Notes On Heidegger S Authoritarian Pedagogy

Educational Philosophy and Theory
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Notes on Heidegger's Authoritarian Pedagogy
Thomas E. Peterson
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Educational Philosophy and Theory, Vol. 37, No. 4, 2005
Notes on Heidegger’s Authoritarian

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Abstract
To examine Heidegger’s pedagogy is to be invited into a particular era and cultural reality—
starting in Weimar Germany and progressing into the rise and fall of the Third Reich. In
his attempt to reform the German university in a strictly hierarchical, authoritarian and
nationalistic mold, Heidegger addressed one group of students and professors and not
another. The petit-bourgeois student and the future philosophers he invited with his ‘logic
of recruitment’ into the corps of instructors, would share his coded language with its built-
in taboos and censorship. The result was a rhetoric of absolute self-reference and a semiotic
of pure propaganda, based on the evocation of the ancient Greeks in which the philosopher
meant to project all that was properly Germanic. Heidegger’s rhetoric is exclusionary;
its politics and its philosophy are interpenetrating. His lecture courses grew increasingly
poeticized, and thus mired in ambiguity, evasion, elision, avoidance, grandiloquence. Parallels
are drawn in this essay between Heidegger and our time. Is Heidegger’s insistence on
autocratic controls within the German university comparable to the corporate positions taken
today by some educators? How does the shifting relation between disciplines affect the role
of the specialist? How might the sciences morales or humanities, along with the much
maligned ‘humanism’, be redefined morally and holistically?
Keywords: Heidegger, facticity, power (myth of ), language, pedagogy,

university (German).
1.
For modern man, evil is immanent in the world; it is not a transcendent principle.
Particularly since 1915, historical time has accelerated and mankind has experi-
enced greater and more horrendous evil than ever before in history. As George
Steiner suggests (1971, pp. 77–78), in the post-holocaust era man confronts his
having manufactured Hell on earth in a manner that exceeded even the most
macabre of literary imaginations, and did so at a stone’s throw from the citadels of
high culture. Steiner’s example is Martin Heidegger, who served as the Rector of
the University of Freiberg in 1933–1934 and was an active supporter of Nazism.
The philosopher had been aware since the Nazi party’s inception of its racist
philosophy, which argued for the superiority of the Germans as saviors of humanity
© 2005 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia

Published by Blackwell Publishing, 9600 Garsington Road, Oxford, OX4 2DQ, UK and
350 Main Street, Malden, MA 02148, USA
600 Thomas E. Peterson
and recuperators of the Greek ‘pagan’ tradition. In reality this mission was the
creation of Hell on earth, with the Dantean factors of the sinner’s moral blindness
and inability to understand the concept of ethical wrong, down to the very denial
of the existence of ‘conscience’. Coming to terms with the enormity of the tragedy
also means contending with those intellectuals who see nothing unusual in the
compresence of great evil and great scholarship. To insist otherwise is not so easy as
it might seem, as it leads one to question the ‘automatic’ aspects of one’s learning
and acculturation, one’s teaching and one’s upbringing. It leads one to ask how the
forms of language and discourse of an education condition its political content, and
how the structure of a university, or the design of an academic class, can contribute
to dehumanization. In our current context it leads us to ask what parallels might
be drawn between such a pedagogy as Heidegger’s and tendencies that have arisen
in today’s university that continue in the same vein of irrationalism, glorification of
the nationalist state, and insistence on autocratic controls within the university.
Here we look at the facts of Heidegger’s academic career. How did he frame and
insulate his specialization? How did he regard academic freedom and faculty
governance, in his rhetoric and his actions? How did he understand the learning
process and the nature of knowledge, in his discipline of philosophy and in the
other disciplines? We attempt to answer these questions, however partially, by
scanning the stages of Heidegger’s troubled career: during his early years, during
his Rectorate, after the Rectorate and before the fall of the Third Reich, during the
years of his banishment from teaching, and finally once the banishment was lifted.
What can we learn from the example he sets of a pedagogical practice that is
seemingly hostile to progress in the sciences and the related field of epistemology?
We do not claim expertise in Heidegger’s Ontology of Being and Dasein. Our goal
is simply to characterize a pedagogy and a teaching practice.
Heidegger writes very little on teaching, but since so many of his writings emerge
directly from his teaching, one can infer a pedagogy from the framing and present-
ation of intellectual issues. Indeed, given the preponderance of lecture courses
among his publications, one has a privileged view into Heidegger’s classroom.
Generally speaking, the philosopher disparages the academic institution: its various
attempts at self-improvement, at revamping or reforming curricula, are in error,
being ‘instrumental’ and goal-oriented, limited by their very use of logic. Discus-
sions of strategies for the classroom are invariably mired in technical, bureaucratic
discourse. Similarly, Heidegger put his own ontological theory of Being over the
other academic disciplines, the arts and sciences. As his influence grew in and out
of the university, this denunciatory and imperious tendency only grew.
2.
In 1919 Heidegger decides to no longer pursue the priesthood; he communicates
to his friend, Father Krebs, that he has outgrown Catholicism but not Christianity,
a change which has had great repercussions in his philosophical work and his sense
of his pedagogical mission: ‘It is difficult to live as a philosopher—inner truthful-
ness regarding oneself and in relation to those for whom one is supposed to be a

Notes on Heidegger’s Authoritarian Pedagogy 601
teacher demands sacrifices, renunciation, and struggles which ever remain unknown
to the academic technician’ (Heidegger, 2002, p. 70). The milieu of the German
university after World War I was that of crisis; professorial authority was put in
question. Professors’ salaries were declining due to inflation as enrolments multi-
plied, especially among students of the lower and lower middle classes. The instability
of this climate affected the faculties and curricula, and pressures grew to place
blame on the former hierarchies of positivists and liberal democrats, contributing
to a growing irrationalism.
As a young professor Heidegger earned a reputation for his zeal, such that he
became the center of interest in his courses:
In those years, in Freiburg and Marburg, when Heidegger was not yet a
writer, the name ‘Heidegger’ was associated only with a teacher. To be
more specific, with a certain way of teaching, with a certain authority and
yet a great passion in the voice, with a certain flame and a certain fire,
that of life-philosophy, the flame of life itself. [ … ] With Heidegger,
philosophy was life itself ! (De Beistegui, p. 39)
The fervor of a man with a mission, and the confusion of the messenger for the
message, were illustrative of the weaknesses of the life-philosophy. Such acts of
classificatory hubris as are evident in the young Heidegger will remain an integral
part of his idea of education, teaching and the university. They conform to an
authoritarian model that goes back to Fichte and sidestep the more uncomfortable,
more democratic aspects of von Humboldt’s model. Once Heidegger is also known
for his writings, he sets out to deny the other sciences the epistemological validity
he grants to ontological thinking, a stance he defends (in a letter to Karl Löwith
from 1921) as a ‘Christian theologian’:
Proper to this facticity of mine is—this I mention only in passing—my
being a ‘Christian theologian’. In this there lies a definite concern for self,
a definite radical scientific character—in this facticity there lies a rigorous
objectivity; in it there lies the historical consciousness of ‘spiritual
history’—and all this I am in the nexus of life of the university. (De
Beistegui, p. 39)
The locus of the university is identified as a place for exploring the problems
of self and the Christian logos, a dyad Heidegger conflates under the auspices of
science and religion. But this understanding of facticity is evasive of the immanent
and practical realm of the university.1 In other words, the notion of facticity—the
human condition of existing—is not related to the transitive language of deeds and
events, but is part of an abstract language of dualisms and reifications (‘rigorous
objectivity’, ‘historical consciousness’, ‘spiritual history’). This runs counter to that
understanding of factum as derived from the transitive verb facere which depends
on deeds, events and dynamic processes, which does not construe the university
community as a totality subject to a hierarchy—with a few philosophers at the
top—but acknowledges the limitation of philosophy as an organic co-participant
among the disciplines.2

In reading Heidegger’s lectures from 1923, one sees the young professor frame
his course on Hermeneutics and Ontology as radically anti-modern and resistant
to the do-nothing status quo of the university: ‘Everything modern is recognizable
in the fact that it artfully steals away from its own time and is capable of creating
an “effect” only in this fashion. (Industry, propaganda, proselytizing, cliquish
monopolies, intellectual racketeering.)’. He warns ‘that questioning has today
fallen out of fashion in the great industry of “problems”. Here [in the mediocre
status quo] one is in fact secretly at work abolishing questioning altogether and is
intent on cultivating the modesty of blind faith. One declares the sacrum [sacred]
to be an essential law and is thereby taken seriously by one’s age, which in its frailty
and impotence has need for such a thing’ (Heidegger, 1999, pp. 15, 4). Modernity
is afflicted by its generality, thinks Heidegger: ‘There is no “generality” in hermen-
eutical understanding over and above what is formal’ (ibid., 1999, p. 14).
In 1925, Heidegger writes his first letter to his student Hannah Arendt, with
whom he has a love affair until 1930 (despite his marriage to Elfride, a ‘zealous
Nazi since the 1920s) (Ettinger, p. 5). The nature of the relation fit within the elitist
and patriarchal hierarchy of the University. As Claudio Magris writes, ‘That cul-
tural world was endogamous and, like all endogamies [ … ] it was possessive and
paralyzing for those who comprised it, it induced its participants to be succubi of
its hierarchies and to adore its authorities like idols’ (Magris, p. 215). By any
standard one applies, the master’s relationship to his illustrious disciple was
exploitive, if not abusive. In their habitual meetings he would speak to her, not vice
versa; even as her works grew famous after World War II, he did not deign to read
them. When she struggled to have him reintegrated into the German university
after his ban from teaching, he refused to acknowledge any errors of judgement or
action during the dark years of the Third Reich.
3.
Being and Time is published in 1927. Here as in numerous later texts, the academic
community is labeled as inauthentic, a physical extension, as it were, of epistemology
[Erkenntnistheorie], that field—which Heidegger repudiated as neo-Kantian—whose
general task is to articulate the predicates of learning and to organize—or acknow-
ledge the self-organization of—the sciences. In dismissing epistemology Heidegger
arrogated the protocols of any theory of knowledge under the umbrella of his
own anti-epistemological system. One of the immediate concerns of the reader of
Being and Time (Sein und Zeit) is that of translation: not simply the arduous task
of glossing Heidegger’s idiosyncratic language, but his use of Greek and his
‘translation’ (in the broader sense) of the previous philosophic tradition, which he
aims to surpass. The task is not lightened by the fact that Being and Time is
itself incomplete; as John Anderson writes, ‘In part, the projected but unpub-
lished sections of the book were to have dealt with an analysis of the history of
philosophy; and in part they were to have included an account of the relation
between Time and Being’ (in Heidegger, 1966, pp. 17 –18). Another difficulty
concerns Heidegger’s imperfect use and knowledge of the archaic Greek language

upon which he bases his sense of Sein (Being) and Dasein (Being-there, or,
openness-for-Being).
Raymond A. Prier argues that Heidegger’s translations from the Greek of Homer
and the pre-Socratics were deeply flawed, that his unsophisticated knowledge of
Greek and his anachronistic prejudice for the Greek of Plato and Aristotle results
in mistranslations that find themselves at the heart of his own operative language.
Heidegger’s typical intellectual short-circuits, mental leaps and bracketings of vast
areas of knowledge, are thus lacking in the richness of the archaic Greek as it
unfolds, for example, in the work of philologist Bruno Snell. In the case of Homer,
Heidegger ignores the dynamism and active, multiple and varied sense perceptions
of the poetry. Prier examines the connections between ‘Heidegger’s false herme-
neutics’ and his linguistic aberrations: ‘No classical philologist who knows the
history of the ancient Greek language can read the introduction to Sein und Zeit
without a shudder. [ … ] Heidegger destroys his argument from the outset by not
acknowledging the Homeric phenomenology of lexical choice and linguistic struc-
ture’ (Prier, 1989, p. 280). Prier connects the philological oversights to the broader
and more intriguing issue of poetic ambiguity: It is not Husserl but Heidegger
who regards the Logos as an ironically nominalistic entity, as that which fathers a
multiply scattered set of stimuli into a reason for a particular response; and he does
so with an aggressive oversimplicity that nullifies completely those natural ambigu-
ities of Husserl’s own thought, which follows from the scrupulous honesty of his
phenomenological descriptions (ibid. p. 227).
Prier traces this ‘visceral’ and ‘uncritical’ nominalism to Heidegger’s attach-
ment to Nietzsche, whose imprecise ‘philological and linguistic methods’ (ibid.
p. 227). Prier rejects, along with his equally approximate Apollonian/ Dionysian
dichotomy (presented in The Birth of Tragedy from the Spirit of Music).3 As Ernst
Cassirer reminds us, Nietzsche failed to understand the importance of artistic
structure:
Even in [Nietzsche’s] theory of its psychological origin one of the
essential features of art has disappeared. For artistic inspiration is not
intoxication, artistic imagination is not dream or hallucination. Every
great work of art is characterized by a deep structural unity. We cannot
account for this unity by reducing it to different states which, like the
dream state and the state of intoxication, are entirely diffused and
disorganized. We cannot integrate a structural whole out of amorphous
elements. (Cassirer, 1970, p. 181)
Cassirer is suspicious of any philosophy that encroaches over poetic speech. Ever
sensitive to aesthetic quality, Cassirer would bear witness to Heidegger’s Niet-
szcheanism during their debate at Davos, Switzerland, in 1929. One can think
of the contrast between the two educators in terms of the contrast between the
finitude of the body and its greater context: ‘At Davos Heidegger also called
attention to the neo-Kantians’ concentration on “consciousness” (Bewustein) and
contrasted this with the fact that man is fundamentally “bound to a body” (Gefes-
seltheit in den Leib). But the enbodied subject was also fundamental for Cassirer’

(Krois, 1987, p. 42). Carl Hamburg, who was present at Davos, summarizes
Cassirer’s position as follows:
Faced with Heidegger’s insistence on the Daseins-minding and death-

anticipating finitude of man, Cassirer both accepted the case for this
dimension and denied its sufficiency for understanding man, who, only to
the extent that he gains distance from the world of his minding concern,
can progress to the dimensions of his symbolic form-world in which there
can be that measure of autonomy and freedom which, experienced in
man’s actual world, also points beyond it. (Hamburg, p. 213)
Cassirer allows for the transcendent principle in man’s symbolic practice; the
renewing effects of artistic language, by combining novelty and conservation, gen-
erate new forms of aesthetic consciousness. Heidegger admits to no transcendence
save that which is found in ‘thinking’, a mystical procedure he compares to the
mastery of a manual craft, with the accompanying terms of dwelling, of letting
learn, and letting truth unconceal itself to the learner.
As Cassirer was to write in an unpublished manuscript:
Everything ‘general’, all giving in to the general is for Heidegger a ‘fall’—

a disregarding of ‘authentic’ Dasein—a giving in to the authenticity of the
‘they’. Here, essentially, is where his path and ours part. The ontological
cannot be separated from the ontic nor the individual from the ‘gene/ ral’
in the way Heidegger tries to—rather the one is only found in the other.
(Cassirer, 1983, pp. 160–1)
This systematic aversion of generality is meaningful if we pair it with its dialectical

opposite, detail or particularity.
The lessons of the emerging sciences of the first half of the twentieth century—
cybernetics, process metaphysics, Freudian and Jungian psychoanalysis, anthropology,
communication theory, genetics, linguistics—depend for their internal coherence as
well as their contextual relations to other disciplines, on the recognition of gener-
ality and indeterminacy, as the operational and empirical milieu within which
details occur and stand in relief, developing pattern.
As a teacher and now the author of a work that would become world famous,
Heidegger pursued his goals with legendary discipline, single-mindedness and aus-
terity. His teaching of philosophy, as Cassirer notes, is profoundly rooted in the
philosophy of religion; one of the consequences of this orientation, and of the
repeated statement of intent to surpass previous (‘traditional’) philosophies, is
that Heidegger ‘recognizes that this whole world of things, the world of ‘reality’ is
a secondary phenomenon’ (1983, p. 160). Given our above remarks about language
and translation, and Heidegger’s pursuit of the ‘poetic’ in his philosophical work,
this detachment from the world of things must be viewed as contradictory. Since
poetry and art are preeminently concrete objects in this primary world of things,
their proper understanding and interpretation depends on critical languages that
derive from them, and not from some other autonomous base of knowledge. Yet as

one sees in Poetry, Language, Thought, Heidegger gives no attention to the musical or
phonetic stratum of verse; the physical grain of the poet’s voice is not his concern.
4.
From 1929 forward, as his administrative power grew, Heidegger sought to re-
organize the university. While derogating the sciences, which he felt had missed their
historical appointment with destiny, he was elevating philosophy as arch-science.
This led to the practical failure in forming an intellectual and spiritual community
that would contend with the otherness of students and acknowledge the advent of
scientific fronts of research that dealt with the points of interest ostensibly repre-
sented by ‘facticity’, by ‘Christian theology’ and by the individual’s ethical engagement
of the will and by the confrontation of contingencies.
In 1933 Heidegger is appointed Rector of the University of Freiberg. During his
one year tenure, and for a few months afterwards, he is a member of the Nazi
party; he would remain ‘a member of the National Socialist German Workers Party
(NSDAP) from May 1933 until the Party ceased to exist, in May 1945’ (Ettinger,
p. 5). In his Rectoral Address of May 27, 1933, Heidegger advocates a revamping
of the German university. The apocalyptic tones and strident, bellicose language
of the address repeatedly invoke the ‘spiritual mission’ of the university and the
need to correct the disciplinary status quo and to side with the National Socialist
state. ‘Science’ is invoked as a handmaiden of philosophy—when not a virtual
synonym—and philosophy is that ‘essence of being’ incarnate uniquely in Heracli-
tus and the early Greeks. Thus the prospective master plan is to return to this
primordial state—to deliver the German students and faculties back to that
essence—so as to liberate science from the mediocre division into disciplines (‘rigidly
separated specialties’) and the encroaching demon of technology, which proceeds
thoughtlessly and without self-reflection. And yet at this very moment in scientific
history the great Viennese scientific revolution was underway. Heidegger uses quo-
tation marks to ironize and distance himself from association with ‘international
associations’, ‘distinguished’ professions, ‘academic freedom’. His attack is direct:
‘The much celebrated “academic freedom” is being banished from the German
university; for this academic freedom was not genuine, since it was only negative.
It meant primarily freedom from concern, arbitrariness of intentions and inclina-
tions, lack of restraint in what was done and left undone. The concept of the
freedom of the German student is now brought back to its truth’ (Heidegger, 1985,
pp. 475–6). The cost or trade-off involved in this ridding of academic freedom
returns to another of the mantras: science. ‘Science’ must become ‘power’ in the
new university; it does this by its students’ associations with the three ‘bonds’:
‘Labor Service’, ‘Armed Service’ and ‘Learned Service’. This latching on of know-
ledge to the workforce and the military is dismaying even to Heidegger’s numerous
apologists. Heidegger adds, ‘Only engaged knowledge about the people and know-
ledge about the destiny of the state that keeps itself in readiness, only these create,
at one with knowledge about the spiritual mission, the primordial and full essence
of science, whose realization is our task—supposing that we submit to the distant

command of the beginning of our spiritual-historical being’ (1985, p. 477). He

rejects the traditional (Humboldtian) ethic and practice of academic freedom,
redefining for his new regime what should be meant by academic freedom and self-
governance. His preoccupation with science—the ostensible goal being to collect-
ively ‘experience the essence of science in its innermost necessity’, is stated so
forcefully that Heidegger leaves no doubt about his intentions to use the Rectorate
to hire and fire to meet his ends of purifying the science faculties of the ‘old’
disciplinarily rigorous scientists, and replace them with the ‘spiritually’ inclined
who can appreciate the ‘danger’ of knowledge attached to the national destiny of
the people (1985, p. 471). To redefine science, to reframe science’s place in the
German university is clearly accepted as a function of his executive role.
Heidegger’s ‘pedagogy of not-knowing’ demonizes technology and ‘calculative’
(rather than poetic or meditative) thinking, but also science and metaphysics. As
George Steiner summarizes,
Both Nazism and the ontological anthropology of Sein und Zeit stress the
concreteness of man’s function in the world, the primordial sanctity of
hand and body. Both exalt the mystical kinship between the labourer and
his tools in an existential innocence which must be cleansed of the
pretensions and illusions of abstract intellect. With this emphasis goes
a closely related stress on rootedness, on the intimacies of blood and
remembrance that an authentic human being cultivates with his native
ground (Steiner, 1984, pp. 262–63).
While insisting on the unity of ‘headwork’ and ‘handiwork’, and adopting an irra-
tionalist ‘back to the roots’ and primitivist perspective, Heidegger preached the
stripping down of the Humboldtian university. Scorning the works of Goethe, he
felt that a mere four philosophy professors would suffice for all the universities of
the new Germany. This opinion stands to symbolize the hieratic nature of his
pedagogy, which tended to isolate the superior man not just from himself and from
his Other, but from the other species. As one who argued for the inferiority of the
life sciences and any form of the ‘ontic’ to metaphysics, or his own ontological
phenomenology, Heidegger may be seen as the extreme development of nominalistic
mystification. While refuting naturalism for the sake of his own system, ‘Heidegger
was driven [ … ] to decouple the [ … ] connection between the ‘ontic’ and the
‘ontological’ in order to ensure [ … ] the oracular privilege of the supposed
pronouncements of Being [ … ] that then can no longer be challenged by any
naturalistic or phenomenological or existential correction’ (Margolis, p. 249).
Nicholas Rand has pursued this deviance through Heidegger’s translation practice,
demonstrating that he uses ideology to obscure rather than clarify the translations
he assumes from the Greek:
In his extended commentary on logos, Heidegger enhances the

established National Socialist ideology of the historic supremacy of the
German people with his own historical theory of linguistic and philo-
sophical priority. The German language alone has the power to transform

the Western world. Consequently, there appears to be no break between

Heidegger’s reflections on language and his support of Nazism. His
political convictions can be seen to have remained constant even after
the war. In 1951 Heidegger replaced the condemned ideology of national
supremacy with the disguised promotion of German as a superior language.
[ … ] The question of the unwitting, tacit, or deliberate dissociation of a
body of thought from its implicit or explicit historical context is brought
into relief in Heidegger’s case because his philosophy elaborates a historic
interrelation of being, humankind, language, and nation. [ … ] The relation
between German and Greek is Heidegger’s instrument for moving the
ideology of national-historical primacy into the realm of language and
thought six years after the end of World War II. (Rand, pp. 445 –46)
Heidegger stands as a radical example of the attempt to separate man’s identity

and being from his action and history. Being is essence and exists prior to man’s
current state of being-in-the-world; for the sake of one’s decisive and resolute
return to that ideal essence, the traditional subject of Western metaphysics must
be eschewed, or rather relocated in language. Heidegger defines reason as man’s
non-sensual side. Furthermore reason is divided into the speculative and practical
reasons, which are not coextensive or able to mediated by morality, judgement, or
taste. Having reified the spirit in his own pseudo-theological language, Heidegger
ignores those forms of symbolic reference that exist independently of language—or
better, alongside language—that serve in fact to reconnect the truths of religious
impulse and the multiple tasks of education. That is, he prefers not to know of
the discoveries in cognitive sciences, gestalt, psychology, psychoanalysis, systems
theory. Basic to this new integration (of intellect and will) is the notion of framing,
and thus the appreciation of the degrees of abstraction allowable within a logical
system of argumentation. Students of cognition and perception, and the links
between them, are enmeshed in particulars and generalities equally, also with
respect to the automatic or assimilated knowledge, or mastery of tasks, that allow
one to cope with present contingency.4
In the 1935 Introduction to Metaphysics, Heidegger exalts the ‘truth and greatness
of the philosophy of National Socialism’. When this text is reissued unedited in
1953, the author defends it; indeed he never repudiated Nazism, nor gave an
explanation of his silence (1959, p. 199). As is known, when his master Edmund
Husserl was forced out of his job and into silence, Heidegger failed to intervene,
either on an affective or intellectual level, either as Christian self and subjectivity
or as scientist and theologian. In 1942 the dedication to Husserl of Sein und Zeit
was omitted, not surprisingly given the connections that exist between the language
and vision of that book’s later sections and those of Nazism. Heidegger’s language-
based and language-specific stance was founded, as Caputo argues, on an Aryan-Greek
fusion of racial preference for the Aryan-Greeks, and a banishment—an intellectu-
alist pogrom—against the Jews and persons of color. Heidegger knew, ever since
the Nazi party’s inception, that its goals included the extermination of the Jews.
What did his action of claiming a ‘moderate’ position finally mean if not a monstrous

and rationalized denial of the problem of evil, as in the symbolic parricide of

Husserl?
Karl Jaspers writes concerning his last visit with Heidegger in June 1933: ‘Face
to face with Heidegger himself gripped by that intoxication [with National Social-
ism] I failed. I did not tell him that he was on the wrong road. I no longer trusted
his transformed nature at all. I felt a threat to myself in view of the violence in
which Heidegger now participated’ (cited in Safranski, p. 231). And even more
revealing to our theme, still from 1933: ‘ “How can such an uneducated man as
Hitler govern Germany?” Jaspers, quite aghast, asked Heidegger on his last visit in
June 1933. Heidegger replied, “Education is quite irrelevant [ … ] just look at his
wonderful hands” ’ (Safranski, p. 232).
This obscurantism is apparent in the bizarreness of the language itself, with the
specifically pedagogical result being mystification, as one might expect from one
who sought to reform the University by opposing academic freedom: ‘An atrophy
of grammar (undernourishment of the sentence, often stripped of its predicate) and
a cacaphony of logic (misnourishment of the rules of discourse so as to make them
perish) serve a hypertrophia (overnourishment) of rhetoric’ (Schürmann, p. 314).
Moreover, Heidegger’s idea of the university was specifically German and nationa-
listic, a view he used to justify the dismissal of deans and professors who struck
him as being politically inappropriate.
5.
In an addendum to the Parmenides lectures of 1942 –43, we gain a sense of
Heidegger’s exhortative teaching style, here in a nationalist key: ‘The highest form
of suffering is dying one’s death as a sacrifice for the preservation of the truth of
Being. This sacrifice is the purest experience of the voice of Being. What if German
humanity is that historical humanity which, like the Greek, is called upon to
poetize and think, and what if this German humanity must first perceive the voice
of Being!’ (1992, p. 167).
As is known, the exposé by Victor Farías brought many of the facts we are
discussing to light, and generated some controversy. Heidegger’s defenders, while
not attempting to explain away the documented facts, seem to argue that he was
helpless in his historical situation. For example, Lacombe suggests that the SA
faction of the Nazi party was seeking to humanize and remove the racism and
anti-Semitism from the SS faction, the more ‘purely Nazi’ faction of the National
Socialist movement. Yet even if one questions Farías’ framing of the questions, it
is difficult to ignore Heidegger’s refusal to show any contrition about the Holocaust.
Even when asked to do so by the poet, Paul Celan, he remained ‘self-enclosed at
the limits of autism’. As the poet Andrea Zanzotto writes, Heidegger ‘buried
[Celan] in the most jarring of discontinuities of attitudes and discourses, wounding
him and committing perhaps the worst of his not irrelevant guilty acts’ (Zanzotto,
p. 349).
Hugo Ott’s biography has revealed the extent of Heidegger’s lies, cover ups and
evasions after the Holocaust. The actions taken to enforce the Führerprinzip [leader

principle] are not eliminated in the anchoritism that follows, but are given their
eerie confirmation. As suggested above, the contrast between Heidegger and
Cassirer is revealing. As Pos writes, ‘Cassirer emphasized the spiritual law, the form,
by means of which man liberates himself from his immediacy and anxiety. [ … ]
Cassirer … aimed [in Kant] at liberation through the spiritual form, in science,
practical activity, and art’ (Pos, p. 67). Furthermore,
Cassirer was the first to apply the basic ideas of neo-Kantianism
concerning spirit and its creative energy to the pre-scientific world-view.
Here, too, he was guided by that historical sense which distinguishes his
treatment of the problem of knowledge. With the aid of an intensive study
of the structures of primitive languages [ … ] he sought to construct a
line of development leading from the most elementary categories of the
world to the more objective ones, and finally to the cognitive results of
the sciences. (Pos, pp. 65–66)
Cassirer had worked to build the freethinking University of Hamburg, while
Heidegger had been intent on the politicizing of the university within a military-
type hierarchy. As Theodore Kisiel writes, ‘From 1919 on, Heidegger was prone to
use in his courses military examples …’ (Kisiel, p. 39). What strikes even the casual
student of Heidegger’s biography is the use of the intellect as a sort of superstruc-
ture or expedient for the gloomy mood-philosophy that insists on the finitude of man;
and as a support for the personal feelings and resentments of a former seminarian
turned recluse. Cassirer also objected to the ‘substantial’ metaphysics implied by
the ‘handicraft’ metaphor for learning, and the implied role of the master as a rare
(and rarefied) ‘superman’, as a throwback to Romanticism’s extolling of genius.
Modern metaphysic, I would say, is not concerned anymore with the
being of substance so much as with a being which is constituted by a
variety of functional determinations and meanings. Here my position
is essentially different from Heidegger’s. I remain within Kant’s basic
methodological version of the transcendental. What is important about
the transcendental method is that it takes its departure from what is
actual fact. Thus, I ask how the fact of language is possible. How can it
be made intelligible that we can communicate through this medium from
one individual existence to another? Or: how is it possible that we can as
much as grasp an object of art as something which is objectively there and
structured? (Hamburg, p. 221)
It is precisely Cassirer’s preservation of the ideal of the infinite as something more
and other than the negation of the finite, and his stress on communication and
relation, that distinguishes him from his less than cordial interlocutor at Davos
(who refused to shake the older philosopher’s hand).
Cassirer’s wife refers to Heidegger’s ‘intense animosity’ toward Cassirer and his
‘anti-Semitism’. Husserl too, ‘in a letter of 4 May 1933, … describes how “difficult”
he found Heidegger’s “breaking off relations with me (soon after his appointment
[as rector]) and in recent years his increasingly strongly expressed anti-Semitism” ’.

When pressed after the war, Heidegger would revert to mentioning positive rela-
tions with individual Jews ‘without addressing the issue of anti-Semitism as a
general doctrine’ (Lang, p. 71). 5 The larger issue at stake here is the fact that
the learned community is easily lured into conformism, failing to develop habits
of aesthetic perception, direct perception and creative initiative. Such modes of
thought are what is lacking from the Heideggerian notion of community, which
effaces the individual will and feeling as a sort of apocalyptic nexus for its ‘revolu-
tionary’ epistemology. For Heidegger this notion of sacrifice, allied with the question
of the sacred, is invariably contained by his ‘gigantic’ knowledge, the superstruc-
ture of his intellect.6 As Adorno demonstrates, ‘Heidegger is irresistibly driven on
to tautological manners of speaking’ (Adorno, p. 132). With its linguistic edifice of
neologism, jargon, and solecism, and its containment of the sacred by language
(indeed by one specific language), this ontologism forfeits the democratic and
humanistic sense of an ecological belonging to the natural world. It does so for the
sake of a doctrine of ‘rootedness’ in one’s native soil.
Jean-François Lyotard details how the Heidegger of Being and Time depended on
the concept of ‘folk’ [Volk] ‘without any critique or elaboration of the usage of this
term’, and notes how his positing of ‘Dasein’ as a kind of shorthand for the enigma
of existence sought to escape or extract itself from speculative idealism: to be done
with the philosophical tradition as it were. (Lyotard, p. 106). But as David Carr
informs us, the pigeon-holing of Kant by Heidegger into the category of speculative
idealist was in open neglect of the transcendental philosophy (which Heidegger
preferred to fuse with idealism). The politics of Being and Time are thus naive with
respect to what the ‘people’ or folk are or might be, what they themselves comport
as an abstract construction and as a reality into the philosophical debate, specifi-
cally in terms of learning, process of learning, educational institutions, modes of
thought. As stated above, Heidegger depends on the University as one of ‘the three
services’. He adapts his authority as Rector and Master philosopher to the three
institutions of the Nazi popular state—‘knowing, producing, and combating’—and
in so doing is bereft of what is crucial in the response to the Shoah, which is ‘the
prose of practical respect’ (Lyotard, p. 108). Like a latter day Ulysses, his presumed
gift of eloquence undoes him for all time:
Too Greek and too Christian, at least in the sense whereby Christian is
compatible with pagan (by incarnation), his resistance found at its end
only Being, and not the Other. (Lyotard, p. 110)
Thus Heidegger’s ontological difference does not escape being a foundational
philosophy and is moreover a philosophy of narcissism. Carr writes in The Paradox
of Subjectivity:
My principle objection to Heidegger’s view is not that it is historically
incorrect but that it has obscured and consigned to oblivion a view of
subjectivity that I think important and worthy of consideration. (Carr, p. 10)
This problem involves Heidegger’s dismissal of the origin of thoughts in human
experience and in the narrative impulse:

[O]ne of the standard features of historical narrative—attending to and

accounting for human actions—that has traditionally applied to the
history of ideas as much as to the history of other human activities is
completely missing from Heidegger’s account. [ … ] It should be noted
here that the tendency to look away from human action—and thought as
a species of action—as the way of accounting for what happens in history
has become extremely widespread. (Carr, p. 13)
The ignoring of action as a formative component of thought is tantamount to a

denial of relation and recurrence (or feedback) in communication. Heidegger’s
passive approach to communicative process (‘letting truth unconceal itself to the
learner’) results in the reciprocally unsatisfying approaches of subjectivism and
moral relativism. Neither perspective provides a rational and practical means for
negotiating the future of learning. And indeed, this is a current crisis of morals and
epistemology cut away from history and humanism.
The supposition of Heidegger, that language speaks through man as a projection
of Being toward futurity and as a potentially supreme act of authentication, is
indicative of his failure to acknowledge the limits of knowledge and consciousness,
to set aside that part of mental process and the encoding of perceptions that we
are not aware of and cannot define; moreover it bespeaks a willful ignorance of
the interrelated nature of the new scientific languages, as manifest in the work of
Whitehead or, closer to home, among the brilliant minds of the Circle of Vienna.
This issue of the problem of closure (or the ineffable) is known to poets, theolo-
gians and philosophers alike. By allowing fields of knowledge to operate as collegially
discrete from one another, the principle of Occam’s razor is served. In contrast,
when the language of philosophy is poeticized, the poet is brought increasingly
under the disciplinary authority of the philosopher with the consequent loss not
simply of myth, but of aesthetic experience.
6.
While much is made of the ‘turn’ in Heidegger’s career with the 1936 publication
of Hölderlin and the Essence of Poetry, as well as the different tactical approach and
formal structure of his later works, neither of these changes seems to affect peda-
gogical matters, on which Heidegger is consistent from beginning to end: exhorta-
tive, redundant, exclusionary, adversative. Certain elements in his teaching do
emerge more strongly, such as the circular thinking that typifies his discussions of
poetic texts, and his ultimate appeal to the unreadable, the unstated essence of the
Word. But the aggressive tenor of his thinking—as he denounces the idle chatter
of the world in order to dramatically set the stage for his own poetic performance—
is unmistakable, early and late. Heidegger’s students are placed in the position of
being told that the assembled order of gathered scientific thought is delusional, in
so far as it is leading civilization down the path to its destruction. To regain one’s
humanity one must return to the wisdom of the ancient Greeks by making oneself
open. While the teacher apprises his students of the difficulty of this task, he

provides no mediating disciplines such as the economic, ethical, or political sci-

ences, by which to articulate and thus better achieve it. What seems most egre-
giously lacking—again in the pedagogical context of his lectures—is the practical
and ethical stratum. Not coincidentally the critics we have cited have focused on
that lack as well. While Piaget has demonstrated in practice that learning must be
individualized and personalized, one doesn’t achieve this by doing as Heidegger
did, that is by simply insisting in the (non-individual, non-personalized) lecture
format that students be open to the individual and personal wisdom of the
ancients. How indeed was a young German student to make himself ‘open’ to the
original language of poetry, or select those poets who are in contact with it? Frank
Margonis writes, ‘Heidegger deals only cursorily with developmental issues. [ … ]
Heidegger’s later philosophy makes the steps from onotology to curriculum espe-
cially difficult because of its nonpractical orientation. While Heidegger sought to
dissolve the division between contemplation and activity, it seems clear that his
reconciliation favors theory and not praxis’ (Margonis, p. 101). Alessandro Delcò
writes of how ‘the rebel Heidegger, while not hesitating to drop his master’s
[Husserl’s] overly credulous credo in the exemplary scientific character of philosophy,
nonetheless does not renounce the venerable conviction that philosophy is invested
with the highest authority’; and ‘when you think of yourself as having the unheard-
of-power of autogenesis in absolute self-transparency, in short, when you put your-
self in the position of a creative intellect, you imagine by the same token that you
have the right to impose your own guiding principle on others [ … ]. It is precisely
here that freedom ceases to be freedom and is transformed into terror’ (Delcò,
p. 232).
In Malign Masters, a study of early twentieth century philosophers drawn to
totalitarianism, Harry Redner defines the ‘socio-logic’ in which Heidegger and
others write their masterworks, then undergo a ‘turn’ in their careers due in part to
the totalitarian shift of governments between the two world wars, then modify their
positions in a subsequent ‘secondary masterwork’. He argues against the increasing
body of literature that apologizes for the political oversights of the masters by
focusing on the ‘internalist’ aspects of the work exclusively. Viewed contextually
and with respect to the other disciplines, Heidegger’s pedagogy is revealed as a
brand of magical thinking, a self-mythologizing at the top of a hierarchy of knowers
and set in a time that is Christian, but without Christ. His theology has been tied
to that of Rudolf Bultmann, the protestant theologian who advocated the ‘demy-
thologizing’ of scripture. Among those who think that Bultmann and Heidegger are
missing the point, by confusing religion with philosophy, and denying Biblical
poetry in the process, are Dietrich Bonhoeffer and Robert Duncan.
The former, a theologian and member of the protestant resistance killed by the
Nazis in April, 1945, had appreciated the work of the early Heidegger, but never
emulated it. As regards Bultmann’s proposed demythologization of the Christ story,
he writes: ‘It’s not only the “mythological” concepts, such as miracle, ascension,
and so on (which are not in principle separable from the concepts of God, faith,
etc.), but “religious” concepts generally, which are problematic. You can’t, as Bult-
mann supposes, separate God and miracle, but you must be able to interpret and

proclaim both in a “non religious” sense’ (Bonhoeffer, cited by Selby, pp. 230 –1).
To eschew myth from the wisdom traditions is a grave error because by doing so
one privileges rationalism and abstraction over the cognitive experience of the
concrete, which is aided by imagination. If Bultmann were alone, the problem
would be minor, but he represents, along with Heidegger, ‘modern man, the very
modern man who, so Bultmann argues, will accept the kerygma of Christianity, if
only the myth-trouble may be removed’ (Duncan, p. 20). Robert Duncan objects
to Bultmann’s fusion as well: ‘When Bultmann tells us that “Myth speaks of the
power or the powers which man supposes he experiences”, he reproves the imagi-
nation itself ’ (Duncan, p. 21). Such a supposition is tantamount to a denial of
sentiment of the entire mythopoeic stratum of consciousness, and thus of the divine
essence of the biblical narrative.
‘The poetic imagination’—writes Robert Duncan—‘faces the challenge of finding
a structure that will be the complex story of all the stories felt to be true, a myth
in which something like the variety of man’s experience of what is real may be
contained. Yet this theologian calls not for the deepening and extension of our
reading of mythological thought but for the abandoning of the mythopoeic itself ’
(Duncan, p. 6). Duncan thus separates himself from the theology of the ‘modern
demythologizing mind’: ‘It is the very idea that there is a miraculous grace ever
about us, a mystery of person, that our modern critic refuses to allow’ (Duncan,
pp. 24–25). Heidegger’s readings of poetry strike us as oddly bereft of the artifact
in this way, rich in questions but poor in illustrations that would situate the poem
in its locus of production and qualify it linguistically within the constraints of
historical accuracy that philologists take for granted. We sense an effort to appro-
priate poetry for the philosopher’s ends that is ultimately anti-individualist and
anti-humanist. Leo Spitzer found fault with Heidegger’s manner of poetic analysis
because it lacked ‘philological tact’ (Spitzer, p. 433), and because it employed
etymology as a kind of divinatory tool whose philosophical authority was anachro-
nistic. To hear the silence and the other, when analyzing a poem, is not to tie
together abstract concepts without the evidence of linguists and poets, for such is
ultimately only a dismissal of the literary document in favor of the interpreter’s
intuition.
In his unrepentance and philistinism, in his ‘discontinuities of attitudes and
discourses’ and ‘self-enclosure at the limits of autism’, Heidegger exemplifies a
kind of linguistic sprawl. Neologisms proliferate and form an exclusive and exclu-
sionary jargon, a language of symbols that usurps the space of self-evidence. What
the prose lacks is the concern for economy and elegance that comes when details
are wed to generalities. As William James writes, ‘The passion for parsimony, for
economy of means in thought, is the philosophic passion par excellence …’ ( James,
p. 4). Whether in the classroom, the work of art, or the managerial hierarchy, one
who fails to understand the importance of parsimony in organizing one’s material
and relations, tends toward the reification of communicative process and a denial
of aesthetic discourse.
Adorno’s Jargon of Authenticity provides a carefully argued denunciation of the
language of Jaspers and Heidegger after their split from Kierkegaard. The individual

words of the cult of ontology (commitment, concern, being thrown, Dasein) are linked
with the imperious logical structure of the arguments it proposed—contradictory,
above all, in assuming under one inward or spiritual option, pairs of opposites, of
mediation. Adorno links these logical structures to the suppression of otherness or
debate (due to the status of the Master), and to the fusion of natural and super-
natural domains and the obligation of faith. Thus one finds expelled the choice of
faith, for the sake of salvaging the falsely elevated obligation to religion, the atti-
tude of reverence toward a leader, or Master, to the status of religion itself. These
themes are linked in turn to the peculiarities of Heidegger himself—his use of
‘rootedness’, his denial of the intellectual (also in himself ), the insipid art works
that are cited in praise of the purity of the peasant’s attachment to the land. All of
this is based on language and, critically, ‘a retreat from the empirical content of
subjectivity’ (Adorno, p. 74).
Heidegger’s baroque and hyperbolic relationship with the Word, his fetishizing of
language for the sake of the inner gathering and at the expense of social and
environmental relation, is itself the explanation for his failure to achieve the grand
synthesis he strove for. This failure may be described in terms of his self-proclaimed
sense of ‘strangeness’, or what Rüdiger Safranski calls his ‘metaphysical dadaism’
and ‘the nonsense of his language’. Similarly, Karl Löwith speaks of Heidegger’s
‘abstraction by essentialization’ and ‘escape into metaphor’, his ‘philosophy still
infected with ideas of power; hence his images of petrification’, and complete lack
of ‘self-reflection and self-examination’ (Safranski, pp. 310 –15). If this lack is a
problem for philosophy, it is fatal to education, because ethics and aesthetics
are radically divided in the effort to preserve thought’s ostensible ability to ‘think
thought’:
Heidegger, the inventor of ‘ontological difference’, never conceived the

idea of developing an ‘ontology of difference’. Ontological difference means
the distinction of Being from that-which-is. An ontology of difference would
mean accepting the philosophical challenge of the disparity of people and
the differences or opportunities arising as a result. (Safranski, p. 265)
By relying on relations with objects rather than people, Heidegger lacks the shared
intercommunal recognition of an ostensive reality that education depends on. His
former student, Hannah Arendt, differs forcefully from him in this regard: ‘Taking
up his concept of truth as unconcealedness, she does not, like Heidegger, let the
event of truth take place predominantly in the relationship of man with things, but
finds it in those relationships between human beings’ (Safranski, p. 381). There is
a comparable contrast with Jaspers who outlines the difference as follows:
H: Thought itself is Being—the talking around it and pointing to it

without ever getting there.
J: Thought has existential relevance—which, in the inner action of the
meditating person, it demonstrates (provisionally, expresses) and in
practical life brings to realization—without this being possible to happen
in the philosophical work. (Safranski, p. 265)

The bizarrely intimate and unremitting relationship with the Word of the philoso-
pher of ‘unconcealedness’, of ‘openness’, has more to do with obfuscation than
with the communication of a logic of relations. Apparently unaware of the Peircean
exploration of a science of signs, and of the birth of semiotics, Heidegger never
included in his speculations Fechner (1801–1887) and Frege (1848 –1925), two
men critical for the history of science and the founding of cybernetics, number
theory, and set theory.
If as Kenneth Burke writes, logological discourse concerns the hortatory (the
‘should do’ of censorial discourse), what Heidegger is involved in is an extreme
logology. By proscribing certain forms of discourse, such as Cassirer’s idea of
transcendence, his impulse is to create a mystique around his own person. As
Adorno writes, the practitioners of the jargon of authenticity find themselves in an
ambit in which genuine contacts with others are rare; thus they tend to sanctify the
encounters they do have by proselytizing and seducing. 7 The major means for
this operation is a form of ontological self-promotion. Jaspers writes in this key,
‘[Heidegger] was attaching too much importance to the stringency of concepts
and to a purely invented and artificial architecture of thought structure’ (Safranski,
p. 388). This inventiveness resides in his personal life too, so that Arendt could
allege that he ‘of course lies notoriously always and at each opportunity’, and
wrote of him to Jaspers as ‘a potential murderer’, and in Safranski’s paraphrase of
a 1946 essay by Arendt, ‘the peak of existential solipsism’ (Safranski, pp. 376, 372,
371).
For hierarchic solipsism to gain a following it must find scapegoats, it must
persuade those who accept its rhetoric to accept its enemies as well: for Heidegger
these foes were Science and Technology, Empiricism and Humanism. The oil that
lubricated his commitment was the same language of obedience that drove the
German war machine, the rhetoric of patriotism and nationalism. Jaspers’ remarks
to the denazification committee indicate why such a teacher was dangerous to
students:
Until such time as a genuine rebirth takes place within him, and is seen to
be at work within him, I think it would be quite wrong to turn such a
teacher loose on the young people of today, who are psychologically
extremely vulnerable. First of all the young must be taught how to think
for themselves. (Safranski, citing H. Ott, p. 341)
The other sign that Heidegger lacks the ability to construct an ontology of difference
is his purely ideological (rather than practical) separation of action and thought.
His rhetoric of ‘at-homeness’, of the organic continuum, which knits the living to
the ancestral dead buried close by, fits effortlessly into the Nazi cult of ‘blood and
soil’, an exaltation of death as life’s purposed summit and fulfillment.
Heidegger considers ‘science’ as an entity incapable of ‘thinking’ in his time,
because the present context is riddled by Technology and has separated ‘manual’
man from his understanding of craft. He does not see science as an activity or
heuristic process, so it is only natural that he radically divides and segregates the
‘meditative’ from the ‘calculating’ mode of thinking (only this latter is attributed

to scientists). By reducing science, he insures philosophy’s ‘control’ of the domi-

nant episteme. He ignores the speculative force of scientific thinking that invents
and imagines what is not yet ‘given’ in the data, that which precedes observation;
in the process he denies philosophy access to the practical reason and its breadth
of forms of inference. Thus the integrative powers of inference are prohibited from
gaining their proximity to the determination of truth.
7.
What is Called Thinking? stands at a critical point in Heidegger’s career, being the
lectures he delivered once his suspension from teaching was raised. Here he could
have addressed context in a practical and rigorously systematic way; here he could
have explained the agonies of the recent past; here he could have embraced the
scientific breakthroughs noted by Cassirer in a nascent ‘logic of relations’ that saw
science as essentially being involved with functions, not entities. But this was not
to be. Heidegger’s technique was to shock students with a ‘revolutionary’ point of
view. Regarding teaching he asserts that the teacher has a harder task than the
student, since the teacher must create a space, must allow for thinking to occur (the
intransitive verb is crucial to Heidegger’s pedagogy): ‘The real teacher, in fact, lets
nothing else be learned than—learning. His conduct, therefore, often produces the
impression that we really learn nothing from him, if by ‘learning’ we now auto-
matically understand merely the procurement of useful information. The teacher
is ahead of his apprentices in this alone, that he has still far more to learn than they—
he has to learn to let them learn’ (Heidegger, 1968, p. 15). Given his tendency to
cite the authority of the ancient Greeks, one might expect the presence of their
practicality and generality, their assiduous attention to multiplicity and detail, and
their expansive vigor. Instead of proposing such an integral system, Heidegger
speculates on what thinking would be if it could be defined. There is a constant
begging of the issue of the difficulty of the superior mind in communicating to the
student. This reframing of the subject ‘thinking’ places in stark relief the hieratic
and highly defensive figure of the professor, the thinker. Long after his engagement
with the life philosophy, Heidegger retains a vitalist perspective: ‘Memory, in the
sense of human thinking that recalls, dwells where everything that gives food for
thought is kept in safety. [ … ] Man only inhabits the keeping of what gives him
food for thought—he does not create the keeping’ (Heidegger, 1968, pp. 150 –51).
A process thinker would argue the opposite: that memory resides in historical facts
and is rich because it is not free of risks. Historical facts leave us feeling unsafe,
due to the breakdown and entropy of natural processes, and thus we are motivated
toward novelty, ascension and upward growth, the transcendence of schema
accomplished by the speculative reason.
If the classic phenomenology of Husserl and others allows for a cogent social and
mytho-linguistic approach to literature as something authentic, because reflective
of the need of consciousness to relativize itself with respect to the objects of its
attention, the philosophies of idealism, nihilism, and neo-gnosticism deny such a
logic of relations. John Dewey, in his chapter ‘Thinking and Education’, writes,

‘When the “mental” is regarded as a self-contained separate realm, a counterpart

fate befalls bodily activity and movements’ (Dewey, p. 162); and,
Processes of instruction are unified in the degree in which they center in
the production of good habits of thinking. While we may speak, without
error, of the method of thought, the important thing is that thinking is
the method of an educative experience. The essentials of method are
therefore identical with the essentials of reflection. (Dewey, p. 163)
It is for the same reason that Whitehead addresses the topic of thinking both as
methodical reason and speculative reason; man the organism is seen to negotiate
the multiplicity of his imperfect intellectual disciplines dialectically and historically
according to these two reasons. Correcting the error that ‘conceives conscious
experience as a clear-cut knowledge of clear-cut items with clear-cut connections
with each other’, Whitehead stresses the approximative, vague and gradual nature
of thought, or rather the multiplicity of phases it must traverse in the integration
of the practical and speculative. The Greeks were the first to integrate thought and
fact into reason, Whitehead asserts, because they possessed the following five
attributes: ‘they were unboundedly curious’; ‘they were rigidly systematic’; ‘they
were omnivorous in their interests’; ‘they sought truths of the highest generality’;
‘they were men with active practical interests’ (Whitehead, 1929, pp. 82 –83). The
legacy of the Greeks is one that does not erect obstacles between the speculative
and practical reasons, or separate ‘philosophy and natural science’ (Whitehead,
1929, p. 61): ‘The real importance of the Greeks for the progress of the world is
that they discovered the almost incredible secret that the speculative Reason was
itself subject to orderly method’ (Whitehead, 1929, p. 66).
In contrast to these recognitions of the requisite complementarity of the general
and the particular, the practical and the speculative, Heidegger founded a hierarchy
based on their radical separation; as Cassirer states:
[Heidegger] does not seek to derive the region of the geist from ‘nature’—
the ontology of existence from the being of ‘things’, from reality. On
the contrary, he recognizes that this whole world of things, the world of
‘reality’, is a secondary phenomenon. Here is the root of Heidegger’s
‘Idealism’. … Everything ‘general’, all giving in to the general is for
Heidegger a ‘fall’—a disregarding of ‘authentic’ dasein—a giving in to the
inauthenticity of the ‘they’ [das ‘Man’]. Here, essentially, is where there is
a parting of the ways between his path and ours. The ontological cannot
be separated from the ontic nor the individual from the ‘general’ in the
way that Heidegger tries to—rather, the one is only from within the other.
(Cassirer, 1996, pp. 201–2)
Citing the example of the cabinetmaker who maintains a manual relationship with
the wood, Heidegger states that the teacher should trust the hands of the student
to gain the sense of craft. The ‘essence of technology’, he claims, is given by the
worker’s loss of a manual relation with the machine, and is determinant of the
impoverished nature of the ‘age’. By ‘machine’ he means to refer to the sciences,

which he considers in their ‘one-sidedness’ and inability to know their essence;

the modern machine is not understood in its cybernetic nature. He separates the
sciences in this way from ‘thinking’, which is concerned with essence. Bruno
Latour has disputed the cogency, if not the intellectual honesty, of this pigeon-
holing, describing it as a ‘lugubrious’ and ‘decadent’ defeatism which pictures man
as inevitably ‘stepping down’ from his ‘humanity’ (Latour, p. 211): ‘Our modern
destiny—technology—appears to Heidegger radically different from poiesis, the kind
of “making” that ancient craftsmen know how to achieve. Technology is unique,
insuperable, omnipresent, superior, a monster born in our midst which has already
devoured its unwitting midwives. But Heidegger is mistaken’ (Latour, p. 176).
Science studies has mediated between poiesis and technology; as Latour argues,
ethnographic studies of primitive cultures and studies of modern technologies
have more in common than is generally recognized. There is no way to justify the
hackneyed tendency to divide the objectivism of technological culture from the
subjectivism of the primitive: ‘If anything, the modern collective is the one in which
the relations of humans and nonhumans are so intimate, the transactions so many,
the mediations so convoluted, that there is no plausible sense in which artifact,
corporate body, and subject can be distinguished’ (Latour, p. 197).8
Signs of historical amnesia and obstinacy run throughout What is Called Think-
ing? In order to reduce the sciences to the academic surrogate of technology, which
controls modern society and under whose thrall society remains unable to distin-
guish technology from thinking, Heidegger engages in a circular argument; the lack
of definitional boundaries and limitations undermines the argumentative frame of
the discourse. He ignores the ‘machine’ of the cybernetic revolution, of information
and dynamic systems theory that is making breakthroughs in these same years, as
well as the pragmatic philosophies of William James and Charles S. Peirce, White-
head and Russell, and his contemporary Wittgenstein. He effectively dismisses the
entire ‘Anglo-Saxon’ philosophy by filing it under the heading of ‘logistics’: ‘Now
that logistics is in some suitable way joining forces with modern psychology and
psychoanalysis, and with sociology, the power-structure of future philosophy is
reaching perfection. But this conformation is in no way of man’s making, or within
his power’ (Heidegger, 1968, pp. 21–22). Similarly he attacks modern anthropology.
Insisting on the inadequacy of today’s thinking, he invokes Nietzsche to gloss the
crisis in Western Civilization between the wars and again after World War II.
[T]he Second World War … has decided nothing—if we here use ‘decision’
in so high and wide a sense that it concerns solely man’s essential fate on
this earth. (Heidegger, 1968, p. 66)
Throughout the tract one senses, in the allusions to power and destruction and
in the failure to acknowledge the reciprocity between the human and natural sciences,
a broader and deeper blindness to the nature of metaphor, to the truths of homol-
ogy and narrative. The Italian philosopher Franco Rella puts the issue succinctly:
Ricoeur has shown [in Temps et Récit] … how vast areas of the experience
of time, are graspable only through phronesis, the knowledge of a story, or

through the mediating intuition of poetry. Heidegger completed an

inverse path. He traverses this space in order to delegate to the ‘poetizing
thought’ itself—the chosen place of metaphor—the task of eliminating the
contradictory and plural experience of the world that is rendered visible
and knowable precisely in the metaphorical space: in poetry and in
stories. For Heidegger, chaos and alienation are at the origin of poetry.
(Rella, p. 44)
For the genuine poets, poetry is a means of ordering the world. It employs
non-verbal as well as verbal technique: song, rhythm, gesture, utterance, play. It
requires obscurity. Heidegger shuns paradox, as Rella suggests, and suppresses his
own paradoxes, ignoring the ‘plural experience of the world’ that is rendered in
song and rhythm. Shorn of narrative, poetry loses its own history and story, its
concrete means of ordering the world. Speaking of Heidegger’s tendency to poeti-
cize his philosophical language, to ‘relax’ to a middle ground where his language
is inflected by poeticisms, Albert Cook writes: ‘This difficult strategy both utilizes
and evades the combinatory approach of predicative, enchained propositions.
Hermeneutic gambits are substituted for propositions, and left somewhat unful-
filled’ (Cook, p. 349). In his readings of Hölderlin, Heidegger fails to apprehend
the poetry’s metaphoric tension and the importance of its qualities of song and
rhythm, which is to say its silences, its Other, its community of readers: ‘Heidegger
early and late follows the procedure of pressing the words of a few poems, or
quotations of a poet’s remarks, in order to flesh out his own thinking’ (Cook,
p. 350). As Paul Ricoeur writes in Oneself as Another,
If we keep in mind the definition of phronesis, which includes right rule in

the choice of the phronimos, one can no longer concur with the Heidegger
of Being and Time that the voice [of the Other] says nothing but is
restricted to directing Dasein back to its ownmost potentiality for being.
… Is not this Other, in one way or another, other people? (Ricoeur, p. 352)
Ricoeur concludes that Heidegger’s concept of the other resides in himself and not
in others. In an educator, as we have been attempting to detail, this can only be a
defect.
In his assessment of the position of the university in Heidegger’s thought and
practice, Pierre Bourdieu states that the vaunted philosopher of man the creature
rooted in temporality and existence was actually impervious to contextual discus-
sions of practical pedagogy. Bourdieu reveals the inexorable ‘homologies’ between
Heidegger’s philosophy and his politics; attempts by supporters and detractors
alike to separate the two are counterproductive, since the philosophy constantly
refers by implication to a politics, and specifically a reformulation of the university
and the exclusion of ‘inauthentic’ forms of knowledge from it, and the archaic
nationalism of his politics constantly refers to his philosophy for justification and
support.
Reading Heidegger one learns a kind of code, since the definitions of even ordinary
words must square with his definitions if one is to grasp the elusive, ineffable ‘essence’

of (his) thought. If Heidegger’s key-words are to retain critical value (Being, being-there,
revealing/unconcealment, lightness, letting happen, etc.), the specialized languages of
the sciences and of history must be avoided. This is done by a rhetoric of self-
enclosure, censorship and taboo. This thinking ‘with no exterior’ weaves itself into
a cult of the art of thinking, with the customary accoutrements of the arts: circular
logic, incontrovertibility, illusion and simulation, puns and other word-play, double
entendre, elision, erasure, and ambiguity.9 A devotee of this writing (for that is
what it demands) would state that the high degree of redundancy is justified by
the difficulty and abstractness of the arguments, and by the uniqueness of the
language, which relies heavily on gerunds, compound-words, adverbs and preposi-
tions, etymologies and neologisms. One thinks of the writing of Gertrude Stein
which proceeds only within its own verbal context of iterations, unfolding in highly
allusive and self-referential rhythms.
In 1953 Hannah Arendt wrote a fable about Heidegger the teacher, based on his
self-description as a fox. This fox was so guileless and ‘completely without natural
protection’ that he was constantly being caught in traps. Finally ‘he built a trap as
his burrow’, which he decorated sumptuously; yet he had no visitors until he
openly declared that his burrow was indeed a trap. Then many other foxes came
and stayed, even though they were free to leave. The point Arendt makes is that
the master’s success depends on the students’ unquestioning acceptance of his
terms, his rhetoric, his framing of the fundamental problems, and his own inability
to step outside of his lair. ‘No one knows the nature of traps,’ Arendt concludes,
‘better than one who sits in a trap his whole life long’ (Arendt, p. 544).
After his return from his suspension from teaching, Heidegger continues to elude
the empirical and historical realities of his past. More important for our purposes
is the continued evasion of epistemology, which amounts to a denial of the a priori
synthetic predicate, or external synthesis of knowledge, that recognizes the mutual
autonomy of the scientific disciplines. Heidegger assumes his own discipline of
Ontological thinking is capable of reigning over the other sciences. One wonders
how he might have reacted to Einstein’s claim: ‘Epistemology without contact with
science becomes an empty scheme. Science without epistemology is—insofar as it
is thinkable at all—primitive and muddled’ (Thagard, p. 1). By asserting that
computational or scientific thought is reductive of essence, Heidegger revealed an
educational method incapable of integrating concrete experience with abstraction,
facts with values. His estrangement from dialectics, symbol, narrative, and historical
process, had the effect of revealing his pedantry.
Notes
1. Agamben defends this facticity as unitive of the common Western divisions of body and
soul, seeing it as the genuine philosophy of national socialism (as opposed to its later
degradation), since it is based on the fundamental human condition of being ‘fallen’, of
being what one is, and not ultimately subject to contingency. Jean-Joseph Goux,
reviewing Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe, La fiction du politique (Paris, Bourgois, 1987),
writes, p. 19: ‘One cannot deny a dangerous proximity between the language and thought
of Heidegger and the thought of national socialism as national aestheticism. But on the

other hand (and here lies the most original and strongest demonstration offered by
Lacoue-Labarthe), Heidegger’s thought, far from coinciding with the discourse of Nazi
ideology, “produces its truth”, throwing a precise light on the essence of national
socialism—which has remained more or less veiled in the diverse theories that try to
understand it—and at the same time illuminating the modern essence of the political’.
2. See Bourdieu, 1997, p. 27: ‘Heidegger presents, especially in the works of his youth, a
particularly acute manifestation of the hubris of thought without limits. At the cost of
much ignorance and some inconsistencies, he gives a particularly trenchant formulation
of the conviction that philosophers sometimes have of being able to think the historical
sciences better than they think themselves’.
3. One sees in Nietzsche’s aesthetics an oppositional dyad which Cassirer skeptically
paraphrases as follows (1970, p. 180): ‘The force of Dionysus was counterbalanced by
the force of Apollo. This fundamental polarity is the essence of every great work of art.
Great art of all times has arisen from an interpretation of two opposing forces—from an
orgiastic impulse and a visionary state’.
4. See Whitehead 1957, p. 16: ‘Metaphysics is nothing but the description of the generalities
which apply to all the details of practice’.
5. See also Lang, pp. 72–73: ‘It is, once more, as if Heidegger assumed that the evidence
of certain individual pedagogical or collegial relationships would be all the proof needed
for judging his disposition towards Jews and thus for refuting the charge of anti-Semitism
(again a variation on the theme of “some of my best friends …”). That other
manifestations of antisemitism—for example, his support of the Nazi Party when it was
disenfranchising Jews and sending them to concentration camps—were compatible with
his maintaining friendly personal relations with certain individual Jews was a possibility
he not only took for granted but used as evidence for claiming his own distinctive
conception of Nazism’.
6. See Adorno, pp. 131–32: ‘In 1938 a National Socialist functionary wrote, in a polemical
variation on a Social Democratic phrase; “Sacrifice will make us free”. Heidegger is at
one with that [ … ]: “Sacrifice is the expenditure of human nature for the purpose of
preserving the truth of Being for the existent. It is free from necessity because it rises
from the abyss of freedom. In Sacrifice there arises the hidden thanks, which alone
validates that grace—in the form of which Being has in thought turned itself over to
the essence of man; that in his relation to Being he might take over the guarding of
Being” ’.
7. See Adorno, p. 78: ‘Whoever looks deep into somebody’s eye is hoping to hypnotize him,
to win power over him, and always with a threat: Are you really faithful to me? no
betrayer? no Judas? Psychological interpretation of the jargon should discover in this
language-gesture an unconscious homosexual transference, and should in that way also
be able to explain the patriarch’s eager rejection of psychoanalysis. The manic eye-to-eye
glance is related to racial insanity; it wants a conspiratorial community, the feeling that
we are of the same kind; it strengthens endogamy’.
8. Regarding ‘collective’, see Latour, p. 304: ‘the term refers to the associations of humans
and nonhumans. While a division between nature and society renders invisible the
political process by which the cosmos is collected in one livable whole, the word
“collective” makes this process central. Its slogan could be “no reality without
representation” ’.
9. Bourdieu writes how the Heideggerian text claims with ‘hauteur’ its hierarchical authority
in the form of an ‘internal reading’ (1988, p. 102): ‘This is a philosophical text [ … ]
which can only be read by those readers converted in advance, prepared to recognize—
in the double sense—the philosophical discourse and to read it as the demand to be read,
that is “philosophically”, according to a pure and purely philosophical intention,
excluding any reference to anything other than the discourse itself, which, being its own
foundation, has no exterior’ (my translation).

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Notes On Heidegger S Authoritarian Pedagogy

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Educational Philosophy and Theory

ISSN: 0013-1857 (Print) 1469-5812 (Online) Journal homepage: https://www.tandfonline.com/loi/rept20

Notes on Heidegger's Authoritarian Pedagogy

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Notes on Heidegger’s Authoritarian

Keywords: Heidegger, facticity, power (myth of ), language, pedagogy,

© 2005 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia

© 2005 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia

© 2005 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia

© 2005 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia

© 2005 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia

Faced with Heidegger’s insistence on the Daseins-minding and death-

Everything ‘general’, all giving in to the general is for Heidegger a ‘fall’—

This systematic aversion of generality is meaningful if we pair it with its dialectical

© 2005 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia

© 2005 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia

command of the beginning of our spiritual-historical being’ (1985, p. 477). He

In his extended commentary on logos, Heidegger enhances the

© 2005 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia

the Western world. Consequently, there appears to be no break between

Heidegger stands as a radical example of the attempt to separate man’s identity

© 2005 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia

and rationalized denial of the problem of evil, as in the symbolic parricide of

© 2005 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia

© 2005 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia

© 2005 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia

[O]ne of the standard features of historical narrative—attending to and

The ignoring of action as a formative component of thought is tantamount to a

© 2005 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia

provides no mediating disciplines such as the economic, ethical, or political sci-

© 2005 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia

© 2005 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia

Heidegger, the inventor of ‘ontological difference’, never conceived the

H: Thought itself is Being—the talking around it and pointing to it

© 2005 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia

© 2005 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia

to scientists). By reducing science, he insures philosophy’s ‘control’ of the domi-

© 2005 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia

‘When the “mental” is regarded as a self-contained separate realm, a counterpart

© 2005 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia

which he considers in their ‘one-sidedness’ and inability to know their essence;

© 2005 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia

through the mediating intuition of poetry. Heidegger completed an

If we keep in mind the definition of phronesis, which includes right rule in

© 2005 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia

© 2005 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia

© 2005 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia

© 2005 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia

© 2005 Philosophy of Education Society of Australasia

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