On Not Knowing the Other, or Learning from Levinas

Abstract

What has recently been coined the ethical turn in philosophy — and there is certainly evidence of this turn in educational theory as well — has been noticeably inflected by an emerging interest in the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas, who is described by one literary critic as “offering the gift of ethicity.” This gift is marked by Levinas’s attention to the category of the Other as a necessary condition for ethical interaction and his insistence upon an ego-less and non-conscious passivity in relation to being responsible for that Other. Ethics, in his view, is rendered less in terms of consciousness and agency, which are the usual hallmarks of moral theory and education, and more on a “pre-originary” susceptibility and openness to Otherness.

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