Education for grown-ups, a religion for adults: scepticism and alterity in Cavell and Levinas

Abstract

In his essay ‘The Scandal of Skepticism’, Stanley Cavell discusses aspects of the work of Emmanuel Levinas with a view to understanding how ‘philosophical and religious ambitions so apparently different’ as his own and those of Levinas can have led to ‘phenomenological coincidences so precise’. The present paper explores themes of scepticism and alterity as these emerge in the work of these two increasingly influential philosophers. It shows education to be a sustained preoccupation in their work, crucially related to these guiding themes. In the process it seeks to dispel certain assumptions regarding poststructuralism, on the one hand, and the religious implications of Levinas's thought, on the other. This lays the way for an account of the criticality of human being, of the significance of this for community, and of the demands this makes on education.

Keywords:

• Cavell
• Levinas
• Scepticism
• Alterity
• Poststructuralism

Notes

Notes

1.  ‘La voie difficile du monothéisme rejoint la route de l’Occident. On peut se demander, en effet, si l’esprit occidental, si la philosophie, n’est pas en dernière analyse la position d’une humanité qui accepte le risque de l’athéisme, qu’il faut courir, mais surmonter, rançon de sa majorité.’ This translation is mine.

2.  The God of Ezekiel, who is severe and just, is eternally the same, but the ways in which he can be apprehended by the people change. In consequence, it falls to each generation to think of God in new ways. The destruction of Jerusalem and exile to Babylon had left the people to whom Ezekiel ministered traumatised and manifesting anger and denial. Ezekiel responded to this by exposing the people's responsibility for the disaster that had afflicted them, castigating them for their worship of idols, and their acceptance of the words of false prophets. He implored them to see that their only hope for recovery was to change. Ezekiel is a key figure in the survival of a Judean identity, and he was a major transitional figure in the move from an Israelite religion to what became the religion of Judaism. He is the prophet who affirms the continued presence of God amongst the people but of God's withdrawal under certain conditions, who challenges the people over their part in the failures of Judah, and who ponders the question of legitimate religious and political leadership in the restored community.

3.  Cavell's translation refers to ‘a trauma of awakening’ (Cavell, 2005a, p. 144). The repeated use of ‘breakup’ in such contexts in translations of Levinas is paralleled in such expressions of Cavell's as ‘a breaking up of one's sense of necessity, to discover truer necessities’ (Cavell, 1979, p. 22) and ‘a breaking up of our sense of the ordinary,’ in the celebrated essay on King Lear (Cavell, 1976, pp. 316, 350).

4.  Originally published in 1935 in Recherches Philosophiques (see Levinas, 1982).

5.  ‘L’insuffisance de la condition humaine n’a jamais été comprise autrement que comme une limitation de l’être, sans que la signification de “l’être fini” fût jamais envisagé. La transcendance de ces limites, la communion avec l’être infini demeurait sa seule préoccupation …’ (‘The insufficiency of the human condition has never been understood other than as a limitation of being, without the sense of “finite being” ever having been envisaged. The transcendence of these limits, communion with infinite being remains its sole preoccupation …’) (Levinas, 1982, p. 93; my translation).

6.  I am tempted by the thought that the face (taken perhaps as a metonym of expressiveness) plays a role in Cavell's thought that is itself other (or prior) to ontology. That is, in the larger-than-life face of the film star, say, of Barbara Stanwyck at the end of Stella Dallas, the signifier of the star's image occupies a semantic and ethical space that may be otherwise than being. If the stars do not exactly govern our condition, they may yet condition the possibilities of our coming to be.

7.  For a discussion of teaching and learning in higher education in these terms, see my ‘Towards an Economy of Higher Education’ (Standish, 2005).

8.  ‘These bonds consciously desired, these bonds freely consented to’ (my translation).

9.  Derrida speaks of ‘jetées’ (jetties).

10.  The most powerful image of the return in relation to scepticism in Cavell is to be found in his essay on Coleridge's The Ancient Mariner (Cavell, 1988).

11.  Cavell takes the following films from the 1930s and 1940s, films in which remarriage may mean the rebirth of a marriage, as defining for this group: It Happened One Night (1934), The Awful Truth (1937), Bringing Up Baby (1938), His Girl Friday (1940), The Philadelphia Story (1940), The Lady Eve (1941) and Adam's Rib (1941). See Cavell, 1981b; also 2004.

12.  The following films are taken to define this genre: Letter from an Unknown Woman (1948), Gaslight (1944), Now, Voyager (1942), and Stella Dallas (1937). See Cavell, 1996; also 2004.

13.  ‘L’homme commence dans le désert où il habite des tentes, où il adore Dieu dans un temple qui se transporte’ (‘Man begins in the desert where he lives in tents, where he worships God in a temple that he carries with him’) (Levinas, 1976, p. 44; my translation).