Levinas, meaning, and an ethical science of psychology: Scientific inquiry as rupture.

Abstract

Much of the understanding of the nature of science in contemporary psychology is founded on a positivistic philosophy of science that cannot adequately account for meaning as experienced. The phenomenological tradition provides an alternative approach to science that is attentive to the inherent meaningfulness of human action in the world. Emmanuel Levinas argues, however, that phenomenology, at least as traditionally conceived, does not provide sufficient grounds for meaning. Levinas argues that meaning is grounded in the ethical encounter with the Other such that meaning arises in rupture. For Levinas, the physical world (i.e., the elemental) and the I provide constraints on the meaning given by the Other, even as the Other is logically prior to all other experience. This Levinasian perspective advocates an epistemology that is open to the rupture of the Other as a way to knowledge. This emphasis on openness to rupture entails a methodology in which psychologists must allow the objects of study to guide their methods of research. Finally, the Levinasian perspective implies a scientific community that is sensitive to the rupture occasioned by the encounter with the Other.

A brief commentary on A Levinasian ethics for education’s commonplaces: Between calling and inspiration by Joldersma.

“…As someone who reads and writes about Levinas, I agree with Joldersma that formal schooling to be educational must be ruptured by an ethical orientation. I think that statement can be broadened to state that any new knowledge is produced by the revelation of ethics (Downs, Gantt, & Faulconer, 2012). I also think we have much to consider concerning his arguments about the roles of educational curriculum and institutions in the process of justice.…”

A Hermeneutics of Love for Community-Based, Participatory Action Research

“…For Lévinas, the interiority of our psychological self is not closed off from others; it is constituted and attuned to others (see also Downs, Gantt, & Faulconer, 2012). 8 The Other, the otherness of others is a shared burden because the Other is, or brings, that which one cannot have; the Other is that which one is not (Lévinas, 1947/1978).…”

The Heart of Humanistic Psychology

“…With the recognition that basic human rights require us to preserve this notion of dignity, and that our holistic, nonreductive, and phenomenological approach gives us the basis on which to do so, it becomes clear that not only does humanistic psychology have a clear epistemological basis in phenomenology and a metaphysical basis in the recognition of ontological dignity, but we also have a clear ethical imperative to protect the basic human rights of all people everywhere. This is so even if that means doing so with great humility, with an awareness, through our existential viewpoint, that any simplistic ethical formulation is bound to be just as ethically violent as the pretense that we can do without ethics (Decarvalho, 1992; Downs, Gantt, & Faulconer, 2012; Robbins, 2008). Sartre (1958/2003) said we are condemned to freedom.…”