The Empty Chair: Education in an Ethic of Hospitality

Abstract

Education is, at all levels and in all forms, guided by ideas about the good life.Values such as independence, honesty, patience, fairness, courage, and care areincluded in mission statements of schools and universities, and taught implicitly orexplicitly in educational settings ranging from the science lab to the soccer field. Inother words, the purpose of the various forms of education is to foster thedevelopment of certain kinds of “ethical subjects.”In the past several decades, ideas about decentering the subject (or self) haveemerged. Many contemporary (especially Continental) philosophers today workfrom the premise that the individual subject that was so solidly at the center inmodernist philosophy, has been definitively dethroned. However, the ethical frame-works that most commonly guide educational practice — autonomy, virtue, and care— still rely on this modernist conception of the subject. While ethics of autonomyand virtue focus on the ethical subject, and the ethic of care focuses on the ethicalrelationship between subject and other, none of these three frameworks go as far asto decenter the subject in the way that new ideas about the subject have done.This essay examines in greater detail this gap between the dominant ethicalframeworks for education and ideas about subjectivity, and proposes an ethic ofhospitality as a framework that assumes a decentered subjectivity. First, I providea brief overview of the ethics of autonomy, virtue, and care and highlight theconception of the subject that informs each of them. Second, I outline somephilosophical critiques of the subject, as well as misunderstandings about the“death” of the subject. It should then be clear that there is a tension between newideas about subjectivity and the ethical frameworks of autonomy, virtue, and care.Finally, I propose an ethic of hospitality and make suggestions for how this ethicmight inform educational practice.T