral understanding students bring into the classroom. By virtue of being professionals, of being older, and thus of having more life experience, teachers can anticipate the 'ground' their students must travel in order to approach authenticity. In practice, teachers can present students with moral rules, determine students' understanding of them, guide them to interpret the rules, and get out of their way so students may judge whether, and if so the extent to which they help them secure and perpetuate the conditions for self-preservation. In short, when leaping ahead of students, teachers intervene in the process of interpretation, but they do not guarantee its results.
<12> Interpretation goes something like this. When faced with a new situation in which a moral judgment must be made, students have to determine whether, and if so the extent to which a particular moral rule applies to a specific situation within a specific set of circumstances. This is easy if the situation and circumstances are sufficiently similar to ones they've encountered, but difficult if they are sufficiently different from them, for students must then determine whether, and if so the extent to which the moral rule applies to the given situation and circumstances. Unfortunately, students cannot interpret the moral rule without first knowing its basis. This basis is precisely what teachers have failed to teach when they require students to merely memorize and regurgitate the rule. If students have discovered the basis of a moral rule, then and only then will they be able to apply it correctly. An education that hides the basis of moral rules teaches students to live inauthentically.
<13> Admittedly, there is nothing easy about this approach to education. Students walk into our classrooms with a staggering array of experiences with moral reasoning. Thus, teachers cannot simply legislate moral rules to students indiscriminately. Students' individual experiences with moral reasoning must be the basis upon which their moral education rests. Our classrooms are not stations on assembly lines that produce multiple copies of the same product, for we do not begin with the same materials. If we are to have citizens capable of critical and independent thought, then there is no other alternative to moral education.
Can We Put Heidegger's Thought to Use with Young Students?
<14> One may argue that my proposal is most amenable for teachers whose students are adolescents and/or adults, for how could teachers teach preadolescent students about the contingency of moral rules without simultaneously promoting moral anarchy? Wittgenstein's notion of philosophy as therapeutic practice, i.e., the practice of shooing the fly out of the fly bottle,[xv] is most amenable for teachers whose students are trapped within the confines of a language game whose logic has held them captive. Such students will have been taught Tradition [xvi] according to the inauthenticity-promoting teaching method I described above. In this light, my proposal aims at helping teachers teach their young students a skill that will help them to avoid flying into the fly bottle in the first place.
<15> Vincenzo Cerami's screenplay for Roberto Benigni's La Vita é Bella (Life is Beautiful) provides such help. The film is set in the Italy of WWII. The Nazis take Guido and his son Joshua to a concentration camp for extermination. The manner in which Guido protects Joshua from becoming captivated by the logic of a tragic language game is instructive, for it illustrates how a teacher may help a young student to avoid flying into a fly bottle from which there may be no exit. In what follows, I summarize the film's relevance to my proposal for early childhood education, and I will consider two illustrations from Life is Beautiful of how parents, as children's first teachers, may provide the kind of moral education which encourages children to treat moral rules as conditional and malleable. Treating them in this way, children could begin to think of the 'self' they would create and preserve via said rules as also conditional and malleable, so that by the time they become adults, such an orientation toward moral rules will have become a habit.
<16> The Nazi guards compelled Guido and Joshua to live inauthentically, for they would not have chosen to live the short and brutal life the guards enforced. In order to give Joshua an opportunity not only to live, but to live authentically, Guido used his sense of humor and imagination to create a language game Joshua found worth playing because it promised a prize he valued: owning a tank. The implicit moral rule Joshua hoped would lead to the prize was this: 'you should obey your dad'. So long as Joshua wanted to own a tank, and so long as circumstances were amenable (even if only in his imagination) to his pursuing his desire-e.g., so long as he could live in beautiful barracks with his mommy; eat regularly and plentifully; and not be turned into a button, a bar of soap, or be cooked in an oven-it was reasonable for him to follow the rule. However, when he found the goal to be less desirable because the circumstances were no longer amenable-e.g., when Joshua saw that he would have to endure living in ugly barracks without his mommy; endure hunger; and even face the prospect of being turned into a button, a bar of soap, or of being cooked in an oven-Joshua interpreted the rule in light of the different circumstances.
<17> Under the different circumstances, his interpretation of the rule 'you should obey your dad' led him to the conclusion that it was no longer worthwhile to obey it. Joshua's reasoning illustrates Nietzsche's claim about the basis of morality: self-preservation. When Guido allowed Joshua to interpret 'you should obey your dad' in light of the new set of circumstances, Guido thereby illustrated leaping ahead of Joshua, for in effectively allowing him to see that circumstances determine the degree of correctness or incorrectness of a moral rule, and in allowing him to reason accordingly, Guido encouraged Joshua to live authentically.[xvii]
Three Examples for Putting Heidegger's Thought to Use
<18> For those parents persuaded by my Heideggerian reading of La Vita é Bella, they could encourage their children-e.g., at bed-time story time-to consider popular stories from alternative perspectives for the sake of encouraging them to develop a conditional and malleable sense of 'self'. I take the first example from "The Boy Who Cried Wolf." The tale is traditionally told to teach children that no one believes habitual liars. Hence, a common conclusion drawn from this tale is that children should not lie at all. However, parents could playfully pose the following question to their children: 'honey, if the shepherd boy wanted to get away with tricking the villagers while maintaining his flock's safety, would he succeed if he were to cry wolf less often?'
<19> I take the second example from a popular political mythology taught to many school children in the United States: George Washington and the cherry tree. Rather than affirm the tale's traditional conclusion, parents could playfully encourage their children to imagine how they could both play with a hatchet and strike trees without felling them, thus encouraging them to conclude that it would be better to strike older trees than younger ones.
<20> Finally, I take my last example from the well-known David and Goliath story. According to the Biblical account, David struck Goliath down with a stone to the forehead. A playful parent could ask: 'sweetheart, would it have been wise for David to sling a stone at Goliath had he been wearing a helmet'?
Conclusion
<21> Discussions of many philosophers' turn toward pragmatism continue to the present day. Given this turn, I need to be very clear about what I have argued here. I am encouraging philosophers and philosophers of education to cease asking the standard epistemological questions, regardless of whether they claim their answers are absolutely true, or just provisionally so. The questions themselves need to change. However, asking different questions does not give us leave to look for ultimate Truth once again. Instead of preoccupying ourselves with trying to provide answers to epistemological questions that are absolutely true or just provisionally so, I have tried to focus on what I think are, in light of Heidegger's (and Wittgenstein's) work, the more important tasks of our field. Heidegger (and Wittgenstein) suggests a way to expand children's consciousness for the sake of teaching them how to see the world according to multiple discourses (or language games), and thus improve their ability to avoid flying into the trap of the fly bottle-i.e., Tradition-in the first place. My hope is that if we strive to develop their ability in this way, we will help them to generate and sustain dialogue across language games, and thereby promote mutual understanding, tolerance, and perhaps even celebration. The continuous need to promote such things is why Heidegger's (and Wittgenstein's) thought still matters, and why Life is Beautiful is an apt illustration of how parents and teachers can put it to use with young students, particularly within the well-known sub-genre of children's literature, the time-honored bed-time story.
Notes[i] It is well-known that Heidegger joined the Nazi Party shortly after Hitler's ascension to the chancellery in 1933, and that he remained a member until after the war. If one therefore concludes that any philosophy of education inferred from his philosophy necessarily (though perhaps implicitly) promotes a Nazi agenda, and must therefore ipso facto be censured, then one would be committing the ad hominem fallacy-i.e., rather than trying to disprove the truth of Heidegger's assertions, and the truth of a philosophy of education inferred from them, the person would be attacking Heidegger's personal character instead. In Irving Copi's words, censuring Heidegger thus "is logically irrelevant to the truth or falsehood of what he says or the correctness or incorrectness of his argument" [Irving Copi, Introduction to Logic, 2 nd ed., (New York: MacMillan, 1961), 54]. Hence, anyone who censures this philosophy of education because I infer it from Heidegger's supposedly tainted philosophy, and not because what I say is false or because I have argued incorrectly, would also be committing said fallacy.
[ii] For a more extensive exposition of the significance of Godel's work regarding epistemology, and its relationship to Wittgenstein and Heidegger's respective work, please see the following: Michael Dwyer, Yasushi Maruyama, and Haroldo Fontaine, "Philosophy of education for the 21st century: The projects of Heidegger and Wittgenstein (Bajo Palabra, Journal of Philosophy, 2011).
[iii] "When Dasein directs itself towards something and grasps it, it does not somehow first get out of an inner sphere [e.g., 'mind'] in which it has been proximally encapsulated, but its primary kind of Being is such that it is always 'outside' alongside entities which it encounters and which belong to a world already discovered…. And furthermore, the perceiving of what is known is not a process of returning with one's booty to the 'cabinet' of consciousness after one has gone out and grasped it; even in perceiving, retaining, and preserving, the Dasein which knowsremains outside [emphasis in the original], and it does so as Dasein [emphasis in the original]" (Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, 89 [see note 6 for full citation]).
In light of the above, it should be clear that Heidegger's project, as he articulated it in Being and Time, was not epistemological, at least not in the traditional sense of attempting to overcome the classic subject/object dichotomy. Rather, his project was fundamental ontology. Said ontology is epistemological insofar as it substitutes existentials for categories. With them, we may signify and thereby know Dasein. For Heidegger, fundamental ontology establishes the proper basis for metaphysics.
[iv] Philosophy as therapeutic practice shoos the fly out of the fly bottle [Ludwig Wittgenstein, Philosophical Investigations, 2nd ed., trans. G.E.M. Anscombe (Oxford: Blackwell, 1958), section 309].
[v] For a thorough discussion about Wittgenstein's work and its educational relevance, along with a longer treatment than we give in this paper of Heidegger's work and its educational relevance, please see the following: Michael Dwyer, Yasushi Maruyama, and Haroldo Fontaine, "Philosophy of education for the 21st century: The projects of Heidegger and Wittgenstein (Bajo Palabra, Journal of Philosophy, 2011).
[vi] Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, trans. John Macquarrie and Edward Robinson (New York: Harper and Row, 1962).
[vii] Hence, Heidegger cannot be charged with relativism.
[viii] John A. Simpson and Edmund S.C. Weiner, eds., The Oxford English Dictionary, 2nd ed., CD-ROM, v. 3.1 (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2004).
[ix] "Tradition" is "a morality, a mode of living … (considered) venerable, unassailable, holy, true" [Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1968), 277-278]. Common approaches to teaching morality insist that students think of moral rules in this way-i.e., as venerable, etc.
[x] "Self" can denote the identity of a single person or of more than one person, as in a community of some sort. Furthermore, it is useful to consider the entire section in The Will to Power from which the quote in note 9 is taken:
Tradition" is "a morality, a mode of living tried and proved by long experience and testing, at length enters consciousness as a law, as dominating- And therewith the entire group of related values and states enters into it: it becomes venerable, unassailable, holy, true; it is part of its development that its origin should be forgotten- That is a sign it has become master- Exactly the same thing could have happened with the [Aristotelian] categories of reason."
On page 43 of Being and Time, in the first paragraph, it is clear that Heidegger inherited the problematic for his fundamental ontology-indeed, for Being and Time-from the just-quoted fragment, viz., fragment 514. For the purposes of this paper, this means that the 'self' to be preserved is one that is perpetually becoming. Finally, my interest in early childhood education is a means to encourage this perpetual becoming, as opposed to having Tradition prescribe to children a particular way to be and thus slow down, if not halt their perpetual becoming.
[xi] Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R.J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage Books, 1989).
[xii] Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics is the model for such a calculus. I will illustrate said calculus in my discussion of interpretation below.
[xiii] This should not be confused with Nel Noddings, Caring: A Feminine Approach to Ethics and Moral Education, 2nd ed. (Los Angeles: University of California Press, 2003).
[xiv] Heidegger, Being and Time, 158-159.
[xv] See note 4.
[xvi] See notes 9 and 10.
[xvii] Given that Joshua's reasoning led him to the conclusion that they must leave the concentration camp at once, and that Guido understood that this was impossible, Guido continued to rely on his imagination and sense of humor to gently and lovingly convince Joshua that it was in his best interest to stay in the camp so that he could own a tank.
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