Date: Tue, 11 Feb 1997 09:33:50 -0600
From: as4481r-AT-ACAD.DRAKE.EDU (allen scult)
Subject: Re: Why Heidegger Teaches


I posed the question :

>>        Does anyone have any other related ( or unrelated) understandings
>>of the intensely didactic tone of Heidegger's pedagogical readings of
>>Aristotle etc, in terms of their possible philsophical signficance?


Chris Rickey answered:
>
>First, to awaken the question of being it is necessary to make the
>question, for lack of a better word, interesting or compelling, because we
>do not pose questions, they are thrust upon us.  If it is Heidegger's goal
>to awaken the question of being in the sense of opening the space within
>which others will first hear the mystery of being, then it is necessary not
>just to pose the question of being for his students, but to make them think
>about it as it confronts them.  Heidegger can at best reveal the
>questionableness of being as it lies covered by centuries of metaphysical
>accretion.

Well said. He does surely seem to be doing that ("for his discourse" at the
same time that he does it for his students( though he later [ in "What
calls for Thinking?"] emphasizes that teaching is about the relationship
between  the teacher and the taught; the students seem to be there as
observers). But I also see the "corrective move" he almost invariably makes
to the students's usual way of seeing/reading as a pedagogical parallel of
Destruktion, the reversal/transformation necessary to authenticity. He
emphasizes in a number of places that the destruktion occurs in the ontic
particularity of an individual dasein.  It is only based on that factical
particularity that the question of being can be pursued in an authentic
way.

The pretext of teaching Aristotle,for example, enables Heidegger to
mediate, in discourse, the destructive moment of tranformation and thereby
to open up a more authentic seeing of the thing/text itself in a particular
time/place/situation.  I mean to suggest that Heidgger's  didactic teaching
in the twenties focuses his discourse on the moment of
destruktion-transformation of the Sehepunkt of particular Dasein in a way
that "formally indicates" the basic movement of factical life through
falling on the way to authenticity"

There is in all of this, more than a hint of Heidegger,  "the Christian
Theologian," doing a somewhat secularized version of Augustinian
God's-work,but it's all part of the same Grundbewegung, isn't it?  The idea
is "not to get out of the hermeneutical circle, but to enter it in the
right way."!

Allen




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