philosophy to offer an ethical theory, i.e., to validate ethical norms as part of our universe of knowledge.
— Hans Jonas, Philosophical Essays
Ontology and Anthropology
I offer here ontological reflections for the practice of anthropology. These reflections center around two key theses: first, that when it is seen from the ontological perspective of nondualism instead of dualism, the distinctively human condition is, above and beyond all else, a condition of choice and a question of ‘ethics’; and, second, that in its defining and intrinsically revolutionary quest to understand others or otherness, to break the bonds of the self, anthropology has been profoundly hampered (if also epistemologically motivated) by its logico-philosophical foundations in Western dualism.
In effect, I want to demonstrate the limits of ontological dualism and explore the intelligibility of nondualism. In dualism, the distinction between, say, subject and object is complete. In nondualism, the distinction is neither negated nor finally subsumed (as it is in monism); rather, it is preserved as ambiguous or imperfect, such that subject and object are still seen as distinct from each other, but only relatively so.1 Put another way, whereas dualism determines absolute boundaries alone, the boundaries predicated by nondualism both separate and connect, such that the distinctions these boundaries make are essentially fuzzy. As a result, the distinctions are definitively situational (‘now you see them, now you don't’), depending on whether it is the boundary's power to cut or to bond that emerges as relevant in any given context. Put still another way, by making entitativity relative rather than absolute, nondualism betrays the oxymoron of an ‘ontology’ in which all ‘things’, because they somehow participate in one another, both are and are not.
Jerusalem, writes Derrida (1995: 70), is “a holy place, but also a place that is in dispute, radically and rabidly, fought over by all the monotheisms, by all the religions of the unique and transcendent God, of the absolute other.” Here, in an apparently unbreakable nutshell, we see the trouble with dualism, as it spawns both monism and pluralism. We have three absolute, monotheistic religions, each declaring itself the one and only ‘One’, yet all three are also implicated, by force of vital circumstance, in the hope of co-existing together, pluralistically. But how can this hope make any sense if the definitive monism of these religions determines boundaries without any real give to speak of, including, at least at the end of the day, in relation to temporal authority? No wonder that Derrida speaks here of “wild-eyed ecumenism” (ibid.). The projected pluralistic order would have to be secured by a superordinate authority, which, for obvious reasons, can only be temporal. This possibility is predicated on the supposition that by subjecting the religious differences to a controlling institutional force—a sovereign political order—they can be retained and allayed at the same time. The trouble is that from the standpoint of the absolutism of these monotheisms (an absolutism so absolute that it occasions “radical and rabid” conflict), there really is no principled room for a higher sovereign force. Only where boundaries are reconceived as essentially relative, such that they always connect as they separate, does there seem to be any real hope for enduring community. But of course, this understanding of boundaries is nondualist and flies in the face of the absolutism at issue. By contrast to pluralism, nondualism promises community in which ‘identity’ is fundamentally relative rather than absolute and is therefore incapable of serving as a sine qua non of communal inclusion.
My method of inquiry is both phenomenological and anthropological. With phenomenology, I focus on tacit knowledge and experiential understanding. In this connection, I am especially concerned with the deep senses of self—and therewith of other—promoted by dualism and nondualism considered not as forms of logic as such but of social existence. Nondualism, which refuses to rend logic from existence, recommends just such an analytical strategy. I mean thus to avoid intellectualism or the presumption (perhaps the sorest affliction of social science) that most if not all human acts are behavioral conversions of prior programmatic predications, and position myself to grasp how dualism and nondualism actually move people. For within one's deepest—which is to say, one's most comprehensive, implicit, and absorbing—sense of self, act and idea may be virtually indistinguishable from each other.
Because tacit knowledge and experiential understanding run deep, they are ordinarily not open to reflection. Giving an anthropological turn to the phenomenologist's techniques for overcoming this difficulty, I try to bring to the surface critical presuppositions of Western thought and reason. I do so in two key ways: first, by taking up cases from ‘home’, that is, cases focused on the profound problematicity of Western dualism or so disturbingly extreme as to present the Western self as anthropologically other to itself; and, second, by plumbing Western thought and reason directly in view of the ethnographic fact of cultures—so-called other cultures—not readily intelligible in the usual terms of this reason and thought. In so doing, determinedly going beyond phenomenology to ethics, my aim is not simply to open to question fundamentals of Western selfhood, but to rethink these fundamentals by critically taking instruction from the ethnographic other as well as from the otherness in ourselves.
What makes the following study anthropologically novel as well as radical, then, is its explicitly ontological charge. Indeed, this charge recasts the discipline, not simply because it opens to question anthropology's deepest philosophical presuppositions and directly draws inspiration from certain philosophical literature, but because at the same time it (along with the philosophically anomalous sense of ethics I propose) derives from straightforward, empirical anthropological deliberations, thus making of our discipline a co-equal partner in a philosophically received enterprise. The revisions of self and reason I intend entail nothing less significant than a reconceiving of reality, from terms of dualism to terms of nondualism. One object of embracing reality as essentially uncertain and ambiguous is to re-emphasize the human condition as a condition of discretion and responsibility, and thereby to refocus and revitalize ethics as the (foundationless) foundation of social existence. Because it is keyed to uncertainty and process, this sense of ethics not only goes beyond but also throws into question the fixed morality of what I have earlier called moralism.
Another object of addressing the very nature of reality is to acknowledge the ethno-graphic enterprise as ontological at its very core. The claim is that the most fundamental problems of anthropological research may well yield to inquiry, but not simply by virtue of empirical analysis, however vital and necessary such analysis is. At bottom, these problems want explicit ontological deliberation. Such defining ethnographic problems as what is the nature of kinship? or how can there be order in a society without government? or, as is germane to the present work, what is the sense of magico-religious presumption? are problems of otherness, and they require for their resolution nothing less radical than ontological conversion. Going beyond phenomenological prescription to ethical act, the idea is not simply to bracket or suspend our received notion of reality (thus exercising the so-called phenomenological epoché) but to change it. By doing so, one hopes to affect, even if only in a small way and the long term, reality itself. The object is to disrupt the rigid pre-epistemological propositions—the material or practical a priori understandings—through which ‘reality’ is made to appear for us and against which nothing in our world seems normally to speak. Put another way, one wants to change the notion of reality so that it affords the opportunity for new modes of practice in the common project of social life. Underlying this ambition is that ideas can be powerful, and as those of (to select august figures) Plato or Descartes or Darwin or Freud or Marx demonstrate, there are none more so than ideas that bear roundly on the nature of reality.
Empirical research is a positively crucial condition of ethnographic inquiry. But that hardly means that that is all there is to the practice of ethnography: the discipline's pronounced turn in recent decades to sophisticated questions of interpretation theory plainly suggests otherwise. This turn, which focuses on the beholder's share in the determining of what there is, constitutes a distinct caution against the ‘empiricism’ that tends to lurk beneath the general idea of empirical research—that all knowledge is synthetic in nature, a matter of sensory perception, or that the facts speak for themselves. What is
