Abstract

The paper considers the question of relationship between Bernhard Waldenfels’s phenomenology of the alien and education. In the first part it presents the character of the experience of the alien developed by the German thinker, underlining its double structure – the stage of shock and surprise with the alien and the moment of response to its “demand”, which philosopher relates to a certain sort of ethics. In the second part, the article establishes the relationship between the Waldenfels’s experience of the alien and a transformative mode of learning understood as the one that makes a place for categories of unexpected and desired in education, allows for subjectivity formation and strengthens critical thinking. The last part of the text addresses a question of the place of transformative Bildung based on Waldenfels’s phenomenological analysis of the alien in the contemporary neoliberal landscape with its shift towards functional, instrumentalist and consumer-based modes of teaching.