Who’s afraid of teaching? Heidegger and the question of education (‘Bildung’/’Erziehung’)1

Gert BiestaBrunel University London

AbstractIn this essay, which is a response to five papers on Heidegger and education but can also be read independently, I argue that it is only when we introduce the German distinction between ‘Bildung’ and ‘Erziehung’ that it becomes possible to discuss in sufficient detail the possibilities and limitations of a Heideggerian account of and engagement with ‘education.’ Central to my argument is the suggestion that whereas Heidegger provides a radical critique of the humanistic foundations of ‘Bildung,’ he nonetheless remains caught in the ‘logic’ of ‘Bildung’ by assuming that education ultimately has to do with the becoming of the self. The difference Heidegger seeks to make is that this becoming of the self does not take place through an engagement with the world of beings – the world of things about which we can have positive knowledge – but rather takes place in the encounter with the Being of beings – an encounter in which Being shows itself to us, and we are receivers and custodians of Being. Against this background I show that what is absent in this configuration is an altogether different possibility, not one where we are listening, but one where we are being addressed or, in other educational terms, where we are being taught. Whereas several authors of the papers under discussion seem to have a certain fear of teaching on the assumption that teaching can only appear as an act of power that limits rather than that it enhances freedom, I explore the opposite option – one where the act of teaching and the experience of being taught are precisely aimed at my freedom, albeit that this freedom is not understood as sovereignty but in terms of authority, that is, in relation to working through the difficult challenge as to what legitimately should have power over me. This altogether different educational possibility brings us from the logic of ‘Bildung’ to the logic of ‘Erziehung.’ Whereas Heidegger and some of the authors of the papers under discussion did try to ‘move’ education understood as ‘Bildung’ from beings to Being, the shift from ‘Bildung’ to ‘Erziehung’ seems not to have been considered explicitly, although it is addressed and in a sense enacted by some of the essays. I conclude by arguing that it is only when we are able to overcome our fear of teaching that the humanism that troubles ‘Bildung’ can really be addressed.

KeywordsHeidegger, Education, ‘Bildung,’ ‘Erziehung,’ Teaching, Humanism, Authority, Freedom

Perhaps there should be a rule that anyone writing about Heidegger and education in a language other than German, and particularly anyone writing in English, should not be allowed to use the word ‘education,’ or at least not

1 I would like to thank Sam Rocha for the invitation to contribute to the special issue, and the authors for their willingness to make their work available for discussion. I also want to thank Koen Wessels for prompting me to be more precise with regard to my concerns about ‘Bildung.’

1

without clarifying how this single English word maps onto an important distinction within the German educational vocabulary, namely that between ‘Bildung’ and ‘Erziehung’ (see Biesta, 2011; Thompson, 2015).2 This would not only be important in order to acknowledge that the English word ‘education’ can be taken as a translation of both ‘Bildung’ and ‘Erziehung’ and thus obscures the very difference that can be made with these words. It is also important, as I will try argue in this contribution, because the distinction between ‘Bildung’ and ‘Erziehung’ matters a lot where it concerns the significance of Heidegger’s work for education (‘Bildung’/’Erziehung’).

Education: Grasping for meaningTrying to make this point immediately brings me to Sam Rocha’s contribution, as his reading of Heideggerian phenomenology seems to lead him to the conclusion that there is very little we can say about ‘education,’ and also that there is very little we ought to say about this ‘thing’. In this light any attempt to claim that we can say something positively about ‘education’ and even more so that it might matter that ‘Bildung’ and ‘Erziehung’ are two very different ways in which we could translate the word ‘education’ into German, appear presumptuous.

One question I have here is whether the point Rocha is making should be understood as a general point about the difference between science and phenomenology, or whether it is a particular point about ‘education.’ Would he make the same point if the topic under discussion were ‘giraffes’ – or ‘cassowaries’ for that matter (see Bulmer, 1967; Barnes, 1981)? Does it only become an issue when we are not referring to natural objects but to social constructions – such as a bank, a shop, a garage, a theatre performance, or health care, to name a few? Or has it got a special significance where it concerns ‘education’?

While I do agree that there is always a danger in trying to pin things down, and even more so in claiming triumphantly that one has been able to pin something down definitively, there is also a danger in the opposite gesture, that is, in the refusal to say anything at all, other than that the ‘thing’ (but then, why a thing?) is a mystery. Here Derrida’s notion of ‘transcendental violence’ (Derrida, 1964a; 1964b) remains helpful in my view, that is, the observation that each time we name something we never get it completely right and therefore do violence to the very ‘thing’ we seek to name, but at the very same time this naming is a condition of possibility for the thing to be in (shared) existence at all – even, so I wish to add, if ‘only’ as a phenomenon.

But perhaps the point Rocha is actually making is much more a political point, namely that what nowadays goes under the name of ‘education’ is a travesty of what should go under that name, and that for this reason we should refuse definitions that try to trivialise education and turn it into, or conflate it with,

2 The contributors to this special issue make their points in English and therefore mostly use ‘education,’ though Ehrmantraut does use the word ‘Bildung’ at one point. Iain Thompson’s work is more helpful here, not only in that he uses the word ‘Bildung’ but also pays attention to its (complex) meaning. See, for example, Thompson (2004).

2

socialisation, schooling, or the effective production of learning outcomes or test scores. But what then is it that the student “who loves to fix cars or weld steel” understands (and that Andreas Schleicher doesn’t seem to understand – see d’Agnese, 2015)? Is it that ‘education’ is always more, or less, and different from what we think it to be? Or is it the more mundane but nonetheless important point that any attempt at willingly or unwillingly undermining the freedom of another human being should not be allowed to be called ‘education’ (even if passing the standardised exam for welding would allow one to become a welder, earn money, escape from poverty, and so on)?

I would be sympathetic to such a political project, but I would be reluctant to approach it in an apophatic manner, not least because negative theology is still theology, that is, it still dwells in the realms of the theological, the ‘logos’ of the ‘theos,’ and not the ‘logos’ of, say, welding. And so with education, I believe that we should still make an effort to speak, not with the ambition to pin down education and fix its meaning once and for all, but in order, particularly in the face of attempts to fix education and claim its meaning, to show that there are alternatives, that there are differences – conceptual or otherwise – that do make a difference.

In relation to this there is one more point I wish to make, which has to do with the question whether the ‘issue’ at stake is that of grasping the meaning of ‘education,’ or whether we should also consider an alternative scenario. This is not the (hermeneutic) scenario where we are after the meaning of education but where – and I mean this in the most serious way possible – education is actually after us. And it is this latter option that begins to reveal something about the difference that can be made with the words ‘Bildung’ and ‘Erziehung,’ which is the theme running through this contribution.

Education: ‘Bildung’ as better sense makingThe question of meaning and definition also haunts Josh Shepperd’s contribution, albeit in a slightly different way. It looks like Shepperd is in a far more ‘positive’ way after the possible meaning(s) of education. But in this exercise two remarkable things happen. The first is that within the space of two lines the question of education becomes transformed into the question of learning. If the title of the first section refers to ‘a Heideggerian approach to education,’ the opening sentence ‘translates’ this into ‘a phenomenological approach to learning.’ To assume that the words are simply equivalents of each other is something that even in the English language seems contestable, so in this regard this quick switch between the two words, which happens several times throughout the essay, is remarkable.

Does that mean that the two words have nothing to do with each other? While I am sometimes tempted to start from that assumption (see, for example, Biesta 2015a), one way to make the point here is to say that where education has something to do with learning – mainly understood as the acquisition of meaning(s), including knowledge – it is in the form of ‘Bildung,’ but not in the form of ‘Erziehung.’ This is not to say that the project of ‘Bildung’ is exclusively about the acquisition of meaning(s), but it is about the process where, through

3

engagement with existing meanings – or with a wider term: culture – individuals ‘invest’ themselves into those meaning(s) and thus become someone. ‘Bildung,’ understood as the formation of self (or in more modern terms: identity) through engagement with culture, in this regard goes back to the Greek idea of ‘paideia’ (see Jaeger, 1945) – a point that will re-emerge below as well.

Shepperd shows that what Heidegger is arguing in relation to this is that when we understand culture as positive knowledge, that is, knowledge that claims to be able to ‘fix’ reality in a particular way, the self that emerges – or in more contemporary language: the subject position that is made possible by this – is unlikely to be a very critical self. The solution Heidegger offers for this problem, so Shepperd argues, is a conception of ‘Bildung’ that highlights the importance of a different ‘subject position,’ that is, of the one who has a ‘disposition toward questioning’ – and Sheppard’s paper shows some didactical suggestions for how this might be done. While these suggestions are useful – and there is potential in asking how angst might be deployed productively (I return to the question of fear below) – there are also some limitations and problems with regard to what is going on here.

This brings me first to the second remarkable aspect of this essay, which has to do with the highly abstract and at the very same time highly specific conception of the university that is being used as framing for the discussion – a university that is made up of ‘academic disciplines’ which, in themselves, are understood as, to use another modern term, ‘regimes of truth.’ This, however, is not the university, but is at most the German university as it existed in Heidegger’s time (indeed as a university of ‘Bildung,’ that was not only aimed at the ‘Bildung’ of the person but at the very same time at the ‘Bildung’ of the nation). If we go one step further we could even say that what the discussion rather is about, is an epistemological understanding of the university, that is, one that assumes that the ‘business’ of the university is the question of knowledge. This is at least historically specific – the French and the British university have a very different history and configuration (see Zgaga, 2009) – and perhaps it’s even ideological, as there is a real question whether this is what was actually going on in the German university during Heidegger’s life. What we rather find, therefore, in Heidegger’s reflections on the university, is his critique of a certain theory of ‘Bildung,’ one that would argue that ‘Bildung’ is a matter of the acquisition of ‘positive’ knowledge.

The critical question is what kind of alternative Heidegger is offering and that Shepperd is endorsing. And again we are put on the path of ‘sense making’ – see for example the concluding sentence – but then as a kind of ‘better’ and ‘more critical’ sense making, where we not just make sense in relation to existing frames and circumspections, but try to go one level ‘deeper’ in order to have a ‘rigorous encounter’ with our assumptions. The question I wish to raise is what the criterion for rigour might be and, perhaps even more importantly, where such a criterion might come from (on the question of the criterion see Biesta, in press). Is the educational challenge in the face of the ‘power’ of positive knowledge indeed one of better, more rigorous and more critical sense making? Or might it be that the project of sense making itself is lacking something? Is it

4

that we need to make ‘Bildung’ better? Or might there be a flaw in the very project of ‘Bildung’ (see also Masschelein & Ricken, 2003)?

Let me, for the moment, just ‘hold’ this question here and point at the remarkable fact that the logic of ‘Bildung,’ of becoming someone through engagement with culture – and I apologise for the crude example – provides an accurate account of both the becoming of Adolf Hitler and the becoming of Nelson Mandela. Could it be, therefore, that there may be a limit to the logic of ‘Bildung’ itself as a paradigm for the educational engagement with the question of being human, rather than that there is a limit to a particular instantiation of ‘Bildung’ – which would be a limit that could be repaired if we make ‘Bildung’ more critical, more philosophical, more ontological, and so on?3

Education: ‘Bildung’ as the pursuit of the meaning of being humanAlthough written in a different ‘tone,’ I see a similar line of thought in Doron Yosef-Hassidim’s essay as I found in Shepperd’s. What is helpful is that Yosef-Hassidim is quite clear about the way in which he ‘positions’ education, that is, “as schooling, the public and institutional system,” but his engagement with this ‘form’ of education is quite similar to Shepperd’s (which is not surprising as it partly relies on the same sources). Central in the argument is the human being – conceived as Dasein – and key is the question “how the human being perceives herself and her life.” The argument relies on an opposition between schooling as ‘strong socialisation’ (my term), that is, “an instrumental approach [where] students are to gain specific identities and be prepared for taking social roles in the future,” and something else, articulated as “a humanistic and existential endeavour, in relation to each student but at the same time also in relation to the whole of humanity” where students are perceived – by ‘education’ – “as human beings in the full sense.” A central ‘device’ in Yosef-Hassidim’s argument is the ontological difference4 – the difference between beings and the Being of such

3 I hope that the reader is not thinking that I am just giving the dog of ‘Bildung’ just a bad name in order than to hang him.4 It is likely that this essay and the ones it is responding to will mostly be read by those with an interest in Heidegger’s work and a certain understanding of key themes and concepts. My own ambition, however, is to speak beyond such a specialist discussion as I believe that what is at stake in the discussion goes to the heart of many contemporary discussions about schooling and its future. Let me therefore very briefly try to explain the idea of the ‘ontological difference’ to the non-initiated. In simple language this idea points to the fact that rather to think of what we know about the natural and social world is about the things that exist in the world (and for these things the term ‘beings’ is being used) Heidegger invites is not to forget the other part of what is going on here, namely that all these things exist, that they are there in some way – and for this existing the term ‘Being’ with a capital B is being used. One of the themes in the essays is whether education should just focus the student’s attention to the things and what we know about them, or whether it could be worth also focusing the attention on the fact of their existing as well – which is also turns back to how we think about ourselves, that is just as things (beings) or as beings that exist (Being) in a particular way. To highlight this latter dimension Heidegger used the word ‘Dasein’ to refer to the human being, where ‘Dasein’ means something like

5

beings – and educational transformation is thus described as “a transcendence to a world, i.e., [education as] the human being’s going beyond all beings towards Being,” which is seen as “a dramatic shift in one’s life.”

Yosef-Hassidim uses travel metaphors to explain how we should understand this shift. He thinks of it like moving to a different place – and travel metaphors and actual travelling do indeed play an important role in the history of ‘Bildung’ – so that “ontological education, education that considers the ontological difference, is an immigration” (emphasis in original). This immigration is a form of transcendence, but Yosef-Hassidim highlights that this is not so much moving to a higher point, but rather “experiencing a whole.” Yosef-Hassidim provides several different (re)descriptions of this ambition, such as that education should “transcend beyond transmission of information and developing skills towards humanistic-existential questioning and understanding,” or that education “should move from delivering and acquiring to paying attention.” In sum, then, the case that’s being made is for an “ontological reflection about being a human being.” In addition to a focus on the ‘whole,’ there is also a focus on the ‘new,’ particularly where Yosef-Hassidim discusses the role of art as a process through which ‘new understandings’ can be formed, “new ways of living and new meanings of being human.” This is not necessarily a process of encountering harmony. After Thompson and after Heidegger Yosef-Hassidim also asks attention for “the existential tension between revealing and concealing” that we encounter in this process.

All this may sound fine where it concerns a critique of those neo-liberal schooling systems that seem to be completely reduced to their economic function – and this is of course a serious issue – but I do not think that the remedy that is proposed works. The simple but in my view crucial question that needs to ask in relation to education (‘Bildung’) that has as its goal “examining the meaning of being human” and that has as its reference points the ‘whole and the ‘new,’ is that of another difference, this time not ontological but rather axiological: how do we distinguish between the right and the wrong whole, between the right and the wrong new, about the right and the wrong meaning of being human (again the question of the criterion; Biesta, in press)? In the conception of ‘Bildung’ that is put forward by Yosef-Hassidim this question does not appear – other, perhaps, than in the statement that we should teach students “how not to swallow everything.” But not swallowing everything is very different from the question how to figure out what to swallow and what not to swallow – the question of judgement, the question of resistance, the question of being-subject rather than being Dasein.

From this angle I find it actually quite difficult to swallow the language of the whole and the new – Isn’t wholeness the aesthetics of Nazism? Isn’t fascism about the fetish of the new? – particularly for education ‘after Auschwitz’ (Adorno), that is, education that has to come to terms with the experience of a fundamental ‘brokeness’ (for lack of a better word) of the human condition and of human possibility. Whereas Yosef-Hassidim provides a more detailed account of education as an exploration of the meaning of being human, his process

‘the being-there.’

6

remains closely tied to the idea that the task of the human being is to make sense – and my challenge here is whether it is perhaps the case that the far more difficult task for the human being, for each human being, is to make the right sense, which is ultimately not a matter of meaning and understanding but of a difficult encounter with the question ‘What is to be done?’ The project of ‘Bildung,’ even rearticulated through the lens of the ontological difference, seems to have difficulty in accommodating this question. Why might that be so?

Education: Learners-in-thinking learning togetherFor an answer to this question I want to move to the fourth essay in this collection, by Michael Ehrmantraut. Ehrmantraut provides a detailed and subtle reading of and reflection on Heidegger’s engagement with Nietzsche’s account of nihilism. In his discussion he shows a certain ‘radicalisation’ happening in Heidegger’s reading of Nietzsche’s idea of the ‘will to power.’ Key here is not just the idea that values are an expression of the will to power, but that in doing so certain phenomena that used to be positioned in a place where they were supposed to provide a binding force for human action – such as ‘God,’ ‘Being’ or ‘Unity’ (Ehrmantraut’s examples) “come in sight as values for the first time” (emph. in original). Ehrmantraut also convincingly shows that for Heidegger Nietzsche’s “metaphysics of the will to power” is not the overcoming of modernity but rather its ‘completion.’

One interesting step in Heidegger’s argument is his suggestion that ‘value-thinking,’ that is, the unmasking of the aforementioned binding forces as ‘mere’ values, not only undermines the possibility of morality understood as an order ‘beyond’ individual human choices and preferences. Heidegger also argues that it brings about an “elimination of beings themselves.“ Man, as will to power, does not adapt himself to the givenness of things, but orders the world for his own purposes,” and hence there is a “dissolution of the ‘binding’ character of the world itself.” Heidegger thus depicts a situation where the only thing that appears to be left are values, understood as preferences. Hence “(m)oral or ethical reflection generally takes the form of deliberation among a variety of alternative values or ways of life,” which, as Ehrmantraut makes clear, also holds for such ‘values sytems’ as fascism, communism and democracy in that these all “justify their existence on the grounds that they preserve or enhance a type of human being.” Ehrmantraut concludes, therefore, that in the age of ‘the metaphysics of the will to power’ “obligation to anything can be only a promise that one makes to oneself and others” – ethics and morality become entirely ‘conventional,’ so we might say.

What is interesting about Ehrmantraut’s essay is that he brings to light an aspect of Heidegger’s work that remained hidden in the previous two essays I discussed, and that actually amounts to an important critique of the positions defended in those essays. Ehrmantraut first of all identifies the problem that follows from Heidegger’s discussion of Nietzsche, which is that all conceptions and programmes of education that have been articulated so far now – that is, after the ‘Death of God’ – become visible (or we could also say: are unmasked) as incomplete forms of ‘metaphysical humanism.’ They are based, in other words, on particularistic preferences about what it means to be human. Interestingly the

7

list of educational ‘projects’ mentioned includes paideia, Roman humanities, liberal arts, and (German Idealist) ‘Bildung’. It is worth to quote Heidegger at length here, as the particular quote seems to encompass a large chunk, if not the entirety, of Western education, pre-modern, modern, and perhaps also post-modern.

This is always what is needed: to take ‘human beings,’ who within the sphere of a firmly established, metaphysical structure of beings are determined as animal rationale, and to bring them, within that sphere, to the liberation of their possibilities, to the certainty of their determination, and to the security of their ‘life.’ This takes place as the stamping of their ‘moral’ conduct, as the redemption of their immortal souls, as the unfolding of their creative forces, as the development of their reason, as the cultivation of their personalities, as the awakening of their sense of community, as the breeding of the body, or as an appropriate combination of some or all of these ‘humanisms.’ In each instance, what occurs is a metaphysically determined circling around the human being, whether on narrower or wider paths. (Heidegger, quoted in Ehrmantraut).

This quote is not just remarkable – it is also astonishingly accurate in its depiction of educational projects that only came to rise long after this was written, including the present-day educational obsession with the liberation of possibilities (the full development of children’s talents), the stamping of ‘moral’ conduct (think of character education), creativity (Ken Robinson comes to mind), the cultivation of personality (particularly in the rise of identity politics), or the awakening of a sense of community (British Values, Australian values, American values, indigenous values, and so on), and even the breeding of the body (think of how fitness and movement science have replaced physical education in many curricula). And all these projects and programmes can be said to be based on the ‘template’ of ‘Bildung:’ the becoming of the individual as ‘this or that’ individual through engagement with ‘culture.’ In this sense we might say that Heidegger here unmasks ‘Bildung’ as itself a value, and this is perhaps where Ehrmantraut’s essay provides an interesting perspective on the readings of Heidegger and education in the previous papers, particularly the previous two papers. (I will come back to Rocha’s paper in my concluding comments.)

But what is left? Is there still a possibility for education after the Death of God and after the end of humanism – an education that does not ‘circle around the human being’? Here Ehrmantraut presents a two-step argument. He first shows how for Heidegger it is the ‘consummation of nihilism’ that clears the space where Being itself – the Being of beings – can reappear, or, in the words of Heidegger, where “Being itself could again take man with respect to his essence into an incipient relation” (quoted by Ehrmantraut). The engagement with nihilism is important here, so Heidegger argues, because it is through this engagement that the disappearance of Being becomes visible not as a matter of human neglect but as what Ehrmantraut refers to as the self-concealment of Being. It is therefore through the “thoughtful engagement with nihilism” that “’Being’ as something other than a projection of human reason or ‘value’ posited by will to power … may show itself.”

8

It is here that Ehrmantraut, with Heidegger, locates the possibility of “a genuine education after the death of God,” namely an education aimed at the thinking of Being – which is therefore named as an “education in thinking.”5 Ehrmantraut, quoting Heidegger, presents this education in terms of learning – the English phrase is “learners in thinking” – where this learning is understood as something people need to do together, not only in order to learn together (‘mitlernen’) but also, with the words of Heidegger that conclude Ehrmantraut’s essay, in order to remain “on the path as fellow teachers [‘mitlehrend’].”

‘Bildung’ and beyond: Stop making sense?It is interesting to see then that Ehrmantraut ends up where Shepperd began, that is with the transformation of education into learning; a sentiment that can also be found in Yosef-Hassidim’s essay. Whereas all three authors seem to advocate, with Heidegger, an education that consists of the study of Being – the study of the Being of beings rather than a study of beings, to put it in terms of the ontological difference – Ehrmantraut’s contribution is interesting because he shows, with Heidegger, that this is not a question of finding better ways to understand or make sense, that is, make the endeavour more critical, more self-aware, more reflective, and so on, but that it requires a ‘clearing’ so that Being as something other than a projection of human reason may show itself.

This is an education aimed at the thinking of Being rather than an education aimed at thinking. It therefore has little to do with adding ‘critical skills’ or ‘reflexivity’ to the curriculum, but is rather after a different way of ‘being in the world,’ not ‘caught’ or determined by the world of beings or, in the terms introduced above, by positive knowledge about the world of beings, the world of things, but where an authentic being in the world becomes possible (on the theme of authenticity see Thompson, 2004), so that, in Heideggerian terms, Being can show itself to Dasein and Dasein can act as a receiver and custodian of Being.

The question I wish to raise here is what kind of education this is and to what extent it is a different education, that is, an alternative to the kind of education it seeks to overcome. What, in other words, is the ‘educational difference’ that the authors seek to make visible with the help of Heidegger? I do think that all three authors discussed so far – as mentioned, I will come back to Rocha’s paper below – are looking for an education that is not tied to or determined by ‘positive knowledge,’ that is, the knowledge of ‘things,’ of ‘beings’ or, if one believes that ‘science’ is an epistemological category, that is not tied to or determined by science. What becomes particularly clear in Ehrmantraut’s contribution is that the educational alternative articulated here is not about a different way of making sense – more critical, more reflective – but about way of being that is beyond sense making. After all the ‘locus’ of education is the place where Being can show itself to Dasein.

5 In German Heidegger writes “Erziehung im Denken” (Heidegger, 1977, p. 195). Heidegger uses the expression “Erziehung zum Denken” in his essay ‘Das Ende der Philosophie und die Aufgabe des Denken’ (Heidegger, 1969).

9

One could see this manoeuvre as a critique of the whole tradition of ‘Bildung’, and again it is particularly Ehrmantraut’s contribution that provides the theoretical tools for suggesting that ‘Bildung’ is a value, that it is ultimately a humanistic determination of education. The point I wish to make, however, is that whereas what emerges here is a conception of education that is not constructivist – that is, it does not start from our sense making – and that is beyond sense making, I do not think that while it escapes from education as sense making it also escapes from the template or logic of ‘Bildung’. The reason for making this point is that the educational project that is being articulated with, through, and I also think by Heidegger, is still after the formation of the individual in interaction with ‘culture’ (where culture needs to be understood in the broad sense of that in relation to which the individual is formed), and where the only difference is that ‘culture’ is not the positive knowledge of beings, but rather Being showing itself. But the focus remains on the becoming of the individual (see also Thompson, 2004) and in this regard it stays with the template and logic of ‘Bildung.’

And it is with regard to this idea, that education is and should be concerned with the becoming of the individual, that I see a number of problems. A quick way of making the point would be to ask why ‘education in thinking,’ which, in the hands of the authors discussed turns out to be a form of learning (including a learning together), is actually not a value, why it is actually not a humanistic determination of education.6 Another way of making the point is to ask whether the escape from the power of positive knowledge towards a situation where Being can show itself is really an escape (this is where my concerns with Yosef-Hassidim’s attempts to articulate what is ‘other’ about this other place stem from and where I also have concerns about his depiction of education as travel and immigration). A third way to make the point then, is to ask whether this other place, where Being shows itself to Dasein so that Dasein can be a receiver and custodian of Being, is actually a good place to be including the question whether this is actually a good place to be together. This for me has to do with what above I have referred to as the question of the criterion. If our ‘task’ as human being is to receive and be a custodian of Being – of Being showing itself – does that mean that any way in which Being shows itself should be received, or is there a task for us to discriminate, that is, to figure out what it is that should be received and be taken care of and what not (on this question see also Gordon, 2012). It is here that an altogether different task for education emerges – so different that a different concept is called for.

On being taught: ‘Erziehung’, authority and freedomWhereas Heidegger provides an effective critique of constructivism and educational humanism, I have tried to suggest that the alternative he ends up with still remains within the template and logic of ‘Bildung’ because it is ultimately concerned with the becoming of the self. Even if it is granted that this becoming of the self is not necessarily a consumerist identity project – Thompson (2004) provides a subtle reading of Heidegger to show that the educational project is not just that of establishing a positive identity – it is,

6 My ongoing critique of the language of learning in education can be read in this way – see particularly Biesta (2013).

10

nonetheless still orientated towards the self. Even more so, and this is key to the ‘movement’ I would like to make here, it is still centred on the self – or, in the vocabulary of Levinas, it is ego-logical, that is, driven by a logic of the ego. Whereas the ego no longer appears as a constructor or a will to power asserting its values, but rather as a receiver and custodian, it is still the self who receives and the self who takes care. Even when Dasein appears as “that entity which in its Being has this very Being as an issue” (Heidegger 1962, p.68) – which I see as the main starting point for the idea of education in thinking – it is still Dasein for whom its Being is an ‘issue.’ It is Dasein who questions its Being, rather than that Dasein is being questioned, is being put in question.

Here a different difference emerges, both with regard to the question of human existence and with regard to the question of education. There are (at least) two ways to articulate this difference. In terms of sense making one could argue that our first encounter with ‘culture’ (in the broad sense) is not a matter of interpretation, is not a matter of me trying to make sense of something out there, but is actually a matter of me being spoken to – in all kinds of ways and forms of speech, including soothing words that seek to comfort me, or a softly-sung lullaby. Another way of putting it, is to say that the first question – and I mean the idea of the first question here also literaly – is unlikely to be the question of identity (the question ‘Who am I?’) but is more likely to be the question of my subject-ness (the question ‘Where are you?’). Before we begin to make sense, before we ‘decide’ to receive, before we ‘start’ to listen, we are already being spoken to, being sung to, we are already being addressed, we are already being engaged in a conversation that has been going on before us, we are already being drawn into a world where we are, in a sense, always too late. And it is here that we begin to find ourselves, that we being to grapple with the question what all this is asking from me, what it is trying say to me, and what kind of response might be called for.

Of course, some of the ways in which we are being spoken to, some of the ways in which we are being addressed, have the intention to put us in our place and to keep us there. They have the intention to domesticate us, perhaps by ‘helping’ us to establish or find our identity, but in such a way that this identity locks us into a particular, often pre-defined position such as the identity of ‘our culture.’ There are, however, other ways in which we are being addressed, in which we are being spoken to, in which we are being put into question, ways that come from a different intention – the intention not to determine us, but to call us into life, to call us into our own existence or, with a difficult but nonetheless appropriate word: to call forth our freedom and call us into our freedom (which does not mean to produce our freedom or make us free, but to appeal to our subject-ness, to put it quickly and briefly). In English we could name them as educational gestures. In German, however, such acts, such ways of addressing, would be in the domain of ‘Erziehung,’ and not that of ‘Bildung.’7 If we wish to include an English word that captures some of what is going on here, particularly in terms

7 Just as there are complex and important discussions about the meaning and definition of ‘Bildung’, there are also complex and important discussions about the meaning and definition or ‘Erziehung’. My point here is that the two terms can be used to refer to two quite distinct educational ‘projects.’

11

of the ‘direction’ of the interaction, I would suggest the word ‘teaching’ and, from the perspective of the individual, the experience of ‘being taught.’ Teaching – or perhaps we should say educative teaching in order to distinguish it from uneducative or didactical or indoctrinary teaching – ‘arrives’ from an ‘outside,’ and therefore always occurs as an interruption of what is going on. It is a mistake to think of this just as an act of power – where power always has the connotation of being unwarranted. Educative teaching, so we might say, is an ‘appeal’ to the freedom of another human being.8

When we can only understand freedom as sovereignty, even the encounter with educative teaching, with ‘Erziehung’, can only be perceived as an unwarranted act of power, one that limits my freedom rather than that it enhances my freedom. And of course we should not be naïve here, as quite often – in the past and in the present – what is ‘sold’ as freedom-enhancing education is in fact severely limiting our freedom. But the real question, if we wish to exist in the world together with other human beings and on a planet that is not just a construction, is not how we an escape from what and who is other, but how we can give what and who is other a place in our own lives. This, so I wish to highlight, is not the question of power but the altogether more difficult and more important question of authority, and education, that is, ‘Erziehung’ or educative teaching, works precisely in the tension between power and authority, aiming at the (mysterious) transformation of power into authority (and here I do feel slightly more comfortable to use the idea of mystery; see Biesta, 2015c for further detail).

The fact that Shepperd, Yosef-Hassidim and Ehrmantraut – along with Heidegger, although he does something more than that as well – seem to move into the direction of learning (including better, more critical and more reflective ways of sense making), indicates what might perhaps be called a certain (modern) ‘fear’ of teaching (the same fear that I think plays a role in Nietzsche discussion of nihilism and Heidegger’s engagement with this discussion). Heidegger, as I have tried to show, pushes against some of this, particularly in order to move education – and human existence – beyond sense making. But I am not sure that he really overcame the fear of being taught, or didn't entirely manage to work through some of the contradictions he ended up with; contradictions that, at least where it concerns education, seem to have to do, so I wish to suggest, with the fact that he was more firmly caught within the template and logic of ‘Bildung’ than he probably thought he was. What I find interesting about Rocha’s essay is that it does not display the fear of teaching, the fear of being taught. I can now say more clearly why I think that his essay is indeed a valuable contribution to this collection of essays – as it address the question about the fear of teaching in an interesting and important way – although I hope that I have also convinced him that we can say more about ‘education’ and that we must say more, and say it with more precise words.

8 Such an appeal is not necessarily based on ‘evidence’ that the other person is capable of freedom – but this is key to the educational dynamic: that it appeals to what may not yet seem to be there. In this regard education – ‘Erziehung’ – always works with a notion of the unforeseen or the incalculable (see Biesta, 2015b; 2001). It appeals to the impossible.

12

And that leaves me with the essay I have not spoken about so far, by Eduardo Duarte. Is it because I have nothing to say about this essay? In one sense that is indeed the case. But that is not because this essay is not speaking to me, but precisely because it is speaking to me beyond the confines of comprehension. While this may be an essay that can be understood – that can be brought into the domain of interpretation, signification and sense making, and that in this way could even contribute to my ‘Bildung’ – it is, at the very same time, outside, beyond, and before; because it is enacting ‘Erziehung,’ even if it doesn’t yet seem to have found words for it. My hermeneutical inclinations in relation to this might have led me to say that I would have preferred if Duarte would not be using the word ‘learning.’ But I know that this essay is trying to say something to me as well, is asking something from me – and is giving me the freedom to figure out what that is. For which I am very grateful.

ReferencesBarnes, B. (1981). On the conventional character of knowledge and cognition. Philosophy of the Social Sciences, 11(3), 303-333.Biesta, G.J.J. (2001). "Preparing for the incalculable." Deconstruction, justice and the question of education. In G.J.J. Biesta & D. Egéa-Kuehne (Eds), Derrida & education (pp. 32-54). London/New York: Routledge.Biesta, G.J.J. (2011). Disciplines and theory in the academic study of education: A comparative analysis of the Anglo-American and Continental Construction of the field. Pedagogy, Culture and Society, 19(2), 175-192.Biesta, G.J.J. (2013). Interrupting the politics of learning. Power and Education, 5(1), 4-15.Biesta, G.J.J. (2015a). Freeing teaching from learning: Opening up existential possibilities in educational relationships. Studies in Philosophy and Education 34(3), 229-243.Biesta, G.J.J. (2015b). «Å kreve det umulige” –å arbeid med det unforutsette I utdanningen. (‘Asking the impossible’ – Working with the unforeseen in education.) In Glenn-Egil Torgersen (Ed), Pedagogikk for det uforutsette (pp. 271-280). Bergen: Fagbokforlaget.Biesta, G.J.J. (2015c). Hva er en pedagogisk oppgave? Om det å gjøre voksen eksistens mulig. [What is the educational task? To make a grown-up existence in the world possible.] In P.O. Brunstad, S.M. Reindal & H. Sæverot (red.), Eksistens og pedagogikk. En samtale om pedagogikkens oppgave (pp.194-209). Oslo: Universitetsforlaget.Biesta, G.J.J. (in press). The rediscovery of teaching: On robot vacuum cleaners, non-egological education, and the limits of the hermeneutical world-view. Educational Philosophy and Theory. DOI: 10.1080/00131857.2015.1041442Bulmer, R. (1967). Why is the cassowary not a bird? Man 2(1), 4-25.d’Agnese, V. (2015). PISA’s colonialism. Success, money, and the eclipse of education. Power & Education, 7(1), 56-72.Derrida, J. (1964a). Violence et métaphysique: Essai sur la pensée d'Emmanuel Levinas (première partie). Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, 69(3), 322-354.Derrida, J. (1964b). Violence et métaphysique: Essai sur la pensée d'Emmanuel Levinas (deuxième partie). Revue de Métaphysique et de Morale, 69(4), 425-473.

13

Gordon, P.E. (2012). Continental divide: Heidegger, Cassirer, Davos. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.Heidegger, M. (1962). Being and time. Translated by John Macquarrie & Edward Robinson. London: S.C.M. Press.Heidegger, M. (1969). Das Ende der Philosophie und die Aufgabe des Denken. In M. Heidegger, Zur Sache des Denkens (pp. 61-80). Tübingen: Niemeyer.Heidegger, M. (1977). Holzwege. Frankfurt am Main: Vittorio Klosterman.Jaeger, W. (1945). Paideia: The ideals of Greek culture. New York, NY: Oxford University Press.Masschelein, J. & Ricken, N. (2003). Do we (still) need the concept of ‘Bildung’? Educational Philosophy and Theory, 35(2), 139-154.Thompson, C. (2015). The philosophy of education as the economy and ecology of pedagogical knowledge. Studies in Philosophy and Education, 34(6), 651-664.Thompson .I. (2004). Heidegger’s perfectionist philosophy of education. Continental Philosophy Review, 37, 439-467.Zgaga, P. (2009). Higher Education and citizenship: The full range of purposes. European Educational Research Journal, 8(2), 175–188.

14