ABSTRACT
Educational critiques adopting a Heideggerian perspective usually rely on the philosopher’s later work that explicitly ascribes an essence to modern technology; namely, a framing or forming mode that enforces a certain way of relating to things and a type of reasoning that calculates the world. Such an approach, withstanding its merits, responds limitedly to Heidegger’s multifaceted theory, which is dispersed throughout his other writings. Through a close reading of Heidegger’s Plato’s Doctrine of Truth (2009), this chapter discusses the connection Heidegger engraves between proper education and proper truth as alētheia. Heidegger’s discussion of the different instantiations of truth soon brings to the fore another constant of his thinking, namely, the fact that image is itself a mode of revealing and a type of relating to and nearing the world. By tracing notions with the common root of image (Bild in German), this chapter sets the stage concerning Heidegger’s deeper concerns about technology, imagination, truth and education, and makes the claim that true nearness, as described by Heidegger, refers to a type of open, imaginative and responsive relatedness to the world that he calls poetic/originary image. This kind of image does not settle easily in the presence/representation opposition, and its nature is not revealed even through the Derridean deconstruction of this pair.
