In March of last year, newspaper readers in the UK were met with headlines along the lines of 'Primary pupils to learn Twitter instead of history' and 'Exit Winston Churchill, enter Twitter'. These articles were written in response to the publication of Sir Jim Rose's proposals for a new primary curriculum, which have since been overturned by the new coalition Government. Predictably enough, conservative papers such as the Daily Mail and Daily Telegraph were deeply disapproving towards such ideas. Now, let us put aside for the moment the question of whether these articles have distorted Rose's report. Let us also put to one side the absurdity exhibited in the idea of teaching the next generation of pupils about a strain of technology over which they will no doubt have a level of mastery over and above that of many of their teachers!
Let us instead cut to the chase. These newspaper headlines help us to focus our attention on a very important matter, that of the relationship between education and technology. Let us note that 'technological understanding' is one of the six 'core areas' identified in Rose's review. We see technology pervading every subject area, not least in geography where Geographical Information Systems (GIS) are playing an ever more central part. Is this, on the whole, a desirable circumstance? Is it anything new? Has education ever in fact been detached from technology? Or has a technological understanding of being always permeated education? In coming blog posts I will be considering these questions through Heidegger's critique of technology. First though, I need to take a closer look at what Heidegger actually had to say about technology, again with the help of Michael Zimmerman.
This is made all the more difficult because Heidegger's attitude to technology changed significantly during the course of his life. But we can say that, in general, he saw the modern technological era as but the latest and most degraded phase in humankind's forgetting of being, an era in which entities are viewed as mere resources to be exploited in the name of human power and security. To understand this, we need to get our head around what Heidegger understood by 'being', and in particular by 'Dasein'. For Heidegger, being is not an entity, but rather the event of the 'presencing' or 'unconcealment' of an entity. Dasein names the very distinct kind of being pertaining to humans. Only Dasein exists in the world in such a way that its own being and the being of others is an issue for itself.
Heidegger put special emphasis on the role of Dasein in enabling the being of entities to come to presence and manifest itself, by providing the 'clearing' in which entities can show up as entities. In case this all sounds a little too anthropocentric however, Zimmerman reminds us that Dasein did not own or produce this clearing, but rather is appropriated as this clearing. Dasein is in this fashion summoned by being and finds itself always already thrown into the world of entities and the ontological play of concealing and unconcealing. Authentic Dasein denotes a kind of embodied being-in-the-world whose essence is 'care', where 'to care' refers not only to ontic intervention but principally to the simple 'letting be' of entities; of not submitting them all the time to the calculating reason of human subjectivity. Authentic Dasein can be seen in this way as the 'shepherd of being'.
According to Heidegger, the degeneration of our understanding of being began in ancient Greek thought. Though Plato was to an extent still alert to the 'presencing' aspect of being, it was nevertheless he who first interpreted being as constant presence or eidos, the eternally unchanging form, thereby founding Western metaphysics. At a later date, Christianity would further embed this understanding of being as permanent presence, now produced by and grounded in a creator God. With the coming of Descartes and the age of reason, humanity would finally arrogate this creation and grounding to itself, "by asserting that for something 'to be' means for it to be representable as a clear and distinct idea of the human subject." In this critical phase entities, or 'things in themselves', were once and for all swallowed up by the human subject who was now the source of all knowledge and value.
This deteriorating historical, metaphysical understanding of being is what ultimately paved the way for the modern, technological, nihilistic era. The technological understanding of being is first and foremost a metaphysical one; hence Heidegger's famous claim that "the essence of technology is nothing technological". In the modern age, entities are 'challenged forth' to be interchangeable raw material to service human needs. Nature is thereby "deprived of any status apart from that of an object for scientific analysis or raw material for modern technology." This highly calculating and rationalistic era may not mark the end of history however; Heidegger appeared to believe that a post-metaphysical era of being was imminent. This would not be a straightforward return to an archaic way of life, but rather a new receptiveness to being as is exemplified in the work of art.
There is much that could be expanded upon in this short account, but this is far as I am going to delve into Heidegger's philosophy of technology at the current time. Needless to say, Heidegger's perspective on technology was, and still is, seen as rather idiosyncratic and has been subjected to much criticism over the years. However, though Heidegger's precise delineation of the 'history of being' might be disputable there is certainly something in his overall analysis that chimes with my own thinking. In the coming months and years I look forward to contemplating carefully the relationship between education and the objectifying, technological understanding of being that may still even now constitute our fundamental way of being-in-the-world. Does technology necessarily restrict the authentic disclosure of being, or can technology actually aid in renewing and revitalising our connection with being, or with nature? Can education, properly thought, bring us 'back to being' and facilitate a less domineering, more respectful attitude towards nature that would meet the aims of environmentalists whilst remaining progressive and optimistic about the capacities and future of humankind?
Zimmerman's 2002 essay 'Heidegger's Phenomenology and Contemporary Environmentalism' makes for excellent further reading and can be found at his departmental web page.
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