Heidegger East and West: Philosophy as Educative Contemplation

"Resonances between Heidegger’s philosophy and Eastern religious traditions have been widely discussed by scholars. The significance of Heidegger’s thinking for education has also become increasingly clear over recent years. In this article I argue that an important aspect of Heidegger’s work, the relevance of which to education is relatively undeveloped, relates to his desire to overcome Western metaphysics, a project that invites an exploration of his connections with Eastern thought. I argue that Heidegger’s desire to deconstruct the West implies the deconstruction of conventional views of learning because both aim to undercut the representational nature of thinking in ord er to recover thinking as a form of contemplation. Consequently, education should not be conceived as the acquisition of a more or less correct mental picture, but suggests the opposite: the relinquishing of all images in a contemplative aporia.