Levinas, Durkheim, and the Everyday Ethics of Education

Abstract

This article explores the influence of Émile Durkheim on the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas in order both to open up the political significance of Levinas’s thought and to develop more expansive meanings of moral and political community within education. Education was a central preoccupation for both thinkers: Durkheim saw secular education as the site for promoting the values of organic solidarity, while Levinas was throughout his professional life engaged in debates on Jewish education and conceptualized ethical subjectivity as a condition of being taught. Durkheim has been accused of dissolving the moral into the social, and his view of education as a means of imparting a sense of civic republican values is sometimes seen as conservative, while Levinas’s argument for an ‘unfounded foundation’ for morality is sometimes seen as paralyzing the impetus for concrete political action. Against these interpretations, I argue that their approaches present provocative challenges for conceptualizing the nature of the social, offering theoretical resources to deepen understanding of education as the site of an everyday ethics and a prophetic politics opening onto more compelling ideals for education than those dominant within standard educational discourses.

Keywords:

• Levinas
• Durkheim
• ethics
• justice
• everyday
• social

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to the Leverhulme Trust for funding, through the Early Career Fellowship Scheme. A version of this article was presented at the UCL Institute of Education, Philosophy of Education Research Seminar. I would like to thank Ruth Sheldon, Guoping Zhao, and the two anonymous reviewers for their comments on an earlier draft.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Notes

1. My interpretation of the relation between Levinas and Durkheim throughout this article is significantly influenced by Caygill’s brilliant Levinas and the Political (2002).

2. These principles refer to the tradition of radical republicanism bequeathed by the French Revolution of 1789 (Caygill, 2002, p. 7).

3. This refers to the public upheaval over the case of Captain Alfred Dreyfus, a Jewish French military officer who was unjustly convicted of treason by a military tribunal and imprisoned on Devil’s Island in French Guiana, where he spent five years. By 1898, the case had become a famous public affair, and many believed France’s future as a democracy rested on the acquittal of Captain Dreyfus.

4. The term ‘fraternity’ is vulnerable to critique as a patriarchal idiom, however, as I will elaborate, Levinas’s use of the term gestures more toward ideas of political friendship and community beginning in my responsibility, rather than necessarily signifying ideas of patriarchy.

5. See Strhan (2012, pp. 4–20).

6. See, for example, discussion in https://www.opendemocracy.net/can-europe-make-it/cas-mudde/no-we-are-not-all-charlie-and-that%E2%80%99s-problem (accessed 16 February 2015).

Additional information

Funding

This work was supported by the Leverhulme Trust [ECF-2012-605].