Levinas, Ethics and the People: A reply to Soyoung Lee and Paul Standish

Abstract

Soyoung Lee and Paul Standish have criticised my article ‘Levinas: Ethics or Mystification?’ for misunderstanding and misrepresenting the phenomenological subtleties of Levinas's formulation of ethics. However, although their arguments are cogent and persuasive, I still cannot see how Levinas's ‘ethics of the Other’, regardless of its merits qua phenomenology or ethical philosophy, translates into the practical ethical and moral understanding that would transform people's everyday lives—which was the underlying theme of my original article. In this article, I shall develop this theme further with specific reference to the following difficulties, as I see them, relating to the practicality of Levinas's ethics: (1) it is unclear how ordinary people would gain an understanding of Levinas's ethical vision, or how, once gained, this understanding would change their behaviour; (2) the rejection of personal relations and attachments in favour of pre‐ontological abstractions and metaphorical images (as the ground for the possibility of ethical understanding) renders Levinas's ethical vision powerless to motivate individuals in their everyday lives; (3) conceived as a political project to transform society, Levinas's vision cannot be realised, not even in the commune; (4) the presumption that real human understanding can be gained through the study of Levinas, or any other philosopher, is a highly dubious one.

Conserving the dignity of teaching through ethics as ‘mise en question’

“…The Levinasian formulation of ethics should be considered a meta‐ethics rather than a search for normative ethics or guidelines for moral education. For this reason, Miller's (2019) comparison of Levinasian ethics to virtue ethics is a misguided interpretation of the former. Defining normative ethical guidelines using Levinas’ philosophy is a secondary task; the research on Levinas’ philosophy is more focused on studying Levinasian ethics as a meta‐ethics and as a rich entry point to the ethics of phenomenology.…”

“…Levinas’ phenomenological ethics has been under fascinating scrutiny in the conversation provoked by Alistair Miller (2017), followed by responses from Soyoung Lee (2019) and Paul Standish (2019). In this article, we intend to negotiate between the rich phenomenological language of Levinasian meta‐ethics and what Miller (2019, p. 444) calls the more prosaic dimensions of teaching. Soyoung Lee's (2019) thorough and dismantling response to Miller provides an inspiring examination of the ethical dimension in teaching and shows how at the very heart of teaching lies a profound ethical demand for the teacher to respond to the students’ questions.…”

“…In his latest response, Miller asks: ‘How could Levinas's vision—whatever its merits qua phenomenology, metaphysics, philosophy, literature or transcendent ethical vision—possibly translate into practical ethics and a transformation of people's everyday lives?’ (Miller, 2019, p. 442). To challenge Miller's question, we argue that Levinas’ understanding of ethics is indeed an ‘optics’ (Hand, 2009; Lee, 2019), which provides a phenomenological perspective to ethics.…”

The existential turn in philosophy of education: In defence of liberal autonomy

“…1515In an earlier article, I explored the repudiation of ‘the personal’ in the context of Levinas's ethics of the Other (see Miller, 2019, pp. 444–447).…”