Deconstructing the Community of Those Who Have Nothing in Common: Education Among a Community of Strangers

Abstract This article is designed to begin to correct the relative neglect of the writings of Alphonso Lingis in the philosophical and educational literature. More specifically, I first attempt to deconstruct Lingis’ depiction of both the rational community and the community of those who have nothing in common. Second, I wish to reimagine Lingis’ notion of community of strangers while also highlighting some of its educational implications. I begin by analyzing Lingis’ understanding of the rational community while arguing that it is misleading to talk about a single community as opposed to plural communities. The next part analyzes the community of those who have nothing in common and show that it, too, is based on a distorted conception of that community, one that overlooks those things that disparate individuals and communities actually have in common. Then, I attempt to salvage the notion of the community of those who have nothing in common by offering a non-literal interpretation of this concept. In the last part of this paper, I reflect on what a reformulated concept of the community of strangers can mean for education. I argue that the notion of community of strangers can shed light and help mitigate against the phenomenon of coddling higher education students in the United States.