Touching the challenge: Embodied solutions enabling humanistic moral education

Abstract

One of the main educational challenges we still face today—more than ever—is the humanistic challenge, namely how to promote humanistic moral values, how to strengthen in students the motivation to be morally active, and especially how to help them recognize the other as a human subject. I adopt Nel Noddings’ approach of relational ethics of care as a solution to the problem of motivation. I elaborate on her approach while presenting the concept of the embodied human subject posited by Merleau-Ponty as an additional channel for communication and empathy between people. The embodied subjectivity serves also as a solution for the problem of recognition. I offer some practical recommendations that apply Merleau-Ponty’s analysis to the practice of moral education.

Keywords:

• Humanism
• care
• embodiment
• Merleau-Ponty
• Nel Noddings

Notes

1. Kolberg’s findings (1981) concerning the moral thinking of children support Kant’s argument, while showing that only few people reach the sixth stage of moral development, in which moral judgment is based on individual rational reasoning, which is traditionally identified as Kantian moral thought.