so-called primitive society (part 2: “The Ethnographic Other”); and, third, a commentary on nondualism in relation to the unfulfilled promise of modernity (part 3: “From Mythic to Value-Rationality”). This tripartite structure features the central argument that arises out of the ontological premise and from which the book takes its title. The claim for the anthropological superiority of nondualism blurs but does not remove the distinction between self and other, subject and object, theory and practice, and structure and process. In doing so, it follows a phenomenological approach and theory of practice, in which, respectively, existential experience and process are featured analytically. Based on this theory and approach, the diacritical human experience is identified as confrontation with the question of relative indebtedness as between self and other. This confrontation makes a chronic and unavoidable lived experience that projects human existence as fundamentally an ethical dynamic of sacrifice and affords an unconventional sense of rationality. Sacrifice, ethics, and rationality, then, compose the thematic burden of the book's other structure, disposing a general linear argument (the topical variety of chapters notwithstanding) in which these themes are discussed for the most part in relation first to dualism, then to nondualism, and finally to a promise of modernity. Here, in the dependence on the thesis of nondualism, this structure of the book intersects directly with the other, rhizomorphic structure.
Key Usages
Nondualism
This book aims to expose ontological dualism as no less perilous for humankind than it is instrumentally powerful. It is argued that dualism promotes performative contradictions, which in turn foster a felt need to reduce one of the poles of whatever particular dualism is at stake—say, the real and the ideal—to the other, thus eradicating one of the poles altogether. But the book also explores and extols a different, nondualist way of seeing the world. In arriving at nondualism, I have been influenced by a myriad of thinkers and writings. I expect, though, that no work has shaped my thinking (and reading) more enduringly and directly than the phenomenological philosophies of Maurice Merleau- Ponty and Emmanuel Levinas and the anthropologies of Evans-Pritchard, Louis Dumont (especially in his Hegelian revision of the notion of hierarchy), Pierre Bourdieu, and—in its situationalism and its conjecture that the principles underlying any given social order basically conflict with each other—the Manchester School. By dualism I intend a (Cartesian) relationship of mutual exclusion, such that things are differentiated one from another in absolute terms. By nondualism, however, I do not have in mind monism or oneness, a state of being that, logically, can issue only from the kind of boundary that dualism defines—an immaculate boundary. Instead, I use this term to denote basic ambiguity or betweenness, an ontologically dynamic state in which boundaries connect as they separate and a thing is always also other than what it is. For the analyst, the challenge offered by this ontology is how to exploit the language of concepts, the analyst's principal tool, to describe a reality of this kind. In order to do its work of clarification, conceptual language depends on the logical law of non-contradiction and, in this sense, is significantly predisposed to exclude from consideration a reality in which nondualism is the order of the day. The analyst is therefore obliged to do his best to employ the logic of conceptuality in such a way that at critical points it disrupts its own epistemological certainty and thus, chiastically, manages to reflect (on) what this logic is not.
Other
In this work, notably inspired by Emmanuel Levinas, I make frequent use of ‘other’, ‘otherness’, and ‘Other’. The line drawn between these usages is rather nebulous and context dependent, since each usage conveys what cannot be or has not been reduced to the self. Generally speaking, ‘the other’ refers to other subjectivities, whereas by ‘otherness’ I have in mind what appears as different or inimical or mysterious (to the self), and can include phenomena such as natural disasters and death. When capitalized, ‘Other’ can evoke the numinous; but I use it principally to suggest simply the essence of what is different or otherwise. Whereas the other constitutes an-other self and therefore, in at least this respect, can be assimilated to one's own self, the Other cannot—it is ontologically other, to the point that it is ultimately irreducible, an alterity that stays undisclosed to quotidian human understanding. As regards the concept ‘self’, because of its centrality to the book's argument(s), this notion is developed throughout and therefore is scarcely in need of comment here. At this point of commencement, suffice it to say that my usage of ‘self’ is more or less in line with some of what passes for postmodern thinking on the ‘subject’, and that for me ‘self’ does not denote self-contained subjectivity but rather a peculiarly human and existential modality of fundamental ambiguity, in which the self remains, as a condition of its being, always other to itself. It thus describes a necessary sacrificial dynamic of becoming, a back-and-forth movement through which the self makes itself both by standing against the other and by alienating itself on behalf of the other. Put another way, every human being is the very movement through which the differentiation of self and other is made manifest.
Ethics
The word ‘ethics’ comes from the Greek ethos, for ‘moral character’, ‘habit, and ‘custom, the last-mentioned concept in particular communicating the profoundly socio-cultural nature of ethics. I use the word here to refer in the first place to the process of deciding the good or the valuable or the desirable (by contrast to the desired). This is basically in line with the Greek usage, right up through Kant. However, departing from the Kantian understanding, which emphatically makes autonomy a condition of ethics, I follow Levinas in construing the ethical capacitation of humans as primarily a matter of heteronomy: instead of the self constructing itself from scratch, it becomes self-responsible or ethical only in response to the other's entreaty. By ‘getting in one’s face, the other virtually ‘elects’ one—thus occasioning the ethical situation—to decide what is owing to the self and what to the other. Plainly, the Levinasian understanding, which informs the Greek with the Hebrew, consists with the social in a broad but fundamental way that arguably is lost to the Kantian theory. In the Hebrew tradition, it is the Other that ‘gets in one’s face'.
It follows from the emphasis on ethics as ‘deciding the good, that having to choose, in accordance with the ordinary Western acceptation of ‘morality’, between predetermined good and evil is simply one manifestation of ethics, and it is by no means the most elementary. Ironically, despite its understood invocation of principle, in practice such global predetermination of the good amounts to a commandingly instrumental manifestation. In fact, in my conception, precisely when the options are fixed before-hand as absolute, thus forestalling creative decision-making, the ethical process is, in a very substantial sense, undercut. In connection with this ultimately negative or self-defeating ethicality, whereby the fundamentally creative and processual impetus of ethics tends to be rendered as having been brought to completion, I speak of ‘moralism’. Still, since reproduction may be regarded as production once removed, the selecting of an encoded option still presents ethics as such. Therefore, under my usage, ‘morality’ remains a term of ethics, which is why at times, depending on context, I employ this word to convey the idea of ethics, for example, when I speak of ‘moral selection’ by contrast to ‘natural selection’.
In another departure from received philosophical usage, ‘ethics’, as I employ it, is not at bottom confined to one kind of decision-making; instead, it amounts to the quotidian and diacritically human conduct of deciding anything at all. This is in the spirit (but not, I think, the letter) of Levinas's thesis of ethics as the defining attribute of being human. Needless to say, most everyday decisions are scarcely of great moment. But even a decision, say, as to whether or not to take a cup of coffee in the morning has the potential to bring to the fore the decision's essentially ethical character. If, for example, one is concerned about the conditions of coffee field laborers or the effects of caffeine on an unborn child, then this choice of breakfast beverages is suddenly seen as belonging directly to the sphere of moral concern, for the economically exploited and the welfare of the fetus,
