Heidegger’s Enframing and the Indigenous Self in Education

Introduction

Aspects of Heidegger’s personal life scream out to be confronted, especially when it is the indigenous writer referring to him and even if his sinister idiosyncrasies in that instance are not the key theme of that writer’s text. The controversy of Heidegger – that he “wrote some really frightful rubbish, some of which explicitly links his philosophy to the most abominable political movement of the modern period” (Bowie 1997, p. 139) – must surely be at stake in any indigenous comparative that seeks to draw on his works. He was, after all, supportive of the extermination of a group of people: such a nasty complicity will not be lost on the indigenous scholar. The recent release of his notorious Black Notebooks only further confirms his involvement. Yet his philosophy on the dark recesses of colonization that force an object to appear in advance as constrained thing is, for indigenous counter-colonial purposes, compelling and amounts to “anything but rubbish” (Bowie 1997,...