The Analytic System of Martin Heidegger’s Da-sein and the Anthropology of Max Scheler in the Educational Perspective

Abstract

When applied to education, Heidegger’s analysis of Da-sein suggests that in his ontology the epistemological problem of clarifying cognition is replaced by the existential problem of the cognition of the understanding individual. Thus, Heidegger treats “education” ontologically as the ability to achieve Da-sein as one’s own true and integral being whose Da-sein always takes precedence in understanding. On this basis, we can say that Heidegger treats education as a transcendental ontological structure that he, like Scheler, calls “disclosedness.” And although Heidegger almost never uses the term “education” in his analytic system, preferring instead to use expressions such as “authentic being,” “projection of the self,” etc., all of this content that he invests in this term closely follows Scheler’s interpretation, because it also characterizes human existence as “open” and “not foreordained.” For Scheler, the same “open” existence is an expression of existential human freedom, since it serves to manifest the spirit as the ontological principle. Considered in epistemological and value terms, this freedom, according to Scheler, is what he refers to as “education,” a transcending state of being that is manifested for another thing in existence as something that is “known” by loving participation in it with a view to achieving “one’s authentic self.”