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'An aphorism, properly stamped and molded, has not been "deciphered" when it has simply been read; rather one has then to begin its interpretation, for which is required an art of interpretation.' -- Nietzsche, 'On the Genealogy of Morals'

Heidegger: university reform#1 « Previous | |Next »
October 10, 2004

The general strategy of Heidegger's university reform can be located within Bildung, or the cultivation or development of our essential human capacities. This is a form of self-development to shape what is our own capacities through a mastering of the philosophical tradition.

For Geist (in Hegel's sense) to come into play this self-development needs to be connected to the national culture of Germany.

For Oswald Spengler in Germany of the 1920's this meant a historical cultural decline, a call for heroic leadership and intellectuals assuming cultural leadership. In contrast to the liberal (Weber's 'Science as Vocation') call for a rigorous value-free science and the university and academics to remain out of politics, Spengler's Nietzschean call was for a heroic response by academics to the historical crisis to take the form of revitalising Germany.

After some initial attempts to stay with both tendencies Heidegger basically goes along with Spengler's legacy of both Nietzsche's account of nihilism; and the Fichte/Humboldt vision of a distinctively German university as a place that integrates life and research as an open ended endeavour and is a communal institution with its own ethical sense of mission.

What united the university (its mission) was either Hegel's totality of knowledge or Humboldt's humanist idea of a shared commitment to the educational formation of character (bildung) and for forming fully cultured individuals. This is what Heidegger inherits, accepts and transforms. The totality of knolwedge is viewed in a critical manner: as a questioing of the fundamental asumptions of the total field of knowledge rather than the transmission of that totality. The humanist understanding of formation of character is transformed to enable individuals to be capable of undertaking that metaphysical questioning. Those who undertake this ontological questioning are doing philosophy.

What we have here is a rejection of philosopher as the underlabourer for science---philosophy tagging behind science straightening out its conceptual tangles in favour of the older conception of philosophy as the queen of the sciences. This is reworked in the Hegelian way of philosophy dealing with the ontologoical presuppositions of the positivist natural and social sciences that are largely accepted by working scientists, unless there is a crisis within that science.

Philosophy's domain, as it were, involves a shift from these presupposed regional scientific entities to a concern about how we understand being in general: eg., a general (fundamental) ontology underpinning the regional ontologies of the different sciences. An example is the materialist understanding of being as a mechanism, which most modern scientists accept as true.

This philosophizing as a critique of ontology is not an imperial philosophy putting science in its place; it is more a transforming of the sciences from within and breaks down the academic barriers and the disciplinary specializations.

The task of leading academic intellectuals (philosophers) is understood in terms of finding an appropriate historical way to carry on Nietzsche's struggle against the process of nihilism. This meant combating the growing problem of historical meaninglessness and renewing a national culture in terms of a questioning of the fundamental ontology that underpins science, the university and the nation.

A fundamental ontology would reunify the different disciplines and whilst those who grapsed this ontology should lead the renewal of the university. The renewal of the university means reforming the university to enable this kind of questioning. However, since little happened in the vitalization of a moribund and hidebound university in the 1920s, more active steps need to be taken to restore the university to a leading role in a national culture.

The assumption here is that the university takes a leading role in the national culture? That does seem to belong to another period. Today, after neo-liberalism, the conception of the liberal university is that it is an engine for economic growth in a world of nations. The university has been hitched up to wealth creation and the critical questioning of the national culture fades into the background.

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| Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at 9:19 PM | | Comments (0)
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