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
