Questions Concerning Knowledge and Being

The world order of knowledge is explored through an account of ‘cabinets of curiosity’ that provide a powerful metonymy of the condition of knowledge in early modernity. It is argued that through both othering and absorption, the ongoing essentializing and anti-ontological stance has been necessary for the persistence of what is taken for a redemptive, ‘ethical’ orientation towards education, even while education’s effects indicate otherwise. The chapter claims that a return to ‘fundamental ontology’, seriously revisiting the conditions of being for the being that puts itself into question, might be a starting point for critically examining some of education’s claims to ethical efficacy, as in the strange case of ‘character education’ with its wilful political conservatism. The necessary foreclosure that the celebration of education entails is considered in relation to the ongoing and essential eugenicist strain at work in education’s ineradicable obsession with assessment. A critique of the role of curiosity follows in relation to questions concerning a politics of the cosmopolitan with some reflections on Heidegger’s contrasting of ‘wonder’ with mere curiosity and its implications for standard educational thinking.