The Exalted Teacher: Heidegger's Way to a Thinking Experience of Learning and Being

Dissertation, University of California, Berkeley (1994)
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Abstract

The Exalted Teacher is a philosophical interpretation of what it means to engage in the practice of teaching for the sake of learning--"learning" understood as "bearing witness" to one's essential nature as a human being. The interpretation is conducted along three lines of inquiry, each marked by a question: What is the current condition of the teaching-learning relation in the schools; and how does this relation reflect the current condition of man? Given these conditions, what are the principal tasks of the learner and the teacher who must work together to accomplish learning? Why does there issue, in the modern age particularly, the call for an "exalted" teacher? ;The peculiarity of the ascription of the word "exalted" to the practice of teaching leads this inquiry to the later writings of philosopher Martin Heidegger who first declared the need for an exalted teacher. Thus, this work reflects Heidegger's later philosophical project: to think and to clarify the meaning of being; to commemorate man's essential nature as the meditative being whose thinking and doing receive changing interpretations of what it means to be; and to awaken human being to the essence of modern technology threatening man's human nature. ;As an interpretive work, the essay conducts a dialogue with Heidegger on three levels. It construes the meaning of the word "exalted" from the utterance, "It is still an exalted matter to become a teacher." It returns the utterance to its original context in Heidegger's most comprehensive statement about the teaching-learning relation. And it elucidates Heidegger's concerns for teaching and learning from the position of his later thought on language and the task of thinking in the modern age. ;Given the responsibility of restoring the condition of humanity in our time, the matter of teaching becomes an exalted matter. The meaning of the teacher's task becomes clear as the interpretation discloses two other related Heideggerian claims, the first directing the activity of learning, and the second stipulating the work of teaching: "To learn means to make everything we do answer to whatever essentials address themselves to us at a given time." "Teaching is more difficult than learning because what teaching calls for is this: to let learn."

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