"Leben lernen": Paul Feyerabend über Bertolt Brechts vergnügliche Theater-Pädagogik der Verfremdung als Habituierung ins respektable Herumtüfteln

This paper explores philosopher of science Paul Feyerabend’s view on German theatre maker and theorist Bertolt Brecht’s pedagogy of Verfremdung. Feyerabend focuses on three pedagogical and aesthetic aspects of Brecht’s theatre: art and science’s social-public (educational) orientation; its participatory unfolding as knowledge; and an artistic form, able to move an audience to critically engage with the world of ideas and practice, and their coming into form on stage (and in life). Brecht’s aesthetic of Verfremdung acts for Feyerabend as a pedagogical model. As such, it is to revive the (aesthetic) pleasure at the heart of a public philosophising as a general form of life – in the habitus of joyful tinkering.