Totality and Infinity at 50

6. Don’t Try This at Home: Levinas and Applied Ethics

127 SIX Don’t Try This at Home Levinas and Applied Ethics DianePerpich As Levinas’s thought has become more familiar in disciplines as diverse as sociology, nursing, psychology, education, and law, the question of the import of his work in practical and applied fields needs to be addressed. Can Levinas’s philosophy serve as support for the claim that nurses or other health care workers are infinitely responsible for patients? Can the face-to-face relation set out in Totality and Infinity serve as a model for doctor-patient care, for the psychotherapeutic encounter between therapist and client, or for the relation between teacher and pupil? Can his writings on the face-toface relationship help us deliver better online education or a richer appreciation of the transformative possibilities of music and music education? Can his claims about the infinite alterity of the Other be assimilated to the idea that we can never fully know the other who is our student, our patient, our client, or the defendant who stands before a judge? And, perhaps most significantly, does Levinas’s thought show us that this failure of knowledge must be the occasion for renewed 128 Diane Perpich moral consideration or ethical respect? All of these have been claimed, but we need to ask directly, is there a way to apply Levinas’s thought? Can notions like the alterity of the Other, the face, or infinite responsibility be transported usefully into applied ethical contexts? As a first stab at this question, the present essay looks at the way Levinas’s thought has been taken up in two applied fields, nursing and psychology. Theorists in both areas have seen in Levinas’s work the possibility of infusing their discipline with an ethical dimension that is otherwise thought to be missing or to have been construed too narrowly. Care and care-giving are central to the theoretical understanding of both disciplines as well as to their professional practice; moreover, Levinas’s thought has increasingly been appealed to in both fields by theorists interested in conceiving care in a directly ethical manner . But is it possible to interpret Levinas’s thought as an ethics of care or would these disciplines be better served by turning more straightforwardly to feminist care ethics or to a virtue ethics that emphasizes empathy or compassion? After elucidating some of the reasons theorists in these fields have understandably turned to Levinas, I argue that they cannot find in his work what they most often hope to find there. Specifically, I argue: that Levinas’s notion of “the face of the other” is misinterpreted where it is invoked as a direct source or origin of ethical responsibility; correspondingly, that his writings are misunderstood if they are read as a constructivist ethics that offers ethical norms that can be put to work in care-giving professions; and finally, that his work is not a defense of our inherently ethical nature nor a guarantee of our ethical responsibility. But rather than concluding that Levinas therefore has nothing to offer those working in applied fields, I suggest that what Levinas does offer is just not necessarily what researchers in those fields have hoped to find. Instead of a philosophy that guarantees the ethical importance of compassion or the certainty of our responsibility to provide care for others, Levinas emphasizes the constitutive uncertainty and fragility of ethical life. If practical Don’t Try This at Home 129 professions are to make anything practical of Levinas’s thought, it is this fragility and vulnerability that must arguably become central to their self-understanding and to their appropriation of texts like Totality and Infinity. LEVINAS AND NURSING CARE Nursing was originally conceived in the West as a calling, akin to (and sometimes identical with) the calling to serve God and humanity as a member of a religious order. By the twentieth century, it had come to be seen instead as belonging to medicine as a profession, sharing in the latter’s knowledge base and its professional ethos. In recent years, in an attempt to have nurses’ contributions more fairly and fully valued, theorists have sought to define the profession apart from the work of doctors and other medical personnel and to demonstrate its distinctive contribution to patient health and well-being.1 Notions of care and caring have been central to this endeavor and now inform a wide range of approaches to the philosophy...