Anthropology as Ethics. T. M. S. (Terry) Evens
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posterity signifies the time of futurity. Although God's promise appears to reduce this time to the certainty of the self and the present, the essential uncertainty and otherness of this time are given in the fact that the promise is decidedly the prerogative of the absolute other. Finally, the time of instantaneity is the time of creation, of the emergence of the singular and novel, of ‘effects’ irreducible to causes. This is the time marked by the point of crossing, that is, Isaac, in whose figure is projected the life-time of a people.
For purposes of the story, the most telling time is the third kind, the instantaneous time of creation. It is this kind of time to which the magic of the trick is keyed. Taken in its everyday sense, creation time is described by decision or choice. As it is the medium of determination, by definition a true choice cannot be told beforehand. A true choice is a quintessentially creative act. Even if in hindsight conditions for it can be isolated and identified, in critical part it constitutes its own condition and remains therefore, in a crucial sense, unconditioned. It makes difference.
The Choice to Choose: Spirit for Matter
The story of the Akedah plainly turns on a pair of choices. God issues to Abraham two commands: respectively, to kill and then not to kill Isaac. In regard to each, Abraham decides to obey rather than disobey. But the choice confronting Abraham exceeds, by a quantum leap, the question of compliance. Given its dire content, its instruction to cut off Abraham's line and thus (from the story's chauvinist perspective) the future of humankind, the first command obliges Abraham to make a choice between what is owing to God and what is owing to himself. Owing to God is not merely allegiance, though; more fundamentally, according to the command, it is life itself. And as a matter of God's promise, owing to Abraham is also life, but life in the unique sense of selfhood. At stake is not simply animate but, more profoundly, reflexive existence. Put another way, at stake is self-consciousness or human life. Put still another way, Abraham is due precisely the power to choose for himself, that is, to choose on behalf of his self.
Every choice of whether or not to obey a directive implicates the choice between having and not having choice. This is because for most practical purposes the choice to obey deprives one of any way to show that one has in fact taken a choice, whereas in the nature of the case the choice to disobey presents one as having chosen for oneself. When one chooses to obey a command, one's self-definition as a chooser, a self, becomes a matter of faith, since there is nothing to be seen in the manifestation of the choice that can serve to distinguish one as anything other than a mere function of the command. But choosing to do other than the other's bidding necessarily describes one indeed as the other's other and therewith as oneself.14
In this connection, what I wish to bring to light is that in the Akedah, the choice to choose, instead of being left implicit, is given added, even exceptional, emphasis. In view of the infanticidal content of the first command, Abraham is being asked to make a choice so hard that it cannot fail to highlight the question of choice itself. He is obliged to choose between being and not being. The question put to him, then, is Hamlet's. And as in the case of Shakespeare's prince, the question asks either that he deny himself, his own being, and suffer the Other's choice (“The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune”) or that he assert himself by choosing to choose for himself (“For who would bear the whips and scorns of time, /…/ When he himself [my italics] might his quietus make / With a bare bodkin [blade] ?”). Whereas for Hamlet the ‘good’ choice is against “conscience” or the Other and for himself, for Abraham the reverse is the case. (In Kierkegaard's terms, Hamlet chooses what is for him the higher ethical value in his given situation, whereas Abraham trades ethics for the infinite, thus making him a knight of faith rather than a tragic hero.) But in both cases, at stake is the capital power to be a chooser, that is, to be empowered to create one's own world.
It is only because Abraham enjoys this creational power that the story can present itself in the thematic terms of a test of faith. How must Abraham prove himself? By forgoing this god-given power and trusting in God to call the shots, even though—and this is the critical point—he, Abraham, could have done otherwise. In effect, in resolving to slay his own son as ordered to do so by God, Abraham makes a sacrifice and is duly rewarded. But what exactly has he offered up? At the end of the day, for all that his beloved son has suffered materially, it is precisely not Abraham's self in any bodily form (including his son's body) that gets sacrificed but rather the self that is belonging to Abraham in spirit. He has agreed, at God's bidding, to return what God had given him in the first place: the power to choose to do other than God's bidding. This is precisely the power not of embodiment but of inspiration—this is the power given man when God breathed life into him, not when he formed him of dust from the ground. The substitution of a beast for a human being is warranted, as the story goes, because Abraham has indeed already sacrificed himself in a profound way—in spirit (cf. Sarnum 1966: 162–63).
The kind of being at stake in this story, then, is described by the power of choice, the magical or spiritual power to create worlds and make time. The story makes the point that if man is to benefit from this power to render being from nothingness, life from death, he must substantially acknowledge that he enjoys it only at God's behest, and therefore always within limits. Hence, while the story turns on an exercise of the power of choice by Abraham, the happy ending depends not on this choice exactly but on the ensuant one taken by God. It is God's intervention—God's choice, the choice of God—that creates the magical transfiguration of life from death. The story means to reaffirm, then, that the deity is the master chooser, the creator of worlds, a claim that has been in question at least ever since Adam and Eve got away, in a critical sense, with stealing the forbidden fruit. The narrative of Abraham and Isaac reminds us, in disturbing terms, that although the tree of the knowledge of good and evil may have fallen into the hands of man, the tree of life remains forever beyond his reach.
The ‘Stupidity’ of Blind Faith
Blind Faith vs. Pre-reflective Understanding: The Akedah and the Nuer Rite of Gar
The story then constitutes a specific, instructional answer to the question of why there is something rather than nothing. The answer is that life is a gift from God, and that the continuing enjoyment of this gift depends on abnegational sacrifice as a matter of blind faith, that is, as a matter of conscious but uncomprehending choice. It strikes me that this answer, while deep and salutary, also bears a grave danger. On the one hand, in a very powerful way it serves to remind us that choice is limited and never wholly witting, individual, and free (a scriptural shibboleth reiterated with a difference by postmodernism); on the other, by promoting the choice of blind faith, the answer can serve to foster Hitlerian aspirations.
In order to elucidate this judgmental conclusion further, I want to compare and contrast the Akedah to another answer to the question of human existence. Given that each and every culture may be regarded as a particular approach to putting off the dead end of being doubly bound, to living a dilemma and making time, there are indeed many other answers or myriad forms of human life. But there is a feature of the Akedah that serves to distinguish it categorically in the present connection. I can bring this feature into high relief by viewing it in light of a phenomenologically ‘more primitive’ treatment of the existential problem of the double bind.
The Nuer of East Africa also perform surrogate sacrifice, to the same life-sustaining purpose as expressed in the Akedah.15 The ideal victim for the Nuer is an ox, and the key to this practice among them is their perception of identity with their cattle. This identity is established in an initiation rite called gar or ‘the cutting, whereby all pubescent boys are made to undergo a severe scarification: several lines are incised, to the bone, in the boys’ foreheads, starting from the center of the brow and extending to each ear. In effect, the horns of cattle are carved indelibly into the boys’ heads. This bloody initiation into manhood empowers the initiates to perform, among other things, ritual sacrifice to Kwoth (Spirit or God). The cutting, then, appears to be a master rite, the root sacrifice that licenses all the others.
For general purposes, the formal and functional parallel between this Nuer ritual and the binding of Isaac is obvious. (At risk of putting too fine a point on it, it is worth recalling here that the Akedah's ram was, as preparatory to the fulfilling of its sacrificial role, caught