Education in the Face of Evil: Violence and Passivity as Limits—A Phenomenological Reading of Radical Evil, the Banality of Evil, and Double Passivity in the Educational Experience—

Abstract

This article offers a phenomenological reading of formation (Bildung) in its constitutive relation to evil, violence and passivity, understood as inner limits of the care of the soul. The article shows how evil disfigures the sense of the lifeworld and undermines any naïve educational claim to guarantee the subject’s goodness. Second, passivity is developed as a structural dimension of formation: original passivity, the lifeworld, acquisition and learning, embodiment and tacit know-how, and the care of the soul as a critical reappropriation of the passive background. Third, violence is analysed through J. Milbank’s ontology of peace and anti-transcendentals, highlighting how the society of the spectacle and contemporary virtuality generate a double passivity of spectatorship that also permeates educational practices. On this basis, the article establishes phenomenological invariants of the formation–evil–violence–passivity nexus and sketches a pedagogy of the limit: formation as critical appropriation of the Thou shalt not kill, as interruption of double passivity, and as simultaneous care of the soul and of the world in societies marked by pervasive violence.