Philosophical foundations of the pedagogy of otherness

Abstract

The experience of the Other’s event, so far from understanding, weakens the idea of power, of permanence, of what returns home intact, despite all experiences. The original experience of alterity produces an affection that is not destined to designate a word that could apprehend it. In this way, the production that the Other makes in me is an ontological fact, a novelty in the being, where what it was before is discarded from its permanence and is moved, modified, forcing it to step out, to leave the room of the same in its same. Otherness is the condition of the Other to remain the Other to me. This had already been seen by Cicero and St. Augustine, the same for Plato and recently Levinas. They have taught us that alterity is the condition of permanence of otherness and, as the sign of a foreign being, it is necessary to think how its strangeness remains despite the efforts of the ego to dominate it. In the following lines we will review how these conceptions have already permeated philosophical thought since antiquity and what are the things that should support any pedagogy that takes as a starting point the problems of alterity.