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.
