Anthropology as Ethics

Nondualism and the Conduct of Sacrifice

T. M. S. (Terry) Evens

• Publisher: Berghahn Books
• Year: 2008
• ISBN:
  9780857450067
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Social Sciences
• Subtopic: Anthropology
• Index: Social Sciences

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.

PART I

THE ETHNOGRAPHIC SELF

The Socio-political Pathology of Modernity

Part 1 argues that dualism constitutes the central principle on which reason qua reason ultimately depends, and that as a consequence reason of this received sort—the rationality peculiarly associated with the Enlightenment and invented by the ancient Greeks—disposes an exclusionism so final as to allow and even cultivate, when it informs political relations, the likes of the Holocaust. In order to bring into relief the phenomenological and existential bearing of this abstract thesis about rationality, I tie it to the conduct of sacrifice in general and Judeo-Christian mythic tradition in particular. Arguing that being human is fundamentally construable as a conduct of sacrifice, I describe the Holocaust as a ritualistic attempt to achieve a form of sacrifice prohibited by but gravitative in the sacrificial logic of Judeo-Christianity—namely, perfect sacrifice. Such a sacrifice is indistinguishable from counter-sacrifice, in that it constitutes an endeavor to establish a self-identity so closed and exclusive that further sacrifice to and on behalf of the other would be obviated. In as much as sacrifice, in my description, is a condition for being human, a defining component of the structural dynamic of human existence, perfect or final sacrifice must be, logically speaking, definitively inhuman (which, of course, only humans can be). It follows that any homicidal enterprise it promotes cannot but also be suicidal, and that the Judeo-Christian logic of sacrifice bears innately the seeds of its own destruction. Finally, in order to help clarify the character of my argument about rationality, I look appreciatively but also critically at the practical reason of both Bourdieu and Habermas. The object of these critiques is twofold: first, to clarify by contrast the difference made by rethinking ‘practice’ and ‘rationality’ with explicit reference to ontology, and, second, in line with the reflexive aim running throughout the earlier chapters, to bring out still more the extreme tenacity of dualism as a scaffolding of Western thought.

The Chapters

Chapter 1, the first of the six chapters in part 1, clarifies the critical importance of ontology for anthropology by looking closely at the Kantian notion of the ‘synthetic a priori’, as this notion is revised in the work of two major twentieth-century philosophers,

Wittgenstein and Maurice Merleau-Ponty. The chapter shows that the synthetic a priori amounts to an intellectually profound attempt to conceptualize ontological ambiguity or nondualism, and for this reason furnishes rich insight into the nature of culture and the peculiar character of human existence.

The next two chapters, 2 and 3, by showing how human existence per se can be described as the conduct of sacrifice, demonstrate the critical lived significance of the philosophical conceptual opposition between dualism and nondualism as well as the notion of ontological ambiguity. In chapter 2, I offer an intensive interpretation of the Akedah, the biblical story of Abraham's ‘binding’ (for sacrifice) of his beloved son Isaac. Contrasting the Akedah to Nuer sacrifice, and bouncing off Derrida's profound interpretation of Kierkegaard's reading, I argue that the story's logic of blind faith—not the only logic to the story, but the one on which Kierkegaard dwells—reveals, rather than a transcending and self-evident good, a dualistic and lethal principle of self-perfection. In chapter 3, the first of two excurses (both provoked by Derrida's piercing meditations), I contend that the Akedah's lesson of murderous abnegation offers a description of human life as essentially a sacrificial dynamic. In light of my argument about perfect sacrifice, chapter 4 takes up the case of the Holocaust. After analyzing the logical contribution of ‘rationalization’ to the realization of the Nazi death camps, I offer a phenomenological analysis of how something so abstract as rationality qua rationality could help to induce people to commit mass murder routinely, on an industrial scale. I find that the basic and most comprehensive self-identity fostered by Nazism pivots dualistically on a principle of self-perfection, making it especially receptive to a rationality defined in dualistic or absolute terms. In result, this existential, and hence ‘naturally’ impelling, self-identity inverts the vital purpose of sacrifice, constituting what I think of as a counter-sacrificial form and logic, whereby the object is simply—to the complete exclusion of abnegation or ‘giving’—the total obliteration of the other.

Chapters 5 and 6 examine two exceedingly powerful and progressive but nonetheless insufficient social theoretical attempts to remedy the dualism that conditions such lethal sacrificial conduct. In chapter 5, I take up Pierre Bourdieu's theory of practice. Through close analysis of certain critical elements of Bourdieu's sociology, I show that his remedial notion of practice is keyed to terms of power rather than ethics, and that as a consequence it fails to overcome dualistic representation. In chapter 6, I perform a similar exercise, only now with ‘rationality’, as this concept is importantly reconstructed by Jürgen Habermas. Habermas takes rationality well beyond considerations of power, yet I show that his treatment of mythological thought as simply closed suggests that his progressive concept of rationality remains still informed by the dualist and instrumentalist one.

Chapter 1

ANTHROPOLOGY AND THE SYNTHETIC A PRIORI

Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty

And Hashem [‘the Name’, a translation of the Tetragrammaton] God formed out of the ground every beast of the field and every bird of the sky, and brought them to the man to see what he would call each one; and whatever the man would call to a living soul is its name.

—Genesis 2:19

“Whatever the man would call to a living soul is its name.” Invert the verse and explain it as follows: Any living soul to which man would give a name, that name is its name forever.

—Rashi, Commentary on the Torah. Vol. 1: Bereishis/Genesis

Without inverting the verse, “call to” appears to be used in the sense of summoning; the verse would be saying, “Whatever living soul man would summon is its name.” [A variant reading of Rashi (1995), given in a footnote in the same edition of Rashi's commentary on Genesis from which the two above quotes are drawn.]

Kant's Notion of the Synthetic a Priori

Before I develop and flesh out the implications and entailments of the ideas expressed in the introduction, I wish to do more to bring into relief their ontological purport. I can do this by putting them in a language more familiar to the expression of universals, namely, philosophy. There is no shortage today of postmodernist critiques maintaining that this (basically Greek) language is essentially culture-bound and, insofar as it continues to present itself as otherwise, has come to its end. However, the endeavor to express in philosophical terms the ontological reflections in question here—nondualist reflections—serves to bring out a self-deconstructive side of philosophy, a side that is, with reference to the strict sense of ‘ontology, de-ontologizing. In this light, the presupposition of foundations or universals, a key diagnostic of philosophy, is not so much abolished as radically revised, such that foundations become, paradoxically, at once both relative and essential—or, more exactly, not only essentially relative but also relatively essential. My notion of ‘primordial choice, as explained in the introduction, is meant to capture this paradoxical sense of foundations, as well as to suggest that foundations of the kind necessarily describe human existence as ethics. I also anticipate here the arguments of part 2 by directly linking this revised ontology of foundations (that are not foundations) to the traditional anthropological fare of magico-religious thought.

The philosophical notion proper of the a priori lacks a prominent professional anthropological genealogy. Nevertheless, it should serve well here to give my anthropological ideas philosophical expression. Although it is a Scholastic term that emerged from certain ideas of Aristotle, in recent centuries it is most critically associated with the thought of Kant and his ‘Copernican revolution’, in which he denied the obvious: not, as Copernicus had already done, that the universe has the earth as its center, but, in a limited yet deep sense restoring to humans the centrality of place of which Copernicus had deprived them, that the world, as we find it, stands utterly outside of our experience of it.¹

The term ‘a priori’ literally translates as ‘from what is prior’, as opposed to a posteriori or ‘from what is posterior’. Initially, the terms related directly to the idea of causality, since to know something from what comes before it is to know it by its cause. For Kant, however, who was concerned with the conditions of knowing, the term had to do with whether one's knowledge was based on experience or not. For to know something from what comes after the fact is to know it inductively, from the facts themselves. The critical Kantian distinction, then, obtained between a posteriori truths, or knowledge derived empirically, and a priori truths, or knowledge derived otherwise.

Obviously, at least in Western thought, insofar as it is defined as non-empirical, a priori knowledge appears to be a question of reason in Hume's sense of the relations of ideas. As such, it would seem to be logically necessary and universal, in contrast to a posteriori knowledge, which is contingent or relative and particular. For Kant, however, who was chiefly concerned to put metaphysical knowledge on a sound footing, it could not do to reduce the a priori thus to a matter of ordinary reason. He saw that humans cannot help making important and far-reaching judgments that present themselves as necessarily and universally true but are nevertheless not simply a matter of formal logical connection.

Judgments based on a relation of identity between subject and predicate, in which it would be self-contradictory to deny the truth of the predicate (as in, say, ‘all bodies are extended’), Kant called analytic; judgments that do not enjoy this sheer logical independence, but are, instead, matters of fact, he spoke of as synthetic. Kant observed, however, that there are critical judgments that cut across the usual classifications, amounting to knowledge that is neither exactly learned by experience nor derived from formal logic as such, knowledge that is, as he said, both a priori and synthetic. The privileged philosophical site of such judgments is the Meno, in which Plato takes up the problem of how it is possible to inquire into the nature of something if one does not know what it is. In response to this problem, Plato has Socrates argue (to Meno) that because the soul is immortal and has had a previous existence, it recalls what it had learned before; arithmetic and geometry are given as examples of such knowledge. Kant, too, draws on these examples, arguing that the truths of mathematics and geometry—for example, the sum of the angles of any triangle is 180 degrees—are, although neither given in the concept of a triangle nor produced simply on the basis of knowing, a priori or universally necessary. But in addressing the question of how we come to have such synthetic a priori knowledge, even though he invokes a sense of prior knowledge from experience, Kant departs from the Platonic belief in rebirth and from Platonic metaphysics, since the latter's idealism posits a supersensible reality without regard to the subject's point of view. For Kant, the connection between the concept of a triangle and the truths about its angles consists in intuitive forms and transcendental logic. That is, he found his answer in pure reason, the reason of necessary and universal categories rather than the reason of particular ideas. Acknowledging that any world presupposes a subjective point of view, he sought to determine the logical conditions of the very possibility of a point a view and of experiential knowledge. Consequently, while Kant tended to exemplify synthetic a priori knowledge by referring to arithmetic and geometry, natural science, and metaphysics, following his conception of transcendental logic, most if not all of our most fundamental understandings about the world must ultimately be keyed to knowledge of this kind.

As knowledge that lies somehow between apparently mutually exclusive onto-epistemological categories, Kant's synthetic a priori plainly turns in the direction of nondualism. Such a turning is implicit in his revolutionary understanding that far from being wholly independent of us, the external world conforms to the categorical structures of mind, or, in other words, that that world is given form by us. Nevertheless, for all its revolutionary force, Kant's synthetic a priori not only falls short of nondualism, but also managed to put dualism on a more sophisticated intellectual footing than had previously been the case. Although he aims to critique reason, his deductive appeal to transcendental logic rather than to experience (in this word's dynamic sense of ‘practice’) leaves reason, in the last instance, in command.

Kant argued that although synthetic a priori truths are not analytically—and thus tautologically—necessary, they must be the case if human life is to be thinkable. In other words, asking himself what are the conceptual categories necessary to conceive of the human world, he deduced certain constituting concepts. Thus, he found that although spatio-temporal concepts such as, for example, ‘object’ and ‘cause’ are neither, strictly speaking, analytic nor empirically learned, they are presupposed in all human experience. As such, they and their like are necessary and universal, presenting themselves as the categorical begetters of human existence.

Plainly, Kant's notion of the synthetic a priori runs contrary to Hume's skepticism, according to which our knowledge of the external world can never really be rationally justified. Hume's skepticism followed naturally from his coupling of radical empiricism with ontological dualism, a combination that guarantees that what we know by experience to be the case can be established psychologically but not logically. Nevertheless, Kant's notion served in at least two crucial ways to reinforce rather than refute ontological dualism. One way concerns the fact that Kant, in an important sense, and despite his anti-Cartesianism, embraced the Cartesian cogito or ‘I think’ (Heidegger 1978: 45, 367). In Kant's argument, the self is rendered as, although emphatically not, as in Descartes’ discourse, a ‘thinking stuff’ or substance, certainly timeless—something akin to a transcendental ego. “There can be in us,” Kant writes (quoted in Walsh 1967: 312),

no items of knowledge…without that unity of consciousness which precedes all data of intuitions, and by relation to which representation of objects is alone possible. This pure original unchangeable consciousness I shall name transcendental apperception…[U]nity of consciousness would be impossible if the mind in knowledge of the manifold could not become conscious of the identity of function whereby it synthetically combines it in one knowledge. The original and necessary consciousness of the identity of the self is thus at the same time a consciousness of an equally necessary unity of the synthesis of all appearances according to concepts, that is, according to rules.

In other words, subjectivity is still presented by Kant as ontologically utterly distinct from the objective world. Indeed, for Kant, the subject is not part of the ‘real’ world. Instead, it obtains in the transcendental logic (the realm of the ideal) that makes it possible to experience a world at all. To be sure, Kant's depiction of consciousness as active rather than passive serves, in a significant way, to link the subject to the object. But that dialectical linkage is predicated on a logically formal and complete distinction between form and content, by virtue of which what we give to the world is not empirical substance but shape alone. (“The identification of the a priori with the formal is the fundamental error of Kant,” observed Scheler [cited in Dufrenne 1966: 57].) As a consequence, the linking remains no less ontologically problematical than in the philosophy of Descartes, who found it necessary to appeal to divine omnipotence to account for the obvious fact that he never met a mind and then a body but always the twain as one. It is not surprising, then, that Kant concluded—ironically deepening Hume's empiricist skepticism by refuting it with idealism—that things in themselves, unconditioned things, or, as he called them, ‘noumena’ (by contrast to phenomena, or things that may be known by their worldly appearance) were indeed inaccessible to human knowing.²

A second way in which Kant's synthetic a priori promoted rather than undermined dualism is this. Correlative to his preservation of an absolute distinction between subject and object, that is, between an inside or mental world and an outside or physical one, is the consideration that his argument continues to predicate a reason that is autonomous and pure. Although by definition it is not analytic, the synthetic a priori is nonetheless conceptual before it is experiential. Indeed, even while it moves to criticize reason by referring it to the evidence of experience, Kant's synthetic a priori proposes that that evidence is not exactly given but intellectually constituted. As Burke puts it (1969: 191), for Kant “experience derives its appearance from the nature of consciousness (the ‘I think, or ‘transcendental synthesis of apperception’).” That is to say, instead of starting with human experience (in the mediatory middle, so to speak), he starts with reason qua reason (transcendental or not), arguing that the human world is begotten conceptually (categorically). Thus, he ends up with such universals as ‘cause’ and ‘object’, that is, with relative but determinate notions that he universalizes, rather than with ‘universals’ that are basically—and paradoxically—conditioned or not specifiable outside of their particular manifestations.³

At this juncture, I can make explicit that the philosophical notion of the a priori is connectable to anthropology at the very core of the latter's scholarly enterprise. As the notion of the a priori directly implicates the idea of universals, so it bears squarely on the question of cultural relativism. Indeed, the deployment of this philosophical notion has powerful implications for anthropological inquiry, from—to sum up broadly the direction of this inquiry—nineteenth-century evolutionism to twentieth-century relativism.

Since empirical statements can always be refuted by further observation, their truth (what indeed it is usual to call synthetic truth) is essentially contingent. But in a manifest sense, so is the truth of analytic statements, since it is dependent on the truth of the other such statements that go to make up the particular system of logic by which truth of this nominal—or, if you like, pure—kind is defined. Moreover, the truth of analytic statements may be regarded as finally necessary or a priori rather than contingent or a posteriori only when the system of logic from which they derive is itself necessarily universal rather than particular (as Kant [1963], in line with his transcendental idealism, professed is in fact the case with classical Western logic [see also Evens 1983]).

Obviously, then, since neither synthetic nor analytic knowledge in itself can support a claim to the epistemic superiority of one culture over another, both are compatible with cultural relativism as opposed to (the Enlightenment idea of) progressive cultural evolutionism. Kant's synthetic a priori, however, which, by virtue of the so-called transcendental deduction, makes some specific concepts both necessary and universal, certainly can offer such support. This helps explain why Kant paid virtually no attention to the role of culture and society in his philosophy of reason and knowledge. To be sure, in picturing consciousness as active rather than passive, Kant made room for cultural activity. By insisting, though, that the synthetic a priori is universal in the received sense (the sense defined by dualism or absolute division between the universal and the particular), and hence according to the epistemological principle of certainty rather than that of basic ambiguity, he could not take advantage of this ethnological opportunity. On the contrary, by defining humanity primarily in terms of reason—a reason whose purity had been critically cut, but only to be further and sublimely rarefied by transcendental distillation—Kant made it possible to conclude (and here I anticipate the interpretation of the Holocaust in chapter 4), whatever his own opinions in such matters, that any peoples who could be shown to fall short of such reason were backward, inferior, or less than human.

Toward True Synthetic a Priori: Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty

Wittgenstein

It seems ironic that in his critique of metaphysics, Kant, in the thrall of reason, failed to follow to its logical conclusion the implication of his own Copernican revolutionary thesis, for if it is the case that all knowledge presupposes a point of view, then his ‘transcendental logic’ cannot escape this circumstance. Even if Kant's ‘categories’ serve as preconditions of empirical knowledge, they too are a form of knowledge and therefore cannot but entail a point of view. The truth of Kant's usage of ‘transcendental’ (that is, its metalogical status) notwithstanding, unless Kant is claiming that this point of view is no less than God's, it must be characterized, as with all points of view, as particular and therefore as less than autonomous.

During his lifetime, Kant did not escape criticism of this kind. Most notably, Johann Georg Hamann, a compatriot of Kant and fellow inhabitant of the city of Königsberg, developed a substantial critique in reaction to Kant's critique of reason, one that had an enormous infl...