Towards a Curriculum of Vulnerability and Blandness: Insights from Levinas and Classical Chinese Thought

Abstract

This article examines two counterintuitive notions—vulnerability and blandness—to rethink the possibility of ethics in our troubled times and the capacity of education to forge potentials and bonds in curriculum spaces. By reading Emanuel Levinas and classical Chinese thought, this article considers vulnerability and blandness not as the limits of human existence, but as the very condition of how to live as humans. In the context of Levinasian and classical Chinese thought, vulnerability and blandness are not something to dispel, but a rich link with the world and our intimate involvement with the great process of things. A curriculum of vulnerability and blandness is unthinkable within the ontological structure of western historiography and the curriculum studies canon. It opens subjectivity onto inderdependence, prevents us from slipping into particularity and partiality, and provokes a deep moral tenor both through the Levinasian “awe” with which we approach the others, and through the Taoist “blandness” with which we strive for the true flavor. Blandness and vulnerability, prompting one to perpetual and never-ending discovery, is the richest and most meditative of pedagogical modes.