"I must feed my body and arrange my house in order to receive the foreigner knocking at my door; if I posses a home, it is not for me alone." (Peperzak, 1993, pp.24-25)
There are many who would argue that in order to develop an ethical relationship, an empathy, for others, one must first acquire knowledge about them. The thinking goes something like this... "how can we expect children to care about people in such-and-such a country if they cannot even place it on a map?" There is something initially reasonable and compelling about such an argument, not least because such thinking (knowledge before ethics) is, as we shall see, entrenched deep in the Western tradition.
As our reading of Levinas in the last posting began to make clear, the history of Western thought has been long dominated by a tradition which sees consciousness as preceding, and having priority over, my encounter with the world. We might call this an 'egocentric' philosophy, one in which the Self comes first, and in which Others appear literally as an after-thought, that is, once they have been submitted to the integration, the 'violence', of thought. What Levinas proposes instead is a philosophy in which ethics, or our relationship with the Other, becomes fundamental. For Levinas, we have a primordial and unchosen responsibility for the Other, which comes before knowledge. Importantly, this is not to deny the Self. Rather, it is to say that the self comes into the world in relation to Others. As Peperzak writes,
"To realize my responsibility for the Other, I myself must be free and independent; but the sense of my selfhood is my being-for-the-Other... it is the needs of the Other who, as a foreigner, disrupts my being at home with myself." (Peperzak, 1993, pp.25)We see, therefore, that the encounter with the Other can be thought of as a disruption. The face, the speech, of the Other calls out to us, pleads to us to open up our doors and be hospitable. It calls for a response, not an objectification in knowledge. And if this responsiveness, this unchosen responsibility, is indeed more 'fundamental than knowledge' then does this line of thinking not have some powerful implications for education? It puts into question any idea that the central aim of undergoing an education is to acquire and accumulate knowledge. Instead, it would suggest that the purpose of education is to provide opportunities to encounter others who are not like us, not with the express aim of acquiring knowledge about them (though we will surely do this anyway) but of learning how to live amongst others- learning how to live the responsible, ethical, life. It calls for a classroom with its doors opened to the outside, as it were.
Alex Standish argues passionately that 'values' and 'attitudes' should be kept out the geography curriculum, which should instead focus on the attainment of 'geographical knowledge and skills' (see this article). Yet, for me, he never successfully justifies why his conception of geography as an 'objective body of knowledge', or as a 'spatial science', is the one we should accept. Why should our aim be to fill young people's heads with facts, least of all in a world where such facts are anyway readily accessible on the internet? The thinking of Levinas would seem to support a view of geography (and other subjects) as a way of seeing, a way of openly encountering and responding to others (other people, other cultures, other places) that does not reduce them to objects to be forcefully integrated into knowledge.
If we dare to think of learning as response (as Gert Biesta has called it) in this way then it would appear that geography, by providing the space within which such encounters can appear, has a particularly distinctive and invaluable contribution to offer.
Reference
Peperzak, A. (1993) To the Other: An introduction to the philosophy of Emmanuel Levinas. Indiana: Purdue University Press.
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