Abstract
This chapter seeks to present a coherent Heideggerian understanding of the essence of the University that is relevant to the challenges of the twenty-first century. Such a pedagogy confronts the consumerist and ecological forces that shape our education principles and protocols, and offers to replace them with a more primordial goal of understanding Being through a more meditative and poetic form of thinking.
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Notes
- 1.
Rorty wrote in the Introduction to Philosophy and the Mirror of Nature that work is to be taken against ‘background that we should see the work of the three most important philosophers of our century Wittgenstein, Heidegger, and Dewey (2009, p. 5).
- 2.
- 3.
This was fuelled, I want to suggest, by the Catholic mediaeval causal powers of the Transcendentals, as the spiritual frame for the revival of the university, rather than the Nietzschean will to power that Heidegger describes in Nietzsche, vol. 2. (1936–40/1991).
- 4.
See Sinclair (2013).
- 5.
Here he speaks of teaching not being based on research as in the Humboldt model which is further developed in his lectures ‘The German University’ in 1934. Of these lectures Thompson (2005, p. 125) suggests he produces a vision for the future university that is ‘a tangled mix of philosophy and Nazi rhetoric’.
- 6.
There are clear overtones of links to the National Socialists here, but in later writing Heidegger will claim that is imbedded in the spirituality he perceived in the Party and it was in that that he was self-deceived. However, more worrying texts have emerged. Milchman and Rosenberg quote Heidegger as stating ‘Revolution in the German universities has nothing to do with surface shifts. The National-Socialist revolution is and will become the complete re-education [Umerziehung] of men, of students, and of the young teachers of tomorrow’ (1997, p. 75). Heidegger defends himself in such documents as his 1945 Rectorate 1933/34: Facts and Thoughts.
- 7.
Heidegger discusses the declination of teachers to teach, based on the downgrading of its activity, which is not seen in his sense but as a form of performativity to be controlled, supervised and measured.
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Gibbs, P. (2020). Martin Heidegger (1889–1976): Higher Education as Thinking. In: Barnett, R., Fulford, A. (eds) Philosophers on the University. Debating Higher Education: Philosophical Perspectives, vol 2. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-31061-5_10
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