My aim, though, is revisionary, not primitivist, and I do not rest my argument with the concept of mythic rationality. By presuming that discretion and otherness are given rather than derived or contrived features of the world, mythic rationality entertains ethical openness implicitly. But as is an anthropological commonplace, this rationality, by virtue of a pronounced naiveté or relative lack of reflexivity, is also unduly restricted in the degree of choice it allows. It should follow that choice and ethical openness can be amplified by strong reflexivity and, since such reflexivity is a principled condition of the emergence of rationality as such, by rationality in the strict sense.
Strong reflexivity is, however, double-edged. On the one hand, epistemologically it admits and even seems to encourage the appearance of a radical split between body and mind: reflecting on itself, the self projects itself as an object or something bodily while it differentiates itself implicitly, by virtue of the act of reflection, as a subject or something mindful. As one overpoweringly consequential result of this dualistic differentiation of the self as either body or mind—either creature or creator—strong reflexivity can produce the illusion of choice and agency as utterly autonomous and complete. Such idealist illusions amount to images of omnipotence and are bound to promote the instrumentalization of the other. Put another way, radical reflexivity's predisposition to mind-body dualism can lead to the pursuit of a perfect—in postmodernist cant, a ‘totalizing’—resolution of the ethical tension between self and other. Such a resolution is indeed final, amounting to the extermination of the very tension that constitutes the possibility of human existence. Therefore, left largely unchecked (as it was to an incredible degree in the case of Nazi Germany), the pursuit of such a resolution is bound to result in the catastrophic destruction of both the other and, given the vital dependence of the self on the other, the self. In other words, it results in genocide, ethnocide, homicide, and suicide. I expect that although here I take up the case of the Holocaust alone, wherever ethnic or racial or political tensions manifest themselves genocidally (including, these days, non-Western and so-called Third World settings), dualism is informing and boundaries are being defined in absolute terms.
On the other hand, the amplification of choice holds out the possibility of a self that is especially aware of its own final indefinition, a self so acutely and steadfastly alert to its ultimate indebtedness to the other, to its own otherness, that it mindfully seeks to sustain its selfhood as a uniquely creative or experimental, rather than exclusive, force. It does so by offering, in moderation but substantively, to ensure the other's due. In terms of my paradigm of sacrifice, such a self does not seek self-completion by making a total sacrifice, one that would free the self once and for all from its dependence on the other. Nor does it close itself down, terrorizing itself with penitential visions, in punishment for its imperfection. Instead, it proceeds by pursuing a continuous course of give-and-take between self and other, a course directed to realizing the self's, and therefore the other's, creative potential. Put so as to highlight the paradox of this ethical process, the potential can be kindled by, and only by, the self embracing the way in which it is always already other to itself.
The peoples of classic ethnography, traditional peoples thematically characterized by mythic rationality and for whom ritual sacrifice tends to be a routine part of everyday life, epitomize a nondualistic mode of human existence. But the point I am making now is that by informing archaic nondualism and mythic rationality with the acute reflexivity of developed reason, it is possible to do significantly more to realize the (defining) ethical vitality of human existence. For just as Western reason, by amplifying autonomous choice, can lead to the exclusion of the other and otherness altogether, so too can it expand the inherent ethical horizons of mythic rationality. It can do so by allowing for the acutely conscious choosing of the otherness that is taken for granted in mythic rationality. Paradoxically, it amplifies choice and autonomy by deliberatively acknowledging that both are fundamentally limited and other-informed. It thus promises to revise mythic rationality into reason that is essentially tempered, as a primary move, by the ethical considerations of choice and other-regard.
Adapting Max Weber's concept to my purposes, I call this form of reason value- rationality.4 Value-rationality constitutes an important condition of the attenuation not only of the massively destructive violence characterizing settings informed in one way or another by modernity (including Third World settings), but also of the kind of insidious violence—witchcraft, sorcery, feud, bloody ritual, and the like—characterizing societies that anthropologists have traditionally studied. Of course, in view of the fact that all such violence is prosecuted in the name of one value or another, value- rationality is not a panacea. But without it, there is no hope at all. It is clear that instrumental rationality, wherein whatever counts is reduced to an object, makes nonsense of the very idea of value as intrinsic worth or significance. My point is not that we may regard any particular value as ahistorical, but rather that for humans, value, in the sense of the capacity to make and entertain particular values, is indeed a given. There is no being human without it. Put another way, the value of Value, whether we discern it or not, transcends its own particularity. Therefore, the particular ‘value’ of instrumental rationality not withstanding, it is vital to bear this consideration in mind by affording Value an ultimate primacy when deciding what we ought to do. In so doing, we oblige ourselves to adjudicate competing values by thoughtful appeal to a value that at once defines and exceeds us (Value), and therewith serves to open us to the value of otherness and other values. The burden of my study is to show that the probability of raising human consciousness (by digging ever deeper, to the specific nature of the groundlessness of all of our grounds) or changing our habits of thought to deliberatively embrace value-rationality can be decisively increased through the considered cultivation of a nondualist ontology. In effect, then, although matters are patently not so simple as to suggest (with the nineteenth-century evolutionists) that what comes first does not also remain fundamental and that moderns are the culmination of evolutionary progress, I will argue for the existence and possibility of epistemic and ethical advance.
Value-rationality is rational because it is non-arbitrary. And it is non-arbitrary because it is founded on a certain judgment of the good, namely, the possibility of setting ends.
This good is at once necessary and universal, in the sense that humanity as such cannot appear without it; to put it another way, in being human one always begins by manifesting this good. Nevertheless, as it ensures no end but the basically ambiguous one of having ends, it leaves one substantially free to arrive at one's own ends—or, better, to take Rousseau's famous dictum (but without the contractarian predicate), it forces one to be free. As a result, it necessarily describes a self, although one whose selfhood or autonomy is virtually defined by its heteronomy. And as the truth of this universal good affords to this self a crucial role in selecting ends, it continues to define an authentic, responsible human agency.
My effort to rethink rationality is thus critically tied to the hoary anthropological problem of rationality—the problem of why ‘other’ peoples adhere routinely, as a cultural practice, to apparently irrational conceptions of how things work. I intend to offer yet another solution to this problem, one keyed as roundly as possible to nondualism. The most prominent anthropological approaches to the problem of rationality, although enlightening in important ways, strike me as too tied to the Cartesian ontological predication of mutually exclusive entities and forces that act on one another through external relations only. As a result, these approaches cannot in the end do justice to the anthropological problem of rationality. The sociologism of structural-functionalism, the intellectualism of structuralism proper, the aestheticism of anthropological hermeneuticism, the (usual) materialism of practice theory, and the politicism of post-structuralism, all constitute perspectives that tend to leave Western reason unrevised in essence—even as they relativize or disparage it. It is precisely the dualist posit of immaculate boundaries between one thing and another that has informed the stark differentiation of such sociological categories as social utility, cognitive structure, aesthetics, practice, politics,