Levinas as Educator

How to teach philosophy has always been one of philosophy’s central questions.  In person, in some sense, but how precisely, and why? The traditional answers usually rely on distinguishing between opinion and knowledge and aligning this epistemological distinction with an ontological-metaphysical distinction between appearance and reality: truth, based in the real, can be taught.  Socrates, seeking definition, interrogated his interlocutors face-to-face; Plato established an Academy and published Dialogues; Aristotle set up a Lyceum and published his lectures.  Levinas calls for a fundamental reorientation of intelligibility, finding its source not in knowledge and being but in moral responsibility, in ethics.  Levinas, throughout his adult life, was a teacher, from 1930 at a Jewish school in Paris through to the 1980s, when, after WWII, he became Director of the same school, and for fifteen years, from 1961 to 1976, he was also a French university professor. His life and thought are devoted to teaching as an integral part of ethics. “Teaching,” Levinas wrote at the start of Totality and Infinity (1964), “is not reducible to maieutics; it comes from the exterior and brings me more than I contain.  In its non-violent transitivity, the very epiphany of the face is produced.”