‘Ethics is an Optics’: Ethical Practicality and the Exposure of Teaching

Abstract

The importance of Levinas's philosophy for education has been widely discussed. In ‘Levinas: Ethics or Mystification?’ however, Alistair Miller questions whether Levinas's work is of value at all, raising doubts about whether his philosophy can, in any way, be helpful when it comes to practical ethical decision-making, especially within education. Levinas's ethics, he argues, in the light of its lack of rational argument, amounts only to poetic imagery and mystical incantation. The purpose of this paper is to read Levinas in relation to education against this indictment by Miller. This paper proceeds by investigating the basis of Miller's arguments, in the light of exegesis of relevant aspects of Levinas's work. My purpose is not the positing of a new system or the formulation of systematic ideas of ethics but rather achieving an understanding of human experience, especially in contexts of teaching and learning, under a different, more accurate description. In doing so I attempt to show that Levinas's philosophy indeed provides a ground for ethics—that is, a means of understanding the practicality of ethics differently, beyond systematic approaches. In the last section, where education is discussed more directly, ethics will be seen as its very condition.