Journal of Philosophy of Education

INTRODUCTION

Recently there have been attempts within educational philosophy to make a critical distinction between learning and other forms of educational discourse and practice outside or beyond learning (Biesta, 2006, 2014; Lewis, 2013). The distinction is called for precisely because learning has radically reduced the scope of what counts as educational to mere socialisation into a given order of things and/or quantification of human capital development. This is not to say that such activities are not important. Rather it is to suggest that what counts as education needs to be radically diversified and expanded beyond the limiting constraints of learning. Scholars have thus returned to the principal question of educational philosophy: what do we consider education in the first place? While often dismissed by the learning community as anti‐educational or as impediments toward learning, certain logics such as repetitive practicing, tinkering around without definitive ends, apprenticing, and study have emerged as ways in which learning can be suspended and alternative experiences of what it means to be educated can once again flourish (Backer and Lewis, 2015; Biesta, 2006, 2014; D'Hoest, 2012; Lewis and Friedrich, 2016; Simons and Masschelein, 2008; Vlieghe, 2013).

Of particular interest to this article is the emphasis that several scholars have placed on study (Arsenjuk and Koerner, 2009; Harney and Moten, 2013; Lewis, 2013; Rocha, 2015). Study is a kind of weak educational logic that does not desire ends, prefers not to be quantified, and thus falls outside the standard approach to learning, learning outcomes, and learning assessments. Because of this, study is often viewed with suspicion in the ends‐oriented framework that dominates most educational practices and evaluations today. Yet for scholars concerned with study, this most obscure of practices grants the studier unique opportunities to experience his/her potentiality, passion for ideas, and educational freedom from ends.

This article will turn toward Heidegger's phenomenology of temporality in order to add to the growing body of research on study. My approach is twofold. First, while there has been work done on the question of the unique temporality of study (Lewis, 2013), Heidegger provides us with a useful distinction that will help further clarify how the temporal structure of study differs from that of learning. Here I will suggest that the Heideggian philosophers Hubert Dreyfus and Stuart Dreyfus’ (1991) famous discussion of education for expert skill building is situated within the temporality of learning, while study is instead situated within and turns us toward Temporality. What is at stake here is the distinction between the phenomenology of a temporality that is oriented toward practices and affordances in the world versus a phenomenology of Temporality that is oriented toward the presence and absence of entities—entities that must appear if there are to be any meaningful practices at all.

At stake in this discussion is an understanding of a fairly common phenomenological distinction between different experiences of educational time. For the learner, time is experienced as ‘making progress toward x’. The temporality of learning is developmental, and is directed at a future state wherein progress can be assessed. The phenomenological experience of studying is radically different, and can be summarised as ‘getting lost’ or ‘getting absorbed’ to the point of losing all track of time. With Heidegger’s help, we will see that learning concerns temporality whereas studying concerns Temporality, hence the phenomenological difference in experiences.

But this essay is not simply an application of a theory to a particular topic: education. Heidegger's discussion of temporality in The Basic Problems of Phenomenology is an illuminating companion to Being and Time, giving added historical breadth and phenomenological depth to the question of temporality. In this sense, it works toward fulfilling the promise left undone in Being and Time. And while the book is noteworthy for elucidating the connections between Dasein's being‐in‐the‐world and temporality temporalising itself, Heidegger's discussion remains formal and thus abstract in nature. It is my contention that grounding Heidegger's fundamental ontology of temporality in terms of education helps bring his formal analysis to life in important ways. Further, it enables us to rehabilitate Heidegger's thought for education. While others have focused on the Heidegger controversy and the connection between his approach to university teaching and Nazism (Thomson, 2005; Wolin, 1993), here I will shift focus from the purposes and implementation of his actual pedagogical practice to the phenomenology of study that, in some ways, interrupts Heidegger's early, highly instrumentalised focus on the primacy of philosophy and philosophical teaching/learning for politicised ends. But this is not simply a localised intervention into Heideggerian scholarship. The case of Heidegger is important for educational philosophy as such because it demonstrates the importance of the distinction between learning versus studying ethics.

In short, the following paper is composed of four major sections. First, I outline Heidegger's distinction between temporality and Temporality. Second, I make a further distinction between inauthentic and authentic learning. Here I turn to the work of Dreyfus and Dreyfus (1991) on expert skill building and contrast this view of learning with standardised or generic forms. When inauthentic and authentic forms of temporality are brought to bear on this distinction, new ways of understanding the convergence and divergence of learning modes opens up for critical reflection. Third, I suggest that while differentiations internal to learning are critical in the struggle to define the nature of education, education cannot be reduced to its temporalising forms. At this point, the work of one of Heidegger's late students, Giorgio Agamben (1995), becomes important for grounding Temporality in a particular educational experience: study. At stake here is carving out a time in education for enpresencing (the Temporality of the potential for something to appear) versus self‐projection through action (the authentic temporality of expert skill building). And finally, I return to Heidegger in order to see the ethical limitations of too quickly collapsing education into learning—even if that learning is authentic. This final section will redeem Heidegger's thought on educational philosophy while simultaneously pointing toward the ethics of study (as opposed to learning).

HEIDEGGER ON TWO TEMPORALITIES

In Basic Problems, Heidegger begins with a crucial distinction between temporality [Zeitlichkeit] and Temporality [Temporalität]. Concerning the distinction, Heidegger writes, ‘The term “Temporality” [Temporalität] does not wholly coincide with the term “temporality” [Zeitlichkeit], despite the fact that, in German, Temporalität is merely the translation of Zeitlichkeit. It means temporality insofar as temporality itself is made into a theme as the condition of the possibility of the understanding of being and of ontology as such’ (1988, p. 228). Later, he repeats this same claim: ‘in its role as condition of possibility of the understanding of being, both pre‐ontological and ontological, we shall call temporality Temporality [Temporalität]’ (p. 228). From these citations, we can infer that the two are intimately connected yet not identical. Indeed, Heidegger writes, ‘Temporality as origin is necessarily richer and more pregnant than anything that may arise from it’ (p. 308). There is something about Temporality that is more developed than temporality, while at the same time immanent to it.

Perhaps a good way to understand what is going on here is to turn to Heidegger's description of the work of interpretation in Being and Time. Making a critical phenomenological distinction, Heidegger (2008) states that through interpretation, basic understanding ‘does not become something different’ than what it already is, yet at the same time, interpretation is a ‘development’ (p. 188) of understanding. The question is: How can interpretation remain immanent to understanding while also developing understanding? The key is that interpretation brings out the ‘as’ (p. 189) structure inherent yet tacit in understanding. When we understand that a chair is for sitting on, the chair as a chair is present in our understanding but never made explicit. When interpretation happens, the chair as a chair is brought to the foreground. By making the ‘as’ structure explicit, interpretation develops understanding. Interpretation is thus a kind of demonstrative gesture that points out something as the kind of thing that it is.

Similarly, Temporality is an interpretation of temporality. Heidegger uses the concept Temporality when he wants to view the most basic or fundamental role of temporality in constituting Dasein's being‐in‐the‐world. Thus there is a difference of interpretive inflections when one hears temporality versus Temporality. What this inflection consists of has yet to be determined. For right now, it is enough to highlight that the inflection points to two phenomenologically distinct features of temporality.

To understand what these two features are, Heidegger begins with a historical account of the concept of time, with particular focus on Aristotle. As Heidegger (1988) argues in the introduction of Basic Problems, the phenomenological method is composed of three parts: reduction, construction and destruction. Together they signify ‘a positive appropriation of tradition’ (p. 23). Methodologically speaking, Heidegger's turn to Aristotle is just as much constructive as it is destructive. Stated differently, Heidegger's treatment of Aristotle is not merely critical. Rather, he finds within Aristotle a fundamental insight into temporality that will then be taken up and further elaborated in Heidegger's own phenomenology. The anchoring point of Heidegger's reading of Aristotle can be found in Aristotle's distinction between before/after and earlier/later. On this reading, Aristotle's pair proteron [before] and husteron [after] indicate spatial changes, or changes of states, without time‐determinatedness. For instance, in English ‘before’ can be both a temporal designator as in ‘before I go to school’ but also a spatial designator as in ‘I stand before the teacher in class’. According to Heidegger's reading of Aristotle, it would be a mistake to confuse before and after with temporal distinctions between earlier and later. Heidegger summarizes Aristotle's important insight as follows: ‘The nows themselves, however, can be expressed and understood only in the horizon of earlier and later. The “with respect to the before and after” and the “in the horizon of the earlier and later” do not coincide; the second is the interpretation of the first. If we take the proteron and husteron provisionally as before and after, previous and subsequent, the genesis of Aristotle's definition of time becomes clearer’ (p. 246). Note, for Aristotle, earlier and later are an interpretation of the more basic and primordial pair before and after. This means that earlier and later are before and after as temporal, or as the temporalizing of before and after. This temporalizing of a change state is Dasein dependent. Heidegger writes, ‘Primarily, proteron‐husteron means for Aristotle before and after in the sequence of places. It has a non‐temporal sense. But the experience of before and after intrinsically presupposes, in a certain way, the experience of time, the earlier and later’ (p. 247). Before and after is a natural sequence or change of state. The now is already there within this back and forth movement of before and after, but is dependent on Dasein's experience in order to be made explicit. Dasein makes explicit what was implicit through an act of interpretation. Indeed the most basic form of interpretation, for Heidegger, is precisely this interpretation of before and after (as a non‐temporal sequence) as a temporal sequence (of nows) by Dasein.

It is my argument that the distinction which Aristotle draws between before and after and earlier and later forms the genesis point in the history of philosophy for Heidegger's phenomenological distinction between Temporality and temporality. To validate this claim, I will now outline the distinction that Heidegger makes between the two, starting with temporality. For Heidegger (1988), temporality is the ‘original ecstatic‐horizonal unity of future, past, and present’ (pp. 286–287). On this reading, temporality is ‘original self‐projection’ (p. 307) where Dasein plunges into possibilities (the future) by taking up that which it has fallen into (the past) in order to cope with the present. Here, Dasein and world are interwoven through a temporal structure that connects ecstatic projection and worldly horizons through the practical actions Dasein cares about.

According to my reading of Heidegger, Temporality is temporality as fundamental ontology. This means that it reveals the very conditions of possibility for the ecstatic‐horizonal unity found in practical activity. Temporality becomes temporality's temporalizing ground. The ground/conditions for temporality are not found outside of temporality, but rather are found within temporality through the work of interpretation. If temporality is self‐projection, this self‐projection is only possible on the basis of Temporality's temporal‐projection.

This becomes clear in Heidegger's analytic of Temporality, the fundamental dimension of which is praesens, or the sequence between presence and absence. The phenomenon that Heidegger has in mind here is the shift between the availability (handiness) and unavailability of the hammer, but we could just as easily recall the earlier description of Aristotle's distinction between before and after. Something must be made present in order for Dasein to experience the now as a temporal instant. As such, praesens is not identical to the now, although the two are interconnected (the later parasitically dependent upon the former as its fundamental condition or ground). Heidegger (1988) summarizes:

… praesens and now, too, are not identical. For the now is a character of intratemporality, of the hand and the extant, whereas praesens is supposed to constitute the condition of possibility of understanding handiness as such. Everything handy is, to be sure, “in time”, intratemporal; we can say of it that the handy “is now”, “was at the time”, or “will then be” available. When we describe the handy as being intratemporal, we are already presupposing that we understand the handy as handy, understanding this being in the mode of being of handiness. This antecedent understanding of the handiness of the handy should become possible precisely through praesens (p. 304).

What then is the present? It is ‘a being‐open for entities confronting us’ (Heidegger 1988, p. 306). Notice that for us to be open to entities (to the horizontal structure of the world which offers Dasein affordances), entities have to have always already confronted us. The present of our actions thus depends upon something to project into and onto. Hence Heidegger's insistence that Temporality is not simply self‐projection but is rather ‘the condition for the possibility of all projecting’ (p. 307). Stated differently, temporality concerns absorbed coping and dealing with the world through the ecstatic‐horizonal structure whereas Temporality as presence/absence is more fundamental and pre‐exists any particular form of practical action.

EDUCATIONAL TIME

Now that the difference between Temporality and temporality has been clarified, we can turn our attention to educational time, both as a concrete phenomenon that will help us further understand the distinction between Temporality and temporality, but also as an important intervention into how educational time is currently structured. In order to rethink educational time(s), I will make a threefold distinction:

Learning =

• a)

  generic = inauthentic temporality (standardized school time, a series of unrelated, meaningless, expectant nows) → instrumental massification;

• b)

  expert = authentic temporality (skill development through the meaningful interrelationship between repetition and instant) → individuation

Study =

• Temporality (experience of the potentiality of something to appear as relevant and meaningful) → stupidity.

Note that the first distinction is internal to learning whereas the second distinction rests between learning and an alternative educational logic, study.

As it stands, educational time is a kind of homogenous clock time of standardized testing which demands the production of evidence of one's potentiality. In both the high‐stakes testing regime of K‐12 and in the audit culture of the university, the time of education has been usurped with a more or less bureaucratic form of abstract temporality that is fast‐paced and metrics‐oriented. Indeed, it is precisely the question of time that has become a focal point in new and emergent forms of struggle in the university, such as the slow scholarship movement (Mountz et al., 2015; Shahjahan, 2015). Perhaps we could argue that time has become nothing more than a form of technology that transforms all education into a mere resource for extracting more labour time from the student‐as‐learner‐as‐worker.

Here a distinction Heidegger makes within the ontic manifestations of temporality becomes important. Heidegger argues that there are two experiences of temporality: inauthentic and authentic. Inauthentic temporality is described by Heidegger (1988) as ‘expecting’ (p. 289). When expecting something, Dasein finds itself only through its commerce with things. In Heidegger's own words, ‘The Dasein thus comes toward itself from out of the things. It expects its own can‐be as the can‐be of a being which relies on what things give or what they refuse’ (ibid.). Dasein can project itself into the future, but this projection is ‘not primarily by the Dasein itself from its own most peculiar self, which nevertheless exists, just as it is, always as dealing with things’ (ibid.). As such, the future is an inauthentic future dictated by the things of the world rather than by Dasein's own unique past. Indeed, such a future horizon is cut off from Dasein's understanding of itself, and as such, is the consequence of a fundamental forgetting. Here I will quote Heidegger in full: ‘When in our commerce with things we lose ourselves in and with them, we are expectant of our can‐be in the way it is determined via the feasibility and unfeasibility of the things with which we are concerned. We do not expressly come back to ourselves in an authentic projection upon our own most peculiar can‐be…. What we are—and what we have been is always contained in this—lies in some way behind us, forgotten’ (p. 290). This forgetting is a ‘disengagement from one's most peculiar having‐been‐ness’ (ibid.).

The inauthentic time of generic learning is precisely the experience of being lost in the meaninglessness of the external rituals of standardized testing and assessment matrices. Such tests and performance quotas do not concern an individual Dasein's own most peculiar having‐been‐ness. Quite the opposite. Dasein can only become an efficient learner precisely by filling out such tests as One would. The feasibility and unfeasibility of learning rests solely on the criteria of what will matter for passing the test, meeting the deadline, and so on. The clock‐time of the test is phenomenologically experienced by Dasein‐as‐generic‐learner in the form of inauthentic temporality, which makes the learner forget a fundamental question of education: Who am I/How am I in the world? All that remains for the generic learner is a series of punctuated nows that are inarticulate and do not culminate in any sense of continuous growth. ‘Now I have to take my history test’, ‘Now I have to take my math test’, ‘Now I have to take my physics test’. The expectation of continual testing is cut off from where Dasein existentially finds itself at any given moment, producing a sense of disconnectedness. Such punctuated nows remain isolated, dispersing Dasein‐as‐generic‐learner into a series of performance measurements that test progress or regress according to the success conditions dictated by abstract calculations such as human capital development. Dasein in this sense is severed from itself.

Opposed to this standardized notion of inauthentic temporality that seems to dominate educational practices (education as mere socialization and quantification), we can turn to Dreyfus and Dreyfus's model of skill‐development. I have chosen to focus on the Dreyfus model because of its Heideggerian, phenomenological approach to the question of learning—an approach dedicated to an understanding of skill development as a way in which Dasein can come to find itself through its actions in a world. As such, it is an excellent counter‐example to the standardized, inauthentic temporality of schooling. In Dreyfus and Dreyfus's model (1991), the student learns skills through a series of developmental phases that lead from rule learning to rule following to a form of expertise that transcends rules. Briefly summarized, the stages of skill acquisition can be outlined as follows: the novice learns by relying on rules, the advanced beginner comes to recognize relevant situations, proficiency then emerges when one has adequately internalized specific types of appropriate situations, and the expert is capable of improvisation without being bound to rule calculation. Dreyfus and Dreyfus summarize this general movement toward expertise as follows: ‘It seems that beginners make judgments using strict rules and features, but that with talent and a great deal of involved experience the beginner develops into an expert who sees intuitively what to do without applying rules and making judgments at all’ (p. 235). Rather than relying on detached, impersonal principles, the expert relies on spontaneous and intuitive familiarity with situations in order to figure out what is the best way of responding to a problem.

It is my argument that such a model is useful for helping us to understand the temporal phenomenology of authentic learning. Although Dreyfus and Dreyfus briefly discuss the question of how an individual might go about learning certain forms of expertise, they do not discuss in any way the temporality of this kind of educational experience. We learn by projecting into possibilities afforded by the world. It is largely intentionally guided, experiential, and connected with specific success conditions that are defined in relation to the task at hand. As Dreyfus and Dreyfus (1991) emphasize, there is usually a ‘clear criterion of expertise’ (p. 237) that enables the success or failure of an action to be assessed. But this criterion comes from situated knowledge rather than from abstracted principles that are purportedly universal and context‐free. The expert learns through repetitive exposure to like situations, building up a set of intuitive skills that exist on the preconscious level of coping and dealing with everyday problems. Whether discussing ethical experts, athletes or chess players (all of which Dreyfus and Dreyfus regularly cite as examples), one finds something similar: the greater the level of expertise, the less need for conscious deliberation/judgment. For the expert, the situation presents itself, and the body plunges into a certain set of possibilities that afford action in such a way as to find an intuitive equilibrium that feels right. Only in situations that exhibit total breakdowns of intelligibility does such an expert fall back on abstract reasoning and judgement to figure out what the best course of action should be. Stated simply, expertise connects the ecstatic projection of Dasein with worldly horizons (affordances) in order to make action possible.

Learning—as Dreyfus and Dreyfus describes it—is a particular educational instantiation of authentic temporality. As opposed to inauthentic temporality (described above), the authentic temporality of learning as intuitive skill development enables Dasein to return to itself within its situation. The generic learner loses his or her self in the external world of deadlines, normative evaluations and human capital development. The result is an experience of Dasein as empty and detached from its own historicity—a state of forgetfulness. The generic learner forgets the purposes behind actions, and thus takes a more or less instrumental approach to his or her education. As opposed to this, the expert experiences learning through a particular conjunction that exists between a repetition and an instant. Citing Heidegger (1988): ‘Repetition is a peculiar mode in which the Dasein was, has been. Resoluteness temporalizes itself as a repetitive coming‐back‐toward‐itself from a chosen possibility to which the Dasein, coming‐toward‐itself, has run out in front of itself [preceded itself]. In the ecstatic unity of repetitive self‐precedence, in this past and future, there lies a specific present’ (p. 287). As with the expert described by Dreyfus and Dreyfus, the resolute Dasein finds that it has run ahead of itself (its deliberative capacities) into the situation at hand. The spontaneous accord between Dasein and its environment is only possible as long as Dasein is able to come back toward itself (find within itself the intuitive skills which have been developed through extended learning experiences). Dasein runs out in front of itself (the future) only insofar as it can come back toward itself (the past) as afforded by the situation at hand (the present). The specific present that is unique to resolute Dasein is, for Heidegger, the instant. Heidegger writes, ‘The instant [the Augenblick, the blinking of an eye] I that which, arising from resoluteness, has an eye first of all and solely for what constitutes the situation of action’ (p. 287). In a blink of the eye, the expert acts free from mental oversight. Although instantaneous, the blink of the eye is not a break from who/how Dasein is. Unlike the generic learner who exists in a series of detached and distinct nows, the individuated learner is embedded in an instant that arcs back toward the recovery of Dasein's own most possibilities and toward the future opened up by the particular context at hand. The instant is the most authentic temporal manifestation of Dasein's resoluteness in the world. In other words, the expert's seemingly spontaneous and effortless response to what is called for in a situation reveals the expert's most authentic self—reveals what he or she most resolutely stands for (the for‐the‐sake‐of‐which that orients his or her being). In an instant, the expert reveals him or herself as a certain kind of individual, with a certain relationship to the world. ‘Individuation’, writes Heidegger, ‘does not mean clinging obstinately to one's own private wishes but being free for the factical possibilities of current existence’ (p. 288). Unlike inauthentic time in which Dasein loses itself in the world, here Dasein returns to itself in order to find itself free to act in accordance with its own most resoluteness.

What I want to emphasise here is twofold. First, Heidegger supplies us with an understanding of authentic temporality that underlies expert learning. The phenomenology of authentic temporality provided by Heidegger and the phenomenology of learning to be an expert provided by Dreyfus and Dreyfus support one another. Indeed, combing the two enhances both phenomenologies in important ways. For the former, the abstract discussion of temporality is made phenomenologically more concrete, and for the latter, the temporal structure of learning as expert skill building is revealed.

But this is not the only form of educational time that is possible (or even desirable). Whereas Dreyfus and Dreyfus enable us to imagine a temporality that embraces the authentic possibilities of Dasein as an educational form of life, we cannot limit the scope of education to learning. Here I would like to suggest that studying is another educational practice that interrupts learning—authentic and inauthentic. Studying is the educational experience of Temporality (the potentiality of entities enpresencing themselves). Notice that for Dreyfus and Dreyfus, learning happens through skill building, which culminates in the spontaneous and intuitive action of the expert, yet this discussion seems to presuppose that entities are already present and thus offering certain affordances for action. Dreyfus and Dreyfus start from a position where chess, driving a car, ethical problems or athletic performance already appear on the horizon of intelligibility as worthwhile, as worthy of care. In other words, Dreyfus and Dreyfus's model focuses on the temporality of practical actions in a world full of possibilities that are always already there for the Dasein who is primed enough to project into such possibilities.

Studying something does not presuppose any such givenness. Instead, studying is the sense of being lost in the potentiality of anything at all appearing. Here we can turn to one of Heidegger's students, Giorgio Agamben, for some assistance in specifying the unique educational experience of Temporality: study. Like the relationship between Temporality and temporality so too study is immanent to learning yet simultaneously more developed, more primordial. It is learning fulfilled but only through a suspension of its ends. On this reading, study will emerge as a special kind of interpretation of learning: not learning as learning but rather learning as not learning, or learning as a pure means rather than a means to an end (expertise).

Commentary on Agamben and study is scattered throughout the secondary literature (Attell, 2015; Kishik, 2012; Snoek, 2012; Whyte, 2013) and has been the focus of at least one monograph (Lewis, 2013). While the relationship between Heidegger and Agamben on the particular issue of study has been discussed (Lewis, 2013; 2014), here I would like to add to this literature by directly arguing that Heidegger enables us to understand the specific Temporality of study.

Giorgio Agamben (1995) writes that studying is an ‘interminable’ and ‘rhythmic’ activity that not only loses a sense of its own end but, more importantly, ‘does not even desire one’ (p. 64). Like Herman Melville's scrivener (Lewis, 2013), the studier would prefer not to engage in the process of actualizing potentiality in order to assess outcomes and improve future performance. The telos of learning towards this or that outcome (whether inauthentic or authentic) is suspended. The studier dwells perpetually in a state that is neither simply naïve ignorance nor expertise, constantly moving forward toward an end while also delaying any end. Agamben (1995) describes the state as follows: ‘Those who are acquainted with long hours spent roaming among books, when every fragment, every codex, every initial encountered seems to open a new path, immediately left aside at the next encounter, or who have experienced the labyrinthine allusiveness of that “law of good neighbors” whereby Warburg arranged his library, know that not only can study have no rightful end, but does not even desire one’ (p. 64). Recalling his time at the Warburg Institute Library where he conducted research, Agamben (1999) returns to the idea of the labyrinth: ‘Like a true maze, the library led the reader to his goal by leading him astray … in a series of detours’ (p. 284). The key here is the interminable activity of getting lost in the eddies of thought where detours become pure means detached from reaching ends beyond themselves; the studier moves from one neighbour to the next in a kind of circling gesture that often leads back to where one started. While learning has a specific purpose with predefined success conditions, studying has, to borrow from Kant, a kind of purposiveness without a purpose (an indefinite sense of rightfulness even if the goal seems to recede with every step forward). And this rhythmic sway of study between undergoing and undertaking makes the studier ‘stupid’ (Agamben, 1995, p. 64), meaning that the co‐ordinates which usually guide the learning process are left in the lurch, creating a kind of ebb and flow as one is let loose from definitive projects, ends, and assessment protocols.

The sadness and inspiration of study is precisely caused by the delay of any actualization of the potentiality of the studier for either the assessment of generic learning or the skill development necessary for expertise. Study therefore lacks definable success conditions against which progress can be measured. In this sense, the essential feature of learning—in both its inauthentic and authentic manifestations—is rendered inoperative. It is not at all clear if the studier develops anything or achieves any predetermined goals. While the sadness of study that Agamben describes is found in the withdrawing of potentiality from measurable actuality, this is only part of the story. For just as much as study withdraws from actualizing potentiality, study also presses forward, hence the rhythmic/oscillating sway of study. One could thus think of the phenomenology of study as a prolonged kind of educational hesitation which does not withdraw into a pure potentiality but neither fully actualizes said potentiality in the form of a measurable output. Thus study actualizes potentiality only by deactualizing itself as learning. It is, in other words, learning as not learning, or a learning that is not negated or deconstructed so much as deactivated in a time of suspended animation.

On this reading, study is neither the time of the now nor the time of the instant. It is learning that is not in time but rather with time (con‐templation). Remember that Temporality is in essence the ontological condition of temporality. Like Aristotle's distinction between before/after and earlier/later, we can argue that learning is the temporalization of study (educational time temporalizing itself through a developmentally oriented action). For this reason, learning concerns subjectification of the self through projection (whether inauthentic or authentic is besides the point here). Also recall that for Heidegger (1988), Temporality is not simply self‐projection but is rather ‘the condition for the possibility of all projecting’ (p. 307). Likewise, study is the potentiality for all self‐projection without actualizing such self‐projection in any particular definable project (the studier is indifferent rather than resolute). Indeed what is unique about studying is that it offers an educational experience wherein the studier comes face‐to‐face with potentiality as such, with the potentiality for self‐projection without fully committing to any particular form of such projection (hence the connection between study and hesitation). Therefore unlike learning, study concerns a kind of de‐subjectification. The studier is stupid and does not desire finality. This is perhaps why life‐long studiers (as opposed to life‐long learners) prefer not to describe their work (‘I would prefer not to say what my dissertation is about’) or their professional status (‘Who me? I did not know I was an expert!’). Studiers do not fit nicely into the order of things, and certainly do not play by the rules of human capital development which dictates which assessments are more important for measuring one's successes and failures. Likewise, such studiers infuriate those looking for manifestations of expertise, where the expert exhibits his or her full potential in the form of virtuosity.

THE ETHICS OF STUDY

Today there is a struggle in education against what I am calling generic learning. This learning is part and parcel of the neoliberalization of education. For those on the existential left, there is a call for learning as expert skill building (Dreyfus and Dreyfus, 1991). While agreeing in part with this position, I also feel it is important to not limit our understanding of education merely to learning—even if this learning is indeed ‘authentic’. What is at stake here is another form of education as well as another notion of educational time—an activity and a time beyond the temporality of development, the fulfilment of success conditions, and thus the quantification of one's progress toward specific aims. This is the Temporality of study. In this concluding section, I would like to turn to the question of education and ethics. Can one learn ethics? Without engaging in the ethics of learning, then this essay would remain a mere philosophical puzzle. As such, a final turn toward ethics will illustrate how the distinctions drawn in this essay have very real world consequences. Indeed, the troubling case of Heidegger is the perfect illustration of the consequences of reducing educational time to the time of (expert) learning.

To address the question of ethics, I will look closely at Heidegger's own reflections on education, and demonstrate how his early understanding of university education as a form of expert learning resulted in an authoritarianism linked to the Nazi Party. Iain Thomson (2005) has carefully reconstructed Heidegger's university career in order to elucidate his underlying educational philosophy. For Thomson, Heidegger's early approach to university reform consisted of two interwoven elements: (a) the communal pursuit of the underlying ontological structure of being that guides scientific inquiry, and (b) the commitment to ‘forming excellent individuals, where “excellence” is understood in terms of a kind of ontological perfectionism, in which students learn to develop their distinctive capacity for world‐disclosing as they participate in the advancement of science by learning to question the sciences’ guiding ontological presuppositions’ (p. 101). As Thomson rightly points out, there is an authoritarian strain running throughout Heidegger's educational philosophy that hinges on the superiority granted to philosophy in the struggle to unify the university under an ontological research agenda. The philosopher king would thus be placed at the apex of the university system as its spiritual guiding light. For Thomson, Heidegger realized this was a profound mistake and ultimately rejected the notion of fundamental ontology and the authoritarian excesses, which accompanied it. I take Thomson's reading to be accurate and astute. The following is more or less in agreement with his argument, but with a rather different inflection. For me, what is at stake is not simply a philosophical change of heart on Heidegger's part (as Thomson would argue) but rather a radical shift in how he came to view educational time. The early Heidegger situated university education within the ecstatic‐horizonal structure of learning whereas the later Heidegger situated it within the enpresencing of study (the time of thinking, or of con‐templation). The following analysis will help unfold this added layer to the story of Heidegger's educational philosophy. Along the way, we will see the inadequacies of answering ethical questions from within the time of learning. Only during the Temporal suspension of the time of development, perfection, and expertise can the ethical be con‐templated. In this sense, I will argue that one can only study ethics and never learn it.

In reaction against the inauthentic temporality of research, Western bourgeois decadence/democracy, and the threat of the collapse of the German Volk, Heidegger's acceptance speech as rector at the University of Freiburg in May of 1933 illustrates how he turned toward an educational philosophy of engaged, authentic learning for excellence/perfection as a solution to these problems. As Richard Wolin outlines, Heidegger's crimes as rector are notorious and include the following: denouncing political dissidents, turning students against non‐Nazi faculty, actively reforming the university along the lines of the Nazi ‘leadership principle’, recommending appointments based on political leanings, and refusing to sponsor Jewish graduate students. But what were the philosophical underpinnings of these decisions? Wolin makes a strong case that it would be too easy to dismiss these rash and politically inexcusable abuses of power as the workings of a naïve but brilliant philosopher. Apologists miss how Heidegger's political and pedagogical machinations were entangled with his philosophical ideas. In his speech titled ‘The Self‐Assertion of the German University’, Heidegger formulates a strong position that articulates many of the key themes of Being and Time (including authenticity, resoluteness, projection and temporality) in relation to his own brand of National Socialist educational reform policy. Thus he writes that ‘Assuming the rectorship means committing oneself to leading this university spiritually and intellectually’ (Wolin, 1993, p. 29). This means turning away from the instrumentalism of science (a consistent theme in Heidegger's reflections on education, the university, and the life of the scholar) but also away from the economic ideology of the university as ‘superficial professional training’ (p. 37). As an alternative to the modern rationalization, instrumentalization and nihilism he saw bearing down on the German Volk, Heidegger prophetically saw a role for the university as guiding the Volk back to the fundamental question of their being, thus reconnecting action to spiritual renewal. Turning attention to the question of being would root research in the ‘soil and blood of Volk’ (p. 29) and thus resist the degradation of culture by undesirable influences. Only if professors and students could stand in the face of nihilistic uncertainty without wavering from the call of being and thereby return to the origin of science would they ‘become strong enough to lead’ (p. 34). The leader in this model would provide ‘spiritual legislation’ (p. 37) for the nation‐state and thus help guide the development of National Sociality towards its world‐historical destiny.

Throughout his various speeches during this period of his career, we see in Heidegger's educational philosophy an emphasis on the temporality of learning which is oriented toward a specific end point: the authentic preservation of the Volk through resolute projection into the National Socialist future. The rector as philosopher king was to guide this learning and keep it from falling prey to the trappings of the degenerate modern world. Key to authentic learning is, for Heidegger, hands‐on labour service and the construction of work camps. In such camps, students from various classes would mingle and come to constitute a homogenous and unified national community bound together by a sense of solidarity guaranteed by the ontology of the German fatherland. Endorsing the primacy of the work camp, Heidegger wrote, ‘In the future, the school will no longer enjoy its exclusive position in education … The work camp is now taking its place alongside home, youth league, military service, and school’ (Wolin, 1993, p. 42). The work camp was, for Heidegger, going to have a ‘purifying effect on the school’ by ‘legistat[ing] what it can and cannot, and should and should not, do’ (p. 43). In short, projecting the self into the potentialities of work in order to harden the will and make one resolute in the face of the possibility of cultural extermination from Western nihilism was privileged over and above the more or less indeterminate and indifferent practice of detached science, philosophy, and (I would argue) any kind of education that could be construed as ‘studying’. The heroic individual is the one who dares, resolutely, to plunge into the act that forms (the will) and builds (the state).

The privileging of committed and resolute action is also seen in Heidegger's direct political speeches to university students where he called for university education to be subsumed by a greater activity that would be ‘performed with full inner commitment to the future’ (Wolin, 1993, p. 45) of the Volk. Such resolute self‐projection would ‘tolerate no vacillation and no hesitation’ (p. 47) and thus wholeheartedly choose a future that would preserve the ontological integrity of the German people against massification and technologization. Indeed, what academic scholars can learn from work and from workers is how to return to authentic knowledge, or knowledge concerning one's way around in the world (p. 58). ‘Genuine knowledge is something that both the farmer and the manual laborer have, each in his own way and in his own field of work, just as the scholar has it in his [sic] field’ (ibid.). The problem is that many scholars in the university now shrink from authentic knowledge into the nihilism and rationality of what Heidegger calls ‘pseudo‐knowledge’ (ibid.) which is divorced from their communities and from the historical destiny of the Volk. In this sense, he calls for a union between workers and academics in order to once again see scholarship as a form of work, meaning a ‘well‐ordered action that is borne by the responsibility of the individual, the group, and the State and is thus of service to the Volk’ (p. 59). Scholarship as work is therefore an assertion of a will in order to accomplish a task for the sake of the spiritual salvation of the Volk. The philosopher king is the master of his or her situation, and thus has authentic knowledge that can judge the proper course of such work.

The temporality of this new form of revolutionary university learning clearly dovetails with Heidegger's theory of authentic temporality wherein one must resolutely choose to take a stand on one's being in the instant of decision. The instant is the moment of finding one's self out in front of one's self in the future potentiality that arises within a world historical situation, and in turn, giving one's self over to this potentiality in order to actualize it in and through action. There is no time for hesitation or deliberation—only time for plunging into the possibilities that open up. Only now, this rather abstract ontological description is concretized in relation to a very real historical instant: the instant when Germany decided its fate by responding to the call of National Socialism. In responding to such a call with decisiveness and without hesitation, the German people ‘learned’ who they always were and took a stand on their being.

It is precisely the unsavory notion of such authentic learning that troubles Dreyfus and Dreyfus’ all‐too‐easy endorsement of the authentic temporality of learning for expertise. Indeed, even as Dreyfus and Dreyfus acknowledge the difficulty of learning for ethical expertise, their argument for grappling with these difficulties seems superficial at best. Dreyfus and Dreyfus (1991) write, ‘It seems that in ethics what counts as expert performance is doing what those who already are accepted as ethical experts do and approve’ (p. 237). In the end, they are left with the advice that one must measure up against past ethical experts in order to gauge the rightness of one's actions. Yet this begs the question: What if all the available examples of experts were Nazi sympathizers? How would one learn what to know, how to know it, and when to act without in some way modelling one's actions/responses on a political ideology of hate, discrimination and destruction? The ethics of expertise thus cannot seem to tackle the truly difficult questions that confront us when we are faced with historic and cultural (rather than purely individual) forces that condition what counts as authentic learning in the first place.

A similar question concerning ethical expertise arises in Hubert Dreyfus and Sean Dorrance Kelly's (2011) description of mastery as an ‘unflinching, unhesitating, and unwavering’ (p. 11) response to the demands of a situation. Dreyfus and Kelly directly address the question of how an expert can fail to be critical of National Socialist rhetoric. Whereas in the earlier article by Dreyfus and Dreyfus there was an easy and effortless connection between intellectual work and manual work (not unlike in Heidegger's university lectures), in the later writings, Dreyfus and Kelly pull back a little and suggest that there is nothing in craftsman‐like skills that enables the worker to see distinctions between ‘dangerous and benign ways of being swept away’ (p. 211). In this update, they call for an additional form of learning wherein the worker needs to acquire poetic skills at deciphering different kinds of potentialities. Meta‐poetic skills are needed for ‘bringing out physis at its best’ (p. 219). This is an important philosophical move, but because Dreyfus and Kelly do not make a distinction between learning and studying, or between temporality and Temporality, I feel that calls for higher‐order skills at making being shine forth even brighter than before do not solve the problem at hand. In other words, poetic skills are still skills focused on making, producing and improving. Poiesis is, after all, concerned with ‘effectiveness’ (Biesta, 2014, p. 133). It seems uncertain that Heidegger would argue his revolutionary educational theory lacked poetic skills. Indeed, it is precisely poetic skills that he was calling for in order to reclaim the origins of the German Volk. This was not a craftsman‐based skill so much as a poetic skill focused on the poetic enrichment of blood and soil.

But what if Heidegger (as well as contemporaries such as Dreyfus and Kelly) had followed a different educational path—one that his own analysis of Temporality points towards? If the philosopher really were a studier, then he or she would be perpetually stupefied, caught up in the uncertainty of the times without resoluteness or strength to become a prophetic leader/expert pointing toward the destiny of a nation with wilful certainty. Instead of pointing toward the direction other disciplines should actualize certain potentialities, the stupefied philosopher would be there as a reminder of that which remains in potential, what remains in surplus of any given actualization. The studious philosopher would dwell in the Temporality of thinking and thus the time of potentiality wherein all necessities are given back to themselves as pure contingencies to be otherwise than. The actualization of purposes in the form of decisive action would give way to an indeterminate rhythm back and forth … a kind of purposiveness without a purpose, a studious hesitation that constitutes action only through de‐actualization. In this time of study, one can prefer not to, and thus dwell with the question of what it means to commit one's self to something through self‐projection.

Such a vision for university study neither (a) capitulates to the inauthentic temporality of generic learning that drives the audit economy found in Western neoliberal countries, nor (b) falls into the ethical aporia of the authentic temporality of learning for expertise (which, as Heidegger's own example illustrates, can lead to disastrous results). Rather it holds onto the place and time of the university for thinking in suspension of action‐oriented projection, of means‐end logic, and thus for the experience of the scholar who prefers not to submit to judgement, evaluation or effectiveness/efficiency measures. On this reading, the fate of the university—as Agamben might say—is not found in either (a) making it more efficient and productive, or (b) making it a spiritual epicenter for the fate of a nation, but rather in rendering it inoperative, suspending its fate as a certain kind of institution with a certain kind of operative logic (economic or nationalistic). This does not mean that learning (in its various guises) is to be excluded from the life‐world of the student. Rather it means that a space and time for study has to be carved out of the university as a learning apparatus. This and only this will ensure that freedom remains a possibility for educational life. Thinking through the ethics of education thus leads from expertise to stupidity as a kind of inoperative virtue in its own right—one that reminds us that there is always something in potential, which cannot be mastered or put to work.