Anna Kouppanou

Technologies of Being in Martin Heidegger: Nearness, Metaphor and the Question of Education in Digital Times

Technology permeates education’s discourses and practices, and further dialogue between philosophy of education and philosophy of technology is urgently needed. This thesis attempts to do this by engaging critically with the thought of Martin Heidegger, Jacques Derrida and Bernard Stiegler in order to show that both education and technology are processes of human formation (Bildung). Heidegger’s philosophy of technology underlines the way technology conditions human action and thus allows for an investigation of the constitution of the human being. At the same time, Heidegger’s philosophy maintains certain essentialist elements that make it unresponsive to the digital technologies that increasingly form our milieu. In matters of technology the nature of nearness is always at issue, and digital technology accelerates the changes that occur in this respect. For this reason, and notwithstanding Heidegger’s achievements, it is necessary to challenge his account in certain respects. Through a deconstruction of Heidegger’s theory, I attempt to show that thinking and technology intertwine in his critique of metaphysics. In fact, thinking and technology function according to presuppositions about image (Bild), imagination (Einbildungskraft) and education (Bildung), and both inextricably involve metaphorisation in various ways. In this thesis, I analyse the notion of metaphor either as passive or active transfer of the self. The role of image, as I have already noted, is very important for this process, and it is for this reason that Heidegger’s distinction between ‘representative’ image and ‘originary’ image becomes very important for this investigation. For Heidegger, the possibility of originary image opens up the path towards a nontechnologically mediated truth (alētheia) that offers true nearness to things, whereas representative image condemns thinking to uncritical repetition and existence to a state in which everything is equally far and equally near. This discussion and the specific chain of notions (Bild, Einbildung, Bildung) offers a new way into the investigation of those current digital image-technologies that purport to afford us nearness to things and people. It examines their effects on thinking and imagination, and education’s role in relation to these developments.

What Can We Learn from Learning Technologies? Technology, Digitization, and Education

Philosophy in general and philosophy of technology in particular have addressed the matter of technology in an attempt to answer either the question: ‘What is a technological thing?’ or the question ‘What does a technological thing do?’. Such a distinction is fused with Western philosophy’s own unfolding, directing us toward a certain shift from an anthropocentric view, which conceptualizes the human being as the center that controls everything, to a more postmodern anti-subjectivist theorization, which conceives the human being as merely one of the many contributing factors that participate in the emergence of beings. This chapter will introduce focal questions of philosophy of technology and suggest alternative conceptualizations of technological artifacts and human beings; indeed, by virtue of different schools of thought and with a special focus on the philosophies of Martin Heidegger and Bernard Stiegler. This thinking will also be related to seminal literature from the field of educational philosophy that allows us to challenge some standard beliefs concerning learning technology. Finally, the chapter will address the current context of digitization and the question of education in digital times.

Approaching by digression: education of nearness in digital times

Despite their strong spatial connotations, nearness, remoteness and distance are terms discussed in Martin Heidegger in connection to technology, interpretation, difference and lived time. In this paper, I investigate the nature of nearness, the possibility of its elimination and the meaning of such contingency via Bernard Stieglers critique. In order to do this, I look into the nature of interpretation as a process of time-synthesis that brings the world near and is conditioned by technology. At the same time, I give special attention to childhood as a unique but telling stage of this process. Furthermore, I look into technologies of nearness, now instantiated as digital technologies, and interpret them as processes that challenge the very notion they appear to promote, that is nearness and difference. Finally, I discuss these technologies in connection to educations possible response and impossible responsibility. Education is discussed as a technology of nearness that forms the child and their interpretive modalities that ultimately allow nearness and the perception of difference in the experience of time. In this light, educations and technologys relation is more complicated than we think.