It must follow, then, however strange it is to say so about a social setting critically defined by ‘free market’ consumerism, the modern world, because it is thematically predicated on dualism, tends to deny, in the deep sense of the term, choice. Put another way, the modern world inclines to reduce choice—the essence of which is a relative indistinction or perplexity as between options—to the availability of a multiplicity of options defined in terms of certainty, on the model of, I venture, material delineation. To take a morally charged example, underlying the politically acrimonious debate on abortion in the United States is the implicit accusation by the ‘pro-life’ supporters that the ‘pro-choice’ side has equated abortion to shopping-mall selection, as if the decision to miscarry a fetus were simply an arbitrary question of, say, whether or not to buy a certain blouse or color of lipstick. In effect, the charge is homicidal reductionism. On the other hand, ironically, by failing to see that the elector of abortion may well be—and ultimately always is—caught between the vital and therefore equally absolute obligations of soulful life on the one hand and the life of one's soul on the other, the pro-life camp, by denying that something like abortion ought to be elective, takes the life out of choice and as a result dehumanizes human or soulful existence. Neither side of the debate seems to grasp very well the sense of choice in which what is at stake is, rather than simply ‘the right to choose’, the creative capacity that is critical to the very meaning of human life. If they did, they would find common ground and be logically compelled to acknowledge that the decision about abortion is an inherently creative matter involving the effort, a definitively ethical enterprise, to hold on to, at one and the same time, the two horns of a vital dilemma.
As the example of the abortion debate might suggest, dualism and nondualism basically describe here contrasting modes of self-other relations rather than ideal schemes of reasoning. Indeed, since I have defined the self-other relationship as an essential tension, dualism and nondualism may be construed as models of and for relatively comprehensive forms of conflict. Whereas dualism tends to make conflict absolute, in the end promoting total violence, as in ethnocide and genocide, nondualism pictures conflict as relative and is therefore superior for irenic purposes. More precisely, nondualism gives implicit force to the primacy of otherness, thematizes the way in which self and other are interdependent as well as opposed, and holds open the possibility of a rationality based on value rather than power.
I want to promote here the reassessment of Western reason and agency, not simply in the abstract, as an ethical exhortation, but also through the concrete means open to me by training—professional anthropology. I aim to demonstrate the merits of nondualism for empirical study in anthropology, and by doing so foster, in practical application, the reassessment of which I speak. Since it is forged in the study of otherness, the anthropological perspective is in principle revolutionary. It is perhaps nowhere more so than in relation to the anthropological problem of rationality (the philosophical problem of ‘other minds’ reformulated in terms of ‘other cultures’), from the study of which I have taken instruction in nondualism. Nondualism, which could hardly be more ‘other’ from the standpoint of received Western thought, has much to offer to the pressing critique of modernity set out in postmodernism. That critique pertains directly to the problems of difference and power in society, and therefore bears sharply on questions of dominance, aggression, violence, and peaceful co-existence. In response to these questions, nondualism has practical implications for the formal organization of conflict and difference in society. In my work on the kibbutz and on the Nuer, I have tried to bear out this claim (e.g., Evens 1984, 1985, 1989a, 1995). What I dwell on in the present book is the broader implication of nondualism for the nature of human nature: by redefining this nature in terms of self-identifying at the behest of the other, nondualism serves to re-create human nature as a matter of responsibility for self and other. In other words, it re-creates it as a matter of ethics.
By ‘ethics’ (as well as by ‘moral selection, since I see ‘moral’ as a term of ethics) I intend the dynamic of self-formation, wherein humans make their way by constantly running an optative course between self-interest and other-regard. In so doing, they tend to establish moralities or codes of good and bad, and by this token identify them-selves as responsible agents and thus as human. By this definition, then, which is critical to understand at the outset, ethics is not above all the considered practice of conforming to a predetermined moral standard. Instead, it is the tensile, existential, and creative conduct whereby humans ceaselessly construct and reconstruct such standards as well as, in doing so, their very humanity. I am not particularly talking about the science of morals or the department of study concerned with the principles of moral duty, but rather about distinctively human conduct and its study in general. I conjecture that insofar as this redefinition of ethics takes root—insofar as its slow assimilation creates a predisposition, a habitus—we are, by virtue of the resultant understanding of ourselves as vitally and existentially always beyond or other to ourselves, more likely to conduct ourselves vis-à-vis one another with tolerance and reason instead of hatred and force. We will do so, precisely by virtue of our self-identification as peculiarly ethical creatures, a definitively open and dynamic self-identity that therewith ultimately encompasses political or economic or aesthetic or religious or familial being.
My argument is not about applying anthropology for purposes of utopian engineering, then, but about reshaping anthropology in a way that allows it to assume its intrinsic ethical charge as a profoundly human science peculiarly centered on self-other relations. Although no one will mistake it for ‘working in the trenches’, the anthropological thesis of nondualism is much more than a theoretical offering—it is patently interventionist. As a redefinition of human nature, it is a very practical measure, a concrete way of furthering self-responsible and other-regarding choice in human affairs.
Ethics, Sacrifice, and the Ethnographic Self
Being acutely inclined to ontological dualism, Western thought has characteristically projected reality as cleanly divisible between principles that are mutually exclusive. As a result, in this onto-epistemological tradition, the peculiar character that human actions bear has been pre-eminently construed in terms of a sheer and principled opposition between subject and object. The inevitable correlate has been the prevalence of a sense of self that derives its meaningfulness from its capacity to exclude the other as such, whether by incorporation or, more simply, by elimination. Disallowing otherness, dualism undermines the definition of the human condition in terms of ethics and therewith the fundamental ethical quality of social interaction. This remains true notwithstanding the pronounced differentiation of ethics qua ethics in Western thought (as in, exemplarily, Kant's philosophy). For in the absence of others and otherness, responsibility cannot really signify. It is the chief burden of this study to show that when it is seen from the perspective of nondualism, a perspective that embraces the logical scandal of self and other (or of subject and object) as only imperfectly distinguishable from each other, the peculiarly human condition turns out to be primarily ethics.
Instead of the usual ethnographic starting point of the ethnographic other as such, I choose to begin this study, in part 1, with the ethnographic self. I do so in order to expose the otherness presupposed by this self, thus moving always from self to other, even when I am self-occupied. Hence, each of the cases I examine in connection to Western thought and practice—whether the philosophic notion of the synthetic a priori, the Hebrew tradition of sacrifice, the Holocaust, Bourdieu's theory of practice, or Habermas's reconstruction of rationality—furnishes peculiarly and paradoxically an ‘inside’ site that flows into and promotes disclosure of its own ‘outside’, thus facilitating betrayal of the self's otherness to itself. Put another way, these ‘at home’ cases are uniquely distinguished by the magnitude to which they disarm the Western self, opening it and its defining dualism to fundamental question. This is self-evident