4 - Death and Rebirth in Being and Time’s Perfectionist Philosophy of Education

Summary

In Heidegger on Ontotheology: Technology and the Politics of Education (2005), I sought to establish and build upon the hermeneutic thesis that Heidegger’s concern to reform education spans his entire career of thought. In my view, a radical rethinking of education – in a word, an ontologization of education, one that situates a transformative death and rebirth of the self at the very heart of the educational vision that founded the philosophical academy in Plato’s Republic – forms one of the deep thematic undercurrents of Heidegger’s work, early as well as late. We will come back to this “ontologization” of education at the end, but I want to begin by addressing a worry I did not previously thematize and confront. If my interpretive thesis is correct, then we should expect to find some sign of Heidegger’s supposed lifelong concern with education in his early magnum opus, Being and Time. The fact, then, that little or nothing had been written on Being and Time’s “philosophy of education” before my first book came out could reasonably be taken to cast doubt upon my thesis that a philosophical rethinking of education was of great importance to Heidegger’s work as a whole. Such a worry, of course, does not arise deductively; even if Being and Time contained no philosophy of education, one might be able to explain such an omission in a way that would leave my general thesis intact. Rather than trying to preserve the thesis in the face of such a hermeneutic anomaly, however, I will instead demonstrate that no such anomaly exists. This chapter will seek both to show that Heidegger’s philosophy of education deeply permeates Being and Time and to explain some of the context and significance of this fact, thereby coming to understand yet another interlocking set of philosophical implications arising from Heidegger’s phenomenology of existential death.