Education systems that render people stupid, mental health treatment that renders people mad, religions that render people wicked, economies that render people poor, political systems that render people powerless. How is it that our social systems break down (render) precisely what they are meant to serve (render to)?<\/p>\n\n\n\n\n\n\n\n
Their common situation: inequality and arrogance in power. Power is arrogant when it does not \u2013 will<\/i> not \u2013 bend its knee to goodness (which is its origin), and thereby renders itself illegitimate. Inequality is then created in order to re-legitimate power: might becomes right. It is a lie. A stupid, mad, wicked, impoverished and ultimately powerless lie.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
***<\/p>\n\n\n\n
When our projects create more problems than they solve, when every field of endeavour is furrowed with corruption, we need to think deeply about what brought us here. We\u2019re called to reconsider our understanding of the world and our place in it. Philosophy is one name for this vocation. Derived from the Greek words for love (philo<\/i>) and wisdom (sophia<\/i>), philosophy is the \u201clove of wisdom\u201d \u2013 or perhaps, in the words of Emmanuel Levinas<\/a>, \u201cthe wisdom of love at the service of love\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Philosophy was such a vocation for Levinas. Born in 1906 to a Jewish Lithuanian family, he went on to study philosophy in France and Germany. After the war \u2013 after his family was murdered, after five years incarcerated in a labour camp, after Christian friends helped his wife and baby daughter survive \u2013 he was provoked by one of the most anguished questions in philosophy\u2019s history. How could centuries of Greco-Christian-European thinking lead to Auschwitz?<\/i> His answer would indict philosophy\u2019s fascination with ontology, its concentration on the nature of being and beings. Europe\u2019s thought had not attended enough to what is particular and sacred in human<\/i> being: that we are responsible for others, that the life of another can be more important to us than our own. For Levinas, the question is not \u201cto be or not to be\u201d but \u201cis it righteous to be?\u201d In his work, ethics replaces ontology as philosophy\u2019s first concern.<\/p>\n\n\n\n