Levinas and the Crisis of Humanism

Claire Elise Katz

• Publisher: Indiana University Press
• Year: 2021
• Print ISBN: 9780253007629
• eBook ISBN: 9780253007674
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Ethics & Moral Philosophy

A study of Emmanuel Levinas's philosophical project and the necessary role his essays on Jewish education play in the project's success.
Reexamining Emmanuel Levinas's essays on Jewish education within the context of his larger philosophical project, Claire Elise Katz provides new insights into the importance of education and its potential to transform a democratic society. Katz examines Levinas's "Crisis of Humanism," which motivated his effort to describe a new ethical subject. Taking into account his multiple influences on social science and the humanities, and his various identities as a Jewish thinker, philosopher, and educator, Katz delves deeply into Levinas's works to understand the grounding of this ethical subject and democracy.
"Claire Elise Katz makes great strides in resolving our current cultural war over the role of religion in the public sphere. By turning to Levinas's writings on education, she shows how religion as a cultural form can engender ethical agents in a way that standard philosophical accounts fail to do." —Martin Kavka, Florida State University
"The great achievement of Claire Katz's new book, Levinas and the Crisis of Humanism, is to explain the meaning of Levinas's ethics in a way that makes it relevant for everyday life without either simplifying it or resorting to the paraphrase that is so often the pitfall of Levinas scholarship. . . . Katz's book succeeds in transmitting a deep sense of how Levinas's philosophy is important and relevant in a world in crisis." — Notre Dame Philosophical Reviews
"[I]n addition to its excellent readings of many texts and its helpful contextualizing of Levinas's project, Katz's book is a very good one indeed and one to be highly recommended." — AJS Review

1 The Limits of the Humanities

The school is the essential distributing agency for whatever values and purposes any social group cherishes. It is not the only means, but it is the first means, the primary means and the most deliberate means by which the values that any social group cherishes, the purposes that it wishes to realize, are distributed and brought home to the thought, the observation, judgment and choice of the individual.

—John Dewey, Philosophy of Education

No sane citizenry measures its public elementary schools by whether they pay for themselves immediately and in dollars. We shouldn’t have to make a balance-sheet argument for the humanities, either, at least not until the balance-sheet includes the value, to the student and to the state, of expanded powers of personal empathy and cross-cultural respect, improved communication through language and other symbolic systems, and increased ability to tolerate and interpret complexity, contemplate morality, appreciate the many forms of artistic beauty, and generate creative, independent thought.

—Robert Watson

In his book The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities, Frank Donoghue, an English professor at The Ohio State University, traces the roots of the corporate model of education back to the turn of the twentieth century, the rise of industrialization, and the increased power attained by those with wealth. It was not long before the newly moneyed were exerting power and influence over university education, while simultaneously expressing their suspicion of the very education they were funding. As Donoghue’s analysis shows, education that did not aim to produce anything—that is, humanities education—was rejected in favor of something—anything—utilitarian. Stanley Fish, Donoghue’s former teacher, comments on the book’s argument, and his comments are worth citing at length:

In previous columns and in a recent book I have argued that higher education, properly understood, is distinguished by the absence of a direct and designed relationship between its activities and measurable effects in the world.

This is a very old idea that has received periodic re-formulations. Here is a statement by the philosopher Michael Oakeshott that may stand as a representative example: “There is an important difference between learning which is concerned with the degree of understanding necessary to practice a skill, and learning which is expressly focused upon an enterprise of understanding and explaining.”

Understanding and explaining what? The answer is understanding and explaining anything as long as the exercise is not performed with the purpose of intervening in the social and political crises of the moment, as long, that is, as the activity is not regarded as instrumental—valued for its contribution to something more important than itself.

This view of higher education as an enterprise characterized by a determined inutility has often been challenged, and the debates between its proponents and those who argue for a more engaged university experience are lively and apparently perennial. The question such debates avoid is whether the Oakeshottian ideal (celebrated before him by Aristotle, Kant and Max Weber, among others) can really flourish in today’s educational landscape. It may be fun to argue its merits (as I have done), but that argument may be merely academic—in the pejorative sense of the word—if it has no support in the real world from which it rhetorically distances itself. In today’s climate, does it have a chance?

In a new book, “The Last Professors: The Corporate University and the Fate of the Humanities,” Frank Donoghue (as it happens, a former student of mine) asks that question and answers “No.”¹

If we recall the question I posed in the Introduction, “How does one develop ethically?” we can see how Fish’s commentary on the humanities assumes a new relevance. This question remains central in education circles and in discussions about moral psychology. Questions about moral development, particularly with regard to formal education, are in turn often conflated with questions about the development of the citizen. As a result, the role of the intellect, and in particular, political judgment, comes into play and frequently muddies the discussion.

With the most recent attacks on the humanities at universities around the world, faculty members who teach in these disciplines search for ways to defend these fields in higher education. Although one can look back through history, to as far back as Plato, and see that there has never been a time when the humanities enjoyed an unchallenged existence, each time period reads as if the crisis of the humanities in that time is the worst yet. The response to the attacks on the humanities in the last few years pressed faculty and scholars once again to defend the humanities; this time, however, faculty invoked the very language used to attack the humanities and that now permeates the academy: value. Where the humanities were once viewed suspiciously because of what people realized it did, now the public demands its ouster from the university because it does not believe the humanities do anything—or rather, anything of use. In response, many of those who come to its defense argue vehemently that the humanities are central to moral and civic education.

When we think about education and the role that it plays in the formation of a self, the education to which we refer is some form of humanities education, even if it comprises a less sophisticated set of materials than those we imagine in a college curriculum. The raging battle over the soul of education is often motivated by the fears people have precisely because of what they imagine the humanities do. Those who believe the humanities are “useless” and lack any value at the same time reveal their fears regarding the dangers of the humanities, and in so doing, they attribute a power—whether real or imagined—to the humanities. The humanities cannot be both wholly useless, even if it is valueless to a particular group of people, and also capable of, for example, brainwashing. I would argue then that at the root of all this debate is actually a fear of what the humanities do accomplish—founded or not—rather than a belief that the humanities do not do anything. These critics often accuse the professoriate for politicizing the university and seemingly brainwashing students into its left-wing ideologies. These Philistine critics thus believe the humanities to be valueless because they do not do what they believe education should be doing: i.e., training students for a particular job.² They believe the humanities to be dangerous because in addition to being useless they can lead intelligent young people to ask questions that these critics do not want them to ask. In the end, they want the university education on the cheap in two senses of this term: they do not want to have to pay for it and they do not want students to have to learn anything that shakes their deepest convictions. Thus, we might reframe the question to be asked conversely: why should the public support a humanities education especially when its effects are perceived so negatively?

The fundamental question regarding humanities education can be stated in this way: Does humanities education have any value outside of the intellectual pleasure it gives to those who engage in it? How this question is answered yields a series of other questions. Ultimately, these questions ask after the fate of the university and those who teach the humanities in it.³ This question has political implications for many reasons, not the least of which is that many colleges and universities are publicly funded and have a responsibility to answer to the constituency that supports them. Why should the public, or anyone, support the liberal arts in higher education if only those engaged in the liberal arts feel its effects?

Within the first six months of 2010, a flurry of books on education—addressing both primary and higher education—emerged with the goal of telling us precisely where in fact we have gone wrong and what we should do now. A survey of these books appeared in Stanley Fish’s blog entry on June 10th, 2010, titled, “A Classical Education: Back to the Future.”⁴ Fish begins his piece by reminiscing about his high school ring, which he had worn for nearly forty years. His reminiscence was, in part, tied to attending his fifty-fifth high school reunion a few weekends before writing this entry. In this piece, Fish recalls the curriculum of the high school he attended, appropriately named Classical High School. As the name suggests, its curriculum was based on a classical education. And lest anyone protest that such an education was only for rich, privileged white males, Fish quickly contests this point with his statement that his classmates comprised all walks of life—including children of non-English-speaking immigrants.

The three books that Fish surveys are Martha Nussbaum’s Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, Diane Ravitch’s The Death and Life of the Great American School System, and Leigh Bortins’s The Core: Teaching Your Child Foundations of Classical Education. To their credit, all three books are thoughtful, and Ravitch in particular is to be commended for publicly admitting that her previous views on education were mistaken. Where Bortins and Ravitch focus on the primary grades, Nussbaum’s book complements them by focusing on the connection that higher education, specifically one focused on the humanities, has to pre-college schooling. Most importantly, as Fish points out, what they all share is a focus on teaching and learning, and not testing and assessment, and all those other words that have become the vocabulary of administrators at all levels of education.⁵

I recognize that for the most part, education in the primary grades has a different set of goals than those viewed as part of higher education and I realize that the conversation can quickly become confused if we conflate these very different kinds of education. Yet, it is worth considering education theoretically, regardless of its level. It is worth noting that while the aims of pre-college education might differ from its higher education counterpart, the two are nonetheless intimately related. Often that which drives higher education influences how pre-college curricula are structured.

The questions I address in this chapter also trace the edges of this entire book: What do the humanities do? Do the humanities have the power attributed to them? If so, is this an effect that can or should be controlled and manipulated?⁶ If humanities education does have value outside of its self-enclosed idiosyncratic pleasure, the question becomes even more pressing. What is its value? How do we identify it? And what do we do about those who fear it, where the object of the fear is simply the opening and developing of the mind? These questions, as Fish suggests, are indeed perennial, and he echoes Donoghue’s observation that our current discussions imply a false sense of history about the relative health of the humanities across universities in the United States.⁷

Recalling Rousseau’s distrust of community, we are reminded that these more contemporary suspicions of community and education did not begin in the nineteenth century.⁸ Yet Rousseau was careful to separate the education of the citizen from the education of the “man” qua male, the latter of which included moral development. Indeed, for Rousseau, the development of the ethical person was central to the proper development of the political citizen, even if he saw the two tasks as separate. I will return to this point in more detail in the next chapter, yet it is worth noting that taken together, these two questions about moral and civic development lie at the heart of debates about the role, purpose, aim, and value of education.⁹

Additionally, while inherently significant, these questions point to a more basic question about the aim of education: What is the role education plays in the cultivation of a self, and more specifically, in the cultivation of a moral self? This question about the humanities guides Levinas in his essays on Jewish education. If the humanities are indeed successful at cultivating a virtuous self, then why turn to Jewish education? Is Jewish education just one kind of humanities education or does Levinas see it as a difference of kind? The aim of this chapter is to examine the limits of the humanities and humanistic education in order to examine Levinas’s emphasis on Jewish education within that context. This chapter explores two prominent models of education whose impact can still be seen in the United States at both the university and pre-college level: the conservative model described by Hannah Arendt, which is positioned against the progressive model originally advanced by John Dewey.

Thus with regard to the question of humanities education and its relationship to the cultivation of character and the development of civic responsibility, we find, on one side of the debate, Hannah Arendt, who argues that education is not political and is not intended to effect change. Rather, its aim is to introduce the child into the world in which he or she is born, thus enabling that child to participate in the public sphere when she is an adult. The role of a classical education then is to introduce the child to those traditions and ideas that inform the world in which the child now lives. Although Arendt’s political philosophy is often viewed as unclassifiable by conventional categories in political theory, having positioned herself against progressive education, her own view of education is decidedly conservative.

On the other side of this debate, we find another extreme put forth by Martha Nussbaum in her recent book Not for Profit. Where Arendt believed that education was not intended to mold in any particular fashion, Nussbaum takes up the mantle of progressive education and deploys it to promote an educational project that she believes will create more people who are better suited to participate as democratic citizens. For her, this means creating more people who will live with each other in mutual respect and fewer who will seek comfort in domination. Ironically, both turn to a classical education in the humanities to serve their respective ends. It is worth considering these two extremes in order to see where the flaws in these views lie.¹⁰ My discussion is not meant to be an exhaustive analysis of moral education or civic engagement, nor do I intend to review the enormous body of literature that examines the possible role of humanities education in the cultivation of either.¹¹ Rather, my aim is to highlight and examine the claims that are prevalent in these discussions in order to consider how these views have shaped the complex relationship we have to and the expectations we have of our educational system at all its levels.¹² In particular, these questions point specifically to the humanities and humanities education of which philosophy is typically emblematic.¹³

Instead of providing an exhaustive account of American education, which would include its ambivalent relationship to the humanities and humanistic education, I highlight the tensions in these two opposing models of education.¹⁴ In both of these models, the respective proponents argue that each is necessary for the creation of an active, productive, politically engaged citizenry. In Nussbaum’s account, the humanities are offered as the savior to democracies around the world. This account of the humanities and its relationship to a democratic society carries its own set of questions. More importantly for this book, it relies on an assumption about the role of the humanities in the creation of a virtuous or morally upright self that Levinas finds questionable on multiple levels. The role of the humanities in the development of an ethical person is significant for my present discussion since Levinas turns to Jewish education and decidedly not to a classical humanities education to develop the ethical subjectivity he describes. My claim is that even if the humanities can cultivate a certain kind of character, this would not be the same as the ethical subjectivity he describes. And it is this ethical subjectivity in turn that provides a solution to what he identifies as the crisis of humanism in his philosophical writings and his writings on Judaism.

Education and the Public Space

In her 1956 essay, “The Crisis in Education,” Hannah Arendt offers a challenging critique of progressive education and in so doing she explores this fundamental question: Is education political?¹⁵ Focusing on primary education, Arendt believes progressive education is founded on several confusions, each resulting in succession from the previous one. Although progressive education’s child-centered approach is a response to a previous confusion whereby children were thought to be little adults, the pedagogy that progressive education offers is just as pernicious. Arendt’s critique of progressive education emerges ...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half title
• Title
• Copyright
• Dedication
• Contents
• Preface
• Acknowledgments
• List of Abbreviations
• Introduction
• 1. The Limits of the Humanities
• 2. Solitary Men
• 3. The Crisis of Humanism
• 4. Before Phenomenology
• 5. The Promise of Jewish Education
• 6. Teaching, Fecundity, Responsibility
• 7. Humanism Found
• Notes
• Bibliography
• Index