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Education and Well-Being: An Ontological Inquiry 1st Edition
Matthew D. Dewar (Auth.)
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The Science of Being Well 2007th Edition Wallace D. Wattles
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Jim Magrini, you helped a dinosaur become a bird in a fortnight. I owe much to you.
P ROLOGUE
The ominous drone of a low-flying helicopter reverberated throughout my classroom. I walked to the window and watched its flight pattern follow the railroad tracks across the street from the school. The site of the helicopter turned my stomach, and my hunch was confirmed a few moments later when the student with whom I was conferring joined me at the window and asked: “Do you think another one did it?”
“It” referred to a few weeks before when a student, on his way to school, placed his backpack on the ground, walked under a railroad-crossing gate, and sat down on the tracks in front of a commuter train. A car full of his peers, waiting at the gate, watched the scene unfold in disbelief.
“I don’t know,” I said. We stood silently at the window for a few moments. When another helicopter emerged on the horizon, I turned from the window and broke the silence: “Let’s get back to work.”
A few hours later, I was informed by an email that, indeed, another student had taken his own life. He had walked out of the front doors of school, crossed the street, and laid down on the railroad tracks in front of another commuter train.
As I entered class later that afternoon, sobs and cries filled the room. Some students stood in groups embracing each other, while others sat or stood alone on the periphery of the classroom with thousand-yard stares. Some of these students had been with their friend only minutes before his fateful walk across the school’s front lawn. Never in my personal or professional life had I felt so unprepared and inadequate. Never before had I so
acutely felt that contemporary education—with its fixation on standardized testing and job preparation—had lost sight of, in the words of Tillich (2009), an “ultimate concern.”
Before the wave of grief could subside, a third student, a few weeks later, also found himself on the tracks. This cluster of eerily similar deaths was not without precedent. In the two years leading up to these events, and within the three years since, current and former students have attempted to take, and continue to take, their own lives—and not just at my school, but across the country (see Sullivan et al , 2015).
Camus (1991) writes, “There is but one truly serious philosophical problem, and that is suicide. Judging whether life is or is not worth living amounts to answering the fundamental question of philosophy” (p. 3). I too believe that judging whether life is or is not worth living still amounts to answering the fundamental question of not only philosophy but also of education. Gelven (1989) writes, “Any philosophical inquiry can be understood in terms of the primary danger or fear which the thinker seeks to avoid at all costs” (p. 10). In the case of the present inquiry, I seek to avoid at all costs a conception of education that impoverishes the meaning of a student’s being. I have seen firsthand, and hope to never see again, the consequences of education failing to help uncover and affirm the meaning of a student’s existence. It does not matter if our students are “college and career ready” if the absence of purpose and meaning in their lives drives them toward self-alienation and annihilation. If we are to safeguard our students from the depths of despair, we, as educators, must assert, as Camus does, “that the meaning of life is the most urgent of questions” (p. 4). It is with this urgency that I inquire into and attempt to uncover the ontological nature of education and well-being.
A CKNOWLEDGEMENTS
I am indebted to Kristen Carlson, Matthew Ferrari, and Efrat Sara Efron for their friendship and editorial support.
I also want to thank William Pinar for his generosity, feedback, and support.
Last, I want to thank Katie and Max for their love and patience.
L IST OF T ABLES
I NTROD UCTION
Judith Guest’s (1982) novel, Ordinary People, explores a year in the life of the “Jarretts,” a wealthy suburban family struggling to heal after the tragic death of their elder son, Buck, and the attempted suicide of their younger son, Conrad. One of the central tensions of the novel is the family’s struggle to grieve in an affluent community dedicated to appearing “ordinary.” In the midst of her grief, Beth, the mother, attempts to uphold an image of perfection at the expense of becoming a caricature of a human being. Her inability to express her own grief drives an increasing coldness toward, and condemnation of, Conrad. To address his vulnerability and suffering requires her to address her own. She refuses. An alienated and disorientated Conrad is then forced to grieve in isolation. The tension between the Jarretts’ affluent surroundings and their internal poverty reveals the inescapability of loss and suffering: No amount of wealth can conceal the realities of human life or replace our need for meaning. At some point, as the novel highlights, there are cracks in affluence’s thick veneer.
What is most interesting about Ordinary People is its depiction of the “hidden curriculum” (Giroux and Purpel, 1983) of the novel’s affluent setting and its effect on seventeen-year-old Conrad. Conrad is implicitly taught to endure pain and suffering alone, which leads him to a sense that his life is meaningless and that oblivion is more desirable than existence. The parallels between Conrad’s struggles and the struggles of the students at my school are eerily similar in that both the fictional and nonfictional communities hide in “ordinariness,” while too many of their children battle with despair despite their affluence.
In The Price of Privilege (2006), Levine explores the emptiness tormenting affluent teens. Despite an outward material abundance, too many affluent teens, Levine reports, are inwardly impoverished. Though it is tempting to dismiss their suffering as a first-world problem, it ultimately reveals something more significant and universal: the need for a meaningful existence and affluence’s failure to provide it. Despite the long-standing cultural belief that material acquisition and wealth determine a life worth living, Levine’s work suggests otherwise—and is supported by Whitaker’s (2010) research on the accelerating rate of mental illness in North America despite increases in wealth. Material affluence not only fails to translate into greater levels of life purpose and meaning, but it also fails to safeguard teens from meaninglessness and despair.
“Why are the most advantaged kids in this country,” Levine (2006) asks, “running into unprecedented levels of mental illness and emotional distress?” (p. 14). The problem lies, she concludes, in how we are “overly concerned with ‘the bottom line,’ with how our children ‘do’ rather than with who our children ‘are’” (p. 14). The distinction between what a child does and who that child is brings to light contemporary culture’s assertion that our net-worth determines our self-worth. Sandel (2012) writes that “implicit in every human situation,” as understood by our capitalist culture, is the belief “that all our behavior, however remote from material concerns, can be explained and predicted as a rational calculus of costs and benefits” (p. 50). Another way of articulating the problem, Fromm (2013) writes, lies in the confusion of being with having, where owning property is mistaken for owning a meaningful life. This conflation of being with having is a condition in which “I want to make everybody and everything, including myself, my property” (p. 21). Unfortunately having “things” does not ensure one has a meaningful life, nor can material objects replace the need for one. As evidenced by the troubled affluent students in my community and across the country, material advantage can make the absence of meaning more resoundingly present because of the unsettling realization that having “things” does not mean students’ lives have meaning. Meaning of course is not a thing but a sense that life is worth living, which motivates Frankl (2014) to write about how, in unprecedented ways, our capitalist culture has “the means to live, but no meaning to live for” (p. 1). Smith (2015) adds that there is a collective “failure or unwillingness to perceive or appreciate the deep human liabilities that accrue when economic determinism is deferred to as a god” (p. 47). Similarly, Postman (1995) implores us to question this “passion-
less,” “cold,” and “severe” “god of Economic Utility,” who has become “the preeminent reason for schooling” (p. 27). When material wealth’s god-like status is privileged above students’ need for value and meaning, we aim schooling, and more importantly students’ lives, toward isolation and despair instead of toward wholeness and meaning.
The looming collapse of “Market Logic,” writes Smith (2015), “inspires a fear of loss of everything promised through utopian market rhetoric,” which requires that we confront “fear itself, and its existential auspices” like “the fear of insignificance, or self-annihilation” (p. 58). Insignificance and self-annihilation—or rather a sense of insignificance that leads to self-annihilation—are not just academic hyperbole; they are powerful and deleterious forces educators must confront, as I experienced a few years ago. When a student’s sense of meaning is at stake, his or her life is at stake, which is why educators must address a student’s need for meaning with the same urgency we address his or her need for future employment.
Unfortunately, and too often, well-intentioned educators reinforce the reduction of students’ value to a market value, to the marketability of their lives as products to be sold and purchased. But when we superimpose market values on students, like a marketable set of “college and career ready skills,” we imply their value is economically conditional rather than an unconditional feature of their being. And when students do not conform to prepackaged versions of themselves, adults too often hijack their decision-making process to prevent the student’s “failure,” which is implicitly understood as a lack of marketability, a life résumé without the socially expected and accepted accomplishments. Though at times well-intentioned, such actions communicate a powerful message without saying a word. When parents and educators prevent teens from failing, as too many do, Levine (2006) contends, they deprive them of the trialand-error process necessary for becoming healthy, autonomous human beings. When taken to an extreme, a life lived outside of one’s control becomes oppressive. When agency, the empowering force central to personhood, is stolen, teens find no meaning in living lives they have not chosen. Consequently, a longing for annihilation, though absent in an emotionally sound teen, begins to represent the possibility of emphatically reclaiming agency in one’s life by, paradoxically, choosing to end it.
Given the extent to which young adults will go to reclaim agency in their lives, why do we steal it from them in the first place? Again, too often well-intentioned parents and educators operate with a view of being that
is reducible to economic standing, which leads to the false conclusion that unless adults micromanage the lives of teens, these teens will fail in school, fail to get a good job, fail to secure the financial resources needed to have more life choices,1 and will ultimately fail to be a person, fated to live a life bereft of meaning and significance. But when we take over young people’s decision-making process to prevent them from failing, we risk affronting and interrupting the ontologically significant questions they are learning to ask and explore: What does my life mean? What kind of human being do I want to become? These are questions that matter and that define, according to Heidegger (1962), the meaning of our distinctly human way of being. Furthermore, these questions do not come with prepackaged answers, which means that young people need to explore and struggle with who they are becoming (as we all did and continue to do) and that education should support this process, not oppose it.
In an educational world dominated by an impoverished view of the human being that is reducible to an economic commodity, educators need to more deliberately reflect on and reconsider education’s philosophical commitments. To conduct such a reflection requires that we challenge, Slouka (2009) writes, “the increasing dominance—scratch that, the unqualified triumph—of a certain way of seeing, of reckoning value” that drives “the quiet retooling of […] education into an adjunct of business, an instrument of production” (p. 32). Are we supporting our children and students in their struggle to cultivate meaningful lives when we reduce and assess their value according to marketplace standards? Are we truly educating when we funnel students into conformity and stamp on them prepackaged identities, diminishing the meaning of their being in the process? The untenability of affluence as the primary reason for one’s education, and ultimately for one’s life, reveals the need for a reconsideration of contemporary education’s philosophical commitments. In the world of institutional education, and in the greater world beyond educational institutions, there is increasingly the expectation that everything (e.g., learning, teaching, being itself) be “readily convertible to product” (p. 32). We need to challenge this expectation, and its accompanying notion that “wisdom,” because of its immunity to measurement, “has no place” in education (p. 32–33). It is precisely wisdom’s immunity to measurement that expresses its importance and the necessity of its inclusion in educational discourse.
Philosophy comes from the Ancient Greek word, philosophia, which means “love of wisdom.” Wisdom, in the sense of illuminating and affirm-
ing the irreducible value of the human being, is too often absent from discourses on contemporary education. It is this book’s intent to change this. Smith (2015) writes about the need for “wisdom” in education and argues that “as educational philosophers, we must live up to our calling as ‘lovers of wisdom’ and not just live as passive enablers of a decaying worldview,” of which nihilism is symptomatic (p. 47). Loving wisdom, Smith adds, points to “a way of seeing the world more comprehensively, more wholly, indeed as holy, in a way of caring that is not naïve but wiser and more attuned to a deeper truth of things” (p. 46). How would we as educators grasp this holiness, wisdom, and attunement to truth? I think fewer students inflicting violence on themselves would be a worthwhile place to start.
If there is any universal feature to human experience, it is the need for a meaningful existence. We need meaning before we need employment in the global marketplace. I am not suggesting that preparing students for participation in economic life has no place in contemporary education. Such a claim would be naïve and irresponsible. But preparation for future employment should not be privileged above the need for a meaningful existence. “Without meaning,” Postman (1991) writes, “learning has no purpose. Without a purpose, schools are houses of detention, not attention” (p. 7). Education must be more than an institution of detention. Education must be more than the means by which the corporatization of our culture stamps on students prepackaged identities. Education must be more than the dangerous belief that we are nothing unless we have things and that every “thing,” including our most fundamental and enduring values, like our own self-value, is for sale (Kuttner, 1999). Ultimately, education should help cultivate the meaning of students’ being, specifically their well-being, and not destroy it. Contemporary education must do more to address the ontological needs of every student. We must not forget the extent to which students will go—or any human being, for that matter—when forced to confront a meaningless life.
“In considering how to conduct the schooling of our young,” Postman (1995) writes, “adults have two problems to solve” (p. 3): the first problem is “technical,” one of engineering the most effective instructional methodology; the other problem is “metaphysical,” one of equipping students with a fundamental sense of meaning without which, “schooling” and more importantly their lives, “do not work” (p. 3). We must realize, Postman continues, that the “truth is that school cannot exist without some reason for its being [emphasis added],” and I argue, neither can we
(p. 3). Consequently, this book is driven by the desire to reopen a reflective space where questioning the philosophical commitments driving contemporary education is “a search for understanding, a meditative thinking […] an attempt to deal with unity rather than bits and parts additively” (Macdonald, 1995, p. 176). This book is not a “how-to” manual, nor does it employ the objectification and reduction of what Pinar (2009) calls “concept empiricism,” the belief that education is reducible to a social science hinging on empirical methodologies that aim to explain, describe, and predict learning outcomes. We will do a better job understanding how to educate once we have more fully reflected on why we educate in the first place.
Heidegger (2000) asserts that we are misguided when we ask: what will we do with philosophy? Instead, we should ask: what will philosophy do with us? In this way, it is ultimately up to the reader to determine if and how the philosophical perspectives in this book translate into his or her own “practice”.2 Regardless of how these philosophical perspectives manifest in the reader’s practice, such a practice will undoubtedly be more attuned to a conception of education that affirms the why of every student’s being. When we are empowered by a why, by a fundamental sense that we matter, we are less likely to find ourselves on the tracks and more likely to find ourselves in the midst of creating possibilities that add value to our lives and the lives of others.
In short, this book is concerned with how the philosophical commitments guiding contemporary education—specifically contemporary educational research and curriculum—perpetuate an impoverished conception of being and consequently perpetuate a nihilism that threatens the lives of students. The reduction of the human being to a purely economic entity is the inheritance of an older and more enduring tradition of philosophical materialism and its reductive tendencies. This tendency to reduce being to a “thing,” to quantifiable properties, occludes the originary ontological nature of education. Therefore, an exploration of the philosophical commitments guiding contemporary educational research and curriculum will illuminate the ontological consequences of these commitments on the meaning of our being, our well-being.
CHAPTER SUMMARIES
Chapter 1 explores the philosophical commitments driving contemporary educational research, specifically the privileging of epistemology over ontology and its ontological consequences. This chapter begins with a
brief sketch of Heidegger’s existential analytic from Being and Time and then draws connections between themes present in Heidegger’s existential analytic and contemporary educational research, which always has, and continues to be, dominated by a positivist epistemology that objectifies and reduces the world, including human beings, into quantifiably exhaustive “things.” I then trace this positivist epistemology back to Plato’s Cave and the development of a dualist metaphysics that separates the mind from the material world, which ultimately leads to nihilism and negates the meaning of being by fracturing our being-in-the-world.
Chapter 2 addresses the philosophical commitments driving the reduction of education to curriculum as techne and its ontological consequences. This chapter begins with a brief sketch of the Aristotelian notion of techne, as developed in Book VI of Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics, and then briefly demonstrates how seminal conceptions of curriculum over the last century instantiate a technical approach to education. The reduction of education to curriculum as techne predetermines what possibilities students will have rather than allowing students to explore their own possibilities. The ontological consequences of losing ownership of our possibilities include an inauthentic disclosure of being and the privileging of actuality over possibility. Curriculum as techne is only interested in producing predetermined copies of the status quo rather than individuated beings who determine for themselves what it means to be. Thus, curriculum as techne narrows the possibilities that most fully characterize the ontological nature of human being as well as education because its predetermined objectives are driven by dominant socioeconomic ideologies.
Chapter 3 moves toward the development of a poeticizing phenomenology of education and well-being that uncovers an originary ontological relationship between education and well-being. I begin by briefly presenting the tradition of phenomenological research in education and curriculum studies, which provides a precedent for my own phenomenological analysis of education and well-being. Given the similar etymological and philosophical meanings of education and well-being, van Manen’s (2014) pathic meditations on language, especially evocative poetic images, provide a direction for uncovering the ontological nature of education and well-being and for discerning a phenomenology of well-being from a phenomenology of health. Most significantly, a phenomenology of well-being brings us to the image of the well itself, which reveals that a well-like being is an authentic, individuated human being who has become such by owning his or her temporality. This ontologically individuating process char-
acterizes the fullest expression of education’s meaning: to uncover and bring forth, like water from a well, the human being’s most meaningful possibilities for being.
Chapter 4 draws from my own lived world experience and examines how the unfolding of curriculum hinges on a long-standing Aristotelian conception of time as a linear and infinite succession of atomistic “now” moments that occludes what it means to be because it occludes the human being’s unique sense of temporality. When we live in time as if it were a “thing,” we lose the more primordial sense that the nature of human being is to live as time. When we reduce time to a thing, to a timeline we live our lives on, we turn death into a thing, to a future event whose ontological significance can be brushed off in the present. But without an authentic consideration of what it means for us to know that we will not live forever, we are unable to prioritize and give meaningful shape to our possibilities for being. Therefore, when curriculum, and consequently education, is dominated by clock time, it occludes the most meaningful possibilities of human being, which is to become a “well” being.
NOTES
1. See Appendix A for a brief discussion on the relationship between economic “choice” and an underlying existential imprisonment that is symptomatic of a cultural nihilism.
2. See Appendix B for a brief discussion on the value of theoretical research in education.
CHAPTER 1
The Privileging of Epistemology over Ontology in Educational Research and Its
Ontological Consequences
Abstract This chapter explores the philosophical commitments driving contemporary educational research, specifically the privileging of epistemology over ontology and its ontological consequences. This chapter begins with a brief sketch of Heidegger’s existential analytic from Being and Time and then draws connections between themes present in Heidegger’s existential analytic and contemporary educational research, which always has, and continues to be, dominated by a positivist epistemology that objectifies and reduces the world, including human beings, into quantifiably exhaustive “things.” I then trace this positivist epistemology back to Plato’s Cave and the development of a dualist metaphysics that separates the mind from the material world, which ultimately leads to nihilism and negates the meaning of being by fracturing our being-in-the-world.
Exploring the epistemological perspectives underlying educational research elucidates knowledge conceptions, commitments, and ultimately understandings of being implicit within education. Magrini (2010) argues “the form of knowledge that education embraces and values grounds the entire curriculum and determines the way in which education is understood and unfolds” (p. 2). The manner in which education unfolds determines more
than knowledge currency in education—it 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 “[in] this view,” which is manifest in “standardized education, the human being is reduced to an epistemological subject, and the most primordial ontological aspects of its Being are lost or occluded” (p. 18). The occlusion of the primordial ontological aspects of “Being” 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, “[the] ontological priority of the question of Being” highlights how “all science and forms of inquiry presuppose an ‘understanding of Being’” (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 (1889–1976). Because my inquiry is concerned with nihilism’s assault on the ontological nature of education, it is heavily influenced by Heidegger’s magnum opus, Being and Time (1962), a philosophically definitive work on the ontological meaning of being.
Being and Time represents Heidegger’s 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 “fundamental ontology.” 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 Heidegger’s 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 Heidegger’s “dekonstruktion” of Western epistemology in Being and Time, a later Heidegger (post 1930) abandons the project of fundamental ontology altogether. This change in Heidegger’s thought is known as the “turn,” a pivotal moment in Heidegger’s 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 Heidegger’s more poetic account of the meaning of being as expressed in works like Poetry, Language, and Thought (1975). In this way, my use of Heidegger’s thought is in no way formal, comprehensive, or exhaustive. Rather, I draw inspiration and guidance from his “existential analytic” 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 Heidegger’s philosophical ideas, questions, and tensions to better understand the ontological consequences, specifically
nihilism and the loss of well-being, of contemporary educational research’s (present chapter) and curriculum’s 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 Heidegger’s 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 Heidegger’s background, expertise, historical circumstances, and audience are radically different than my own, his driving question remains timelessly essential for investigating the meaning of being—or, in the case of my present inquiry, the meaning of being and its occlusion in educational research.
Heidegger’s 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:
1. Though it has been argued that being is the broadest, most encompassing concept and, consequently, cannot be examined, Heidegger claims, echoing Aristotle, that being’s 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 “being” 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)
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.
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 theorypractice, 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 objecti-
fication and reduction of experience to “things,” 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 x’s meaning, one suggests that x’s 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 x’s physical properties can one begin to glean what x is in the epistemological sense. But a closer analysis reveals, Heidegger contends, that x “itself” is presupposed by x’s 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 “hammerness” 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, “hammer.” To understand the hammer, one must glean what it means to hammer, to understand what hammers are used for, and what the hammer’s use ultimately reveals about human’s 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 “thing” or “entity.” 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
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