Levinas’s ethics and teacher: Teaching as the time of speech

Abstract

Levinas’s ethics and teacher: Teaching as the time of speech. − Emmanuel Levinas emphasized that the other teaches me ethics by its face. He considers face expression as my primary learning before any other learning. The paper uses Levinas’s ethics to draw the teacher–student relationship as asymmetrical and focuses on language understood as their teaching and learning time. Nevertheless, is it possible to bring Levinas’s philosophy and its critical points into the practice of teacher and simultaneously to avoid getting back into mere rhetoric and pedagogy? Although it is inevitable to thematize while teaching and to expect the answers while asking (the said in teacher role), presence of students as others remind the teacher to answer for himself (the saying as human vocation). The study wants to initiate a debate on the matter of how levinasian ethics could contribute to the understanding of a teacher’s profession and teaching itself.