This groundless ground, which is altogether more radical than objective thought and beyond which there is nothing to understand, forms of course the land of the synthetic a priori, and both scholars, as we have just seen, use the word ‘magic’ to describe it. When they do, as is also plain from the quotations, they have in mind a kind of thinking that is usually associated with so-called primitive peoples. In anthropological literature, perhaps the key diagnostic of such thought has been apparent indifference to logical contradiction. It is especially in view of the logical law of non-contradiction that Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty find the word ‘magic’ appropriate to the sort of ground to which they are laboring to (re)turn the mind's eye. As this ground is also groundless, a foundation that is not a foundation, it basically flouts the law of non-contradiction and cannot be logically determined. Merleau-Ponty, again evoking the anthropological concern with thought that runs contrary to logical logic, speaks of this ground—on which objective reflection is said by him to rest—as “brute” or “wild” being (1968: 110).10
Wild being and the synthetic a priori implicate nondualism, and nondualism—since it can be shown but not said, that is, since it ultimately defies thought—is magical. Using an example from Wittgenstein, perhaps I can point more transparently to what these two thinkers are driving at when they speak of magic. With his inimitable genius for lighting up an issue at a stroke, Wittgenstein (1972: § 621) poses the following question: “[W]hat is left over if I subtract the fact that my arm goes up from the fact that I raise my arm?” In effect, he is posing the body-mind problem in an effort to clear up misleading expressions concerning willful or voluntary movement. To take an example of my own, if I were to ask a student to please close the classroom door (as I have done on occasion to make the present point), and she obliged, there would appear to be no mystery about what happened: the student took the meaning of my request, and, imparting physical energy to the door, closed it. But when I ask myself to raise my arm, and my arm goes up, a mystery immediately emerges. It seems that we know what caused the door to close; but what ‘caused’ my arm to go up? With this mystery, we can see that even the interpretation of the act of closing the classroom door is woefully inadequate. We so take for granted the possibility of intelligible communication between one another that we are inclined to see the student's behavior simply in terms of the physical energy she delivers to the door. But when the request is given internally—by oneself to oneself—the translation of request into physical movement poses an enigma for explanatory purposes. My request to her moved the student to move the door. To pose the question that escapes notice, though, how did the student move herself?
Ordinarily, we disregard the fact that the physical movement originated in something that we imagine to be irreducible to the physical, “to be without any mass” (Wittgenstein 1972: § 618)—call it, if you like, will or volition. Still, it is absolutely crucial to avoid the subject-object dualism that communicating with oneself, inside the cavity of one's own head, makes so inviting here, and to realize that what is mysterious is not volition in itself. For volition never really does appear in itself, that is, it never appears save as a component of physical action. What is ultimately mysterious and unfathomable is the action itself, which is as physical as can be but has as its defining end something proposed rather than given in the ‘nature’ of the case. The willing of the action is the action (“I raise my arm”), and yet its purposefulness contrasts with the fact of the action (“my arm goes up”). Logic proper has zero tolerance for such fundamental ambiguity. As a result, the action is ultimately inexplicable, in the critical sense that it cannot be clarified by reason as such. In Western thought, clarity is typically determined by the canonical laws of rationality, and each of these is predicated on the eschewal of ambiguity and contradiction in favor of mutual exclusion or absolute boundaries between one thing and another (cf. Evens 1983).
In the ethnographical literature, the condition of fundamental ambiguity has classically been construed as a mistaken picture of the world, wherein ideal relations are taken for real ones, and it is this picture that was held by anthropologists to reveal magical thought (e.g., Evans-Pritchard 1956: 141–42). By striking contrast to classical anthropologists, who were inclined to see such thought simply as wrong, and for that matter to most modern anthropologists, who have tended to see it as merely symbolic, both Merleau-Ponty and Wittgenstein are suggesting that this magical picture of the world, although nonsensical for logical reasons and purposes, is not only profoundly meaningful but also in some existential sense penetrating, and that accordingly it deserves the greatest respect. The answer, then, to Wittgenstein's cutting question is that because it is enchanted, we cannot really say what is left over when we subtract the one form of arm-raising from the other, but we can (and do) show it. Here, in trying to say it with the imagery of a transcendental opening in the fullness of biological life, Merleau-Ponty deftly points to the remainder in question (1962: 189):
The use a man is to make of his body is transcendent in relation to that body as a mere biological entity. It is not more natural, and no less conventional, to shout in anger or to kiss in love than to call a table ‘a table’. Feelings and passional conduct are invented like words. Even those which, like paternity, seem to be part and parcel of the human make-up are in reality institutions [here Merleau-Ponty footnotes Malinowski on the Trobrianders]. It is impossible to superimpose on man a lower layer of behaviour which one chooses to call ‘natural’, followed by a manufactured cultural or spiritual world. Everything is both manufactured and natural in man, as it were, in the sense that there is not a word, not a form of behaviour, which does not owe something to purely biological being—and which at the same time does not elude the simplicity of animal life, and cause forms of vital behaviour to deviate from their pre-ordained direction, through a sort of leakage and through a genius for ambiguity which might serve to define man.
Chapter 2
BLIND FAITH AND THE BINDING OF ISAAC—THE AKEDAH
[F]aith is a privative concept: it is destroyed as faith if it does not continually display its contradistinction to, or conformity with, knowledge…The paradoxical nature of faith ultimately degenerates into a swindle, and becomes the myth of the twentieth century; and its irrationality turns it into an instrument of rational administration by the wholly enlightened as they steer society toward barbarism.
—Max Horkheimer and Theodor W. Adorno, Dialectic of the Enlightenment
Then Abram bound the youth with belts and straps…/ And stretched forth the knife to slay his son. / When lo! An Angel called him out of heaven, / Saying, Lay not thy hand upon the lad, / Neither do anything to him, thy son. / Behold! Caught in a thicket by its horns, / A Ram. Offer the Ram of Pride instead. / But the Old Man would not so, but slew his son. / And half the seed of Europe, one by one.
—Wilfred Owen, “The Parable of the Old Man and the Young”
All at once he feels weary of ganefs and prophets, guns and sacrifices and the infinite gangster weight of God. He's tired of hearing about the promised land and the inevitable bloodshed required for its redemption. “I don't care what is written. I don't care what supposedly got promised to some sandal-wearing idiot whose claim to fame is that he was ready to cut his own son's throat for the sake of a hare-brained idea. I don't care about red heifers and patriarchs and locusts. A bunch of old bones in the sand. My homeland is in my hat.”
—Michael Chabon, The Yiddish Policemen's Union
In this chapter I examine certain a priori or primordial features of Western thought, in effect, aspects of the reality that this thought takes for granted. I do so by scrutinizing closely a story at the center of the Judeo-Christian tradition. This story, the Akedah or binding of Isaac (chapter 22 of the book of Genesis), has the theme of sacrifice. I intend