Levinas & Education

At The Intersection of Faith and Reason

The Priority of Ethics Over Ontology, the Issue of Forgiveness and Education

Levinas’s Face-to-Face EthicsMarianna Papastephanou

FACE-TO-FACE ETHICS AND EDUCATIONAL THEORY

Philosophers of education want to enlarge educational conceptual horizons through new philosophical encounters.

It is proposed that the picture of schooling will be composed by practical and institutional demands for performativity and competitiveness.

Picture of Liberalist Education:

The young will be skilled an allotted to various social and professional spaces. They will be ready to fight for survival, for pleasure and lastly for their own interest.

However, this picture of liberalist education is sometimes more complex than the one mentioned.

New philosophical positions provide conceptual tools or standpoints for:

criticizing the direction education has taken.

For the promotion of alternative ideal of self and society.

Levinas also considers the prevailing construal of education as a project of producing rational autonomous subjects.

Face – To –Face ethics

This may be one of the best alternatives to the flat liberalist dealings with morality.

This point in itself suffers from problems which eventually solidify rather than shake the predominance of performativity in education.

When education is about the ethical relation, we enrich our perspective with Levinasian insights.

When the issue is about transmitting values, debating practices and imparting knowledge, we leave educational notions of experience, participation and critical thinking untouched.

The Priority of Ethics Over Ontology

Levinas’ face-to-face ethics turns to an unconditional openness and asymmetrical ethical responsibility to change dictated by nothing other than change itself.

All moral foundationalism derived from notions of duty, rationalist, convention and contract are considered external and even harmful to the pure ethical command of the Face.

All change is brought into correlation with a sovereign subject, a positive entity that categorizes difference imposing criteria and setting self-serving conditions.

*ontology – the branch of metaphysics which studies the nature of being

“to be good is a deficit, waste and foolishness in a being; to be good is excellent and elevation beyond being’’

This quote is phenomenological and not a sociological statement – it does not aspire to describe what holds in certain social configurations at a specific historical period.

It refers to a feature that characterizes being.

Liberalist theory and society hold such a (mis)conception of goodness, they appear to be the true mirroring of ontology, the accurate mapping of being.

From his initial prioritization of ethics over ontology, Levinas concludes that there can be pity, compassion, pardon and order in the world.

Statements of this kind can make sense ‘’only when responsibility is seen to precede subjectivity’’.

Responsibility differs to subjectivity, since the latter is always ready to violent to otherness.

Ontology is qualitatively different from ethics, and the latter must be granted priority over it.

Forgiveness in a Levinasian context appears as an act of absolute and unconditional goodness, a pure absolution or suspension of judgement passed on the other.

In a school setting, some might think such a break with ontology would entail teacher-pupil model relation of lenience and generosity, a reforming rather than a punitive stance toward the young.

Levinas’ position on forgiveness is far more complex than the fashionable reading of it as an unconditional act, and far more educationally fertile than the views which concentrate on the wronged who grant forgiveness.

Levinas and the Issue of Forgiveness

Levinas discusses two kinds of forgiveness: one which involves the wrong-doer and the other law violations against other people.

Pardon is not understood as something one learns simply to grant oneself and other, but as a profound occurrence of ethical and existential contemplation on the part of a wrongdoer.

Pardon often becomes a performed duty which restored the subject and staves off risks, thus serving conflict resolution and the good function of social order.

Educating the young to forgive and ask for forgiveness may appear as a useful tool of expedience for adaptation and survival in the world.

How would a Levinasian teacher react to a request to forgive a fault?

Assuming true forgiveness is an unconditional act of ethics freed from ontology and epistemology, who the wrongdoer is should not be an issue.

Pure exteriority is suspended and the inwardness of the other is revealed not in dialogue but apocalyptically in a dream.

The master who does not forgive the pupil, and in this way refuses the entanglement and influence of dialogue, seems to hold an assumption of intrinsically evil behavior of the wrongdoer which cannot be eradicated through the educational relationship itself.

Several questions arise regarding why the possibility of the act of refusing forgiveness could have a reforming effect on the pupil.

Levinas sets two conditions for the granting of pardon – two conditions for forgiveness;

the good will of the offended party and;

the full awareness of the offender.

Conclusion

Levinas’ ethics challenges some dominant liberalist assumptions about subjectivity and its cultivation in schools.

Analysis of human lived experiences can offer educational discourse an unprecedented depth.

Conclusion

Liberalism appears fairly appropriate to deal with matters which fall in the ontological province.

Reciprocity, criteria and economy are some notions which require reformulation and examination from a standpoint which is critical but not totally dismissive of liberalism.

Conclusion

Overall, Levinas has shown educators that ethics does not begin in the warm security of prearranged settings of law, order and predictability of the others’ moves, but in the unilateral subjection of the I to the command of the other.

Both positions have risks but to Levinas, the risk of the latter is beautiful. This is a beautiful risk that thinking has yet to take.