Exploring the epistemological perspectives underlying educational research elucidates knowledge conceptions, commitments, and ultimately understandings of being implicit within education. Magrini (2010) argues âthe form of knowledge that education embraces and values grounds the entire curriculum and determines the way in which education is understood and unfoldsâ (p. 2). The manner in which education unfolds determines more than knowledge currency in educationâit expresses a fundamental understanding of what it means to be a human being (Freire, 1971; Huebner, 1999; Magrini, 2014). If the question of what it means to be a human being is central to education, then education is a deeply ontological, and not just an epistemological, phenomenon.
Contemporary educational research perpetuates nihilism because it privileges epistemology over ontology. Magrini (2014) offers that â[in] this view,â which is manifest in âstandardized education, the human being is reduced to an epistemological subject, and the most primordial ontological aspects of its Being are lost or occludedâ (p. 18). The occlusion of the primordial ontological aspects of âBeingâ are precisely the aspects of being uncovered in more authentic conceptions of education and intimated by the poetic imagery of well-being (which I will explore in greater depth in Chap. 3). If education is to recover its ontological nature by allowing students to uncover and relate to their own possibilities for being, then educational research must reconsider its privileging of epistemology over ontology because, as Gelven (1989) writes, â[the] ontological priority of the question of Beingâ highlights how âall science and forms of inquiry presuppose an âunderstanding of Beingââ (p. 29). What, then, is this understanding or misunderstanding of being that currently drives contemporary educational research? And, what are its consequences in terms of how we conceive of education? But before I can address these important questions, a philosophical context of the question of what it means to be needs to be established so that I can more clearly delineate the misunderstanding of being in education and its ultimate ontological consequence: the loss of well-being.
Asking the Question of What It Means to Be
Confronting the problem of nihilism gestures at existential phenomenology, a strand of philosophical thought inspired by the twentieth-century German philosopher Martin Heidegger1 (1889â1976). Because my inquiry is concerned with nihilismâs assault on the ontological nature of education, it is heavily influenced by Heideggerâs magnum opus, Being and Time (1962), a philosophically definitive work on the ontological meaning of being.
Being and Time represents Heideggerâs attempt to answer the problem of nihilism by correcting what he perceives to be a 2400-year-old misunderstanding of the question of what it means to be. To this end and throughout Being and Time, Heidegger delineates what he calls the ontic-ontological distinction, which establishes the ground for his âfundamental ontology.â Fundamental ontology asserts the primordiality of ontology over epistemology, the notion that being precedes knowing, which means that being cannot be epistemologically reduced and quantitatively exhausted.
Since Plato, Heidegger (1998) contends, Western philosophy has abandoned the question of what it means to be for the relentless pursuit of epistemological certainty expressed in objective and universal knowledge forms. A major consequence of this pursuit of epistemological certainty, Heidegger contends, is nihilism. The objectification and reduction of the world into parts annihilates its primordial ontological wholeness and, consequently, the meaning of being. As a result, the main thrust of Heideggerâs thought is to recover an originary ontological wholeness that is rich with meaning. It is also important to note, here, that though the ontic-ontological distinction grounds Heideggerâs âdekonstruktionâ of Western epistemology in Being and Time, a later Heidegger (post 1930) abandons the project of fundamental ontology altogether. This change in Heideggerâs thought is known as the âturn,â a pivotal moment in Heideggerâs thinking where he moves away from attempting to uncover the ontological meaning structures of being as they are revealed in the lived world and instead moves toward a less systematic and technical philosophical treatment of the openness and presencing of being as expressed in language, especially poetry. I will initially employ the ontic-ontological distinction to reveal the impoverished conception of being in contemporary educational research and, in Chap. 2, curriculum. However, in no way am I utilizing fundamental ontology formally, as a preliminary step toward a phenomenology consistent with the lived world thematic analysis Heidegger attempts to develop in Being and Time. Instead, my phenomenological exploration of the evocative poetic imagery of well-being in Chap. 3 is inspired by and draws from a later Heideggerâs more poetic account of the meaning of being as expressed in works like Poetry, Language, and Thought (1975). In this way, my use of Heideggerâs thought is in no way formal, comprehensive, or exhaustive. Rather, I draw inspiration and guidance from his âexistential analyticâ as I work through the focus of my own inquiry: The recovery of a more ontologically grounded understanding of education guided and inspired by a poeticizing phenomenological exploration of the imagery well-being.
Therefore, I draw from Heideggerâs philosophical ideas, questions, and tensions to better understand the ontological consequences, specifically nihilism and the loss of well-being, of contemporary educational researchâs (present chapter) and curriculumâs philosophical commitments (Chap. 2). Last, my reading of Being and Time is informed and enhanced by the commentaries of Gelven (1989) and Dreyfus (1991), to whom I am indebted for making more accessible a text that, at times, seems impenetrable.
The Importance of the Question of What It Means to Be
In the first of two introductions to Being and Time, Heidegger moves to reawaken the significance of the question of what it means to be. In other words, why must we confront the question of what it means to be? Why is such a question even meaningful to ask? Heidegger does not want to assume that everyone agrees that the question is significant, or even approachable. In a similar vein, I begin with Heideggerâs elevation of the question of what it means to be because I want to make clear the importance of such a question, especially in light of contemporary educational research, which embodies many of the anti-ontological commitments within epistemology that Heidegger challenged nearly a century ago. Though Heideggerâs background, expertise, historical circumstances, and audience are radically different than my own, his driving question remains timelessly essential for investigating the meaning of beingâor, in the case of my present inquiry, the meaning of being and its occlusion in educational research.
Heideggerâs initial task is not just to raise the question of what it means to be but to reawaken its ultimate significance. In order to do this, he works through three significant historical-philosophical objections to, and misconceptions of, the question of what it means to be:By addressing these concerns, Heidegger not only asserts that it is possible to inquire into the meaning of being, but that we must inquire into it because it is presupposed in all other questions. What it means to be is the ultimate and most primordial question. All knowledge forms, including those dominant in contemporary educational research, presuppose, at the very least, a tacit stance on what it means to be. For the purposes of the present inquiry, I want to emphasize that the seemingly abstract, inaccessible, and arguably useless nature of the question of being lies not in the question itself but in a common misunderstanding of how the question is really being asked. Heidegger is not asking what being is; he is asking what being means. This shift in emphasis requires an important philosophical distinction that reverses the historical privileging of epistemology over ontology. To this end, Heidegger develops a unique and specialized nomenclature intended to challenge, and ultimately overturn, our traditional orientation to being (via epistemology) by making the distinction between two types of inquiry: the ontic and the ontological.
- 1.Though it has been argued that being is the broadest, most encompassing concept and, consequently, cannot be examined, Heidegger claims, echoing Aristotle, that beingâs meaning is a priori, which, consequently, makes it the most universal concept rather than a mere generalized abstraction.
- 2.Though it has been argued that by logical consequence of âbeingâ serving the most universal concept, it cannot be defined. Heidegger argues that without a meaning to being, all other concepts become void of meaning. Consequently, the elaborate epistemological system of classification we use to define concepts and assign them value cannot reveal what it means to be because being is not an object.
- 3.Though it has been argued that being is self-evident, Heidegger contends that it is not, which is precisely why he is inquiring into the nature and meaning of being. The need to uncover the meaning of being presupposes that it is, in fact, covered. Furthermore, Heidegger suggests that any argument positing a self-evident claim is inherently unphilosophical because philosophy by nature is based in inquiry, and if the answers to important questions are self-evident, then there is no need for philosophical inquiry in the first place. (Heidegger, 1962)
The Ontic vs. The Ontological
As Gelven (1989) notes, Heidegger (1962) argues that when one inquires into the nature of something, one navigates around two significant metaphysical questions that have stifled Western philosophy for over two millennia: does x exist and, if so, what kind of thing is x? Pursuing these two questions, Heidegger argues, leads to a litany of unnecessary and problematic philosophical tensions that thematically organize the Western philosophical tradition: subject-object, fact-value, mind-body, and theory-practice, to name a few. Heidegger calls the whole enterprise of pursuing the what of objects and people an ontic investigation. Ontic investigations privilege and reduce philosophical inquiry to epistemology, to the objectification and reduction of experience to âthings,â to quantitative and concrete properties. Furthermore, Heidegger claims, the relentless pursuit of the what of objects and people conceals more primordial ontological realities, like the meaning of being.
A more developed example might clarify the point. Gelven (1989) notes that when one asks about xâs meaning, one suggests that xâs meaning is more fundamental, more primordial than the what of x itself. This, of course, runs counter to 2400 years of philosophical thinking, where only through the exhaustive epistemological discernment and reduction of xâs physical properties can one begin to glean what x is in the epistemological sense. But a closer analysis reveals, Heidegger contends, that x âitselfâ is presupposed by xâs meaning. To illustrate this point, Heidegger (1962) employs his famous hammer analogy. Before one understands the physical properties of a hammer, the hammer already exists in a world, a world that makes the âhammernessâ of the hammer intelligible. The physical hammer uncovers a whole way of being in and understanding the world that is expressed in the physical artifact, âhammer.â To understand the hammer, one must glean what it means to hammer, to understand what hammers are used for, and what the hammerâs use ultimately reveals about humanâs way of being, specifically, that we build in order to dwell, to be at home. The hammer is only intelligible when it is seen through its referential totality, its relational context to other situations, objects, and meanings, much in the same way our own language is unintelligible to those who do not speak it and vice versa. The hammer is not simply the physical sum total of wood and steel, which would be an ontic account of the hammer. Rather, the hammer is an articulation of a way of being interpreted and understood through our own way of being, which means that the hammer is most fundamentally an ontological reality not an epistemological one. Only by asking what it means to be, can we begin to make more intelligible what we are in the sense of being an ontic âthingâ or âentity.â When one asks what being means instead of what being is, the question of what it means to be is pulled out of abstraction and placed into a very real and immediate lived world experience.
Human Being as Dasein
If Heidegger is not interested in the ontic properties of people, then how are we to understand human beings? Once again, Heidegger develops a unique nomenclature. He employs the word Dasein to describe and uncover not what a human being is but what a human being means. The term Da means âhereâ and sein means âto be.â Though in German Dasein is commonly used as a noun, Heidegger cleverly uses it as the infinitive âto be here,â which highlights that the essen...