Author ORCID Identifier

https://orcid.org/0009-0000-2127-4885

Semester

Summer

Date of Graduation

2026

Document Type

Dissertation (Campus Access)

Degree Type

PhD

College

College of Applied Human Sciences

Department

Education

Committee Chair

Sam Stack

Committee Member

Melissa Sherfinski

Committee Member

Sharon Hayes

Committee Member

D. Jake Follmer

Abstract

ABSTRACT

Education and Liberty: What Is Inherited, Felt, Lived, and Entrusted

Mark Aaron Morgan

This dissertation argues that educational thought must be understood ontologically before it can be understood instrumentally, and that when this ontological inquiry is pursued far enough, education is disclosed not primarily as a method, institution, or intervention, but as participation in the conditions under which the world can appear as meaningful, questionable, and open at all.

The argument develops through five movements. The first names the originary event in which the world first comes to matter for a being claimed by significance before any curriculum arrives to organize it, and traces the architectural distinction between the ontological condition of openness within which beings can appear, the event through which that condition becomes consequential for a particular being, and the structural articulation through which that being inhabits the openness as its own. The second traces the passing-over of this condition into institutional life, where a foundational diagnostic concept is developed to name the displacement that operates through adequacy rather than refusal, through the sufficiency of representation rather than falsification, restructuring the field within which dwelling can take hold. The third asks what it would mean for education to remain answerable to what it cannot produce. The fourth turns inward toward the self that education encounters and helps to form, tracing the arc through embodiment, reflexivity, inheritance, decision, and endurance, and developing further the inherited Heideggerian distinction between fallenness and authenticity by articulating the lived modes of attunement through which human being inhabits the field whose poles cannot themselves be reached. The fifth carries the inquiry outward into the shared world that no individual life completes — the world that must remain mutually perceptible if liberty is to be more than private consolation.

The project finds it necessary, in pursuing this inquiry, to develop several specific neologisms — both in Latin and in Irish — whose articulation requires the philosophical development the chapters provide. Rather than naming these terms in advance of the conditions that make them necessary, the dissertation introduces them at the points where the phenomenon being traced cannot be adequately named within the inherited vocabulary. The reader is best served by encountering these terms as they emerge from the work rather than as terminology stipulated in advance.

Four specific claims distinguish this project from its phenomenological and post-structural interlocutors. The first is that the ontological condition of openness within which beings can appear is prior to the life-world as Husserl develops it in the Crisis, naming what even the life-world already presupposes in order to be given as a pre-given ground at all. The second is that the foundational diagnostic concept developed in the second movement is ontologically prior to symbolic violence in Bourdieu's sense, operating on the field within which any social world becomes inhabitable in the first place rather than within an already-constituted social world, and reaching a register that symbolic violence as a sociological analytic cannot. The third is that the Foucauldian subject, including the self-forming subject of Foucault's later work, remains insufficient to account for the surplus of mattering that persists within and despite the institutional forms through which the learner is taken up, because that surplus is not a residue of subjectivation but the trace of what the originary event has opened prior to any field in which subjectivation can occur. The fourth is that the inherited Heideggerian apparatus — indispensable for what it provides — does not contain the modal vocabulary required to articulate how human being actually inhabits the field whose poles it names; the project develops further what the inherited vocabulary establishes as structural orientation by articulating the lived modes through which the field between those orientations is actually traversed.

The project contributes to philosophy of education by tracing education's role in sustaining or foreclosing the conditions for genuine inhabitation of a meaningful world through the institutional practices by which each generation receives what has been handed down. Beyond educational theory, the project contributes to Continental Philosophy and to phenomenology specifically — through the architectural distinctions developed in its foundational vocabulary, through the further development of the inherited Heideggerian apparatus into territory the apparatus itself does not fully reach, and through the diagnostic and modal vocabulary the project introduces to name phenomena the inherited phenomenological vocabulary does not differentiate at the level the contemporary lived field requires.

Keywords: phenomenology; philosophy of education; ontology; Heidegger; liberty; hinge; ontological-slow-violence; clearing; What-is

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