Teaching is not a species of a genus called domination, a hegemony at work within a totality, but is the presence of infinity breaking the closed circle of a totality.
Emmanuel Levinas (1969)
Teaching should be emancipatory – not predatory!
Nel Noddings
American public education is in a state of siege. Constant vitriolic assaults from the neo-conservatives and the religious right have educators at all levels running for cover while trying to comply with outrageous demands that are necessarily doomed from their inception. In this paper I will adopt an ethical stance described by Emmanuel Levinas across his long and productive career, one that focuses on three fundamental concepts. First, Levinas argues that ethics is the “first language,” one that is present prior to any other language. Secondly, ethical language is based on the relation of the self (ego) to the absolute Other (infinity). That the self is in an aysemetrical relationship with the other, one that approximates an aysemetrical relationship with the Other. The relationships of self and other together comprise a totality (existential time); that they are accommodated by what Levinas calls the face-to-face in which language is the medium of the encounter. Finally, it is through the aysemetrical responsibility of the self for the other that makes the self responsible for even the responsibility of the other that the ethical encounter is most visible (Levinas, 1969, 1994, 1996, 1997).
I contend that the assault on education from the neo-conservatives and religious right fails to meet the ethical concerns outlined by Levinas and, as such, are both unethical and immoral at the core. Levinasian ethics require a conversation, a face-to-face exchange. This exchange necessitates the self taking responsibility for the other in an aysemetrical, yet, recipricol relationship. Without the reciprocity embedded within the asymetery the exchange is onesided and reductionist, reducing the other into the same; a necessarily violent, negative exchange. I maintain that the neo-conservative and religious right assaults on public education are exchanges without reciprocity, that, while maintaining an aysemetrical quality, the asymetry is not based on responsibility for the other but, rather, it is bound up in issues of power, control and reductionist politics.
The asymetry of the ethical relationship is recipricol in the sense that the other is also a self and has the same responsibilities toward his or her other as the same as the “I” has for its other. In other words, each human being as self is responsible for the well-being and even the very life of the other even at peril to the life of the self itself. The nature of the responsibility to care for the stranger and the orphan, even at significant risk to the self, is dependent on an acceptance of and a relationship with the Other—the absolute Other—that resides outside of the totality of the self and other. While the relationship of the self to the other has its foundation in situated space and time, the relationship of the self to the Other is external to space and time. It is a relationship that cannot be described, objectified or thematized in any phenomenological sense. The relationship to the Other is an unthought, perhaps unthinkable, thought, one that cannot be formulated because it is outside the totality that is comprehendable. Levinas understands the Other to be the Infinite, that which cannot be comprehended, yet the Other provides a model for the self-other ethical relationship.
No comments:
Post a Comment