Ilan Gur-Ze’ev, The University of Haifa
 

Normalizing education has many faces. At its best it is power realizing its responsibility for the efficient subjectification of the subject and its pleasures. Within the process of subjectification it produces the "I". In the course of its production the "I" is constituted as a focus of selfhood in a manner that ensures the identification of the subject with the present order of things, reinforces its justifications, and makes possible the invisibility of the violence which construct and represent it as "reality". Normalizing education guarantees efficient orientation in the given order of things, perfects competence in its classification and representation, and allows communication and functional behavior, success, security, pleasure, and social progress.(1)
It distributes these competences, knowledge, and powers in a socially uneven manner, creating or reproducing social and cultural asymmetries and violences within the system. It not only permits human social life and its normalities, it even constitutes its telos. This success, however, has its price: it opens the gate to reflection, resistance, alternative orders, and unexpected new versions of normalization and standardization. Even in such situations, not solely in situations of stability, it must ensure the constitution of the normalized subject as a false not-yet-“I”; as an unproblematic product of the subjectification processes. As long as normalizing education is unchallenged the human comes upon her relation to the Other, to the world, and to herself while imprisoned in the framework of never-fully-deciphered representation apparatuses. Even if unconsciously, she faces the full toll of the efficiency of the representation apparatuses in the form of "the given" limitations and possibilities. As existential, political, and theoretical "realities", these horizons actually manifest her very existence as a constant downfall. This is so since "reality" and her own self are constructed by the manipulations, traditions, structures, and powers that she can reflect on or challenge only through the ways, tools, and manner imposed on her by the very system whose logic and "vocabulary" are to be questioned, resisted, and overcome. Normalizing education does not "influence" or "limit" the self: it actually produces the "I" and the self-evidence of the self.  In this respect normalizing education produces the human subject as some-thing and prevents her from becoming some-one, a true subject. Normalizing education achieves this by internalizing in the subject from "outside" the conceptual apparatus, the moral yardsticks and ideals, the consciousness, and the main actual possibilities for reflectivity and social behavior. It governs even the human possibilities for encountering the otherness of the Other and knowledge about knowledge. Even knowledge and evidence about the otherness of the "I" are fabricated by normalizing education. The annihilation of the subject’s otherness is a bona fide manifestation that the human subject is more than the product of the powers that fabricate and control her, that reduce her to an object of care, education, salvation, and oppression. She is much more than what she was directed to become.

     But what if not only knowledge and knowledge about knowledge, but even yardsticks to categorize, evaluate, and receive/reject knowledge, values, fears, and quests are nothing but manifestations of the productivity of normalizing education, which is effective enough to hide its violence from its victims, who are created by, and to make them its most devoted agents? What if, in the end, our sense of evidence, certainty, and desirability manifest the efficiency of the creative violence of normalizing education? In this light we should ask: Is there room for "genuine", "authentic" reflection, dialogue, and transcendence from omnipotent meaninglessness? Is there room at least for a tragic sense of life, real nihilism, or even real overcoming of the quest for life, for meaning, or for happiness in such a closed system? There are several answers to this challenge, but here I offer only one, which is a conditional “yes”. Yes – but only if this closure is not quite entire or unchallenged. That is, the world and the human are infinite in a way that also includes antagonistic elements of a kind that might fertilize an essential alternative to normalizing education, one that is not just another version of normalizing education. "But", one should ask, "is there any serious justification for talking about the possibility of counter-education as a different stance in life, which transcends the conflicting versions of normalizing education, many of which pride themselves on being emancipatory, different, ever more radical, or anti/counter-educations"?

     Below I suggest that the philosophy of Martin Heidegger is of much relevance for the elaboration of an attempt to open the gate to counter-education as an open possibility. An attempt of this kind already challenges the triumph of normalizing education. From its part, counter-education is far from an unproblematic alternative. It is a very dangerous path, and the reconstruction of Heidegger's philosophy of education suggested here will manifest this danger.

     The centrality of the concept of transcendence results from the severity of the struggle over meaning, from the despair invested in the search for a meaningful manner to relate to the human as a subject. Such a search is conditioned by the possibility of a very special moment. It is a moment of transcendence from thingness. This “moment” in itself is the beginning of elevation. It is immanent to life as an effort for overcoming the closure of contextualism, of the situateness of each perusal, quest, and act. Every such moment, indeed, every “moment”, incubates a promise for transcendence. It is embedded within this special kind of relation to human existence as transcendence, as elevation in, but also from, the context which constructs the human as an object of manipulation, as one among countless beings, materials, or merchandize. Is it justified to speak about the human if she or he does not ask the question of Being and cannot but become but a mere manifestation of the violence of the context – be this as an effect of the manipulations, traditions, or present horizons that are arbitrarily imposed by social-cultural-technological structures? If the context, the situation, or the human enframing merely reflect the omnipotent contingent arbitrariness of the context, then what it actually ensures is this: a perfect de-humanization of the human subject. If the situateness is totalistic, closed, and contingent, and has no invitation or room for the presence of the totally other, talk of de-humanization processes is unjustified. This is because from the very beginning, in her essence, the human subject has no room to exist as a subject or to engage in a  meaningful relation to her stolen subjectivity as a manifestation of her humanity.

     Nor is there any air for the human to breath within conditions of total "freedom"; where nothing within the "I", the context, or the transcendental can reveal/enforce alienation and sparse in terms of an aim, meaning, yardstick, or impetus - as in the Utopia of the cyberoptimists. The category of transcendence as an open possibility manifests or preconditions the humanity of the subject. It manifests itself as a social and individual process of overcoming the given horizons, the present conditions, or the fabricated/revealed truths, internalized strivings, fears, and hopes, as well as the power of the hegemonic representation apparatuses. The minimalist claim is that the subject can be human as a subject of discourse, as a manifestation of a position he or she holds within a system, whereby she can offer resistance and repositioning – although not transcendence. Yet even this claim is still grounded on a concept of transcendence.(2)  But, one can ask, what if this quest or this reasoning too is nothing but one of the manifestations of the hegemonic representation apparatuses? What, then, would be the first step in challenging normalizing education, which often manifests itself in the form of extreme skepticism, relativism, escapism, and anti-philosophical orgies? For centuries Western and Eastern philosophies committed themselves to respond to this challenge, and Heidegger's contribution here is of special importance. It is particularly so in face of post-modern conditions in which traditional dichotomies such as subject-object, real-imaginative, center-margin, same-different, and even human-machine or culture-nature, have been transformed.

     Heidegger too is occupied with the question that concerns us here in various articulations, relating to the possibility of overcoming meaninglessness or the possibility of transcending from unauthentic to authentic life.

     At first glance Heidegger "solves" the traditional problem of the gap between the known/unknown object and the knowing/failed-attempts/vain attempts of the knowing subject. This is apparent in his refusal to develop the subject-object problematic within the framework of traditional Western realism, relativism, skepticism, and solipsism. Accordingly, in his philosophy the possibilities and limitations of transcendence from ignorance to knowledge or from evil to worthy life, or the question of redemption come to a turning point in Western thought.

     According to Heidegger the human being as Dasein is not like a stone, one of the beings who is positioned as an object among other objects. The presence in the world of Dasein differs from that of a stone or a table in the sense that these are parts of Dasein's world who is the center of this world within which the Dasein works, concerns, uncovers, forgets, or transcends himself from or in face of nothingness. The world of appearances, or reality, is not to be understood as "objective”, in the sense that its existence is unconditioned by the will or recognition of the human being. For Heidegger, the being-there of the Dasein is not to be understood as if it merely exists within a physical space or within another essential content. The human "being-there" is exclusively human. While rejecting the traditional attempts to overcome skepticism or produce proofs to the existence of reality,(3)  Heidegger’s being-in-the-world of the Dasein projects human creativity on all other beings. It is not “within” but part of being-in-the-world in which the human becomes a meaningful reality and reveals the world within a mode of existence as a human existential. "If Dasein is understood correctly, it defies such proofs, because, in its Being, it already is what subsequent proofs deem necessary to demonstrate for it" says Heidegger.(4)

     Transcendence is the fundamental structure of the subjectivity of the subject. This is why in the traditional sense for Heidegger there is no transcendence: for him it is immanent in human existence. If the subject were not constantly on the move, did not transcend beyond the given, she would not be a subject. “To be a subject means to transcend. This means that Dasein does not exist as something that transcends from itself from time to time - the fundamental meaning of his existence is the transcendence beyond the given”.(5)  While being-in-the-world as a creator of the world and as concern (Besorgen) Dasein manifests itself simultaneously in authentic and in unauthentic life. Freedom manifests itself in both. This is how existence manifests itself not as a fact, reality, but as a possibility.

     A dialectical tension exists between the concept of the constant partiality of the Dasein, as being-there which is committed to self-overcoming, and Heidegger’s concept of the human subject who conceives herself as a constant possibility to become wholeness. This tension manifests the uniqueness of the human as a special being among beings, who as in the traditional concept of God creates/subordinates all beings, all non-human beings as a manifestation of her freedom.

     Heidegger’s concept of freedom avoids moral or other hierarchical models of concern. In his philosophy, authentic life possibilities do not stand in hierarchical relation with unauthentic life. Both are but manifestations of the exile of Being. In this respect, at first glance “genuine” transcendence seems is impossible in Heidegger’s philosophy, given the human condition. Later on we will see two versions of transcendence in his philosophy. These are two levels of problematizing the possibility of transcendence in the sense of confronting the possibility of overcoming meaninglessness. The two versions of transcendence are of special importance for the evaluation of Heidegger’s contribution to philosophy of education, offering a theoretical framework for the elaboration of the possibility of counter-education.

     The existential possibilities of normalizing education as well those of counter-education are always manifested in concrete relations and in specific historical arenas, even if they are never reducible to power relations and to efficiency of political struggles. This stance makes a special contribution to the attempt to avoid self-contained, easy going, “emancipatory” educational projects. Often these projects introduce pedagogies for the oppressed, for overcoming contextualism in the form of hegemonic consciousness and unjust structural power relations. They avoid being swallowed by instrumentalist-oriented educational projects. These are normally functionalistic in their nature and are committed to improving the adaptation of the human being to the governing facts, improving humans’ productivity, ”success”, and pleasures while serving as an agent of the governing violences. Both “conservative” and “emancipatory” trends represent normalizing education, which counter-education should resist. A possible resistance should refer to Heidegger’s concept of transcendence.

As we have seen for Heidegger transcendence is immanent to the Dasein, yet at the same time it has an ontological framework which positions as a normal human situation unauthentic concern and oblivion of the call of Being. Before examining Heidegger’s conception of the ontological conditions for transcendence, which makes transcendence to authentic life or a worthy struggle such a rare situation on the one hand and ultimately imaginary and futile on the other, we should revisit his dividing lines between the categories of authenticity and unauthenticity.

     For Heidegger, the human subject can exist only by self overcoming, which as an authentic existence reveals itself in the moment of conceiving herself - and her surroundings -  as some-thing, and will open herself to the call, to her or his mission of revealing the openness of Being in beings - and in herself. She manifests herself as a creator in realizing the call of Being and manifests her uniqueness in disclosing the thingness of the world. Dasein is “the location of the truth of Being”.(6)  For Heidegger “the essence of man consists in his being more than merely human, if this is represented as being a rational creature”.(7)  This is revealed when he responds to the call of Being: “Man is the shepherd of Being. Man loses nothing in this ‘less’; rather, he gains in that he attains the truth of Being. He gains the essential poverty of the shepherd, whose dignity consists in being called by Being itself into the preservation of Being’s truth”.(8)  Man in his authentic existence, as the shepherd of Being, is in an ecstatic “homelessness”.(9) This is the Heideggerian understanding of realizing human responsibility as “ecstatic dwelling in the nearness of Being”(10)  which enables the Dasein to face meaninglessness, to confront the question of Being, and to exit authentically in face of the Daseinfrage (question of Being).

     The possibility of authentic life is inseparable from the question of truth. But here the question of truth is not revealed as an epistemological question within a correspondence theory but as an erotic posing of the question of the truth of Being. As the shepherd of Being the human subject is not a mere thing, one of the beings which do not concern for the question of Being and the truth of his mission. He has a responsibility, an aim to fulfil – to face the absence of the call by which he is to be awakened. The response to the absent call fertilizes a creative self-positioning which is anti-instrumental or anti-goal oriented.

     The Heideggerian concept of truth as a-letheia as Ent-bergung (dis-covery, un-covering, un-veiling) confronts Verbergung (concealment), closure and thingness. Transcendence in the authentic ex-istence realizes concern as un-covering, as opposed to the possibility of oblivion of human responsibility and being swallowed in an opposite, unauthentic concern in the given appearances as an alternative mode of existence.

Angst (anxiety) normally drives the human subject away from himself. It prevents him from facing his situateness as being-thrown (geworfen) into meaninglessness (as manifested in accepted truths, values, and ways of life), of the Man, of a way of being-in-the-world which is contrasted to itself, and as such realizes itself in an unauthentic existence (Uneigentliches Dasein).(11)  Authenticity is here revealed as a human existential in which the presence of the absence of wholeness manifests itself as a human question. It is exactly the absence of the presence of wholeness which enables the authentic human subject to face the partiality and creative-meaninglessness which surrounds him - as a precondition to turning himself to the wholeness, to the infinity of nothingness beyond the given reality. This is manifested in being-towards-death.(12)  Anxiety is not only the way for human to experience her or his authentic experience of death as being-towards-not-being. This is where, for Heidegger, freedom manifests itself: when deciding for authenticity and against unauthenticity not as a realization of a positive Utopia but as a manifestation of realizing responsibility for overcoming all false promises of optimistic-purpose-oriented projects. Freedom reveals itself in letting-things-be.(13)

     To be authentic the human subject must overcome the governing world of facts, the realm of self-evidence or “proved” truths and resist the threats and temptations of security, pleasure, and success offered by the Other, by society. Then, and only then, in face of the anxiety,(14)  of confronting the infinity of nothingness and of homelessness, will the overcoming of the given be possible and truth as uncovering realize itself in human transcendence.
 

Da-sein means: being held out into the nothing. Holding itself out into he nothing,

Dasein is in each case already beyond beings as a whole. This being beyond

beings we call “transcendence”. If in the ground of its essence Dasein were not transcending, which now means, if it were not in advance holding itself out into

the nothing, then it could never be related to beings nor even to itself.(15)

 

      Threatened and utterly disquieted as man is by the infinity of nothingness the authentic subject approaches the things in the world in a unique, never-determined or instrumentalized manner. In this sense she transcends from unauthentic existence, faces things in their veiled situateness and sees in light of Being the original, not-yet-revealed meaning of the things, as they actually are. In this anti-utopian concept of transcendent freedom, in authentic existence, must at the same time be a binding-to what-is. Precisely the authentic human in an act of free creation manifests her infinite openness, letting-a-being-be what it actually is.
 

          But when the gods are named originally and the essence of things
          receives a name, so that things for the first time shine out, human
          existence is brought into a firm relation and is given a basis.(16)

 This authentic self-positioning, while transforming the human condition and realizing transcendence from unauthentic into authentic existence, ultimately manifests human freedom as openness. This openness makes possible infinite possibilities and realizations of the letting-be of things in the sense of unveiling the Being within beings. Only as such does it reclaim the truth of Being, which is what poets and philosophers - when true to their mission - represent:
 

         To ‘dwell poetically’ means: to stand in the presence of the gods
         and to be involved in the proximity of the essence of the things.
         Existence is ‘poetical’ in its fundamental aspect - which means
         at the same time: in so far as it is established (founded), it is not
         a recommence but a gift.(17)

 It is not only that morally there is no difference between authentic and unauthentic life. An authentic decision to realize human freedom which uncovers what normality is veiled and abandoned is ultimately revealed as one of the manifestations of the veiling/unveiling games of Being which in itself manifests the infinity of nothingness, its aimlessness and meaninglessness. This is so even when the human is transcended into authentic life and “dwells poetically” as an ecstatic creator. In this sense in Heidegger's philosophy there is no redemption.

     Freedom manifests itself here as a transcending power: as a binding call to the human mission as the shepherd of Being and as a Dionysian response to the call of Being - which ultimately is revealed as the call of his own lonely, finite, conscious. As such it cannot but reveal the illusions and the abyss of untruth - as part of the a priori structure of the essence of truth. But mostly the human subject is far from authenticity and from the kind of openness that makes possible transcendence, self-creation, and unveiling the truth of Being. She is deprived of sensibility and power for responding to her mission and the to call of her own conscious.(18)
 
     The normalized subject is swallowed by the meaninglessness of the "Them"; she forgets herself as a finite openness towards infinity, exiled from the possibility of living in the nearness of Being. This is the
starting point of transcendence from unauthenticity towards authenticity, when the human subject faces nothingness as the only gate to the endless struggle for worthy life, for true, frightening, religious existence. The traditional category of God is here replaced by nothingness and the traditional concept of love of God as the ultimate manifestation of religiosity is here replaced by true transcendence into authentic life. It is of vital importance, however, to acknowledge that ontologically, for Heidegger not transcendence alone does not offer a positive Utopia into truth as something positively attainable and as a gate for rest or nirvana. The various versions of unauthentic life and their concerns offer transcendence too; but only as an escape from the anxiety of facing nothingness and the infinity of empty freedom. An escape from endless, never-guaranteed, struggle for fulfilling the responsibility which does not offer a new Garden of Heaven in the form of dogma or a formed “way of life”.

     The historical fascinating success of normalizing education is offered a grounded explanation by Heidegger’s philosophy: the possibility of unauthentic concern and unauthentic transcendence opens the gate for the human subject to flee from herself, from her responsibility, and from freedom as a danger. This is in the form of retreats into the “Them”, into the Other not before he was deprived of his otherness. The “Them” replaces the Being-there as part of the possibilities of being-there. In contrast to authentic dialogue with the Other normalizing education offers escape from loneliness and from the anxiety of ecstatic presence of the exile of the truth of Being. The “poetic dwelling” is represented by poets such as Hoelderlin, whose poetry targets the essence of language, the exile of the gods, and the possibility of being “between” “the gods” and “the people”(19)  as manifestation of “this conversation, which we are”.(20)  The surrendering of the subject to the manifestations of normalizing education is not to be reduced to mere power relations and manipulations as suggested by critical pedagogy or the post-colonial, multicultural, and feminist pedagogies of the day. In their rush for optimistic critique, “solutions", and languages of “possibilities” these alternatives ignore what Heiddeger's thought teaches us: that the abandonment of the subject contains much more than a mere self-neglecting enhanced by “exterior” manipulations. It is one of the ways by which Being reveals itself. Only as such does it represent an existential tiredness. And as such it constitutes the human’s eternal companion. Like other modes of being-towards-death, this one too makes possible concern for the given realities as an escape. An escape from the human’s mission to face the exile of the gods and the omnipotence of meaninglessness (from which accepted truths, meanings, values, yardsticks, perspectives, and identities spring).

     This escape is responsible for creating objective validity, justifications for the “realities” and the calculative logic of control, production and representation in science, technology, and society. The rationality and efficient, functionalist, objective, justifications of the “They”, or of normalizing education, to which the subject flees in his Fall (Verfall), is not "false". In the present order of things it "really" offers more efficient understanding of humans' life and constitutes an unproblematic promise of redemption, security, truth, justice, pleasure, or success, compared with the "unrealistic" reflective, transcendental impulse as it is galvanized in counter-education. The "Fall" expresses not an historical “mistake” or an outcome of unfortunate conditions to be optimistically replaced or corrected by efficient political struggle and emancipatory education. "Falling” here expresses the essential ontological structure of Dasein itself: "Dasein evades its very self".(21)  This “Fall” is manifested in modern science and technology and indeed in the very possibility of genuine thinking, learning and teaching.

     According to Heidegger, modern science and technology are instrumental-oriented. We may even use the word “oppressive”, even if he does not, since he tries to avoid dichotomies such as ppressive-emancipatory. Modern science and technology challenge truly human possibilities and demolish the uniqueness of the things in the world which might have ??call?? the human for their unconcealment, by such a life realizing humans’ freedom in truth. In its essence technology is a central element of openness towards life and a flourishing of non-standardized life possibilities: “Technology is a mode of revealing. Technology comes to presence in the realm where revealing and unconcealment take place, where aletheia, truth, happens”.(22)  Technology is no mere means. Quite the opposite. In its origin, in its essence, technology is techne, which for the Greeks did not refer only to the activities and skills of the craftsman but also to the arts of the mind and the fine arts. “Techne belongs to bringing-forth, to poiesis; it is something poetic”.(23)

     Modern technology and modern science  also display - but in an essentially different way, namely in an instrumental, calculating, and subordinate manner – a diminishing of the otherness, the uniqueness of the object. “Everywhere everything is ordered to stand by, to be immediately on hand, indeed to stand there just so that it may be on call for a further ordering... We call it the standing-reserve (Bestand)”.(24)  Within this process modern science and technology transform man himself into a standing-reserve. Enframing and unconcealment as roads to realizing human freedom are blocked in a manner that does not enable the human to acknowledge and challenge it. Modern education is part of this process of dismantling the possibilities for self-constitution, of life as unconcealment. Instead life becomes a concern and a response to the call of instrumental, calculated thinking and its fabrications. This is where education can celebrate its victory over the possibilities for counter-education. “When thinking comes to an end by slipping out of its element it replaces this loss by procuring a validity for itself as techne, as an instrument of education and therefore as a classroom matter and later a cultural concern”.(25)

      As we can see, Heidegger makes no effort to contribute to normalizing education or to scientific thinking and its successful reduction to the progress of technology, elevation of  “the standard of living”, propagating “joy”, or enhancing “success”. Nor can he contribute, as some scholars would suggest, to the improvement of schooling and the elevation of teacher-pupil relations. He is interested in something very different: in life. This is where his conception of transcendence is anchored.

     Within the framework of his attraction to thinking as a mode of transcendence but never as means, medium, or instrument, he offers an important alternative to normalized human relations and to the kind of schooling and teacher-pupil relations which are only too common and so well known to us. This is exemplified specially  clearly in his “What calls for thinking?"

     The situateness of the human determines his possibilities for reflection (26)  and the kind of resistance she will put up to the closure of “her” horizons. In modern Ge-stell, in the human’s being framed in modernity as advanced by modern science and technology, human situateness ensures the oblivion of the mission of the human, of life as something more than mere life. But for Heidegger, framing has deeper roots, and is not to be reduced to a specific historical situation. It springs from the very fact of situateness of human life, of always living enframed. In this sense there is not much truth in the rhetoric of emancipation and the promises of all positive utopias. Thinking itself is actually exiled while alternatives such as science celebrate their triumph. “Science does not think”(27). But if there is no air left for thinking for the modern human subject, how might true learning and teaching be experienced? In what sense is authentic transcendence possible?

     According to Heidegger, who does not make the differentiation between a teacher and an educator, “to learn means to make everything we do answer to whatever addresses itself to us as essential”.(28)  We can, however, struggle for possibilities for learning, even in the face of the exile of thinking. In a certain respect it is exactly the absence of thinking that makes learning, thinking, and transcendence possible. But this is possible insofar as we start by radically unlearning what thinking has been traditionally. Heidegger’s anti-functionalist, anti-positivist, and anti-instrumentalist attitudes are manifested here too. Genuine teaching is not a successful transmission of knowledge. “What teaching calls for is this: to let learn”.(29)  This is also the reason why teaching is more difficult than learning. The teacher is ahead of his apprentices in this alone, that he has still far more to learn than they - he has to learn to let them learn.  This is also why he has to be far less sure of his material than those who learn are of theirs. This conception of teaching is very close of Heidegger’s concept of unconcealing, which opens free relations between the human and beings in their openness, or of relating to the open-being. Since this kind of teacher is not instrumental and does not transmit information “his conduct, therefore, often produces the impression that we really learn nothing from him”.(30)

     So even in face of the success of modern science and technology, even in face of the present situateness, even in face of the absence of thinking  - transcendence into learning to think is still an open human possibility. The presence of the absence of thinking does not halt genuine learning - and unlearning: it is its starting point.

 
             Once we are so related and drawn to what withdraws, we are drawing
             into what withdraws, into the enigmatic and therefore mutable nearness
             of its appeal. Whenever man is properly drawing that way, he is thinking -
             even though he may still be far away from  what withdraws, even though
             the withdrawal may remain as veiled  as ever.(31)

But in what sense is that which calls us to think preferable to concealment, framing, and unauthentic life? For Heidegger there is no way to justify the one rather than the other. In this sense, on Heideggerian grounds there is no way to favor this kind of learning over the conventional kind. The two ways represent opposing versions of concern.

     The reception of Heidegger’s ideas in the field of philosophy of education and within different pedagogies varies. Some scholars claim that it has no relevance whatsoever, or at least that he never really had a great deal to say about education.(32)  Some see Heidegger's educational implications as nothing but "nonsense".(33)  Others are basically critical of his “abstractness” and still others propose various means to “implement”, instrumenatalize, or domesticate Heidegger’s philosophy and make it “relevant” to actual teaching in schools.(34)  For all their differences, these responses to Heidegger's thought consider it in respect of schooling and normalizing education. Even at their best, when following Heidegger they refer to teaching as an artistic-non-instrumental process.(35)

     Normalizing education, as was shown, guarantees not only security, prosperity, cooperation and reproduction: it offers even concern and transcendence. This kind of concern, however, represents an abandonment of another kind of concern, an authentic one, which does not satisfy itself by successful imposition on the things in the world; it does not fulfil itself as technological success or social cooperation and solidarity.

     This other kind of concern makes another kind of transcendence possible. Here truth as letting-be the otherness of beings realizes human freedom. It is transcendence not as "progress" or self-oblivion but as an outcome of the worthy suffering of facing meaninglessness and living-towards-death. As such, transcendence faces the infinity of nothingness and makes the absent freedom and truth present. It becomes what Heidegger never speaks of: worthy suffering. It sheds light on the futility of the mere thingness in the beings which have been stripped of their uniqueness by human instrumentalism. Worthy suffering makes possible a kind of transcendence, which allows reflection on the production of meanings, identities, and quests. It even reflects on the representation apparatuses and their manipulations.(36)  But can it also offer transcendence from pain/pleasure into the worthy suffering/happiness of facing the truth of Being/nothingness as a transcendence into a worthier way of life? Into the terrain of truths which are not fabricated by successful violent manipulations? Is there a way of transcending metaphysical violence itself in the form of the closure/arbitrariness of enframing (Ge-stell), of human beings as standing-reserve (Bestand), of the limits of language and the effects of the essence of Being as ontological exile?

     The kind of counter-education to which Heidegger's concepts of "unlearning", unconcealment", and "transcendence" are not foreign is still voiceles. It cannot become institutionalized or avoid becoming a dogmatic positive Utopia. It should avoid the quest for "authentic authority" and the acceptance of mundane violence as a tool for overcoming metaphysical violence as it is invested in normalizing education. When counter-education is not true to itself, in the name of authenticity and transcendence it will speak, with Heidegger, the vulgar language of National Socialism and other positive Utopias, and create a rhetoric of this kind:
 

                The knowledge of true scholarship does not differ in its tradition
                from the knowledge of farmers, lumberjacks, miners and craftsman.
                For knowledge means being at home in the world in which we live
                as individuals and as part of a community. Knowledge means growth
                of resolve and action in the performance of a task that has been given
                us…Knowledge means being in the place where we are put. (37)
 

     But counter-education can find in Heidegger's philosophy a different kind of the concept of transcendence. In it transcendence is conditioned by overcoming authority, any authority, especially that of the one who "knows" (39) or sets the standards, quests or telos. Here it is impossible to differentiate between self-overcoming as "let-learn" and  unconcealment as let-things-be what they already are in their essence. In both, thinking manifests itself, and the presence of the exile of Being allows authentic transcendence or a kind of religiosity in which redemption as a relevant pole of existence is saved. Transcendence into thinking, which is normally absent, is transformed into a special existential "moment". Facing the presence of its absence is already thinking:
 

            And what withdraws in such a manner keeps and develops its
            own incomparable nearness. Once we are so related and drawn
            to what withdraws, we are drawing into what withdraws, into the
            enigmatic and therefore mutable nearness of its appeal. Whenever
            man is properly drawing that way, he is thinking – even though he
            may still be far away from what withdraws, even though the withdrawal
            may remain as veiled as ever. (40)
 

           And what it gives us to think about, the gift it gives to us, is nothing
           less than itself – itself, which calls on us to enter into thinking. The
           question “What calls for thinking?” asks for what wants to be thought
           about in the preeminent sense: it does not just give us something to
           think about, nor only itself, but it first gives thought and thinking to us,
           it entrusts thought to us as our essential destiny, and thus first joins
           and appropriates us to thought. (41)

Notes

(1)  Ilan Gur-Ze’ev, “Introduction”, in Ilan Gur-Ze’ev (ed.), Conflicting Philosophies of Education, Dordrecht 2000, p. 1.

(2) Michel Foucault, Power/Knowledge: Selected Interviews and Other Writings 1972-1977, translated by
Colin Gordon, Leo Marshal, John Mepham, Kate Soper, New York 1980, p. 117.

(3) Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, translated by John Stambaugh, New York 1996, p. 248.

(4) Ibid., p. 249.

(5) Martin Heidegger, Gesamtausgabe, 26: Metaphisische Anfangsgruende der Logik im Ausgang von Leibniz,
Frankfurt a.Main: Klostermann, 1978, p. 33.

(6) Martin Heidegger, “The way back into the ground of metaphysics”, in Existentialism from Dostoevsky to Sartre,
ed. Walter Kaufman, Clevelend and New York: Meridian Books, 1969, p. 213.

(7) Martin Heidegger, “Letter on humanism”, in Basic Writings, London 1996, p. 245.

(8) Ibid.

(9) Ibid., p. 242.

(10)  Ibid., p. 246..

(11) Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 233.

(12) Ibid. p. 234.

(13) Martin Heidegger, “On the essence of truth”, Basic Writings, p. 125.

(14) Martin Heidegger, “What is metaphysics?”, Basic  Writings, p. 106.

(15) Ibid., p. 103.

(16) Martin Heidegger, “Hoelderlin and the essence of poetry”, in Being and Existence, London  n.d., p. 305.

(17) Ibid., p. 306.

(18) Martin Heidegger,  Being and Time, p. 269.

(19) Martin Heidegger, "Hoelderlin and the essence of poetry”, in Existence and Being, p. 312.

(20) Martin Heidegger, Ibid., p. 303.

(21) Martin Heidegger, Being and Time, p. 179.

(22) Martin Heidegger, “The question concerning technology”, in: Basic Writings, p. 319.

(23) Ibid., p. 318.

(24) Ibid., p. 322.

(25) Martin Heidegger, “Letter on humanism”, p. 221.

(26) Ilan Gur-Ze'ev, Jan Masschelein, Nigel Blake, "Reflectivity, reflection, and counter-education”,
Studies in Philosophy and Education, 20: 2 (2001).

(27)  Martin Heidegger, “What calls for thinking?” in Basic Writings, , p. 373.

(28)  Ibid.

(29)  Ibid., p. 380.

(30)  Ibid.

(31) Ibid. p. 381-382.

(32)  George H. Douglas, "Heidegger on the education of poets and philosophers", Educational
Theory, 22 (Fall 1972), p. 449.
Frank Margolis, "Heidegger and curriculum", Philosophy of Education, 42 (1986), p. 101.
 
(33) William Bruening, "Heidegger on teaching", Philosophy of Education, 37 (1981), p. 238.

(34)  Angelo A. Giugliano, "Heidegger, authenticity and education: the move from existentialism to
phenomenology", Philosophy of   Education, 44 (19888), pp. 150-156.
Helen Khoobyar, "Educational import of Heidegger's notion of truth as 'lettingg-be'", Philosophy of
Education, 30 (1974), pp. 47-58.
Michael Dwyer, "The educational implications of Heidegger's authenticity", Philosophy of Education,
44 (1988), pp. 146.
Ignacio L. Goetz, "Heidegger and the art of teaching", Educational Theory, 33:1, (1983), p. 8.
Donald Vandenberg, Being and Education: An Essay in Existential Phenomenology, New Jersey 1971.

(35)  Ignacio L. Goetz, "Heidegger and the art of teaching", Educational Theory, 33:1 (Winter 1983), p. 7.

(36)  Ilan Gur-Ze’ev, Jan Masschelein, Nigel Blake, “Reflectivity, reflection, and counter-education”,
Studies in Philosophy and Education, 20:2 (2001).

(37)  Martin Heidegger, "Follow the Fuerher", in German Existentialism, translated by Dagobert D. Runes,
New York 1965, p. 40.

(38)  Ibid, p. 42.

(39)  Heidegger, "What calls for thinking?" p. 380.

(40)  Ibid, p. 382.

(41)  Ibid, p. 391.