This post continues on from this one Like the previous post it works off this article by Ian Thomson, as we move towards considering the politics of university reform in Heidegger's 1933 Rectorial Address entitled, 'The Self-Assertion of the University.'
As we have seen the role of the Rector is to unify the university around the various fragmented disciplines shared commitment to ontological questioning. This questioning awakens researchers to their implicit ontological assumptions, finds ways to disclose a new understanding of the being of their presupposed entities they study and transcends the older ontology. So the focus is on the unifying mission of the university at the expense of the academic freedom of individual researchers.
Heidegger opens the 1933 Rectorial address thus:
"Assuming the rectorship means committing oneself to leading this university spiritually and intellectually. The teachers and students who constitute the rector's following will awaken and gain strength only through being truely and collectively rooted in in the essence of the German university. This essence will attain clarity, rank, and power, however, only when the leaders are, first and foremost and at all times, themselves lead by the inexorability of that spiritual mission which impresses onto the fate of the German Volk the stamp of their history."
It is generally understood in terms of self-governance says Heidegger. So what is self governance? This is what has been understood to have been taken away from Australian universities as they have been transformed into corporations by the liberal state. Heidegger says:
"Self-governance means: to set ourselves the task and to determine ourselves the way and means of realizing the task in order to be what we ourselves ought to be. But do we know who we ourselves are, this body of teachers and students at the highest school of the German Volk? Can we know that at all, without the most constant and most uncompromising and harshest self-examination?...Self governance can exist only on the basis of self-examination. Self-examination, however, can only take place on the strength of the self-assertion of the German university."
What then is the self-assertion of the German university? Heidegger says that it is the will to its essence. It educates and discplines the leaders and guardians of the fate German Volk. ' Fate' and 'destiny' indicate historicality of our being-in-the-world. Historicality refers to modernity and modern machine technology.
previous Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at October 19, 2004 07:36 PM
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