Anthropology as Ethics
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Anthropology as Ethics is concerned with rethinking anthropology by rethinking the nature of reality. It develops the ontological implications of a defining thesis of the Manchester School: that all social orders exhibit basically conflicting underlying principles. Drawing especially on Continental social thought, including Wittgenstein, Merleau-Ponty, Levinas, Dumont, Bourdieu and others, and on pre-modern sources such as the Hebrew bible, the Nuer, the Dinka, and the Azande, the book mounts a radical study of the ontology of self and other in relation to dualism and nondualism. It demonstrates how the self-other dichotomy disguises fundamental ambiguity or nondualism, thus obscuring the essentially ethical, dilemmatic, and sacrificial nature of all social life. It also proposes a reason other than dualist, nihilist, and instrumental, one in which logic is seen as both inimical to and continuous with value. Without embracing absolutism, the book makes ambiguity and paradox the foundation of an ethical response to the pervasive anti-foundationalism of much postmodern thought.
Отрывок из книги
ANTHROPOLOGY AS ETHICS
Nondualism and the Conduct of Sacrifice
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In order to demonstrate that ideas or truths of reason are always tied to being-in-the-world, Merleau-Ponty takes up Descartes’ example (in his Fifth Meditation, but harking back to Plato and forward to Kant) of the triangle as a pure idea, that is, as an idea in itself, cleanly detached from the empirical world. Merleau-Ponty's discussion is involved (1962: 383ff.; cf. Hall 1979), but the following highly anthropological observation by him—evocative of Wittgenstein's that “norms of description” can grow from hard to soft propositions—suffices here to indicate the spirit of his point (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 394): “[T]he alleged transparency of Euclidean geometry is one day revealed as operative for a certain period in the history of the human mind, and signifies simply that, for a time, men were able to take a homogeneous three-dimensional space as the ‘ground’ of their thoughts, and to assume unquestioningly what generalized science will come to consider as a contingent account of space.”
What, then, of the other side of the two-way relationship he called “founding”? If, as against intellectualism, the truths of reason are always derivative, then must we, as dualism bids us, plump for empiricism? But the whole of Merleau-Ponty's great book is geared to show that neither empiricism nor intellectualism can do the ontological trick. For the founding facts in which Merleau-Ponty's “founding” begins are, like Wittgenstein's hard propositions, far from ordinary empirical facts. Instead, they are matters of basic ambiguity. Such ambiguity, which cannot be “resolved” but can be “understood as ultimate” (Merleau-Ponty 1962: 394), recalls Wittgenstein's thesis of truths that can be shown but, precisely because they are imprisoned in practice and do not stop for logical logic, cannot be said.
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