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
