From sameness to otherness in education

Abstract

To interpret educational action from the Cartesian viewpoint inevitably equals thinking about education from the viewpoint of reason that is powerful, de-contextualized and seemingly free from all time and place. The philosophy of Cartesian subjectivity supposes that the subject relates to the world in a one-to-one way and to other subjects, as their opponents or different from them. From this perspective, the self is both starting point and destination for knowledge; there is no place for otherness, only sameness. However, the Cartesian pretension finds an exceptional opposition in the philosophy of Nietzsche. The Nietzschean anticogito is not the inverse of the Cartesian cogito, but the destruction of all isolated, inward-looking consciousness. Instead of sameness or the self, this paper proposes the dialectic of otherness as a governing category that makes it possible to construct a hermeneutic pedagogy where I is replaced by the other, that is, an individual who is focused on mediation, on ethical relationships configured from otherness.