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
