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Journal of Moral Education

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Ethics before Equality: moral education after Levinas

Paul Standish Online Publication Date: 01 December 2001 To cite this Article: Standish, Paul , (2001) 'Ethics before Equality: moral education after Levinas', Journal of Moral Education, 30:4, 339 - 347 To link to this article: DOI: 10.1080/03057240120094832 URL: http://dx.doi.org/10.1080/03057240120094832

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Journal of Moral Education, Vol. 30, No. 4, 2001

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Ethics before Equality: moral education after Levinas

PAUL STANDISH
University of Dundee, Scotland, UK

Emptiness, indeed nihilism, is a characteristic of so much contemporary discourse regarding morality and moral education. This is found in facile notions of teaching right and wrong but also in the prevalence of rights-talk, with its sacrosanct assumptions about equality. This article examines this discourse in the light of Levinas account of the primacy of ethicsof my absolute responsibility in the face of the other, of the asymmetry of my relation to the other. It seeks an account of receptivity that releases the ethical from the limitations of moral reasoning.
ABSTRACT

I. Emptiness, indeed nihilism, is a characteristic of so much contemporary discourse regarding morality and moral education. This is found in facile notions of teaching right and wrong [1]. It is apparent in a common understanding of values and of values education. It is evident in the prevalence of rights-talk, with its sacrosanct assumptions about equality. It is there in the mantra of standards [2]. Why should I call this nihilism, why see it as a kind of emptiness? Because these different ways of thinking about moral education or about matters related to it have in common a certain conception of human being, of subject-object relations, in which values are grafted onto, or otherwise attached to, an original subjectivity. I shall explain this more fully in terms of the targets of my argument below. This article examines this contemporary discourse in the light of remarks of Jean-Francois Lyotard and, especially, of Emmanuel Levinas. I want to call upon Levinas account of the primacy of ethicsof my absolute responsibility in the face of the other, of the asymmetry of my relation to the otherin order not only to move beyond the carping that I might otherwise be accused of here, but also to adumbrate an idea of human being that might show the potential of such a shift in thinking. This invokes of sense of the importance of receptivity, a receptivity that releases the ethical from the limitations of moral reasoning (where the central gure is the autonomous free agent) but that also goes well beyond the terms of current accounts of virtue ethics [3]. The targets of my argument manifest problems of two related forms. To begin with there is the tendency to see the ethical as a segment of human experience that
ISSN 0305-7240 print; ISSN 1465-3877 online/01/040339-10 2001 Journal of Moral Education Ltd DOI: 10.1080/03057240120094832

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can leave more or less untouched other segments. Ethics is a part-time business: it is the stuff of dilemmasof earnest discussions on radio shows or classroom debatescovering such issues as abortion, capital punishment, euthanasia, etc. (Note incidentally the pretentiousness that such discussions sometimes encourage. Many teachers of adolescents will be familiar with the way that discussions of such issues can take on an air of unreality: it is perhaps a combination of the relative remoteness of these matters from the lived experience of most students, the abstract nature of the discussion, and peer group pressure that inclines many students to adopt attitudes for debate that may have little bearing on the rest of their lives. Note also the potential trivialisation of these matters resulting from commercial or media in uencefor example, in such television shows as Oprah, or in a game such as Scruples where players have to select from multiple choice options concerning such matters as delityWhat would you do if ?.) The segmental character of ethics is seen, although the vocabulary swirls around unstably, where people say such things as Surely you shouldnt bring religion into politics! Or politics into sport. Or politics into religion. Or morality into business or professional practice and so on. There goes with this a tacit idealisation of objectivity as freedom from value, where the accusing tone of Arent you bringing values into this? or You shouldnt be judgemental is evidence of a kind of subjectivism: to wit, the only values there can be are ones that are personal; and no one is in a position to pass judgement on the values of another. Of course, the motivation behind these ways of thinking is not dif cult to see when one considers the various illegitimate ways in which values have been imposed on people, but this does not make such a position any more defensible or coherent. The related set of problems here concerns the assumption that human beings are fundamentally isolated individuals in quasi-contractual relationship with society (that is, with others). Such individuals have needs and desires, and these are, other things being equal, to be satis ed. Indeed it is the authenticity of my feelings that gives authority to my judgementsso you are in no position to judge me! Such individuals also have rights, which can be (often rightly) the occasion of much clamour, and responsibilities, which have recently been the source of rather more concern. But responsibilities here take off, as it were, from their logical correlation with rights. Both are typically focused on relatively speci c matters, such that they could, for example, be entered in a list (These are your rights ). It goes without saying that such rights are (again rightly) central to the concerns of equal opportunities policies. If some of what is described here is less typical of the thinking of those engaged directly in aspects of moral education but rather a backdrop of popular thinking against which such education takes place, it should not be supposed that (moral) philosophy has itself been free from these ways of thought. The picture of the individual in a contractual relationship with others is clearly derived in part from Thomas Hobbes, and it continues to be a salient feature of the moral philosophy of the modern (Anglophone) world. Similarly, the modern sense of ourselves as beings with inner depths, attunement to which is the requirement of authenticity and reference to which is a source of authority, derives most clearly from Rousseau. A

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critical factor in Rousseaus profound and revolutionary thought is the way that this relocation of authority in the inner self lays the way, to our immense bene t, for a principle of equality, and indirectly, and to our cost, for the subjectivism mentioned above. It is in this light that the attempt in phenomenology to understand things in terms of how they come to appear (to us as human beings) reinforces what has become the presumption in favour of the primacy of ontology over ethics, so that, the danger is, ethics comes in somehow after the event. It is this too that must be opposed. To be or not to be is not the question: this can only be a distraction from the ghost that rumbles under the stage, the ghost to whom we are inevitably, inescapably, always obligated[4]. Levinas points to a generalised responsibility. In what follows I want to isolate two quotations, from Lyotard and from Levinas, and to explore the ways that these might unsettle the kinds of views considered above. II. In Postmodern Fables Lyotard imagines the effects of globalisation in terms of a megalopolis that spans the globe, a megalopolis where all have been absorbed into an endless suburbia, a social structure with no other. In this dystopia, needs are satis ed, rights are exercised, and, with phone-ins or focus groups answering to all occasions, everyones views can be expressed. All are represented. But, Lyotard urges us to see, a second existence of privacy, silenceof a silence and privacy beyond the scope of representationmust be prior to the assertion of rights. A background silence is necessary for rights to be articulated: If humanity does not preserve the inhuman region in which we can meet this or that which completely escapes the exercise of rights, we do not merit the rights that we have been recognized. Why would we have the right to expression if we had nothing to say but the already said? and how can we have any chance of nding how to say what we know not how to say if we do not listen at all to the silence of the other within? The silence is an exception to the reciprocity of rights, but it is its legitimation. The absolute right of the second existence must be well recognized, since it is that which gives the right to rights. But as it escapes rights, it must always be content with an amnesty [5] (Lyotard, 1997, 1993, pp. 121122). Lyotard can speak favourably of the inhuman here because the idea of the human is loaded with precisely those (western) commitments to the individual, to rights, to representation, and to the metaphysics of presence that run through the problems identi ed at the beginning of this article. The human, thus understood, is not a context free category or essence but a construct of those ways of thinking and those values delineated abovewith all their shortcomings. Let us consider in relation to this quotation a remark by Levinas, from some 30 years before, from Totality and In nity. In Levinas usage, happiness is to be contrasted with desire in that happiness relates to needs and wants that can be

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satis edin other words to the more or less naturalistic ethics that is familiar in the viewpoints being criticised here (the realm of politics, as Levinas sometimes puts this); desire, in contrast, relates to an aspiration to what is in nitely higher and beyond reach but which can constantly beckon (the realm of the religious): the distance that separates happiness from desire separates politics from religion. Politics tends toward reciprocal recognition, that is, toward equality; it ensures happiness. And political law concludes and sanctions the struggle for recognition. Religion is Desire and not struggle for recognition. It is the surplus possible in a society of equals, that of glorious humility, responsibility, and sacri ce, which are the condition for equality itself (Levinas, 1969, 1961, p. 64). Neither Lyotard nor Levinas is against rights, it must be clear; neither is against equality. Their concern is rather with what is under threat where the framework of values of which they are typical holds sway. In their remarks here, there is a symmetry in the phrasing that I want to draw attention to. The silence is an exception to the reciprocity of rights, but it is its legitimation, writes Lyotard. The absolute right of the second existence must be well recognized, since it is that which gives the right to rights (italics added). For Levinas, It is the surplus possible in a society of equals, that of glorious humility, responsibility, and sacri ce, which are the condition for equality itself (italics added). Levinas wants to overturn the primacy of ontology, even where this is conceived in terms that overcome the subjectobject dichotomy (in Heidegger, for example). He wants to do this by showing that fundamental to our being, indeed prior to our being, is our responsibility to the Other [6]. Paradigmatically, in Levinas, this is a responsibility to other people, though we shall consider shortly how far this can be extended to a generalised responsibility towards other living things and towards non-living things. Levinas characterises this responsibility in terms of the contrast between our awareness of things through sensible experience and the epiphany of a face. Where sensible experience is our starting point, it is understandable that we can construct a story of that experience in terms of the receiving of data, the stimulation of affect, and the objecti cation of the world as we gradually grasp the objects in it. In contrast, when confronted with the face I see something that necessarily goes beyond anything my senses can determine. For what I see to be a face something must be revealed of the interiority of the Otherperhaps no more than that interiority is there. That interiority always exceeds any possibility of knowing that I may have. Moreover, for the face to be a face, it must reveal a being whose ultimate vulnerability and need puts me always in a position of obligation. This, Levinas will claim, is a responsibility that will deepen the more that I answer to it; and this is wholly other to any calculus of want and satisfaction, of need and ful lment. Levinas famously quotes The Brothers Karamazov: Each of us is guilty before everyone for everyone, and I more than the others. Before the Other I am individuated in my obligationthis is not something I can pass up or pass onand before the Other my obligation is absolute. As John Llewelyn puts this, Ethical Desire is not the correlate of satisfaction. It is Absolute relation that disturbs all

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correlation, bad conscience that provokes consciousness, the itch of the other under my skin. Every apology pro vita mea is ever increasingly lame (Llewelyn, 2000, pp. 121122). All this can seem wildly implausible, or hyperbolic to say the least. But might it not give us pause to consider how far this very sense of implausibility is itself the product of our being steeped in those assumptions of modernity that are at issue here, assumptions so deep that we do not notice them? How dif cult it is for us to think of the world other than in terms of inert matter to which we subsequently attach value, and how dif cult for many not to think that it might be most rational to view others initially in terms of the cold light of objectivity, before particular obligations and attachments are taken into account! There is, perhaps, a further factor that can make more plausible the evocation of the face. In developmental terms, is not the growing awareness of the face of the mother (the rst Other) crucial for the childs becoming a person, and for the subsequent awareness of things? The mothers face is present to the child not merely as a source of sensations but as an interiority the nature of which is quintessentially the call to the child for response and responsibility. (It is relevant here, surely, that the childs initial awareness of things in the world, which partly takes off from this awareness of the mother, is animistic.) Levinas is emphatic that the Other teaches me, and this teaching involves the sense of this unscalable height and mysterious depth, and of the Other as both holy and humble. The face, as interrogative, presents itself to me in discourse. It is to this that I now turn. III. Let us say: I am as nothing before the Other. The height or the distance that confronts me is in nite, beyond measure. Is this not scandalous to modernity? To be condemned surely as poetic licence? (It is this sense of scandal that Kierkegaard wanted to excite.) In that scandalised reaction are there not grounds once again for a suspicion of the repressions of modernitys all-too-rational thought? And is not the suspicion of the poetic [7] suggestive of a language too preoccupied with the representational and the indicative, a language where active and passive, subject and object, transitive and intransitive are too neatly dichotomised? In an earlier book that also pursues Levinassian themes, John Llewelyn explores the signi cance of the disappearance of the middle voiced forms of verbs, as found, for example, in Ancient Greek, verbs that are something between the active and the passive (Llewellyn, 1991). Thus, the active Luei ton hippon He unties the horse.

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is to be contrasted with the middle-voiced Luetai ton hippon He unties the horse and in doing so affects himself.

Of course, the clumsy and inadequate nature of this second translation very much proves the point: that there is something lacking or suppressed in the

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dominant forms of our language. Perhaps the curious interchangeability of the phrases she married him and she got married to him and he married her, with their merging of the active and passive, is partially suggestive of what is at stake here. While our own conception of language is dominated by the indicative mood, we might ponder forms of language that defy categorisation as indicative or interrogative or subjunctive, or that seemingly give greater prominence to a different mood. (Llewelyn connects the imagination, so crucial in our ethical lives, with the subjunctive mood especiallythe imagination that ponders what may be, and that thinks perhaps: let it be so.) Can we think of the childs proto-language or rst words as being primarily subjunctive in mood? Or think of the language of other tribes as giving greater priority to the subjunctive? Then is the presumption in favour of the indicative in our own language perhaps something that may inhibit that exercise of the imagination and sti e our ethical lives? Llewelyn regrets that Levinas is so struck by the need to do justice to the human being that he fails to do justice to the non-human being. Yet there is in ordinary lives the potential to relate to things in richly ethical ways, a potential that is covered over by our ways of speaking and our inhibition of a certain kind of imagination. Llewelyn is attracted to an idea that might be drawn from Heidegger of a responsibility that is incumbent on us in our relationship to the non-human. Such a responsibility is not something that I can sign up to by recognising, for instance, the arguments of the Green Party; it is not wholly or even primarily a matter of choice. Rather it needs to be understood in terms of the mutual appropriation of man and Being, in Heideggers termsof the way the world comes to be not as the object of scienti c research but as the place of dwelling (from which a scienti c understanding can only be a subsequent abstraction). Perhaps that childs proto-language or the language of the primitive tribe more vividly realises this; and perhaps, as Wittgenstein recognised, this insight is constantly vulnerable to misunderstanding when it is exposed to the spectatorial scrutiny of the western world (see, for example, Wittgenstein, 1979). In a lyrical, dif cult, richly allusive passage, the source and sense of which I elaborate below, Llewelyn gestures towards the Heideggarian and poststructuralist ideas in play here. Initially, let these words speak for themselves: The ordinary mortal shares with the poet who is struck by Apollo and whose eye too many is dazzled by the re of the sky the responsibility of loyally remembering the extraordinariness of ordinary beings, whether they be human beings or not: the jug and the bench, the footbridge and the plough tree and pond too brook and hill heron and roe deer, horse and bull mirror and clasp, book and picture, crown and cross, where the book may be the Book or may not, its word the word of the prophet or the word of the poet, where the cross may be the cross of the Word, of the Trinity, or may not, because the cross of the word Being, the quaternity, @ ? and the burden of ontological responsibility it carries with it, are prior to theistic and atheistic faith as well as to rational onto-theology and ontoatheology (Llewelyn, 1991, p. 141). The suspicion of the poetic, which was recognised at the beginning of this section,

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is shown here to have consequences that affect our ordinary livesand that is, let us make no mistake, the morality of our ordinary lives. But the sensibility or response in question here has less to do with a heightened sense of being than with the responsibility of remembering the extraordinariness of ordinary thingsof their otherness to us and ultimate unfathomability even as they are part of our ordinary world. This goes beyond, and perhaps against Levinas, in that this loyal remembering is directed towards things whether they be human beings or not. These particular thingsthe jug and the bench Llewelyn nds in the closing paragraphs of Heideggers essay The Thing (in Heidegger, 1971). Such things are discovered, Heidegger shows us, not as items among the innumerable objects in the world, or amid the measureless mass of men as living beings. They depend upon a dwelling with things. This dwelling is characterised by a reverence for things that is poetic in kind, where the poetic implies something both about language itself (and the dangers of an excessive emphasis on the indicative or representational), and about the poeisis of bringing things forth into being. With Heideggers turn from the project of fundamental ontology, the direct description of being [8], the word Being is crossed through with two intersecting diagonal lines. The notion of being is displaced by the idea of the fourfold of earth, sky, gods and mortalsthe quaternity mentioned in this passage, that is, a quaternity graphically gestured by the four points of this cross. These are the dimensions of the world in which our lives are lived out. They are dimensions without which things as things cannot be understood. For what is (something so simple as) a jug? Is it a three dimensional object, inert matter, of a certain weight and shape? In one sense there is no doubt, of course, that it is. But this is how the jug is understood in abstraction, by way of a reduction of language that can, if it is imagined to be somehow fundamental, obscure more than it reveals. This is not how the jug is understood in the context of lived experience. For then the jug holds the water that slakes the thirst after the days work; it pours the wine shared at the family meal. The jug focuses a practice in such a way that what it means must be something more than the physical description offered above can possibly convey: that physical description effects a kind of etiolation of the thing. What the jug means, the way it is understood, is tied to the practices of which it is a part, in all their fourfold richness. In contrast to the reductiveness that threatens to deny this richness, the language of poet and prophet, in proximity here, suggests a way of thinking beyond rational ontology or rational theology, beyond also the idolatrous dei cation of Being, in that a responsibility is realised to what cannot be directly named or represented: this is a responsibility to what may be, to a way of being that is always still to come. IV. One of the quotations with which Levinas prefaces Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence (1981, 1978) is the remark of Pascal: That is my place in the sun. That is how the usurpation of the whole world began (Pascals Pensees, 112). Ethical naturalism, the satisfaction of need and want, is here implied to lead to an avaricious or grasping relation to the Other. Its usurpation takes over the space in which the

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sense of mystery and reverence might be felt, and this is effected through its presumption that that space is reckonable and graspable. The emptiness of so much of our language of morality and moral education is to be understood in this way. In part it may be true that these problems are to be associated with the absence of a religious ethos in the common school, but it would be wrong to see them simply in those terms, or to imagine that the religious school is necessarily free from these vices. If the secular school makes the assumption that religion is an optional extra, this is as fallacious as the conception of ethics as part-time. There are, on the strength of these arguments, implications for classes in moral education but it may be, it surely is the case, that what would constitute the best moral education would necessarily exceed such bounds. Only a brief indication of what this might entail is possible here. The sense of unattainable height and the sense of mystery that are so strongly evident throughout Levinas work point to a kind of perfectionist education. Just as my attempt to answer to my obligation to the Other only deepens that obligation, so too a student inspired by the sense of what is in nitely high might nd that her deepening knowledge of a subject only intensi es her aspiration, her desire. The point here is not just the character that this might give to the academic life but rather its total de ance of attempts ultimately to categorise and contain. It is what this models for the learner. We can see behind this perhaps some sense of the subjunctivity that subtends our practices and thoughts, where to do or think anything at all we must rst let things be (this as this and that as that), and let them be in certain relations and practices that are the unfounded conditions of our lives [9]. The precious fragility of this for ethics! Education at its best (indeed, as properly understood, I would like to say) must be suggestive of the good life and of the compelling and absolute obligation that this imposes on us. Its vision must be such as to expose the limitations of performativity (of clear objectives that must be hit, of competencies to be attained, ef ciently and effectively), where things are geared ultimately to secure my (or someones) place in the sun. Think for a moment what that models for the learner! Placing ethics before equality, education must expose the limits of totality through its sense of in nite responsibility. Correspondence: Dr Paul Standish, Educational Studies, University of Dundee DD1 4HN, Scotland, UK; Tel: (0)1382 345138; Fax: (0)1382 344105; E-mail:p.standish@dundee.ac.uk
NOTES [1] Such notions are found in the tendency to blame teachers for whatever misdemeanours of the young have most recently captured the attention of the popular media. Sometimes such attitudes are exploited by politicians; sometimes they are evident in educational policy. This aspect of contemporary conceptions of moral education is examined in Smith and Standish, 1997. [2] The term standards often functions to stop debate rather than as its tting subject. The emotive force that the term currently commands, and the hollowness that this masks, is addressed in Blake et al., 2000. [3] Examples in modern educational theory of the emphasis on moral reasoning are to be found in the restatement of liberal education in the work of R.S. Peters, Paul Hirst, R.F. Dearden and John

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[4]

[5]

[6]

[7]

[8]

[9]

Wilson, and of course in the work of Lawrence Kohlberg. Their emphasis on the centrality of the value of rational autonomy has been a main preoccupation of a certain strand of contemporary moral philosophy. An energetic advocate of virtue ethics in education is David Carr, while Carol Gilligans response to Kohlberg is also to be understood very much in these terms. This is the ghost of Hamlets father, whose murder he is obligated to avenge. The sound Hamlet hears comes from below the stage on which he stands, the stage which, in his preoccupation with the nature of his being, with What a piece of work is man ?, he imagines to be the ground of his being. Obligation is prior to being. The amnesty here should perhaps be understood as an amnesty from litigations. By litigations Lyotard means the application of rules of judgement in which what is being judged is compelled to submit to the terms of those rules. Of course, such litigations are a normal part of our lives, and it could hardly be otherwise. Lyotard is concerned to show ways in which such application can, however, do violence to what is being judged by forcing it into terms that do not do justice to its nature. The capitalisation of Other denotes a relationship of a different order from the kind of otherness that is de nitional of items in a categorisation. This Other is different from me not in virtue of any perceivable characteristic or quality but because of its invisible interiority. The suspicion of the poetic has ancient roots. It is there in Platos banishment of the arts, though this is complicated by deep and surely self-conscious irony given the literary character of Platos own writing. It is there in modern ideals of objectivity, where language is conceived as a potentially pure instrument of communication. To clairfy the terminology here, Heideggers concern in his earlier work, in Being and Time especially, is with Sein rather than Seindes, which is typically represented by translators in terms of a contrast between Being and beings. That is to say, he is concerned not with the properties of things, with what they are like, but with the nature of their being, with what it is to be. The phrase let things be echoes Heideggers Gelassenheit (see Heidegger, 1966), but what is at stake here is subtly different. This implies no necessary traditionalism or conservatism, still less a resignedness to what cannot be changed. It does acknowledge the way in which our deliberations always rely on a background that can only ever be examined piecemeal. That background is one of provisionality, of taking things this way or that through our accustomed practices. It could never be the scene of foundational activity. It is understood appropriately in terms of subjunctivity.

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REFERENCES BLAKE , N., SMEYERS , P., SMITH, R. & STANDISH , P. (2000) Education in an Age of Nihilism (London, RoutledgeFalmer). H EIDEGGER , M. (1996) Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. J.M. ANDERSON & E.H. FREUND (New York, Harper & Row). H EIDEGGER , M. (1971) Poetry, Language, Thought, trans. A. HOFSTADTER (New York and London, Harper & Row). LEVINAS , E. (1969, 1961) Totality and In nity: an essay on exteriority, trans. A. LINGIS (Pittsburgh, PA, Duquesne University Press). LEVINAS , E. (1981, 1978) Otherwise than Being or Beyond Essence, trans. A. LINGIS (Pittsburgh, PA, Duquesne University Press). LLEWELYN , J. (1991) The Middle Voice of Ecological Conscience: a chiasmic reading of responsibility in the neighbourhood of Levinas, Heidegger and Others (London, Macmillan). LLEWELYN , J. (2000) The HypoCritical Imagination: between Kant and Levinas (London and New York, Routledge). LYOTARD, J.-F. (1997, 1993) Postmodern Fables, trans. G. VAN DEN ABBEELE (Minneapolis and London, University of Minnesota Press). SMITH, R. & STANDISH, P. (Eds) (1997) Teaching Right and Wrong: moral education in the balance (Stoke-on-Trent, Trentham Books). WITTGENSTEIN , L. (1979) Remarks on Frazers Golden Bough, RUSH RHEES (Ed.), trans. A.C. MILES , revised by RUSH RHEES (Doncaster, S. Yorks, The Brynmill Press).