More than any other event in the twentieth century, the Holocaust has informed recent Western social thought. For Popper, Arendt, Adorno, Habermas, Lyotard, Foucault, Derrida, Levinas, and a host of other celebrated thinkers, the Holocaust has served as a constant backdrop to the development of key ideas about human social order. In order to penetrate their imposing social theories—open and closed societies (Popper), totalitarianism and banalized evil (Arendt), the dialectical destructiveness of Enlightenment thought (Adorno), communicative or pragmatic rationality versus rationality proper (Habermas), the exclusionism and totalism of modernity (Lyotard), the powerful and insidious terrorism of the Occidental self (Foucault), the driving illusion of intellectual foundations (Derrida), and ethics or other-regard as the fundamental condition of human social existence (Levinas)—it is necessary to grasp that each of these thinkers was moved profoundly by an effort to understand how, in the midst of civilization, Nazi Germany could have perpetrated mass murder on a scale that lends itself to description in transcendental terms.
Because the Holocaust marks a watershed in the development of Western reason and displays human nature at its extremes, it lends itself markedly to the sort of root anthropological investigation I wish to conduct here. My interpretation focuses on the fundamental way in which the ‘logic’ and execution of the Holocaust depended on a dualistic picture of the world. By referring the logic of the Holocaust to the existential plane on which self-identity is forged, I position myself to construct a paradigm of human existence as a nondualistic, relational dynamic of self-and-other.
I build this paradigm in terms of sacrifice, a conduct well studied by anthropologists in its ritual forms. As I see it, an approach I initially develop here in my reading of the Akedah, sacrifice centers on the tension between self-interest and other-regard. It thus can serve representatively to describe the fundamentally ethical condition of being human. Whatever the specific cultural context, in order for the self to emerge, sacrifice of the other must occur. Indeed, by definition (drawing on, as will become clear in later chapters, Levinas's radical redefinition of subjectivity), selfhood always signifies displacement of otherness. However, since self can neither appear nor sustain itself outside of its differentiation from other, it is always and indispensably owing to the latter. Put another way, the self is ‘bound’ both by self-interest and (given that selfhood is inherently characterized by discretion) obligation to the cause of preserving the other. But this condition is acutely paradoxical, for it is only by virtue of abnegation that the self can manage the preservation of the other.
This picture of sacrifice and selfhood thus describes a fundamental human dilemma. The self, in all its vitality, both bodily and morally, is caught between other- and self-sacrifice. The dilemma can be lived, producing the temporal dynamic of conventional act and meaning we call ‘human history’, but it cannot be ‘successfully’ resolved. Because the dilemma describes the very dynamic of human existence, final resolution would spell the end of human history. It would be homicidal.
Whereas the Akedah tells the story of an aborted resolution of this kind, National Socialism, prompted and enabled by the dualism of Western reason, managed such a resolution—a ‘final solution’—to an unprecedented degree. It is a terrifying irony that under Hitler's regime, the self-identification of Nazi men and women as ‘human’, which is to say, their master or primordial choice of how to live the dilemma of self-and-other, came to depend for its meaningfulness on the industrial perpetration of absolute violence and perfect exclusion. As Goldhagen, among others, has pointed out, existing Holocaust interpretation often fails to clarify how abstract explanatory categories—such as ‘rationalism’, ‘capitalism’, ‘modernism’, ‘bureaucracy’, or ‘instrumentalism’—might motivate people to perform such violent acts. But although it comports a logic of hatred and may be a critical feature of genocide, even anti-Semitism seems to suppose a ‘motivational’ dynamic that runs deeper than sentiment (however strongly felt) and dogmatic conviction, if it is to account for eliminationism of mythical proportions and ambition. What one wants to know is how a pathology such as anti-Semitism can become the keystone of the arch of one's self-identity as human, that is, of one's humanity.
Given its existential import and gravity, its matchless capacity to represent the action through which the human sense of self is produced vis-à-vis the other, the idea of sacrifice can show how something so abstract as, say, formal rationality, that is, rationality consistent with logic proper, might move ordinary men and women to organized, absolute violence. For taken as a name for the continuous process of becoming human (as it is in the biblical story of Abraham's ‘binding’ of Isaac), sacrifice bears on the constitution of basic self-identity. By ‘basic self-identity’ I mean identity that is a matter of convention (and in this broad, loose sense, choice) and yet is existentially so indistinguishable from its host that its enactment veritably is the host's nature. In effect, basic self-identity is bodily, and thus no less necessary and a priori than it is contingent and arbitrary. The uniquely human challenge is to make it also ‘good’ by virtue of both reason and ethics—to ensure that its contingent character is not, contrary to all reason, merely arbitrary, and that on the side of ethics, this character fosters humaneness and the possibility of continuing self-other creation.
Rationality, Ethics, and the Ethnographic Other
The task I have set myself, that is, forging a nondualist ontology and an anthropology as ethics, is intimately tied to the question of rationality. Indeed, the critical emphasis on dualism (and nondualism) marks my enterprise as a study in both rationality and human agency. Although it finds roots in both its Greek and Judeo-Christian heritage, modern Western dualism received its baptismal formulation in Descartes' philosophy of consciousness, in which agency and selfhood are defined in terms of rationality. For Descartes' onto-epistemology, rationality was founded in the certitude of mathematics as well as in opposition to matter-as-mechanism. As one result, rationality, human agency, and selfhood have been pre-eminently conceived in terms of the efficient and calculated manipulation of matter by mind, or, put another way, of what is other by what is self.
Here, in stark contrast, I construe rationality primarily by reference to—as against self-evidence, absolute knowledge, and instrumentality—action and argumentation anchored in the consideration of the essential uncertainty of ethical choice. And I understand human agency not as self-transparent subjectivity but as selfhood, the autonomy of which knowingly and paradoxically depends on its own fundamental heteronomy, such that the self is always becoming other to itself.
My effort to rethink rationality in nondualistic terms pivots critically on the special research province of anthropology. Given its conspicuous and diagnostic focus on the study of magic, ritual, and politico-economic orders that are likely to appear to the modern Western observer as irrational, anthropology has had an abiding interest in the problem of rationality. Arguably, finding rationality in the mentation and enterprise of tribal and archaic peoples has defined the chief problem axis around which the discipline turns. From the perspective of dualism and instrumental efficacy, so-called primitive thought, or, if you like, atheoretical understanding, looks relatively uncritical or ‘closed’ and appears to define a separate and distinct mentality. From the perspective of nondualism and ethics, however, as I aim to show, this kind of thinking, for all its genuine limitations, enjoys a certain critical openness, and although it is hardly the same as or even a modal equivalent of ‘modern’ thought, it is fundamentally continuous with it.
The openness I have in mind corresponds to an implicit apprehension of the basic ambiguity of the world, an ambiguity that is understood as revelatory of the operation of discretion. Accordingly, instead of irrationality or even arationality, I speak here of mythic rationality. Mythic rationality is nondualistic, and it enjoys a certain fundamental superiority over its instrumental counterpart. In this connection, it is important to see that this rationality, as nondualistic, does not exclude instrumental success. Instead, it precludes the precept ‘the end justifies the means’, grasping the means