The Displacement of the Other by the Self
The terrific irony is that Abraham's plain and powerful movement toward spirituality leads, not ineluctably but nonetheless forcefully, to the logical extinction of the very idea of spirit. Although it would seem to treat its two constitutive principles equally, in fact the dualism of matter and spirit always privileges the former. This is because the defining essence of dualism, mutual exclusivity, supposes a world in which things do not participate in but are instead exterior to one another. Notwithstanding the rationalism of Descartes’ cogito, such a world is at bottom primarily material. Hence, in the dualistic contest between spirit and matter, spirit cannot really win. The contest implies that each of the two principles is essentially purposed to reduce the other to itself. But whereas logically the material principle can succeed in eliminating the spiritual one, by defining the world in quantifiable terms, in order for the spiritual principle to triumph, it has to reduce itself to the measure of the material. In the dualistic terms of the contest, it can win only by excluding or by wholly incorporating the material world, thus denying its own defining essence as basic ambiguity. Thus, with the advent of dualism, spirituality is insidiously denatured and denied.
The point can be made more concretely. One upshot of the Akedah is that spirit is put decidedly at the disposal of humanity and history. As the just reward for his act of self-sacrifice, Abraham, through his descendants, is re-spirated, or hooked up in perpetuity to a divine respirator. Once the life, nationhood, and supremacy of Abraham's posterity seem guaranteed, though, he is positioned to forget the experience of his own heteronomy. A presumption of perpetuity so imposing as to be received as in the order of things (as is promised at the close of the story) invites one to take oneself as self-contained, as one's own starting point. What does it mean to forget that one ever originates in otherness, if not that one has displaced in one's own mind the other with the self? And what is the self in this dualistic context but, at least at first, the sense that one has of oneself as a substantive denizen of the world of procreation. Hence, the starting point of perception looks to be, instead of a blind spot, or something always already forgotten, or what is otherwise than being, an empirically well-defined and highly visible phenomenon.
The narrative of the Akedah is finely attuned to just such a turn toward self-centeredness. The narrative tells a horror story, a story expressly meant to serve as a reminder that, for all the promise of their continuing existence as self-contained entities, men are in fact vitally and irredeemably dependent on what is other to them. The reminder is necessary because one of the forceful consequences of the development of self-consciousness is the loss of memory of the other as truly other. With each advance in the development of self-consciousness, man is given to feel more secure in the promise of his empirical being; correspondingly, he becomes less cognizant of the experience of his own otherness. The inevitability of this state of affairs is lodged in the reminder itself. I mean nothing so uncomplicated as that the reminder would not be necessary but for man's inclination to self-perfection. Rather, I mean the following eventful paradox: that the reminder cannot recall to man his essential heteronomy without at the same time reminding him of his autonomy. It works, even when it is meant to strike the fear of God into the hearts of men, by appealing to them in view of their power of choice, their power to do otherwise. For this reason, in their capacity as a phenomenology of mind, the biblical stories speak here of ‘temptation’ instead of, for example, ‘determination’ or ‘dialectic. With abiding insight, the stories grasp man's essential situation of consciousness as no less a matter of conscience and hence in terms of what is called here ethics rather than reason.
The Reduction of the Infinite
All this is inscribed in orthodox religion's password, ‘blind faith’. As we have seen, this usage denotes that Abraham decides on the basis of faith alone, without benefit of reason or understanding. In effect, he makes his decision in view of what is invisible to him, of that to which he is perfectly blind. The reminder of his heteronomy is a reminder of precisely this: that the truth of God is no less certain for being objectively unknowable and unrepresentable. According to Midrashic commentary, at the moment his father raised his hand to take his life in sacrifice, Isaac was blinded (Shulman 1993: 4). With this interpretive insight the Midrash is surely indicating that, as a correlate of Abraham's pious decision, the blind spot that is the truth of God, the fount of all perception, is phenomenologically brought into relief. What Isaac was forbidden to see at that life-threatening instant was the very source of himself, that which gives life and takes it away.
The inherent but perilous temptation to self-perfection on the part of man makes it easy to see why it might be critical to institute a set of understandings, whatever their specific contents, that serve constantly to remind men of their fundamental belatedness, of the primacy of the Other. To forget this condition, whether in relation to other human beings, other kinds of animals, inanimate things, or, more abstractly, otherness as such, is a profoundly risky business. This kind of forgetfulness amounts to the attitudinal exclusion of that on which life ultimately rests—an exclusion the consequences of which are logically predictable.
But it is one thing to remain alert to one's fundamental finitude and quite another to take instruction from it as if the invisible ground imposing it issued commands on the model of a human order. To take instruction in this way makes not only a category mistake but also a consequential contradiction. For it implicitly renders the invisible ground present and even accounted for, as if it were man's to access in the way men facultatively access one another. True, in Abraham's case the ground remains for him out of sight, but it is presented plainly as within his earshot. God's fundamental invisibility certainly highlights his otherness, the way in which he differs from any determinate object in this world. However, although vision and hearing inflect absolute otherness differently, the voice Abraham hears speaks words that are clear and distinct, in the manner of human talk, talk that bespeaks, as vision betokens, not indefinitude, but the present-at-hand.21
I am again arguing, then, that Abraham's willingness to take God's instruction in this story actually constitutes not the knightly success celebrated by Kierkegaard's commentary but an egregious failure by Abraham to stay alert to his own fundamental limitedness. It is futile to question that in the general case there is always something to which we cannot but remain blind. Since any question cannot explain its own possibility without effecting an infinite logical regression of further questions, the question at point ultimately betrays the operation of the very blind spot it seeks to dispel. But if there is one thing that we have learned from the horrific events of the twentieth century, it is never to allow a specific command to remain unquestionable. Unlike an existential condition, each and every specific command is finite or contingent and therefore accessible in principle as to its rationale.
By trusting implicitly the justice of God's command, far from demonstrating trust in the invisible otherness that goes in the story by the name of God, Abraham actually violates that trust. The essential black hole of human understanding can be brought to the attention of human consciousness by the figure of God, but it cannot be brought to light. In claiming to know God's specific command, Abraham does not remember but forgets that there is always already something forgotten. He