Abstract
Focusing on Heidegger’s complex explorations of (un)truth in clearings, this chapter suggests in traditional direct teaching of “truth,” teaching is reduced to a method instructing students to acquire knowledge under the shining Sun of Truth, a concept criticized by Heidegger (The piety of thinking. Indiana University Press, Bloomington, IN, 1958/1976) as “brighter than one thousand suns” (p. 56). The powerful ethical, pedagogical, and philosophical question Heidegger raises is how to “view the stars by day” when we have to “descend into the dark of the depths of the well” (p. 56). A Taoist Pedagogy of Pathmarks thus encourages teachers to teach in the complex play between light and darkness rather than in the permanent and often rabid zeal of that shining Sun of Truth, which causes a blindness masquerading dangerously as enlightenment.
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- 1.
In the Concise Oxford English Dictionary (2004), truth is defined as “The quality or state of being true: that which is true as opposed to false; a fact or belief that is accepted as true” (p. 1549) and knowledge as “1. Information and skills acquired through experience or education: the sum of what is known; true, justified belief, as opposed to opinion. 2. Awareness or familiarity gained by experience” (p. 789). Obviously, both have the same implication of being “true”—justified and established fact or belief “as opposed to false” and are thus often conflated.
- 2.
Dasein is a key word in Heidegger’s theoretical framework. For Hediegger, Dasein is human being, not as a subject, but as openness to the world in which beings can disclose themselves. It does not reveal or describe the hidden essence of being but is the complex of defining relations and potentials of being: it is a verb, rather than a noun. Heidegger (1925/1992) says “Dasein is the entity which I myself am in each instance, in whose being I as an entity ‘have an interest’ or share, an entity which is in each instance to be it in my own way” (pp. 152–153, emphasis original). In other words, Dasein is constituted by its own ways to be in each particular moment, it can thus unconceal and, at the same time, conceal beings.
- 3.
Heidegger (1936/1993b) writes, “The critical concepts of truth which, since Descartes, start out from truth as certainty, are merely variations of the definition of truth as correctness” (p. 177). He uses the example of art to demonstrate the advent of the happening of truth: standing before any painting by a great artist, what opens people is not merely the depiction of any actual thing in the painting, but something beyond projected in the clearings of open region by Dasein in its own ways at that moment. This is why Heidegger thinks, “The work makes public something other than itself; it manifests something other; it is an allegory” (p. 145).
- 4.
In German, Lichten also means “to empty out” or “to raise up.”
- 5.
Lichtung means “lightening” or “clearing .”
- 6.
A movie released in 2009 which tells of an imaginary planet. Its residents are blue and called “Avatar.”
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Yu, J. (2018). “View the Stars by Day” in a Deep Dark Well. In: The Taoist Pedagogy of Pathmarks. Spirituality, Religion, and Education. Palgrave Pivot, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-01605-0_3
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