The priority of ethics of ontology, the issue of forgiveness and education

1. Levinas & Education
At The Intersection of Faith and
Reason
The Priority of Ethics Over Ontology, the Issue of Forgiveness and
Education
Levinas’s Face-to-Face Ethics
Marianna Papastephanou

2. FACE-TO-FACE ETHICS AND
EDUCATIONAL THEORY
 Philosophers of education want to enlarge educational conceptual
horizons through new philosophical encounters.
 It is proposed that the picture of schooling will be composed by
practical and institutional demands for performativity and
competitiveness.

3. Picture of Liberalist
Education:
 The young will be skilled an allotted to various social and professional spaces.
They will be ready to fight for survival, for pleasure and lastly for their own
interest.
 However, this picture of liberalist education is sometimes more complex than
the one mentioned.
 New philosophical positions provide conceptual tools or standpoints for:
 criticizing the direction education has taken.
 For the promotion of alternative ideal of self and society.
 Levinas also considers the prevailing construal of education as a project of
producing rational autonomous subjects.

4. Face – To –Face ethics
 This may be one of the best alternatives to the flat liberalist dealings
with morality.
 This point in itself suffers from problems which eventually solidify
rather than shake the predominance of performativity in education.
 When education is about the ethical relation, we enrich our perspective
with Levinasian insights.
 When the issue is about transmitting values, debating practices and
imparting knowledge, we leave educational notions of experience,
participation and critical thinking untouched.

5. The Priority of Ethics Over
Ontology
 Levinas’ face-to-face ethics turns to an unconditional openness and
asymmetrical ethical responsibility to change dictated by nothing other
than change itself.
 All moral foundationalism derived from notions of duty, rationalist,
convention and contract are considered external and even harmful to
the pure ethical command of the Face.
 All change is brought into correlation with a sovereign subject, a
positive entity that categorizes difference imposing criteria and setting
self-serving conditions.
*ontology – the branch of metaphysics which studies the nature of being

6. “to be good is a deficit, waste and foolishness in a being; to be good is
excellent and elevation beyond being’’
 This quote is phenomenological and not a sociological statement – it
does not aspire to describe what holds in certain social configurations
at a specific historical period.
 It refers to a feature that characterizes being.
 Liberalist theory and society hold such a (mis)conception of goodness,
they appear to be the true mirroring of ontology, the accurate mapping
of being.

7.  From his initial prioritization of ethics over ontology,
Levinas concludes that there can be pity, compassion,
pardon and order in the world.
 Statements of this kind can make sense ‘’only when
responsibility is seen to precede subjectivity’’.
 Responsibility differs to subjectivity, since the latter is
always ready to violent to otherness.
 Ontology is qualitatively different from ethics, and the
latter must be granted priority over it.

8.  Forgiveness in a Levinasian context appears as an act of
absolute and unconditional goodness, a pure absolution
or suspension of judgement passed on the other.
 In a school setting, some might think such a break with
ontology would entail teacher-pupil model relation of
lenience and generosity, a reforming rather than a
punitive stance toward the young.
 Levinas’ position on forgiveness is far more complex
than the fashionable reading of it as an unconditional
act, and far more educationally fertile than the views
which concentrate on the wronged who grant
forgiveness.

9. Levinas and the Issue of
Forgiveness
 Levinas discusses two kinds of forgiveness: one which involves the
wrong-doer and the other law violations against other people.
 Pardon is not understood as something one learns simply to grant
oneself and other, but as a profound occurrence of ethical and
existential contemplation on the part of a wrongdoer.
 Pardon often becomes a performed duty which restored the subject and
staves off risks, thus serving conflict resolution and the good function
of social order.
 Educating the young to forgive and ask for forgiveness may appear as a
useful tool of expedience for adaptation and survival in the world.

10.  How would a Levinasian teacher react to a request to forgive a
fault?
 Assuming true forgiveness is an unconditional act of ethics freed
from ontology and epistemology, who the wrongdoer is should
not be an issue.
 Pure exteriority is suspended and the inwardness of the other is
revealed not in dialogue but apocalyptically in a dream.
 The master who does not forgive the pupil, and in this way
refuses the entanglement and influence of dialogue, seems to
hold an assumption of intrinsically evil behavior of the
wrongdoer which cannot be eradicated through the educational
relationship itself.

11. Several questions arise regarding why the
possibility of the act of refusing
forgiveness could have a reforming effect
on the pupil.
Levinas sets two conditions for the granting
of pardon – two conditions for
forgiveness;
the good will of the offended party and;
 the full awareness of the offender.

12. Conclusion
 Levinas’ ethics challenges some dominant liberalist
assumptions about subjectivity and its cultivation in
schools.
 Analysis of human lived experiences can offer
educational discourse an unprecedented depth.

13. Conclusion
 Liberalism appears fairly appropriate to deal with
matters which fall in the ontological province.
 Reciprocity, criteria and economy are some notions
which require reformulation and examination from a
standpoint which is critical but not totally dismissive
of liberalism.

14. Conclusion
 Overall, Levinas has shown educators that ethics
does not begin in the warm security of prearranged
settings of law, order and predictability of the others’
moves, but in the unilateral subjection of the I to the
command of the other.
 Both positions have risks but to Levinas, the risk of
the latter is beautiful. This is a beautiful risk that
thinking has yet to take.