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ОглавлениеINTRODUCTION
Nondualism, Ontology, and Anthropology
The crisis of modern man…can be put in these terms. Reason triumphant through science has destroyed the faith in revelation, without, however, replacing revelation in the office of guiding our ultimate choices. Reason disqualified itself from that office…precisely when it installed itself…as sole authority in matters of truth. Its abdication in that native province is the corollary of its triumph in other spheres: its success there is predicated upon that redefinition of the possible objects and methods of knowledge that leaves whole ranges of other objects outside its domain. This situation is reflected in the failure of contemporary philosophy to offer an ethical theory, i.e., to validate ethical norms as part of our universe of knowledge.
— Hans Jonas, Philosophical Essays
Ontology and Anthropology
I offer here ontological reflections for the practice of anthropology. These reflections center around two key theses: first, that when it is seen from the ontological perspective of nondualism instead of dualism, the distinctively human condition is, above and beyond all else, a condition of choice and a question of ‘ethics’; and, second, that in its defining and intrinsically revolutionary quest to understand others or otherness, to break the bonds of the self, anthropology has been profoundly hampered (if also epistemologically motivated) by its logico-philosophical foundations in Western dualism.
In effect, I want to demonstrate the limits of ontological dualism and explore the intelligibility of nondualism. In dualism, the distinction between, say, subject and object is complete. In nondualism, the distinction is neither negated nor finally subsumed (as it is in monism); rather, it is preserved as ambiguous or imperfect, such that subject and object are still seen as distinct from each other, but only relatively so.1 Put another way, whereas dualism determines absolute boundaries alone, the boundaries predicated by nondualism both separate and connect, such that the distinctions these boundaries make are essentially fuzzy. As a result, the distinctions are definitively situational (‘now you see them, now you don't’), depending on whether it is the boundary's power to cut or to bond that emerges as relevant in any given context. Put still another way, by making entitativity relative rather than absolute, nondualism betrays the oxymoron of an ‘ontology’ in which all ‘things’, because they somehow participate in one another, both are and are not.
Jerusalem, writes Derrida (1995: 70), is “a holy place, but also a place that is in dispute, radically and rabidly, fought over by all the monotheisms, by all the religions of the unique and transcendent God, of the absolute other.” Here, in an apparently unbreakable nutshell, we see the trouble with dualism, as it spawns both monism and pluralism. We have three absolute, monotheistic religions, each declaring itself the one and only ‘One’, yet all three are also implicated, by force of vital circumstance, in the hope of co-existing together, pluralistically. But how can this hope make any sense if the definitive monism of these religions determines boundaries without any real give to speak of, including, at least at the end of the day, in relation to temporal authority? No wonder that Derrida speaks here of “wild-eyed ecumenism” (ibid.). The projected pluralistic order would have to be secured by a superordinate authority, which, for obvious reasons, can only be temporal. This possibility is predicated on the supposition that by subjecting the religious differences to a controlling institutional force—a sovereign political order—they can be retained and allayed at the same time. The trouble is that from the standpoint of the absolutism of these monotheisms (an absolutism so absolute that it occasions “radical and rabid” conflict), there really is no principled room for a higher sovereign force. Only where boundaries are reconceived as essentially relative, such that they always connect as they separate, does there seem to be any real hope for enduring community. But of course, this understanding of boundaries is nondualist and flies in the face of the absolutism at issue. By contrast to pluralism, nondualism promises community in which ‘identity’ is fundamentally relative rather than absolute and is therefore incapable of serving as a sine qua non of communal inclusion.
My method of inquiry is both phenomenological and anthropological. With phenomenology, I focus on tacit knowledge and experiential understanding. In this connection, I am especially concerned with the deep senses of self—and therewith of other—promoted by dualism and nondualism considered not as forms of logic as such but of social existence. Nondualism, which refuses to rend logic from existence, recommends just such an analytical strategy. I mean thus to avoid intellectualism or the presumption (perhaps the sorest affliction of social science) that most if not all human acts are behavioral conversions of prior programmatic predications, and position myself to grasp how dualism and nondualism actually move people. For within one's deepest—which is to say, one's most comprehensive, implicit, and absorbing—sense of self, act and idea may be virtually indistinguishable from each other.
Because tacit knowledge and experiential understanding run deep, they are ordinarily not open to reflection. Giving an anthropological turn to the phenomenologist's techniques for overcoming this difficulty, I try to bring to the surface critical presuppositions of Western thought and reason. I do so in two key ways: first, by taking up cases from ‘home’, that is, cases focused on the profound problematicity of Western dualism or so disturbingly extreme as to present the Western self as anthropologically other to itself; and, second, by plumbing Western thought and reason directly in view of the ethnographic fact of cultures—so-called other cultures—not readily intelligible in the usual terms of this reason and thought. In so doing, determinedly going beyond phenomenology to ethics, my aim is not simply to open to question fundamentals of Western selfhood, but to rethink these fundamentals by critically taking instruction from the ethnographic other as well as from the otherness in ourselves.
What makes the following study anthropologically novel as well as radical, then, is its explicitly ontological charge. Indeed, this charge recasts the discipline, not simply because it opens to question anthropology's deepest philosophical presuppositions and directly draws inspiration from certain philosophical literature, but because at the same time it (along with the philosophically anomalous sense of ethics I propose) derives from straightforward, empirical anthropological deliberations, thus making of our discipline a co-equal partner in a philosophically received enterprise. The revisions of self and reason I intend entail nothing less significant than a reconceiving of reality, from terms of dualism to terms of nondualism. One object of embracing reality as essentially uncertain and ambiguous is to re-emphasize the human condition as a condition of discretion and responsibility, and thereby to refocus and revitalize ethics as the (foundationless) foundation of social existence. Because it is keyed to uncertainty and process, this sense of ethics not only goes beyond but also throws into question the fixed morality of what I have earlier called moralism.
Another object of addressing the very nature of reality is to acknowledge the ethno-graphic enterprise as ontological at its very core. The claim is that the most fundamental problems of anthropological research may well yield to inquiry, but not simply by virtue of empirical analysis, however vital and necessary such analysis is. At bottom, these problems want explicit ontological deliberation. Such defining ethnographic problems as what is the nature of kinship? or how can there be order in a society without government? or, as is germane to the present work, what is the sense of magico-religious presumption? are problems of otherness, and they require for their resolution nothing less radical than ontological conversion. Going beyond phenomenological prescription to ethical act, the idea is not simply to bracket or suspend our received notion of reality (thus exercising the so-called phenomenological epoché) but to change it. By doing so, one hopes to affect, even if only in a small way and the long term, reality itself. The object is to disrupt the rigid pre-epistemological propositions—the material or practical a priori understandings—through which ‘reality’ is made to appear for us and against which nothing in our world seems normally to speak. Put another way, one wants to change the notion of reality so that it affords the opportunity for new modes of practice in the common project of social life. Underlying this ambition is that ideas can be powerful, and as those of (to select august figures) Plato or Descartes or Darwin or Freud or Marx demonstrate, there are none more so than ideas that bear roundly on the nature of reality.
Empirical research is a positively crucial condition of ethnographic inquiry. But that hardly means that that is all there is to the practice of ethnography: the discipline's pronounced turn in recent decades to sophisticated questions of interpretation theory plainly suggests otherwise. This turn, which focuses on the beholder's share in the determining of what there is, constitutes a distinct caution against the ‘empiricism’ that tends to lurk beneath the general idea of empirical research—that all knowledge is synthetic in nature, a matter of sensory perception, or that the facts speak for themselves. What is striking about the hermeneutic turn in anthropology, though, is that while it has occasioned an acute awareness that there is no such thing as an unbiased ethnographic perspective, it has only rarely grasped that the biases the ethnographer brings with her necessarily comport a taken-for-granted picture of what there is—that is, an implicit ontology. Instead, correlative to the disciplinary rise in importance of such topoi as women's and post-colonialist studies, emphatically the tendency has been to take the biases as primarily political in nature, as matters of power. It would seem that in reaction to the realization that the effort to maintain sheer ethnographic objectivity and impartiality is naive, the anthropologist, rotating dualistically, has been inclined on the whole to expressly politicize the discipline. This shift appears to have turned on an undeniably attractive logic to the effect that if implicit political bias is unavoidable, then one may as well assume, with all due deliberation, an explicit political position.
The resulting positions, the bulk of which move to empower and dignify the relatively powerless, are, surely, splendid and salutary in themselves. Nevertheless, and notwithstanding the consideration that perfect objectivity is indeed a chimera, insofar as it saps the life from the consideration that without the bias of relative objectivity ethnographic practice per se has no ‘scientific’ warrant, this politicization may itself be naive. It takes very little reflection to see what we all experience on a day-to-day basis anyway—that although there can be no observed in which the observer is not participant, the ‘distance’ between observer and observed is patently relative and varies precisely with the nature of the perspective the observer takes. And while it cannot afford the observer a view from nowhere, ‘objectivity’ can be efficaciously assumed as one such perspective. The critical point is that if when adduced on behalf of a political position ethnography (qua ethnography rather than pure political discourse or power play) is to serve effectively, it must take scrupulous care not to impugn its own relative objectivity, for its special force in relation to political argument must rest with its comparatively objective determinations.
But here what I particularly want to bring out about this politicizing movement is that, ironically, it seems not to have alerted the discipline substantially enough to the problem of empiricism as an implicit and obstructive dogma underlying ethnographic interpretation. Indeed, arguably the emphasis on ‘power’ as the defining concept of this anthropological turn continues, at least tacitly, to lend support to this dogma. To see this, one need only consider that ‘power’ is itself an inherent bias, one that carries with it a picture of reality consistent with the positivist idea of objectivity from which such empiricism takes flight. The empiricist dogma that all knowledge is reducible to brute facts, that is, to immediate experience, presupposes the ‘clean’ differentiation of an object world. In turn, on this positivistic conception of the world, ‘power’ is afforded a driving phenomenological purchase: since for its operation power requires an object, an ontology of absolute objectivity is likely to breed an epistemology of absolute power. For a full-blown example decidedly telling in respect to the rise of modernity, we can cite Baconian empiricism, according to which, on Horkheimer and Adorno's interpretation ([1972] 1998: 4; my italics), “What men want to learn from nature is how to use it in order wholly to dominate it and other men.” Bacon aside, the point is that empiricism consists with power. In view of the arresting degree to which anthropology's politicizing turn has been informed by Foucault's work, I should add that if we take technology in the wide sense to include all techniques of domination, productive as well as repressive, then empiricism does so whether we are talking about power in a Weberian or a Foucauldian sense. For in line with Horkheimer and Adorno, Foucault's thesis of anonymous power that produces a subjectivity for the purpose of subjection implicates—inasmuch as the subject's subjectivity then consists in treating itself as an object—the enclosure of the subjective by the objective.
There is, then, reason to think that the relatively recent and conspicuous interpretive turn in anthropology, with its strong political character, has not confronted directly the shadowy but suffuse presumption of empiricism that has characterized ethnographic anthropology's rise as a social ‘science’ and has helped to eclipse from view the absolutely critical extent to which ethnographic inquiry is also and always an exercise in metaphysics.2 It is notable that the ontological implications of Foucault's notion of power were not seen as such by anthropologists. (Given his anti-metaphysical proclivity, though, the great French thinker must take some blame for this oversight.) In conceiving of power in terms of production as well as repression, he had in mind the creation of the real. Although his work tended to concentrate on the constraining force of the reality thus produced, he also took this constituting function to mean that power must be seen in a positive as well as negative light. This supplementary understanding of power points directly to the importance of ontology for anthropology, to the way in which humans in their relations to things and to one another (including the ethnographic interaction) participate in the creation of reality. Because it seems not simply to blur but virtually to eradicate the distinction between ethics and power, I am loath to use the term ‘power’ in this universalistic (Nietzschean) way. Nevertheless, the usage plainly and forcefully suggests that at the end of the day, anthropology is—whether its practitioners know it or not and despite its quite proper credentials as social science— ontology, and that therefore ontological preconceptions, both those of the studied and the student, should be an explicit and pivotal concern of anthropological inquiry.
As they are constructed through experience, these preconceptions plainly are historical. Yet precisely because they are preconceptions, they serve also to constitute reality. As synthetic a priori, they mark a zone of ambiguity between theory and practice, or between mental act and bodily action, and therefore, under most quotidian circumstances, their hosts are in no position to tell them from reality, including the reality of the hosts themselves. They are innocently enacted in the ‘natural’ course of everyday life. If this is correct, then it suggests that it is to our great advantage to seek to isolate and identify these ontological preconceptions, which betray themselves in their own existential and discursive practice (where ‘betray’ means both, on the one hand, ‘deliver’ or ‘construct’, and, on the other, ‘disrupt’). And since the anthropologist's onto- logical preconceptions are critical to his professional inquiry, it is in his direct, professional interest to do the same for his own, taking advantage of the disruption offered by ethnographic confrontation to jar his reflexive insight and rethink reality. It is a central contention of this book that of anthropology's synthetic a priori, dualism remains one of the most, if not the most, stubborn and comprehensive, and that it has worked and continues to work to restrict profoundly—at the heart of the discipline's defining purpose—the anthropologist's ability to plumb the reality of other cultures.
Obviously, an anthropology rooted in ontological dualism is at an elemental disadvantage when facing an alien culture in which the real is projected as basically ambiguous, for such a reality cannot be neatly factored into things that simply stand outside to one another. Instead, an ambiguous reality presents entities as concretely participant of one another and therefore only relatively self-contained or identifiable. In order to capture the characteristic human dynamic of such a reality, I deploy the notion of ‘primordial choice’ (cf. Evens 1995). This notion is predicated directly on a reality the most diacritical feature of which is ambiguity. Under this ontological condition, reality may be seen as finally somehow giving rise to itself, presenting an open-ended causality not subject to analysis that pursues a cause-effect regression. This is so because basic ambiguity does not finally allow for things that are utterly separate and distinct, things that thereby lend themselves to the logical canons of identity, non-contradiction, and the excluded middle. Instead, basic ambiguity amounts to imperfect holism, and imperfect holism entails a causal dynamic in which, paralogically, the effect both issues from and is continuous with the cause. Inasmuch as cause and effect participate in each other, it cannot be otherwise.
Such causality amounts to a kind of self-generation, wherein what is both does and does not give rise to itself or is at once self-contained as well as other to itself, and therewith open to its other. Among humans, this fundamentally opaque causal process is so pronounced that it effects a reflexivity indistinguishable from what we, in the West, are accustomed to call ‘choosing’. The openness of ontological ambiguity manifests itself consummately as, to make here a fruitful distinction, not natural selection but moral selection. Whereas in natural selection there is indeterminacy but no witting agent to speak of, in moral selection the self that is distinguished, not as a given but as a phenomenal function of the process of selection itself, continues to select with at least tacit intentionality. Still, the evident agency of moral selection is fundamentally imperfect. In the West, we are inclined to epitomize choice in terms of explicit intentionality and wholly autonomous selection. In fact, though, notwithstanding Kant's metaphysic of morals, choice as such is always necessarily to some critical extent heteronomous as well as autonomous. Put another way, to emphasize the paralogical nature of moral selection, heteronomy serves as an enabling condition of autonomous choice.3
By ‘primordial choice’, then, I do not intend choice that is perfectly witting, individual, and free, as if it springs from a self-transparent or noumenal or transcendental or absolute self. Still, as befits self-generation, to a notable extent a primordial choice also resists reduction simply to determination by what is other. It is characterized thus by a fundamental indeterminacy and is therefore also creative. Indeed, such a choice is so wonderfully creative that it tends to found a self-identity as well as the particular social and cultural world—the ‘second nature’—that inevitably corresponds to any such purposeful identity. Hence, for example, as one differentiates oneself as either male or female, one distinguishes the world as dualistically gendered; or as one delineates oneself as a cogito, an ‘I think’, one identifies the world as divided pristinely between the subjective and the objective. The capacity of such choices to create worlds is relative and limited to be sure, but it is also plain and consequential.
Although primordial choice always presupposes essential ambiguity, paradoxically such a choice, if it is sufficiently oblivious to its own constant heteronomy, can project the self as complete unto itself and the corresponding world as given to immaculate boundaries between one thing and another. This picture of things is paradoxical because if immaculate rather than fuzzy boundaries are the rule, the primordial choice that issued in these boundaries becomes logically inconceivable. Primordial choice is intelligible only in a nondualistic world. Of course, if one takes for granted formal, classical logic and its law of bivalence, then by definition primordial choice is paradoxical in its own right. But precisely because nondualism does not take such logic for granted, proceeding instead according to a ‘logic’ of ambiguity, primordial choice remains a conceivable proposition. A logic of ambiguity allows for the possibility and functionally specific use of formal logic but ultimately does not admit of an absolute boundary between logic and practice.
Indeed, if choice is to be meaningful as such, which is to say, creative or originary, then the relevant options must themselves be essentially indeterminate as to their relative merits. These merits receive their determination, in part, by virtue of the choice itself, giving the choice its creational due. In a certain sense, a choice between alternatives the relative merits of which are perfectly fixed and decisive is no choice at all. Under this circumstance, even should one choose the non-meritorious or inferior option, the choice can issue only in the ‘same’, in which case it denies its own creative capacity, the capacity in view of which one can truthfully say that because of one's choice, things have indeed become otherwise. A choice that denies this amounts to a difference that makes no difference.
It must follow, then, however strange it is to say so about a social setting critically defined by ‘free market’ consumerism, the modern world, because it is thematically predicated on dualism, tends to deny, in the deep sense of the term, choice. Put another way, the modern world inclines to reduce choice—the essence of which is a relative indistinction or perplexity as between options—to the availability of a multiplicity of options defined in terms of certainty, on the model of, I venture, material delineation. To take a morally charged example, underlying the politically acrimonious debate on abortion in the United States is the implicit accusation by the ‘pro-life’ supporters that the ‘pro-choice’ side has equated abortion to shopping-mall selection, as if the decision to miscarry a fetus were simply an arbitrary question of, say, whether or not to buy a certain blouse or color of lipstick. In effect, the charge is homicidal reductionism. On the other hand, ironically, by failing to see that the elector of abortion may well be—and ultimately always is—caught between the vital and therefore equally absolute obligations of soulful life on the one hand and the life of one's soul on the other, the pro-life camp, by denying that something like abortion ought to be elective, takes the life out of choice and as a result dehumanizes human or soulful existence. Neither side of the debate seems to grasp very well the sense of choice in which what is at stake is, rather than simply ‘the right to choose’, the creative capacity that is critical to the very meaning of human life. If they did, they would find common ground and be logically compelled to acknowledge that the decision about abortion is an inherently creative matter involving the effort, a definitively ethical enterprise, to hold on to, at one and the same time, the two horns of a vital dilemma.
As the example of the abortion debate might suggest, dualism and nondualism basically describe here contrasting modes of self-other relations rather than ideal schemes of reasoning. Indeed, since I have defined the self-other relationship as an essential tension, dualism and nondualism may be construed as models of and for relatively comprehensive forms of conflict. Whereas dualism tends to make conflict absolute, in the end promoting total violence, as in ethnocide and genocide, nondualism pictures conflict as relative and is therefore superior for irenic purposes. More precisely, nondualism gives implicit force to the primacy of otherness, thematizes the way in which self and other are interdependent as well as opposed, and holds open the possibility of a rationality based on value rather than power.
I want to promote here the reassessment of Western reason and agency, not simply in the abstract, as an ethical exhortation, but also through the concrete means open to me by training—professional anthropology. I aim to demonstrate the merits of nondualism for empirical study in anthropology, and by doing so foster, in practical application, the reassessment of which I speak. Since it is forged in the study of otherness, the anthropological perspective is in principle revolutionary. It is perhaps nowhere more so than in relation to the anthropological problem of rationality (the philosophical problem of ‘other minds’ reformulated in terms of ‘other cultures’), from the study of which I have taken instruction in nondualism. Nondualism, which could hardly be more ‘other’ from the standpoint of received Western thought, has much to offer to the pressing critique of modernity set out in postmodernism. That critique pertains directly to the problems of difference and power in society, and therefore bears sharply on questions of dominance, aggression, violence, and peaceful co-existence. In response to these questions, nondualism has practical implications for the formal organization of conflict and difference in society. In my work on the kibbutz and on the Nuer, I have tried to bear out this claim (e.g., Evens 1984, 1985, 1989a, 1995). What I dwell on in the present book is the broader implication of nondualism for the nature of human nature: by redefining this nature in terms of self-identifying at the behest of the other, nondualism serves to re-create human nature as a matter of responsibility for self and other. In other words, it re-creates it as a matter of ethics.
By ‘ethics’ (as well as by ‘moral selection, since I see ‘moral’ as a term of ethics) I intend the dynamic of self-formation, wherein humans make their way by constantly running an optative course between self-interest and other-regard. In so doing, they tend to establish moralities or codes of good and bad, and by this token identify them-selves as responsible agents and thus as human. By this definition, then, which is critical to understand at the outset, ethics is not above all the considered practice of conforming to a predetermined moral standard. Instead, it is the tensile, existential, and creative conduct whereby humans ceaselessly construct and reconstruct such standards as well as, in doing so, their very humanity. I am not particularly talking about the science of morals or the department of study concerned with the principles of moral duty, but rather about distinctively human conduct and its study in general. I conjecture that insofar as this redefinition of ethics takes root—insofar as its slow assimilation creates a predisposition, a habitus—we are, by virtue of the resultant understanding of ourselves as vitally and existentially always beyond or other to ourselves, more likely to conduct ourselves vis-à-vis one another with tolerance and reason instead of hatred and force. We will do so, precisely by virtue of our self-identification as peculiarly ethical creatures, a definitively open and dynamic self-identity that therewith ultimately encompasses political or economic or aesthetic or religious or familial being.
My argument is not about applying anthropology for purposes of utopian engineering, then, but about reshaping anthropology in a way that allows it to assume its intrinsic ethical charge as a profoundly human science peculiarly centered on self-other relations. Although no one will mistake it for ‘working in the trenches’, the anthropological thesis of nondualism is much more than a theoretical offering—it is patently interventionist. As a redefinition of human nature, it is a very practical measure, a concrete way of furthering self-responsible and other-regarding choice in human affairs.
Ethics, Sacrifice, and the Ethnographic Self
Being acutely inclined to ontological dualism, Western thought has characteristically projected reality as cleanly divisible between principles that are mutually exclusive. As a result, in this onto-epistemological tradition, the peculiar character that human actions bear has been pre-eminently construed in terms of a sheer and principled opposition between subject and object. The inevitable correlate has been the prevalence of a sense of self that derives its meaningfulness from its capacity to exclude the other as such, whether by incorporation or, more simply, by elimination. Disallowing otherness, dualism undermines the definition of the human condition in terms of ethics and therewith the fundamental ethical quality of social interaction. This remains true notwithstanding the pronounced differentiation of ethics qua ethics in Western thought (as in, exemplarily, Kant's philosophy). For in the absence of others and otherness, responsibility cannot really signify. It is the chief burden of this study to show that when it is seen from the perspective of nondualism, a perspective that embraces the logical scandal of self and other (or of subject and object) as only imperfectly distinguishable from each other, the peculiarly human condition turns out to be primarily ethics.
Instead of the usual ethnographic starting point of the ethnographic other as such, I choose to begin this study, in part 1, with the ethnographic self. I do so in order to expose the otherness presupposed by this self, thus moving always from self to other, even when I am self-occupied. Hence, each of the cases I examine in connection to Western thought and practice—whether the philosophic notion of the synthetic a priori, the Hebrew tradition of sacrifice, the Holocaust, Bourdieu's theory of practice, or Habermas's reconstruction of rationality—furnishes peculiarly and paradoxically an ‘inside’ site that flows into and promotes disclosure of its own ‘outside’, thus facilitating betrayal of the self's otherness to itself. Put another way, these ‘at home’ cases are uniquely distinguished by the magnitude to which they disarm the Western self, opening it and its defining dualism to fundamental question. This is self-evident in my discussion of the philosophical notion of the synthetic a priori, which I see as another name for nondualism and take as bearing sharply on my idea of primordial choice. It is also apparent in my critiques of Bourdieu's and Habermas's respective attempts to overcome dualism. Regarding my choice of the Akedah, the biblical story of Abraham's murderous sacrificial conduct towards his beloved son Isaac, and of the Holocaust as telling cases for my argument, I need to say more by way of introduction here.
More than any other event in the twentieth century, the Holocaust has informed recent Western social thought. For Popper, Arendt, Adorno, Habermas, Lyotard, Foucault, Derrida, Levinas, and a host of other celebrated thinkers, the Holocaust has served as a constant backdrop to the development of key ideas about human social order. In order to penetrate their imposing social theories—open and closed societies (Popper), totalitarianism and banalized evil (Arendt), the dialectical destructiveness of Enlightenment thought (Adorno), communicative or pragmatic rationality versus rationality proper (Habermas), the exclusionism and totalism of modernity (Lyotard), the powerful and insidious terrorism of the Occidental self (Foucault), the driving illusion of intellectual foundations (Derrida), and ethics or other-regard as the fundamental condition of human social existence (Levinas)—it is necessary to grasp that each of these thinkers was moved profoundly by an effort to understand how, in the midst of civilization, Nazi Germany could have perpetrated mass murder on a scale that lends itself to description in transcendental terms.
Because the Holocaust marks a watershed in the development of Western reason and displays human nature at its extremes, it lends itself markedly to the sort of root anthropological investigation I wish to conduct here. My interpretation focuses on the fundamental way in which the ‘logic’ and execution of the Holocaust depended on a dualistic picture of the world. By referring the logic of the Holocaust to the existential plane on which self-identity is forged, I position myself to construct a paradigm of human existence as a nondualistic, relational dynamic of self-and-other.
I build this paradigm in terms of sacrifice, a conduct well studied by anthropologists in its ritual forms. As I see it, an approach I initially develop here in my reading of the Akedah, sacrifice centers on the tension between self-interest and other-regard. It thus can serve representatively to describe the fundamentally ethical condition of being human. Whatever the specific cultural context, in order for the self to emerge, sacrifice of the other must occur. Indeed, by definition (drawing on, as will become clear in later chapters, Levinas's radical redefinition of subjectivity), selfhood always signifies displacement of otherness. However, since self can neither appear nor sustain itself outside of its differentiation from other, it is always and indispensably owing to the latter. Put another way, the self is ‘bound’ both by self-interest and (given that selfhood is inherently characterized by discretion) obligation to the cause of preserving the other. But this condition is acutely paradoxical, for it is only by virtue of abnegation that the self can manage the preservation of the other.
This picture of sacrifice and selfhood thus describes a fundamental human dilemma. The self, in all its vitality, both bodily and morally, is caught between other- and self-sacrifice. The dilemma can be lived, producing the temporal dynamic of conventional act and meaning we call ‘human history’, but it cannot be ‘successfully’ resolved. Because the dilemma describes the very dynamic of human existence, final resolution would spell the end of human history. It would be homicidal.
Whereas the Akedah tells the story of an aborted resolution of this kind, National Socialism, prompted and enabled by the dualism of Western reason, managed such a resolution—a ‘final solution’—to an unprecedented degree. It is a terrifying irony that under Hitler's regime, the self-identification of Nazi men and women as ‘human’, which is to say, their master or primordial choice of how to live the dilemma of self-and-other, came to depend for its meaningfulness on the industrial perpetration of absolute violence and perfect exclusion. As Goldhagen, among others, has pointed out, existing Holocaust interpretation often fails to clarify how abstract explanatory categories—such as ‘rationalism’, ‘capitalism’, ‘modernism’, ‘bureaucracy’, or ‘instrumentalism’—might motivate people to perform such violent acts. But although it comports a logic of hatred and may be a critical feature of genocide, even anti-Semitism seems to suppose a ‘motivational’ dynamic that runs deeper than sentiment (however strongly felt) and dogmatic conviction, if it is to account for eliminationism of mythical proportions and ambition. What one wants to know is how a pathology such as anti-Semitism can become the keystone of the arch of one's self-identity as human, that is, of one's humanity.
Given its existential import and gravity, its matchless capacity to represent the action through which the human sense of self is produced vis-à-vis the other, the idea of sacrifice can show how something so abstract as, say, formal rationality, that is, rationality consistent with logic proper, might move ordinary men and women to organized, absolute violence. For taken as a name for the continuous process of becoming human (as it is in the biblical story of Abraham's ‘binding’ of Isaac), sacrifice bears on the constitution of basic self-identity. By ‘basic self-identity’ I mean identity that is a matter of convention (and in this broad, loose sense, choice) and yet is existentially so indistinguishable from its host that its enactment veritably is the host's nature. In effect, basic self-identity is bodily, and thus no less necessary and a priori than it is contingent and arbitrary. The uniquely human challenge is to make it also ‘good’ by virtue of both reason and ethics—to ensure that its contingent character is not, contrary to all reason, merely arbitrary, and that on the side of ethics, this character fosters humaneness and the possibility of continuing self-other creation.
Rationality, Ethics, and the Ethnographic Other
The task I have set myself, that is, forging a nondualist ontology and an anthropology as ethics, is intimately tied to the question of rationality. Indeed, the critical emphasis on dualism (and nondualism) marks my enterprise as a study in both rationality and human agency. Although it finds roots in both its Greek and Judeo-Christian heritage, modern Western dualism received its baptismal formulation in Descartes' philosophy of consciousness, in which agency and selfhood are defined in terms of rationality. For Descartes' onto-epistemology, rationality was founded in the certitude of mathematics as well as in opposition to matter-as-mechanism. As one result, rationality, human agency, and selfhood have been pre-eminently conceived in terms of the efficient and calculated manipulation of matter by mind, or, put another way, of what is other by what is self.
Here, in stark contrast, I construe rationality primarily by reference to—as against self-evidence, absolute knowledge, and instrumentality—action and argumentation anchored in the consideration of the essential uncertainty of ethical choice. And I understand human agency not as self-transparent subjectivity but as selfhood, the autonomy of which knowingly and paradoxically depends on its own fundamental heteronomy, such that the self is always becoming other to itself.
My effort to rethink rationality in nondualistic terms pivots critically on the special research province of anthropology. Given its conspicuous and diagnostic focus on the study of magic, ritual, and politico-economic orders that are likely to appear to the modern Western observer as irrational, anthropology has had an abiding interest in the problem of rationality. Arguably, finding rationality in the mentation and enterprise of tribal and archaic peoples has defined the chief problem axis around which the discipline turns. From the perspective of dualism and instrumental efficacy, so-called primitive thought, or, if you like, atheoretical understanding, looks relatively uncritical or ‘closed’ and appears to define a separate and distinct mentality. From the perspective of nondualism and ethics, however, as I aim to show, this kind of thinking, for all its genuine limitations, enjoys a certain critical openness, and although it is hardly the same as or even a modal equivalent of ‘modern’ thought, it is fundamentally continuous with it.
The openness I have in mind corresponds to an implicit apprehension of the basic ambiguity of the world, an ambiguity that is understood as revelatory of the operation of discretion. Accordingly, instead of irrationality or even arationality, I speak here of mythic rationality. Mythic rationality is nondualistic, and it enjoys a certain fundamental superiority over its instrumental counterpart. In this connection, it is important to see that this rationality, as nondualistic, does not exclude instrumental success. Instead, it precludes the precept ‘the end justifies the means’, grasping the means in virtue of not simply their outcome, but their capacity to bear the end in their own doing. In effect, as befits nondualism, the means are not separate and distinct from the end, but rather, in significant part, indistinct from it. In this light, the superiority I claim for mythic rationality over instrumentalism proper has to do not with efficient technological control and the powerful sort of truth that accompanies this control, but with ethics and other-regard.
My aim, though, is revisionary, not primitivist, and I do not rest my argument with the concept of mythic rationality. By presuming that discretion and otherness are given rather than derived or contrived features of the world, mythic rationality entertains ethical openness implicitly. But as is an anthropological commonplace, this rationality, by virtue of a pronounced naiveté or relative lack of reflexivity, is also unduly restricted in the degree of choice it allows. It should follow that choice and ethical openness can be amplified by strong reflexivity and, since such reflexivity is a principled condition of the emergence of rationality as such, by rationality in the strict sense.
Strong reflexivity is, however, double-edged. On the one hand, epistemologically it admits and even seems to encourage the appearance of a radical split between body and mind: reflecting on itself, the self projects itself as an object or something bodily while it differentiates itself implicitly, by virtue of the act of reflection, as a subject or something mindful. As one overpoweringly consequential result of this dualistic differentiation of the self as either body or mind—either creature or creator—strong reflexivity can produce the illusion of choice and agency as utterly autonomous and complete. Such idealist illusions amount to images of omnipotence and are bound to promote the instrumentalization of the other. Put another way, radical reflexivity's predisposition to mind-body dualism can lead to the pursuit of a perfect—in postmodernist cant, a ‘totalizing’—resolution of the ethical tension between self and other. Such a resolution is indeed final, amounting to the extermination of the very tension that constitutes the possibility of human existence. Therefore, left largely unchecked (as it was to an incredible degree in the case of Nazi Germany), the pursuit of such a resolution is bound to result in the catastrophic destruction of both the other and, given the vital dependence of the self on the other, the self. In other words, it results in genocide, ethnocide, homicide, and suicide. I expect that although here I take up the case of the Holocaust alone, wherever ethnic or racial or political tensions manifest themselves genocidally (including, these days, non-Western and so-called Third World settings), dualism is informing and boundaries are being defined in absolute terms.
On the other hand, the amplification of choice holds out the possibility of a self that is especially aware of its own final indefinition, a self so acutely and steadfastly alert to its ultimate indebtedness to the other, to its own otherness, that it mindfully seeks to sustain its selfhood as a uniquely creative or experimental, rather than exclusive, force. It does so by offering, in moderation but substantively, to ensure the other's due. In terms of my paradigm of sacrifice, such a self does not seek self-completion by making a total sacrifice, one that would free the self once and for all from its dependence on the other. Nor does it close itself down, terrorizing itself with penitential visions, in punishment for its imperfection. Instead, it proceeds by pursuing a continuous course of give-and-take between self and other, a course directed to realizing the self's, and therefore the other's, creative potential. Put so as to highlight the paradox of this ethical process, the potential can be kindled by, and only by, the self embracing the way in which it is always already other to itself.
The peoples of classic ethnography, traditional peoples thematically characterized by mythic rationality and for whom ritual sacrifice tends to be a routine part of everyday life, epitomize a nondualistic mode of human existence. But the point I am making now is that by informing archaic nondualism and mythic rationality with the acute reflexivity of developed reason, it is possible to do significantly more to realize the (defining) ethical vitality of human existence. For just as Western reason, by amplifying autonomous choice, can lead to the exclusion of the other and otherness altogether, so too can it expand the inherent ethical horizons of mythic rationality. It can do so by allowing for the acutely conscious choosing of the otherness that is taken for granted in mythic rationality. Paradoxically, it amplifies choice and autonomy by deliberatively acknowledging that both are fundamentally limited and other-informed. It thus promises to revise mythic rationality into reason that is essentially tempered, as a primary move, by the ethical considerations of choice and other-regard.
Adapting Max Weber's concept to my purposes, I call this form of reason value- rationality.4 Value-rationality constitutes an important condition of the attenuation not only of the massively destructive violence characterizing settings informed in one way or another by modernity (including Third World settings), but also of the kind of insidious violence—witchcraft, sorcery, feud, bloody ritual, and the like—characterizing societies that anthropologists have traditionally studied. Of course, in view of the fact that all such violence is prosecuted in the name of one value or another, value- rationality is not a panacea. But without it, there is no hope at all. It is clear that instrumental rationality, wherein whatever counts is reduced to an object, makes nonsense of the very idea of value as intrinsic worth or significance. My point is not that we may regard any particular value as ahistorical, but rather that for humans, value, in the sense of the capacity to make and entertain particular values, is indeed a given. There is no being human without it. Put another way, the value of Value, whether we discern it or not, transcends its own particularity. Therefore, the particular ‘value’ of instrumental rationality not withstanding, it is vital to bear this consideration in mind by affording Value an ultimate primacy when deciding what we ought to do. In so doing, we oblige ourselves to adjudicate competing values by thoughtful appeal to a value that at once defines and exceeds us (Value), and therewith serves to open us to the value of otherness and other values. The burden of my study is to show that the probability of raising human consciousness (by digging ever deeper, to the specific nature of the groundlessness of all of our grounds) or changing our habits of thought to deliberatively embrace value-rationality can be decisively increased through the considered cultivation of a nondualist ontology. In effect, then, although matters are patently not so simple as to suggest (with the nineteenth-century evolutionists) that what comes first does not also remain fundamental and that moderns are the culmination of evolutionary progress, I will argue for the existence and possibility of epistemic and ethical advance.
Value-rationality is rational because it is non-arbitrary. And it is non-arbitrary because it is founded on a certain judgment of the good, namely, the possibility of setting ends.
This good is at once necessary and universal, in the sense that humanity as such cannot appear without it; to put it another way, in being human one always begins by manifesting this good. Nevertheless, as it ensures no end but the basically ambiguous one of having ends, it leaves one substantially free to arrive at one's own ends—or, better, to take Rousseau's famous dictum (but without the contractarian predicate), it forces one to be free. As a result, it necessarily describes a self, although one whose selfhood or autonomy is virtually defined by its heteronomy. And as the truth of this universal good affords to this self a crucial role in selecting ends, it continues to define an authentic, responsible human agency.
My effort to rethink rationality is thus critically tied to the hoary anthropological problem of rationality—the problem of why ‘other’ peoples adhere routinely, as a cultural practice, to apparently irrational conceptions of how things work. I intend to offer yet another solution to this problem, one keyed as roundly as possible to nondualism. The most prominent anthropological approaches to the problem of rationality, although enlightening in important ways, strike me as too tied to the Cartesian ontological predication of mutually exclusive entities and forces that act on one another through external relations only. As a result, these approaches cannot in the end do justice to the anthropological problem of rationality. The sociologism of structural-functionalism, the intellectualism of structuralism proper, the aestheticism of anthropological hermeneuticism, the (usual) materialism of practice theory, and the politicism of post-structuralism, all constitute perspectives that tend to leave Western reason unrevised in essence—even as they relativize or disparage it. It is precisely the dualist posit of immaculate boundaries between one thing and another that has informed the stark differentiation of such sociological categories as social utility, cognitive structure, aesthetics, practice, politics, and so forth. The same posit has also secured rationality in the strict sense of the term, constraining the apperception of much atheoretical thought as irrational. For atheoretical thought seems to presuppose a world in which the relations between one thing and another are, by jarring contrast to the received Western ontology, always basically ambiguous, always internal as well as external. For this reason, the anthropological problem of rationality has most notoriously presented itself in terms of atheoretical thought's apparent indifference to contradictions. Obviously, since it is predicated on basic ambiguity, nondualism is bound to put such thought in a fresh light. In the following chapters, I argue that from the perspective of nondualism, thought of this kind enjoys a certain primacy in relation to rationality proper, yet is also subject to progressive development precisely by means of the latter.
