After the Covid-19 pandemic, things have returned to normal. Normal, not the new normal nor the post-normal. But by normal, I don’t mean people now adhere or follow moral standards of behavior or that bad practices are gone from everyday life. What the world is remains different from what the world should be. As a society and as a people, we still are consumed by the same biases that have undermined the meaning of the good life for many. Justice and equality are still ideals so that we are stuck in the system where authority and power precede the respect for human dignity.
The classroom is supposed to be the agora of democratic and rational discussion. But even after the turmoil and difficulty brought forth by the pandemic, there are still teachers who are more concerned about their reputation than pursuing the ends of education. For these people, in whose hands the future of our children is entrusted, building an image is far more important than teaching the lessons of the past and how we need to unlearn our prejudices against others so that human character becomes the ground of authentic morality. But no, they measure education and see teaching solely on the basis of grading systems and mental aptitude.
Outside the four walls of the academe, politics still rules the world. It continues to ruin everything. From the dreams of a young man to the aspirations of many women, a corrupt system controls the way how this world works. In fact, our leaders bargain our sovereignty for the sake of diplomatic gain, and propose to sacrifice the dignity of our nation for the sake of economic advantage or profit from globalization. Real friends do not exist in the political realm, and if you believe that it does, then we are not living in the same world.
What seems to be the problem? The problem is not metaphysical. We do not need to reinvent the wheel, as they say. The problem is ethical. This is what Emmanuel Levinas meant when he said that “ethics is first philosophy”. Levinas suffered during the Holocaust. Ethics as first philosophy manifests the human condition. It is rooted in the moral and unconditional demand to respect the other. But who is the other? The meaning of otherness can be understood by means of the philosophy of the face.
The face of other, according to Levinas, is the orphan, the poor, the homeless. The face is the other that we ignore. The other is the man on the street who is hungry and cold, and who has been denied love and attention. The face of the other in our midst is that quiet and slow student that teachers neglect because there are those among us who prioritize the value of personal glory and achievement more than the value of teaching this generation the importance of respecting the dignity of each human being.
The other, however, precedes my own being, for I am nothing without the other. The ego is nothing. Alterity implies that the existence of the other is not parallel to but is prior to the self. The former gives the latter its primordial meaning. The other is my superior. In the classroom, the students are the heart and soul of the learning process, not the means to advance the whims and caprices of idiosyncratic mentors. Students are not supposed to be treated as strangers nor as victims. Teaching only has meaning because someone before us gave his everything to make our existence possible.
In the real world, it is not a battle between “what is” and “what ought to be”. The world in which we live ought to be moral. The world exists precisely for the other because without the face of the other, there is no self, no being, no meaning. The philosophy of the face, hence, is that moral imperative. Each time a child dies because of poverty, each instant a life is sacrificed for the sake of territorial integrity, each moment that hope is shattered because of greed, I, the ego, is inescapably guilty of a terrible moral wrong.
