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ORGANIZATION AND KEY USAGES

Organization

Because this book tries to do many things at once, putting forward numerous topics and intertwined strands of thought, it is imperative to clarify at the outset the dual nature of its structure. From one perspective, the book's chapters tend separately to present diverse topics of analysis. Thus, the chapters respectively lay out arguments about Kant's philosophical notion of the synthetic a priori as reinterpreted by Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty, the Akedah or binding of Isaac, the Holocaust, Pierre Bourdieu's idea of practice, Habermas's notion of communicative rationality, Foucault's understanding of selfhood, Charles Taylor's of Foucault as well as of scientific rationality, Derrida's of ethics and the Akedah, the genesis stories of the Hebrew Bible and the Dinka, Zande oracular practice as opposed to psychotherapeutic interaction, the classical anthropological question of primitive mentality in relation to the logical law of non-contradiction, the force of ethics, and the question of ethnographic authority. In light of this wide array of topics, the chapters constitute a rhizomorphic rather than tree-like structure. Nevertheless, they do not make a motley, for each finds its ultimate sense in a critical rethinking of basic categories of anthropological thought—most particularly the self- other relation—in light of ontological nondualism. One way of reading this book, then, is as an assemblage of essays, each of which is meant to show the anthropological advantage and credibility of embracing nondualism when conceiving reality.

However, the premise of the critical importance of ontology for doing anthropology provides a second, no less substantial organizing principle, one that allows the chapters to read in meaningful sequence instead of mere assemblage. The principle of which I speak consists of the question of the relation between dualism and nondualism with respect to ethics. This principle organizes the book into three broad discursive steps: first, a critique of dualism and modernity (part 1: “The Ethnographic Self”); second, a comparative examination of nondualism in the context of so-called primitive society (part 2: “The Ethnographic Other”); and, third, a commentary on nondualism in relation to the unfulfilled promise of modernity (part 3: “From Mythic to Value-Rationality”). This tripartite structure features the central argument that arises out of the ontological premise and from which the book takes its title. The claim for the anthropological superiority of nondualism blurs but does not remove the distinction between self and other, subject and object, theory and practice, and structure and process. In doing so, it follows a phenomenological approach and theory of practice, in which, respectively, existential experience and process are featured analytically. Based on this theory and approach, the diacritical human experience is identified as confrontation with the question of relative indebtedness as between self and other. This confrontation makes a chronic and unavoidable lived experience that projects human existence as fundamentally an ethical dynamic of sacrifice and affords an unconventional sense of rationality. Sacrifice, ethics, and rationality, then, compose the thematic burden of the book's other structure, disposing a general linear argument (the topical variety of chapters notwithstanding) in which these themes are discussed for the most part in relation first to dualism, then to nondualism, and finally to a promise of modernity. Here, in the dependence on the thesis of nondualism, this structure of the book intersects directly with the other, rhizomorphic structure.

Key Usages

Nondualism

This book aims to expose ontological dualism as no less perilous for humankind than it is instrumentally powerful. It is argued that dualism promotes performative contradictions, which in turn foster a felt need to reduce one of the poles of whatever particular dualism is at stake—say, the real and the ideal—to the other, thus eradicating one of the poles altogether. But the book also explores and extols a different, nondualist way of seeing the world. In arriving at nondualism, I have been influenced by a myriad of thinkers and writings. I expect, though, that no work has shaped my thinking (and reading) more enduringly and directly than the phenomenological philosophies of Maurice Merleau- Ponty and Emmanuel Levinas and the anthropologies of Evans-Pritchard, Louis Dumont (especially in his Hegelian revision of the notion of hierarchy), Pierre Bourdieu, and—in its situationalism and its conjecture that the principles underlying any given social order basically conflict with each other—the Manchester School. By dualism I intend a (Cartesian) relationship of mutual exclusion, such that things are differentiated one from another in absolute terms. By nondualism, however, I do not have in mind monism or oneness, a state of being that, logically, can issue only from the kind of boundary that dualism defines—an immaculate boundary. Instead, I use this term to denote basic ambiguity or betweenness, an ontologically dynamic state in which boundaries connect as they separate and a thing is always also other than what it is. For the analyst, the challenge offered by this ontology is how to exploit the language of concepts, the analyst's principal tool, to describe a reality of this kind. In order to do its work of clarification, conceptual language depends on the logical law of non-contradiction and, in this sense, is significantly predisposed to exclude from consideration a reality in which nondualism is the order of the day. The analyst is therefore obliged to do his best to employ the logic of conceptuality in such a way that at critical points it disrupts its own epistemological certainty and thus, chiastically, manages to reflect (on) what this logic is not.

Other

In this work, notably inspired by Emmanuel Levinas, I make frequent use of ‘other’, ‘otherness’, and ‘Other’. The line drawn between these usages is rather nebulous and context dependent, since each usage conveys what cannot be or has not been reduced to the self. Generally speaking, ‘the other’ refers to other subjectivities, whereas by ‘otherness’ I have in mind what appears as different or inimical or mysterious (to the self), and can include phenomena such as natural disasters and death. When capitalized, ‘Other’ can evoke the numinous; but I use it principally to suggest simply the essence of what is different or otherwise. Whereas the other constitutes an-other self and therefore, in at least this respect, can be assimilated to one's own self, the Other cannot—it is ontologically other, to the point that it is ultimately irreducible, an alterity that stays undisclosed to quotidian human understanding. As regards the concept ‘self’, because of its centrality to the book's argument(s), this notion is developed throughout and therefore is scarcely in need of comment here. At this point of commencement, suffice it to say that my usage of ‘self’ is more or less in line with some of what passes for postmodern thinking on the ‘subject’, and that for me ‘self’ does not denote self-contained subjectivity but rather a peculiarly human and existential modality of fundamental ambiguity, in which the self remains, as a condition of its being, always other to itself. It thus describes a necessary sacrificial dynamic of becoming, a back-and-forth movement through which the self makes itself both by standing against the other and by alienating itself on behalf of the other. Put another way, every human being is the very movement through which the differentiation of self and other is made manifest.

Ethics

The word ‘ethics’ comes from the Greek ethos, for ‘moral character’, ‘habit, and ‘custom, the last-mentioned concept in particular communicating the profoundly socio-cultural nature of ethics. I use the word here to refer in the first place to the process of deciding the good or the valuable or the desirable (by contrast to the desired). This is basically in line with the Greek usage, right up through Kant. However, departing from the Kantian understanding, which emphatically makes autonomy a condition of ethics, I follow Levinas in construing the ethical capacitation of humans as primarily a matter of heteronomy: instead of the self constructing itself from scratch, it becomes self-responsible or ethical only in response to the other's entreaty. By ‘getting in one’s face, the other virtually ‘elects’ one—thus occasioning the ethical situation—to decide what is owing to the self and what to the other. Plainly, the Levinasian understanding, which informs the Greek with the Hebrew, consists with the social in a broad but fundamental way that arguably is lost to the Kantian theory. In the Hebrew tradition, it is the Other that ‘gets in one’s face'.

It follows from the emphasis on ethics as ‘deciding the good, that having to choose, in accordance with the ordinary Western acceptation of ‘morality’, between predetermined good and evil is simply one manifestation of ethics, and it is by no means the most elementary. Ironically, despite its understood invocation of principle, in practice such global predetermination of the good amounts to a commandingly instrumental manifestation. In fact, in my conception, precisely when the options are fixed before-hand as absolute, thus forestalling creative decision-making, the ethical process is, in a very substantial sense, undercut. In connection with this ultimately negative or self-defeating ethicality, whereby the fundamentally creative and processual impetus of ethics tends to be rendered as having been brought to completion, I speak of ‘moralism’. Still, since reproduction may be regarded as production once removed, the selecting of an encoded option still presents ethics as such. Therefore, under my usage, ‘morality’ remains a term of ethics, which is why at times, depending on context, I employ this word to convey the idea of ethics, for example, when I speak of ‘moral selection’ by contrast to ‘natural selection’.

In another departure from received philosophical usage, ‘ethics’, as I employ it, is not at bottom confined to one kind of decision-making; instead, it amounts to the quotidian and diacritically human conduct of deciding anything at all. This is in the spirit (but not, I think, the letter) of Levinas's thesis of ethics as the defining attribute of being human. Needless to say, most everyday decisions are scarcely of great moment. But even a decision, say, as to whether or not to take a cup of coffee in the morning has the potential to bring to the fore the decision's essentially ethical character. If, for example, one is concerned about the conditions of coffee field laborers or the effects of caffeine on an unborn child, then this choice of breakfast beverages is suddenly seen as belonging directly to the sphere of moral concern, for the economically exploited and the welfare of the fetus, respectively. Every decision, mutatis mutandis, is ethically charged in this way.

Explicitly instrumental decisions, which are classically regarded as separate and distinct from moral ones, are also essentially matters of ethics—and not just because they can have ethical consequences. The differentiating of a decision as merely instrumental is already an act of ethics, an understanding implicit in the (Nietzschean) postmodernist critique of rationality. Constructing, on the basis of instrumental rationality, a category of decisions that stand outside the realm of ethics is just a deceptive way of doing ethics by taking for granted the good of instrumentality or, more incisively, instrumentality as the good. Put another way, the inauguration of a clean, dualistic distinction between means and ends marks an ethical decision of immense moment implicitly made on the basis of instrumentality. Indeed, in the economizing of ethics, this distinction goes a step beyond moralism: instead of curtailing the ethical process by determining the bad and the good beforehand, this distinction precludes altogether an immense category of decisions from the very idea of ethicality. Instrumentality is of course unavoidable, and I certainly do not mean to suggest that it may be taken simply to define the bad. I leave that to the moralists. Rather, I am arguing that the sheer distinction between means and ends is, although epistemologically powerful, existentially deceptive and ethically insidious.

A principal thrust of my usage is that ethics enjoys a fundamental primacy over determinacy. Because all of our decisions ultimately rest on our decided agential capacity, in the end all must be a question of ethics. It is important to be clear, though, that this critical (Levinasian) thesis of ethical priority does not mean that the realization of the good is inexorable. Although I describe ethics as the human condition, when ‘ontology’ is taken in the strict sense—the deterministic sense in which it tells not only what but also that something is—the force of ethics is not exactly ontological. Obviously, an ethical injunction against theft, for example, does not hold that in reality nobody robs and steals. Rather, the priority of ethics means that human existence is always informed by discretion. Of course, the measure of choice being fundamentally limited, since the idea of wholly unconstrained choice is specious (absent worldly constraint or delimitation, what would there be to choose between?), discretion itself betrays existential necessity. But this very necessity is one key meaning of my thesis of the primacy of ethics, for, paradoxically, it virtually condemns us to conduct ourselves in terms of meanings and values. In turn, it entails yet a second key aspect of ethics: human existence is necessarily mediatory. By virtue of our finite capacity to determine our own good or ends, we are, to an exemplary degree, our own medium.

In effect, then, the force of ethics is not a question of the power of being but of our ability to determine our own worth, which is to say, to mediate our lives in terms of value qua value. On the basis of this ability (and taking direction from Levinas), we might reformulate the second meaning of the primacy of ethics as follows: because it enables us to take advantage of the mediatory possibility of the good, ethics is better, not more powerful, than ontic necessity (R. Cohen 1986). To speak in terms of ‘better’ evokes the ordinary meaning of ethics as a matter of relative good and evil. I mention this here because it explains the paradox of why—regardless of the truth of the other meaning of the primacy of ethics (that one's conduct cannot help but describe ethical process)—it remains possible to conduct oneself unethically, that is, to choose against ethicality. Choices of this kind enfeeble the human capacity for self-mediation.

Power

The exhortation ‘to speak truth to power’ distinguishes the sense of power I stress here. It opposes what is ‘right’ (in the sense of fair, or just, or good, all of which are, like ‘right, enabling and relatively open terms) to what can simply be imposed without regard to what is right. In Nietzschean usage, ‘power’ signifies both sides of this opposition: the side of right as well as the side of might. Here I identify the right in terms of the concern to preserve and enhance humankind's capacity to make and remake itself continuously, which, apart perhaps from my insistence on this capacity's dependence on the other, I believe is similar to what Nietzsche had in mind by the positive, life-affirming side of power. More often than not, it is easier to spot what threatens rather than what fosters this side. From my perspective, which means to advance onto-epistemological nondualism, Nietzsche's purposely ambiguous usage—which has come to inform the theories of some of the most influential and celebrated thinkers of our age, such as Foucault and Bourdieu—is importantly salutary, since it brings into relief the fundamentally relative nature of power, the way in which the two sides of power help to define each other. Nevertheless, since I find that when it is used in this double-sided way, ‘power’ tends (perhaps because in the context of political economy, the relatively negative side has been so presumptive an acceptation) to reduce, and in this sense corrupt, the positive side, I prefer to use different terms for the two sides. I thus refer to the two sides as ‘power’ and ‘ethics’, respectively, the latter term serving as not only the opposed but also the inclusive rubric. By seeing power as both a counterpart to and a form of ethics, I make room for the relativistic nature of power while calling attention to the primacy of the positive side, which primacy is a question of power as a function of discretion, and of discretion or the principle of negative freedom as the pre-eminently distinguishing mark of being human.

Value-as-Such

I use ‘value’ loosely to mean end or good. By ‘value-as-such’ I am propounding a narrower meaning, in order to point to what it is about value that distinguishes the desirable from the merely desired. This usage follows from nondualism and the conception of ethics by reference to human existence as fundamentally a creative or mediatory dynamic. I do not intend by it value in itself, as if value could obtain without an element of practicality; rather, I am presenting the idea of a value that does not inherently lend itself to instrumental reduction. Put another way, value-as-such remains a relative usage, but one whose own relativity is itself relativized. Judging any given value is situationally dependent, but every such judgment is itself necessarily predicated on the idea of value, in the sense in which value is opposed to fact. Some values display this sense so representatively as to reaffirm critically the very idea of value. For example, because the value of ‘turn the other cheek’ transcends, eo ipso, the demonstrative economic function of reciprocity (in this instance, revenge), it veritably creates value-as-such. By contrast, the values of, say, racism and slavery, lending themselves as they do to economization and dehumanization, tend, paradoxically, to undermine or even deny the idea of value. I do not mean to suggest that any given value is in practice immune to all attempts to instrumentalize it, for depending on how it is deployed, it can always have its measure as value qua value vitiated. The rhetoric of values can serve well to conceal and justify instrumental conduct. Thus, a value such as ‘freedom’—which surely is construable as a value-as-such—can be used to justify all sorts of perfectly instrumental and ethically vile practices (such as, for example, torturing human beings in order to extract information). Even so, I propose that inasmuch as a value-as-such logically is based on its own opposition to the instrumental, it differs significantly from values whose internal logic directly cultivates reduction to instrumentality. And for this reason, in my view, values-as-such, although hardly foolproof, may be regarded as crucial components and conditions of social arrangements and practices that furnish the interpretative and rhetorical resources to resist virulent instrumentalization.