Anthropology as Ethics. T. M. S. (Terry) Evens
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a priori is nothing if not value somehow given.
To come to the principal point, under these ontological conditions, by which the capacity to create or evaluate is associated in the first place with the other rather than the self, it is the other that enjoys the axiological primacy of the hypergood, not the sentient or even the sensible. In other words, it follows from Merleau-Ponty's ontology, that the universalistic bias toward the end of having ends, the at once (incomprehensibly) natural and ethical direction of our being, is toward the other.
The Synthetic a Priori and Ethics, Mysticism, and Magic
Merleau-Ponty does not couch his ontology of ambiguity and reversibility in the distinctly axiological terms I have used here. Indeed, although he wrote about the nature of human freedom and was politically concerned, he did not develop a systematic account of ethics. And although Wittgenstein essayed a lecture on ethics, he held that, in line with his dichotomy of showing and saying, philosophical ethics is an attempt to say what can only be shown. But I am anxious to show that Merleau-Ponty's as well as Wittgenstein's recasting of the synthetic a priori in uncompromisingly and irrevocably nondualist terms leads directly to the conclusion that, notwithstanding the driving objectivist pretension of science, at bottom we cannot perceive the world save in the language of non-indifference (cf. Evens 1995: 195ff.). A nondualist ontology entails the understanding that discretion is as generally necessary as it is necessarily particular in the world as we find it.
Merleau-Ponty's observation that we are condemned to meaning and Wittgenstein's that we are ceremonious animals implicate this picture of what I think of as the primacy of the ethical in human affairs. Both of these arguments bear on the diagnostic centrality of convention in human nature, and, as it is definitively void of instinct, conventional conduct proceeds according to its own evaluative ends. The interpretation of Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty as essentially, if inexplicably, concerned with the ethical nature of human existence is given support in the secondary literature, in the case of Wittgenstein substantially so (see especially Edwards 1982; with reference to Merleau-Ponty, see Yeo 1992).
I have drawn a number of suggestive parallels here between Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty. It has not been my intention, however, to make a rigorous, detailed comparison of their work; rather, I have tried to bring out a profound commonality of focus between them. That focus is their comprehensive concern to rethink the notion of the synthetic a priori in unrelentingly nondualist terms. As a result of this shared ontological problem, both thinkers, despite the fact that they are not normally mentioned in the same philosophical breath, and however outstanding the differences between them, developed remarkably comparable understandings of human conduct. These understandings picture that conduct as proceeding on the basis of, to highlight the paradox, foundations that are not foundations. In other words, the foundations are immanent and transcendent at the same time, both given and facultative. I have argued that this radically paralogical picture of human conduct necessarily committed both scholars to a counter-ontology, one that grasps what there is in terms of basic ambiguity and therewith processually as discretionary becoming or ethics, as I use the latter term here. I confess that the ethical implications of this ontology did not become transparent to me until I became familiar with Emmanuel Levinas's philosophy of otherness. Hence, when I dwell on ethics in the present work, more often than not I am drawing directly on Levinas for inspiration. At any rate, before leaving off this discussion of Wittgenstein and Merleau-Ponty, I want to point once more to the ethical force and heavy anthropological bearing of their work by citing their deep appreciation of what in Western thought tends to get dismissed as mere mysticism and magic.
Wittgenstein deleted (as “bad,” i.e., “S” for schlecht) the following lines from his original manuscript of his remarks on Frazer's The Golden Bough (cited in Klagge and Nordmann 1993: 116–17):
I now believe that it would be right to begin my book with remarks about metaphysics as a kind of magic.
But in doing this I must not make a case for magic nor may I make fun of it. The depth of magic should be preserved.—
Indeed, here the elimination of magic has itself the character of magic.
For, back then, when I began talking about the ‘world’ (and not about this tree or table), what else did I want but to keep something higher spellbound in my words?
Wittgenstein is suggesting here that, like magic, metaphysical questions tend to evoke in us a sense of something deep and mysterious, something fundamental but also unfathomable. Hence, like magic, metaphysical philosophy—take, for example, the proposition that everything serves a purpose or that the universe is a vast mechanism or that what really exists are not trees or tables but monads—can be consequentially misleading, but not for that reason frivolous. On the one hand, since it makes logical nonsense, he does not wish to speak in favor of such ‘magical’ thought; on the other, since its depth needs to be preserved, neither does he wish to make fun of it. In effect, although he is far from uncritical of it, he takes magic very seriously.
The following quotation, which serves to link magic with ethics and religion, makes plain the respect in which Wittgenstein (in Monk 1990: 277) held such thought:
My whole tendency and I believe the tendency of all men who ever tried to write or talk on Ethics or Religion was to run against the boundaries of language. This running against the walls of our cage is perfectly, absolutely hopeless. Ethics so far as it springs from the desire to say something about the meaning of life, the absolute good, the absolute valuable, can be no science. What it says does not add to our knowledge in any sense. But it is a document of a tendency in the human mind which I personally cannot help respecting deeply and I would not for my life ridicule it.
Merleau-Ponty too takes magical thought seriously (1968: 24):
It was…evident to the man brought up in the objective cognition of the West that magic or myth has no intrinsic truth, that magical effects and the mythical and ritual life are to be explained by “objective” causes and what is left over ascribed to the illusions of Subjectivity…[T]he ethnologist in the face of societies called archaic cannot presuppose that, for example, those societies have a lived experience of time like ours [i.e., the experience of time as simply linear]…and [he] must describe a mythical time where certain events “in the beginning” maintain a continued efficacity…To be sure, we have repressed the magical into the subjectivity, but there is no guarantee that the relationship between men does not inevitably involve magical and oneiric components.
In point of fact, Merleau-Ponty is quite certain that “the relationship between men” does inevitably involve such components (1962: 365):
It will perhaps be maintained that a philosophy cannot be centred round a contradiction, and that all our descriptions, since they ultimately defy thought, are quite meaningless. The objection would be valid if we were content to lay bare, under the term phenomenon or phenomenal field, a layer of prelogical or magical experiences. For in that case we should have to choose between believing the descriptions and abandoning thought, or knowing what we are talking about and abandoning our descriptions. These descriptions must become an opportunity for defining a variety of comprehension and reflection altogether more radical than objective thought…We must return to the cogito, in search of a more fundamental Logos than that of objective thought, one which endows the latter with its relative validity, and at the same time assigns to it its place.
The philosophy “centred round a contradiction” is of course his own, keyed as it is to the body-subject or subject-object regarded not as a relationship between two autonomous principles but as opposing principles, each of which integrally defines the other—that is, as a fundamental ambiguity. The distinction between ‘thought’ and ‘description’, in which the latter concept denotes what ultimately ‘defies’ the former, seems identical in essence to Wittgenstein's between what can be said (i.e., thought) and what can only be shown (because when we try to say it, we cannot really know “what we are talking about”). And like Wittgenstein, Merleau-Ponty rejects the dualism, choosing instead to privilege the descriptional pole as more fundamental, not because it replaces logical thought, but because it founds it (endows it “with its relative validity” and “assigns to it its place”). In this connection, recall that for Wittgenstein,