57 Fragmentation and Subjectification 1 is a personal pathology’, Palmer (2004) stated, ‘but it soon becomes a problem for other people. It is a problem for students whose teachers “phone it in” while taking cover behind their podiums and their power…’ (p. 6). The difficulty with all this is that it is relatively easy to point out the problem but hard to indicate what will help to address this fragmentation on the personal level in and through education. Palmer’s (2004, 2017) work outlined a beautiful ideal, but it did not provide a scientific method that transcends the boundaries of subjects and disciplines. Dohmen’s (2023) plea for personhood formation with a strong philosophical foundation indicated a certain direction but left the reader without a clear educational roadmap towards an educational ideal. The same can be said, in a way, about Taylor (1989), with whom Dohmen (2023) shared the metaphor of the journey, which also appeared in the works of Palmer (2004, 2017). Most explicit on the steps to take is, in this sense, MacIntyre (2007), who called for ‘small communities’ to rediscover the classical ethic of virtues. However, his suggestion is characterised by too much scepticism and gloom to be deemed a solution. In the following two chapters, the movement and concept of WCD will prove helpful in filling this gap, especially in its evaluation and adaptation from the perspective of Christian pedagogy. Emmanuel Levinas It is—rather than MacIntyre or Taylor—the French-Jewish philosopher Emmanuel Levinas who inspired a new educational focus or approach. Although he cannot be identified with MacIntyre and Taylor, his work reflects basic elements of their critique of modernity and individualism. He performed his philosophical retrieval, however, in his own, Jewish way, a way marked by his experience of the Holocaust. This renders Levinas’ (1969) paradigm less ontological and more ethical than those of MacIntyre (2007) and Taylor (1989). For Levinas (1969), the major philosophical question was not the why of existence but the where of the quest for what is good, which is a question not of wonder but of alarm, not of consciousness but of conscience (de Boer, 1976). Levinas (1969) offered an ethical approach, without a comprehensive ethical framework but with the explicit recognition of fundamental metaphysical unity. Thus, Levinas brought ethics very close to the person, albeit in a way that rendered it specifically applicable to situations characterised by high diversity and complexity. With this approach, he applied two dynamics that together form the title of his central work, Totalité et Infini (1969). Here, Totalité refers to a closed system, a system that is separated from other systems and has no room for otherness. It can be a system of thought,
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