Background

Martin Heidegger 1889–1976 has been acclaimed as one of the greatest philosophers of the twentieth centuryFootnote 1 attributed with changing the way we think about philosophy and the way we engage in the world. His most celebrated work, Being and Time (1923/1962) resonates with his understanding of ancient and medieval philosophy and places temporality as central to his adventure in trying to understand being. His notoriety is not solely reserved for his philosophical work, but also for his with an engagement with German National Socialism which may have contributed to his appointment as Rector of the University of Freiburg, but caused him to lose his ability to teach after the end of the Second World War. His ground-breaking work in ontology and metaphysics determined the course of twentieth-century philosophy on the European continent, and exerted an enormous influence on virtually every hermeneutics, psychology, and theology.

Heidegger is a complex character. His work is in places brilliant, his turn from temporality to language brave and the ever-present flow of mysticism, spiritually stimulating. These influences make his work often difficult to read but repays the effort if one suspends a traditional philosophical frame work. In what follows is an attempt to understand his work directly in relation to the university. His work is much richer than this, but space does not allow for discussion. Sufficient to say that Heidegger can inform our ideas of ‘higher education’ (i.e. sets of pedagogical processes) and the unfolding of the student (e.g. in a technological context) and of ‘the university’ (as an institution, not least in its relationships to the state and its role in the wider society and culture).

The basis for scholarship in Heidegger spans his early works as a philosopher and as a practitioner. Above all else, Heidegger was a teacher, vulnerable to his own vanity, weakness and self-deception. The controversy surrounding his active and less than convincing denial of the atrocities of political force have done his reputation no good, and more recent revelations in the Black Notebooks 1931–1938 (2016) have cast further doubt over his superficial denial of racism. Indeed, Thomson (2003) goes so far as to suggest that Heidegger’s ‘philosophical views on higher education were largely responsible for his decision to become the first Nazi Rector of Freiberg University in 1933’.

So, given such an introduction, we might stop here and address his work no more, on the premise that all is bad and corrupted that emerges from his endeavours. Although I abhor his racism, I find within his work much that I believe sheds light on what a university might be. He is accepted by most philosophers as a significant contributor to the philosophy of the twentieth century, and his work is becoming more frequently referenced in the philosophy of education literature; acknowledged by many as ground-breaking. It is with his thinking about the university that this chapter engages.Footnote 2

Introduction

Heidegger began his publishing career as a 20-year-old student of Catholic theology at Freiburg University with an article in the then newly founded monthly journal of the Catholic Academic Association. In 1911, he wrote ‘On a Philosophical Orientation for Academics’ at a time when the role of the German university was under considerable debate. It was written in terms that were to ground his student advocacy in his Rectoral Lecture of 1927:

a justified egoism must again be more strongly emphasized, one which ranks intellectual and ethical consolidation and development of one’s own personality as a basic requirement over and above all other projects and occupations. This is not meant to launch a polemic against any specific tendency among the students. Only this should be set in the foreground: personal development should not take a back seat to outside involvements which are becoming ever more intrusive’. (2007, p. 6)

Moreover, the young mind searches, driven by an inner, magical urge for truth, to secure for itself the basic outlines of the necessary pre-knowledge. One can then proceed to take up and think through on one’s own the ‘principal problems of worldviews. One only possesses truth in a genuine sense when one has made it one’s own in this way (ibid., p. 17).

In this advocacy of personal development as personal responsibility, Thomson (2003) sees, and I agree, that what guides Heidegger’s engagement with the university (and indeed his existential phenomenology) is a place where thinking ought to be a process of ontological questioning, and that a philosophical disposition is a precursor to engagement with sciences and other studies. This is a challenge given what he sees as the hegemony of technological enframing (The Question ConcerningTechnology, 1953a/1977) and machination, (Contributions to Philosophy 1936–1938/1999) which reduce education as a goal in and of itself to becoming no more than a resource the purpose of which is to obtain more for oneself, rather than to appreciate what nature offers. These terms refer to the way in which we see others in the world as resources to be used for our needs, and not in the value they have in themselves (such as lakes for water and natural life rather than as sources of hydroelectricity to be used and ordered up to be used as we desire). We need to find a different way to understand ourselves and flourish, Bildung.

It is to restore Bildung to its original meaning that Heidegger takes up the notion of education. He does so through a discussion of Plato’s allegory of the cave, which provides him with what Thomson calls an ontological education that faces the enframement of education and frees the authenticity of one’s becoming from the constriction of enframement. In this, the unity of presence and spirit reinforces a primary link to being, through a more grounded notion of science. It is an awakening to a fundamental comportment, a form of receptive spontaneity, which is discussed more fully as releasement. Turning again to Ehrmantraut, he quotes from the Einleitung in die Philosphie that:

for some time now it has become more evident that the connection between science and the effective idea of Bildung has been severed. It is no longer clear in what ways not only the results of science, but Bildung in science itself should be directed into the undisturbed growth of a genuine Bildung of human communities. (quoted by Ehrmantraut, 2010, p. 46).

Science and the Primacy of Philosophy

In 1919, as the discussion on the German university began to draw its lines, in his lecture series ‘Towards the Definition of Philosophy’, Heidegger warned against its rash reformation, for its real purpose was yet to be articulated. He argues that the renewal of the university needs to involve a return to inner truthfulness as a prerequisite for a worthwhile, self-culturing life (1919/2008, p. 4). The core of this cultivated life is a notion of spirit that is central to his discussion in ‘The Fundamental Question of Metaphysics’ in 1935 and to the essence of the university. Conceptually, he considered the university as following parallel tracks of science as practical knowledge, and as cultural value. Yet both, according to Heidegger, ‘are misinterpreting and disempowering of the spirit’ (1935/2000, p. 50), a spirit of what is was to be German. He argues that the collection of disciplines taught and researched within a body called a university is just ‘a name, no longer an originally unifying spiritual power that imposes duties’ (ibid., p. 51). This spirit is referred to in the opening line in his 1929 inaugural lecture, that ‘The assumption of the rectorate is the commitment to the spiritual leadership of this institution of higher learning’. In this period Heidegger avoids actually defining “spirit”. It is not until his essay on the ‘Language in the Poem’ (1953b) that he clearly offers us: ‘Spirit is flame. It glows and shines. Its shining takes place in the beholding look. To such a vision is given the advent of all that shine, where all that is, present’ (1982, p. 181).

It can be inferred from his early writing, and is manifest in the ‘Rectoral Address’, that Heidegger assumes students have an earnest commitment to their studies and to the vocation that they might follow. From this, he concludes that they must have a serious interest in philosophy and be eager to understand themselves and take a stance on this. He sees the educator’s role as one that includes activating concern in students and, indeed, in the tutor, to understand, or at least to understand how one ought to exist. It creates a comportment in students toward a serious philosophical questioning of how one ought to be awakened. It assumes that they can see an alternative to the way in which they are and how they might find ways to be different. At the core of the philosophical disposition advocated by Heidegger for his students, and those more generally in the university, is a calling unto oneself to question. This questioning has its roots in the sense of the authenticity developed in Being and Time.

According to Ehrmantraut (2010), in Heidegger’s Freiburg Lecture Course, Winter Semester 1928/29 (‘Einleitung in die Philosphie’) Heidegger undertakes an extensive thematic analysis of why students should be concerned with this philosophical disposition, almost as a preliminary preparation, rather than focusing exclusively on their other studies. His justification for this is based on what he sees as a crisis in the relationship of the individual to science, its socio-historical position and its essential meaning. In this argument, Heidegger discusses how science as a representational process ignores the key principles of Bildung as a process of human flourishing. In 1931, Heidegger asserted in his lecture ‘Plato’s Doctrine of Truth’, Bildung [formation] means two things:

On the one hand, formation means forming someone in the sense of impressing on him a character that unfolds. But at the same time this ‘forming’ of someone ‘forms’ (or impresses a character on) someone by antecedent taking measure in terms of some paradigmatic image, which for that reason is called the proto-type. [Vorbild] (2007, p. 166).

Heidegger develops his characteristic of modern science in many places, from his inaugural lecture ‘What is Metaphysics’ (1929b) through his discussion in ‘What is a Thing’ (1935), into his much later writing in his ‘Memorial Address for Kreutzer’ in 1955. From his point of view, science becomes the handmaiden of technology and then, as such, it is put to service in industry, ceasing to address the fundamental questions of being. This leads to thinking, which, controversially, Heidegger claims is safe thinking, whilst the philosopher submits himself to what is worthy of thinking.

This theme is taken up by Heidegger in a short lecture entitled ‘Introduction to Academic Studies’. Here, he again concerns himself with the crisis in the German university education system in the early twentieth century. It was a system which, according to him, leaves its graduates helpless once they have completed their studies, for the university had become (and perhaps is even more so today) just a storehouse of skills to be distributed. He asks if the university misses that which is essential to our understanding of our being and thus to our own flourishing. This is the missing aspect of university education: the creation of hope. The fragmentation of disciplines leads to a fragmentation of reality. This leads to distress and alienation. This loss, which is only met by the questioning of our being, is the essential being of our Being. It can only be found in the wholeness of our understanding; a wholeness that includes a notion of spirituality, which is found in the laterwriting of Heidegger, especially in Country Path Conversations (1944–45/2005).

‘Rectoral Address’ and ‘The Rectorate 1933/34: Facts and Thoughts’ (1945)

From the above, the themes of the ‘Rectoral Address’ can be identified. First, there is the university in crisis (as well as the country). Next, there is a need to reassert the notion of Bildung as a way to flourish.Footnote 3 Finally, there is the audience of scholars who are seriously interested in learning as a duty or obligation to the state: a ‘Spirit is neither empty acuity, nor the noncommittal play of wit, nor the understanding’s boundless pursuit of analysis, nor even world reason, but rather springs originally attuned, knowing resolution to the essence of Being’ (Heidegger 1945/1985, p. 52).

So to the Address, and its intent to prepare student and teachers for their personal and national Volk-identity enhanced as a educative, spiritual-political movement. This is clear from the opening sentence of the Address, in which Heidegger states his position, his mission, as a:

commitment to the spiritual leadership of this institution of higher learning. The following of teachers and students only awakens and strengthens through a true and common rootedness in the essence of the German university. This essence, however, only gains clarity, rank, and power if the leaders, first and foremost and at any time, are themselves led – led by the relentlessness of that spiritual mission that forces the destiny of the German people into the shape of its history (1945/1985, p. 470).

What is more, he takes up the position whereby the university is led not as one amongst equals, but by a manager, much as currently is the practice in a growing number of universities. This facilitates a personal plan for the development of what universities do, not what might be inherent in the notion of the university as a collective, but rather focusing on the power in the head, over the university and its other activities and structures. This is not through his personal authority as Rector, but through the authority of the essence of the German university. Heidegger claims that this is not a political but rather a spiritual authority, which has its source in the German people. This is a direct attack on the structure of the traditional Humboldtian modelFootnote 4 of the university and the State interventions that support it, and is made more clear in his 1933 address ‘The University in the New Reich’.Footnote 5 Indeed, Heidegger claimed later that the initiation of a Humboldtian university model was a consequence of the Napoleonic wars, conditions that, he suggested when he delivered his Address (1945/2002, p. 31), differed from those in Germany at the time of Address. The new model appoints a dynamic head to run the university, seeking to reflect the desire of the people for a notion of the university that they may never conceive of, but will to exist. In this, he expects students and teachers to follow his interpretation.Footnote 6 This interpretation is presented in stark terms. In the Address, he uses the phase ‘only if’ as many as five times to emphasise the necessity to will the essence of the German university, to place it under the spirit of the beginning of its spiritual-historical existence, and to resolve to submit to it, so that both the faculty and student bodies are only so because they submit to the spirituality that he mentions.

In Heidegger’s 1945 paper ‘The Rectorate 1933/34: Facts and Thoughts’, he explains his position, arguing that it was:

to renew itself starting from its essential ground, which is precisely the essential ground of the sciences, that is to say from the essence of truth itself; and, instead of persisting in a technical organizational-institutional pseudo-unity, it was to regain the primordial vital unity of those who question and those who know (1945, p. 481).

The Essence of a Heideggerian University

There is much more that can be said about the Address, especially how it may reflect the National Socialist credo accepted by Heidegger. However, I want to consider the structure that Heidegger is proposing, that of the authority of a head, a university reflecting the needs of its people whilst honouring a tradition of questioning and enquiry. This structure deals with how Heidegger saw the threats to the essence of the university in modern times, a threat mirrored in much of our contemporary literature. This model seems to have had fundamental themes that are echoed in the ‘Basic Concepts’ in his later writing, especially in his concern of das Gestell, the enframing effect of technology (1977) on humanity, that creates a reductive and disingenuous view of education.

Cooper (2002) identifies three threats in the Address: the disappearance of traditional scholarship, to be replaced by the researcher; the shift of accountability to the professions and away from the academic (for ‘knowledge is not in service or the professions but vice versa: the professions effect and administer that highest and essential knowledge of the people concerning its entire existence’ Heidegger, 1985, p. 479); and third, the disintegration of the community of inquiry. Here, members of the institution are either reduced to controllable entities under the surveillance of management, or, under corporatisation and marketisation, turned into products and resources that are exploited then discarded when their use-value is finished. Indeed, in both contexts, such reality is evident in contemporary higher education. This is an insidious process, where universities become sites of scientific research and teaching becomes nothing more than ‘cultural decoration’ (Contributions to Philosophy,1999, p. 108) which lose anything that is essential to being a university, because of the ‘political-national mobilisation’ (ibid.). In this, there seems to be justification for Young’s observation that Heidegger was not calling for ‘the subordination of the university to the state, but precisely the reverse’ (1997, p. 20).

Heidegger’s notion of the university and what he means by its essential nature are perhaps most fully explored in his disposition to the De-Nazification Committee, convened in 1945 to consider his worthiness to teach in universities. In this, he states that:

The function of the university, as the pinnacle of our educational system, is to assume and to remain faithful…regardless of consequence, because, according to the nature of its task, the university finds itself under a categorical imperative to advance the understanding of intentionality before all other service to society, whether it is the interest of church, state or civil society… To grasp the task of education is thus already to know something essential about the structure of the university that it cannot be an instrument of social engineering or, generally simply a means to an end, without ceasing to educate (2003, p. 30).

Heidegger goes on to discuss why the university is not a place where theory ought to be its singular or core purpose, for ‘making theory into its principle, the university inevitably conditions the quality of the pedagogic relation’ (ibid, p. 39). It leads to forms of abstract exchange, which are imparted into the learning experience set for the teacher to impart to the student. Necessarily, this leads to learning being governed by the logic of contract, resulting in a contractualising ofpedagogy. This, he claims, has reached axiomatic status within the university. Heidegger’s pedagogical stance is revealed by, ‘one must go back to the figure Socrates in order to find an example of teaching and learning at odds with the law of exchange’ (ibid.).

It is a place where a Socratic encounter is in opposition to contractualising ofpedagogy, and where it is replaced by concrete pedagogy. Concrete pedagogy, or a pedagogy of ontologicalfreedom, as Thomson terms it (2002, p. 137), calls it facing up to the enframing of education, which Heidegger sees that higher educational institutions have fallen into, for it enables students to see how the enframing has engulfed them. In ‘Plato’s Doctrine of Truth’ in a passage on pages 168–72, Heidegger suggests that this is a four-stage process. First, this pedagogy shows the impact of the reductive form of education on our understanding of the world in showing entities only as resources. Second, this attachment to enframing is broken by allowing things to show up in the context of their being, rather than that assigned to them as resources. The third stage allows students to see the validity of their own accessible and visible form, and the final stage is advocacy of the truth that is revealed, and this advocacy culminates in teaching.

This teaching cannot be a passing on of knowledge and skills, as in the consumer/seller model, but a withholding it in order that the student attain their own answers for learning. Heidegger asks in ‘What is Called Thinking’ (1951/52) what is learning, and answers it thus: ‘Man learns he disposes everything he does so that it answers to whatever essentials are addressed to at any given moment’ (1968, p. 4) and ‘Depending on the kind of essentials, depending on the realm from which they address us, the answer and with it the kind of learning differs’ (ibid., p. 15) He is clearly suggesting that learning allows ourselves to respond to what is essential in that which addresses us.

But what of the teacher? For Heidegger, teaching is a craft that is much harder than learning, for it calls for the teacher to allow the student ‘to let learn’ (ibid., p. 15). He goes further to declare that, if ‘the relationship between the teacher and the taught is genuine, therefore, there is never a place in it for authority of the know-it-all or the authoritative sway of the official (ibid).Footnote 7Teaching, for Heidegger, is an exploration of ‘(I)gnorance as a mode of suspension [which] interrogates the role of the teacher as one who knows and of the student as the one who does not. The teacher’s silence is finally what has to be heard’ (Allen and Axiotis 2002, p. 41). Reflecting on his own practice, Heidegger feels that this might be why some have found his lectures odd!

I digress here momentarily to consider expressly political support for the mission statements and strategies of universities in the United Kingdom (and, I suspect, elsewhere), which are demanded to retain government support, and how this technological enframement of universities, as envisioned by Heidegger, is now a reality.

For Heidegger, this is a manifestation of the technological enframing of our world from which universities are not exempt. Heidegger offers a powerful critique of the way in which our educational institutions have come to express a nihilistic, ‘technological understanding of being’. In ‘What is Metaphysics’, he pronounces the death of the higher education institution, proclaiming that ‘The rootedness of the sciences in their essential ground has dried up and atrophied’ (2007, p. 83). Yet, as Thomson points out in the Rectoral Address, that under his ‘deliberate provocation Heidegger is not beating a dead horse; his pronouncement implies that it is fated to wither and decay unless it is revived, reinvigorated from the root’ (2001). Heidegger’s goal was to understand being through the philosophical understanding of Being within which the multiplicity of dispersed disciplines would have a true meaning.

Thomson observes that Heidegger seeks to ‘dissolve the concealments it has engendered in order to ‘recover’ from the beginning of the educational tradition those ‘primordial experiences’ which have fundamentally shaped its subsequent historical development’ (Thomson 2001, p. 243). Indeed, Heidegger would have abhorred, but predicted, how it went further, in terms of the metrics and analytics now determining the quality and worth of research and teaching. This has taken place now that calculative thinking as a mode of investment and money as worth, which emerged as sciences became the source of knowledge unencumbered by the reflection of philosophical deliberation, is taken as the way of becoming at a societal level.

The root of this Heideggerian decline is that of thinking, which Heidegger addresses in a number of his works. It is this that offers a clear understanding of education as Bildung through the suspension, the release from the scientific-technological modes of calculative thinking, and their replacement with meditative and poetic thinking. Heidegger’s work calling on meditative thinking is initiated in Discourse on Thinking. This form of thinking is predicated on the inadequacy of entrapment for thought in forms of logic that have led to calculative thinking, and the fracturing of discourses of wisdom and dislocation of values and emotions from thought. This more critical line can be traced back to the opening lines of his book What is Called Thinking? In that book, Heidegger considered that accounts of thinking when construed as some kind of practice are misleading. Indeed, we only ‘come to know what it is to think when we ourselves try to think. If the attempt is to be successful, we must be ready to learn thinking (1968, p. 3). Heidegger also added that ‘In universities especially, the danger is still very great that we misunderstand what we hear of thinking’ (p. 13).

Heidegger’s ‘Thinking and Releasement’ as the Basis for His Ontological Pedagogy

For Heidegger, the student-teacher relationship is not conceived as a vehicle for the attainment of some authoritarian engagement – what is, in in effect, a management tool – but as a genuinely creative encounter in which the lecturer senses the quality of the learning event. This strikes a sharp contrast to effective thinking in the calculative mode. For Heidegger, learning to think is conceived as mystery and wonder. It is based on trusting, which perceives the integrity of the learner and the lecturer. The essence of inceptual thinking, (mediative, free flowing thinking) then, is in the unfolding of the world in wonder rather than attempting to control it. This thinking is non-conceptual; it neither requires concepts to enable us to think nor requires us to have the openness to the world to do so. It is what Heidegger refers to in his later works as ‘releasement’. The focus becomes the understanding revealed in the act of the dialogue of the unfolding moment, rather than what is actually said; not in a linear manner, but in hermeneutic circles.

Allowing understanding to emerge, unshackled, from forms of abstract, logical, rational investigation opens up new realities and new truths. Moreover, it allows letting the nature of the Being of things to come into the context of the present, as a totality of Being. Heidegger commented that ‘(M)an is obviously a being. As such he belongs to the totality of Being – just like the stone, the tree, or the eagle’ (2002, p. 31). This thinking is essentially meditative, and can be considered metaphorically as ‘the activity of walking along a path which leads to Being’ (1966b, p. 25). Further, it requires a releasement (Gelassenheit) of that which enframes and defines the characteristic of man’s nature. Releasement seeks the equanimity to allow technology into our lives yet also resist it. It creates the context of meditative or ‘inceptual’ thinking (Heidegger 1999), as an alternative to calculative thinking that defines and measures reality.

Releasement is a central theme for the later Heidegger, and is first discussed in his Memorial Address for Kreuter (1996a). Its reliance is on the notion of meditative thinking, which Heidegger counterpoints against calculative thinking. He argues that meditative thinking is as difficult as any other and concerns us in ‘what is closest; upon that which concerns us, each one of us, here and now; here, on this patch of home ground; now, in the present hour of history‘(ibid., p. 47). It is about contemplating what this might mean to self and humanity. It is not willed thinking (and it links to the essence of being, as he discussed regarding the work of Nietzsche, 1991), and allows an openness to things; it is open-systems thinking across barriers and between ideas.

Specifically, his extensive explorations into thinking and willing/non-willing in Conversation on a Country Path have two central themes. The first is the ‘open-region’, which is both the place of being and where beings can be with one another in a ‘topology of being’; the second is a critique of the willfulness of representational thinking and ‘a search for a way of releasement from its grip and into authentic, non-willing manner of thoughtfully dwelling within the open-space of being’ (Davies 2010, p. xiii). This concept, especially the discussion of awaiting rather than awakening thinking, creates a transformative way of thinking that opens up a means to understand transdisciplinary thinking. Indeed, there remains a certain spiritual feel to Heidegger’s work that might lead one to consider an onto-theological stance, a requirement for a cosmological entity from whom all is understandable. Heidegger foresaw danger in humanity’s reliance on calculative thinking (and its manifestation in machination) that prompted his comment in his 1966 Der Spiegel interview, ‘only God can save us’ (Wolin 1993, p. 91).

Heidegger’s conversations try to break from the metaphysical and physical to reveal a way of thinking as onto-epistemological enquiry, unlike formal metaphysical questioning. For Heidegger, metaphysics’ failure is that it enquires into the being of human beings, not into the notion of Being – on which being is contingent. For him, this ‘Being’ is the fundamental ontology, representing a thread running through much of his early work and leading to his more poetic, even mystical, later contributions (Young 2002). His struggle is hampered by the use of forms of thinking designed for the understanding of being in its enframement as a technological way of being, especially the calculative thinking that encourages nature, including humans, to be seen as resources in the gift of those in power. His insistence on thinking on Being, as truth, at the core of our understanding of human being, began to resolve itself in language that is more poetic and mystical to understand Being. In his essays ‘What Are Poets For?’ (1946a) and ‘Language’ (1946b), Heidegger suggests that the language of great poetry can allow man to dwell once again in a world in which he is aware of intrinsic values and truth. Irwin describes this well, as ‘disfiguring all other ways of knowing’ (2015, p. 62).

For Rieser, the poet creates an affective state, so that the clarity and sobriety that is the mark of other kinds of mental activity is lacking in such work: ‘During realistic thinking the emotions are muted and their unconscious background is relatively quiescent’ (1969, p. 18), and ‘In work for driving the creative process the mind of the poet is fixed on the inner world of his ideas and recites them in a chant’ (1969, p. 19). This cleaving to an inner imaginary world of dreamlike content is essential to the differentiation of poetical from scientific and, in general, from any practical activity of thinking. This exploration has much in common with Heidegger’s approach, with language in the primordial sense, in relation to the constitution of the world, in place of the representational thinking dominated by logical thinking that is ‘rule-dominated, formalistic and doctrinal’ (Halliburton, 1981, p. 126). For Heidegger, to ‘appeal to logic for the purposes of delimiting the essence of thinking is already a questionable enterprise…in the service of thinking we seek to attain precisely that which determines the essence of thinking… Being as unconcealment and this is precisely what was lost due to “logic”’ (1981, p. 127).

Concluding Comments

Heidegger’s contribution to the philosophy of higher education lies in a number of areas, especially his conviction that thinking and questioning have withered in the modern university and in the techno-scientific world of which it is an integral part. Yet we must, I believe, follow Milchman and Rosenberg in acknowledging that a ‘profound ambiguity suffuses all that Heidegger said and did about the need to transform the university’ (1997, p. 96). In seeking to return the university to its essence, a spirit where questioning, inquiry and thinking are central, he highlights the crisis that can, and in my view has, fallen upon contemporary university. This has taken place through the enframing of education as a technological way of being, under the sway and surveillance of the unaccountable, powerful Other. He offers us a picture of the university aligning itself with interests other than a search for our fundamental comportment.

He does more than this. He offers a form of higher education that, albeit counter to the fashionable massification and means-need model, allows individuals to become educated, in the sense of identifying for themselves the world before the enframement of contemporary science and the commodification pressure of non-liberal policies. He argues for a university both within and outside society, one able to recognise the concerns in which it exists but not hamstrung by dwelling within those communities that it serves. Heidegger sees the need for the university to assert itself in these complex and confusing terms, not to ‘go with the flow’ with those who wish to use the university as an economic resource. Heidegger sees the university as a source of reviewing the spiritual, of willed and of hope for a civilised society, not one fragmented by fractions, disciplines and powerful external groups such as professions and business.

Heidegger’s vision for the university is as a place of unity based on the becoming of being, not one that revels in the crisis of the modern university in terms of its essential turmoil as a provider of instrumental skills. It is one where development is the flourishing of one’s being through members of the academy who are resolute, able and willing to serve their communities, and as a site for the transformation of human existence. This vision is especially pertinent today. As Barnett and Bengsten comment, ‘the thoughtful university does not have its have it feet on the ground but in the spiritin the ground’ (2018, p. 4).

Heidegger accepts that, in terms of education, philosophy warrants the description of a teachable science, although it is one that is separate from other sciences. For Heidegger, science implicitly has a notion of Being that is neither warranted nor grounded in the essential nature of Dasein, the understanding of which is the task of philosophy. In this, philosophy became the central way to understand Being and so lies at the core of all knowledge creation, for the sake of being.