A Levinasian Ethics for Education's Commonplaces

Between Calling and Inspiration

C. Joldersma

• Publisher: Palgrave Pivot
• Year: 2014
• ISBN:
  9781137415493
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education Administration

Joldersma applies Levinas's ethics systematically to the commonplaces of education - teaching, learning, curriculum, and institutions - and elucidates the role of justice and responsibility and the meaning of calling and inspiration in education.

1

Calling and Inspiration

Abstract: This chapter develops Levinas’s idea of the ethical as the structural call to responsibility for the other’s good. I first develop an idea of transcendence, especially as relates to what I term ‘time immemorial’ and ‘time unforeseen.’ I concretize this by elaborating two types of indirect experiences, one that I name call and the other that I refer to as inspiration. My goal is to interpret education’s commonplaces in light of these two experiences. I argue that these form the structural conditions of those commonplaces, namely, being called to normative responsibility and being inspired with a hope that motivates to action. The idea of a regulative function uncovers the ethical orientation that gives rise to education.

Keywords: calling, ethics, hope, normativity, transcendence

Joldersma, Clarence W. A Levinasian Ethics for Education’s Commonplaces: Between Calling and Inspiration. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2014. DOI: 10.1057/9781137415493.0005.

The stated purpose of formal schooling has changed over time. Earlier, many argued that its role was to develop citizens who could actively participate in democratic society or to provide economic opportunities for upward mobility. In the past thirty years, the stated purpose has shifted to efficiently creating workers for the global economy. There are myriads of structural features associated with current formal schooling. Teaching is almost always done in the context of large groups of students, whose differences are only indirectly acknowledged and who are treated as if they were virtually identical. Learning takes place in the context of other learners who are attempting to learn the same thing at the same time. The curriculum is most often organized around subjects, units roughly based on academic disciplines or on material thought to be important for entry into those disciplines. Formal assessment is ubiquitous in institutionalized schooling, which currently has a heavy emphasis on high-stakes standardized testing.

The recent era of high-stakes testing can rightly be called an age of measurement (Biesta, 2010). In this interpretation, the purpose of schooling is translated into quantifiable outcomes, where a school’s primary purpose is considered to be ensuring that the majority of students reach proficiency in various basic subjects as measured on standardized tests. On this model, learning is equated with short-term acquisition of testable basic skills and knowledge, and teaching is depicted as ensuring that such skills and information be learned. The curriculum is the material constituting the content of such learning and teaching. And schooling’s institutional structure is modeled as formal supervision, including hierarchical lines of accountability, for such teaching and learning. The schooling mechanism itself is thought to be the proper and primary vehicle to deliver ‘shovel ready’ workers for a national economy to compete in a global context.

I aim to unsettle this understanding of schooling. I believe this current orientation has lost its educational moorings. My goal is to reorient schooling by suggesting it needs to be more explicitly animated by an ethical undercurrent—only then will education emerge. For this, I would like to use Emmanuel Levinas’s understanding of ethics, something I develop in some detail in this chapter. I first explore the idea of transcendence, and then develop the ideas of calling and inspiration. These concepts will be used in the subsequent chapters.

Transcendence

The ethical is a call to responsibility and an inspiration to hope. Both of these reorient the self-centered preoccupation of striving to live. In the context of society, the ethical is felt as something implicit that regulates social life. The idea of a regulative function uncovers an ethical normativity and animation that relativizes, if not undermines, the centrality of the self-centered character of one’s striving to live.

To sketch this out more fully requires a discussion about transcendence. Although not without some risk, I will employ the idea of transcendent condition throughout the book. Transcendence is an incoming movement from some ‘beyond,’ something that shows up as an “affective disruption” within one’s subjectivity (Bergo, 2005, pp. 142–143). Transcendence is a dynamic, directional relation between me and something that is not me, where something outside oneself is experienced as a disruption within. The disruptive movement is felt simultaneously within and outside, an experience of something coming in while simultaneously being pulled toward it, something strange that is, nevertheless, deeply personal.

What is transcendent is not easily captured, either conceptually or experientially, as we experience transcendence indirectly. Bergo’s idea of affective disruption is a good term for its indirect character. Affective disruption shows up particularly in two phenomena: normativity and hope. By normative I mean, rather than usual or average, the experience of an ought—how we ought to live. From this vantage point, transcendence is experienced as something incoming that disrupts our satisfaction with status quo practices, experienced as a pull that things ought to be different. But the incoming disruption is simultaneously felt as if it comes from somewhere deep within. It is felt as a personal disruption of satisfaction with the status quo, encountered as a gap between the way things are and how they should be. It is felt as a personal obligation to close that gap while simultaneously feeling that the gap is unbridgeable.

This leads to a second affective disruption, accompanying the first, an experience of hope. Despite the felt roadblocks and obstacles—the experience of unbridgeable gaps between the way things are and how they ought to be—humans, nevertheless, also often experience an inner conviction that maintains a positive outlook, an experience we rightly identify as hope. Hope is the conviction that overcoming impossibilities is possible, despite the odds.

The felt disruptions I’m identifying as normativity and hope are complex affects that implicate each other. Together, the obligation felt as the normative ought is simultaneously sensed as a hope in a real possibility of the impossible. I’m suggesting that normativity and hope each brings in the other while simultaneously keeping the other at a distance. This dynamic of separation and connection indicates a trace of something transcendent.

Normativity and hope are not neutral disruptions. Normativity provides the basis for critique of society. What makes it possible to criticize society’s inequalities is a normative understanding of what the good life ought to be. Normativity is felt as how we ought to live, individually as well as collectively. That oughtness provides the traction for critique of how things are. Normativity functions as a vantage point from which to identify the fault lines in the organization of present society and its institutionalized practices. At the same time, hope provides the necessary traction for attempting to do the concrete work necessary to bring about positive change in society. Hopefulness provides the necessary impetus to move society against its current dynamics of how things are, to how they ought to be. The hopeful dimension thus functions as a counterforce to the causal powers that maintain the status quo. Critique and action form an indissoluble tandem, informed by the affective disruptions of normativity and hope.

The felt disruptions of normativity and hope are experiences of transcendence. But, as transcendence, we experience them only indirectly, as traces. To highlight the ‘trace’ character, I will use the notions of calling and inspiration. We experience ‘the ought’ of normativity as being called to something, and we experience the possibility of hope as being inspired by something. Calling and inspiration are indirect, enigmatic experiences. More specifically, as calling and inspiration, these are experiences of simultaneous presence and absence, as something lacking while something is here, identifying that which is and that which ought to come about. I thus use the terms call and inspiration to mark felt experiences as traces, not fully present.

The enigmatic character of call and inspiration can be brought out more clearly by connecting them to the idea of time. The phenomena of past and future mark something as simultaneously absent and present. I’m connecting call to something experienced in the present as coming from a time past and inspiration to something also experienced in the present, but coming to us from a future time.

Now, this has some risk. Talk of the past can be construed as an actual past, one that used to be present, a known historical period, one that is remembered. And we might infuse that memory with a kind of normativity, namely, as an Edenic time in which all things were right and beautiful, something for which we should rightly pine. Similarly talk of the future can equally be construed as an actual historical period, say, in fifty years, or after the revolution. And we might infuse that actual future as some better time which we can concretely envision. There is, of course, nothing wrong with pining for an actual past time when things were remembered as better. Similarly, there is much to be said for envisioning an actual future in which things will be better. But these are the “present past” and the “present future” (Caputo, 2012). We can use the terms memory and vision as placeholders, in the present, to refer to these two. Although memories are about the past, they are not themselves in the past—they are totally present to us, individually or collectively, in the present. We might say that they are present representations of the past, bringing the past to mind in the present. Similarly, although visions are about the future, they are not in the future—they also are totally present to us in the present. We might say that they are present representations of the future, bringing the future to mind in the present. Or, to put it slightly differently, our present living, here and now, is lived in the context of present memories and present visions. However, these do not depict the enigmatic character of call and inspiration.

The felt call to normativity is something that comes from beyond present memory, something that I will depict with the phrase ‘a time immemorial.’ And I will depict the felt inspiration to hope, as something that comes from beyond present vision, by using the phrase ‘a time unforeseen.’ Both of these are meant to signal something enigmatic, namely, not recoverable into memory and not projectable into vision. When we look back in the past, a time immemorial refers to something located in a time that cannot be brought adequately into present memory. And when we look into the future, a time unforeseeable refers to something located in a time that cannot be adequately envisioned as a concrete future. Together, these two form transcendent conditions for the present.

These conditions, felt as the enigmatic traces of calling and inspiration, animate and orient action here and now, on this globe, in this society, in the twenty-first century. Something calls us here and now not just to sit on our hands waiting around for some perfect society. Something inspires us here and now to work to such ends, even though they are difficult if not next to impossible. I will explore each of these in more detail.

Calling

In this section I will explore more fully the enigmatic experience of transcendence I am naming the call of normativity and connecting it to what I’m calling ethics. By relating normativity to the idea of a time immemorial I will explore the conditioning character of the ethical.

Levinas uses the phrase “a time immemorial” to suggest an opening onto mystery (Levinas, 1987, p. 80). The idea of a time immemorial is a temporal metaphor for the mystery of how and why something exists. By mystery I mean a reality that is not self-sufficient, something that does not carry on its sleeve its own story of existence. The phrase creates conceptual room for the idea that the process of coming-into-existence leaves little cognitive trace in the subsequent newly minted existent. There seems to be no obvious, self-contained, easily found evidence of the movement of coming–into-existence that can be garnered from the resultant order and structures. More strongly, the notion of a time immemorial fundamentally involves the idea of coming to be seemingly out of nowhere (Levinas, 2001a, p. 75).

Levinas suggests that the mystery of existence essentially involves being called—called into being. That is, existence is not first the concrete existent thing itself. The mystery of existence is precisely the fact that a thing, structure, or process—including trees, stars, dogs, atoms, laws, social structures, economic systems—isn’t itself because of itself. It is what it is not from its own internal dynamics, but because it is called into being from elsewhere, external to itself.

The idea of being called in general doesn’t yet fully illuminate this call’s enigmatic character. Lots of calls successfully register through our auditory equipment, ones that we can hear quite clearly, both their character as call and their particular content. Auditory calls in and of themselves are not any more mysterious than visual intuitions. By contrast, there is something essentially enigmatic about the particular call associated with existence, something that cannot be recovered into memory. It is this that the negative prefix ‘a time immemorial’ indicates.

The trope ‘a time immemorial’ is meant to indicate a sequence: first comes the call and then the response. The mystery of existence is a primordial response that comes after the call. From an existent’s perspective, the response is primordial, the first thing, although, as a response, it responds to a call that came before. The mysteriousness of existence is that something answers a call before it seems rightly able to do so. More strongly, central to being an existent is precisely not to exist when answering the call to come into existence. In order to come into existence a call must be answered obediently (Levinas, 1998d, p. 113).

For this reason I’m characterizing the call in temporal terms. The trope ‘obedience before existence’ is a way of speaking about the call from a time immemorial. For a call to be recoverable into memory, the existent must exist at the time of the call; but if the call happens to bring it into existence, then the call exists prior to the possibility of bringing it to mind. Hence the call is from beyond memory. This ‘time’ of the call, the ‘time’ of obedience before existence, can best be indicated rather than explained; the trope ‘time immemorial’ attests to a mystery rather than explaining it. I put ‘time’ in scare quotes to signal that it isn’t temporal in our usual sense, of an actual time in the past that used to be present. The call that can never be brought into presence is an enigma. Only the history of existing reality—that which once was present but slipped into the past—is a candidate for present memories, for being represented in the present as a memory. The very ‘essence’ of obedience before existence is beyond memory, situated in a time immemorial (Levinas, 1998c, p. 97).

Obedience to the call is not an autonomous affirmation, as if it were one option among others freely chosen. Instead, the response is the acquiescence of submission (Levinas, 1998d, p. 122)—the response of affirmation is a kind of passivity. It is the passivity of being affirmative before being ready to reasonably discern what is being submitted to. The passivity of an existent called into being while not being there to hear the call, but which it, nevertheless, affirms, is what Levinas calls pure passivity (Levinas, 1996, p. 89). The passivity of affirmation answers the call from a time immemorial without bringing it into memory, without being able to recover the call into the present.

What is felt as an affective disruption is the trace of the call from a time immemorial. The experienced normative character of the trace is a felt responsibility, one reorienting thoughts and actions, which comes from elsewhere. By coming from a time immemorial, the call’s content is not recoverable into adequate representations; rather, the normativity is experienced as intruding into our subjectivity before we are ready, asking for our affirmation before we are in a position to make adequate judgments about it. This creates the orienting character of normativity, uncovering the ‘ought’ of responsibility prior to our freedom as autonomous subjects.

The normativity of the call is asymmetric. The asymmetry of the normative oughtness shows itself as an obligation beyond our voluntary commitments and judgments. More strongly, it forces us into becoming responsible beings, beyond our minds or wills, by disrupting ourselves as centered, conscious subjects. The normativity of the call is experienced as an imperative obligation that seeps into our consciousness before we are totally aware of it. Before we can theorize about it, grasp it in our consciousness, model it intelligibly, it is there. Obligation happens before we can possess it, domesticate it, coral it for our own purposes, even just to make it manageable. It is something beyond domestication—an unruly call to affirmation. Affirmation is a belated response to the call, a confirmation of obligation before we are free to choose. The call exposes the passivity of obligation before we are reasonably ready to make a choice, an asymmetry arising from something transcendent, from a time immemorial.

Levinas suggests that the asymmetrical response is an obligation oriented outward, toward the other. He often marks the other with words such as the neighbor, the stranger, the widow, the orphan—words used by ancient Hebrew prophets to name the vulnerable in ancient Israelite society. Although on the surface these are empirical terms, identifying actual groups of people in distinction from others, for Levinas they also indicate something structural about responsibility. The ‘something that is not me’ is structurally experienced as something that is vulnerable, fragile, exposed, in a precarious position. Obligation doesn’t just accidentally happen, but it is a structural feature of intersubjective relations. Obligation, a testimony to the normativity of the enigmatic call that originates in a time immemorial, comes via others as vulnerable and exposed. It is felt rather than understood; it cannot be fully grasped although it can clearly be experienced as an affective disruption. The normativity of the call reveals us as responsible beings; we become responsible subjects through affirmative responses.

The call of normativity thus provides the obligation for living here and now, affecting us in present without being present to mind. Being obedient to the call means the impossibility of abandoning that obligation. To abandon one’s obligation would really be tantamount to abandoning the very structure of one’s deepest subjectivity. Despite its enigma, the impossibility of shaping it into a well-formed mental representation, its normativity requires affirming action here and now, before we are in a position to judge whether we ought to say...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Introduction
• 1  Calling and Inspiration
• 2  Learning
• 3  Teaching
• 4  Curriculum
• 5  Institutions
• Conclusion
• References
• Index