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.
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
