Anthropology as Ethics. T. M. S. (Terry) Evens
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for Abraham, evidently, it was enough to trust in God. But for all those trying to penetrate and justify Abraham's behavior, it is necessary to trust not only in God but also in Abraham's trust that he has indeed heard the word of God. In view of the heinous act he intends to perform and his inability to make the commission of the act comprehensible in human terms, why should we?27
We cannot help but have faith, but we need not be stupid about it. Earlier I indicated that by ‘stupidity’ I intend a structure of thought that fosters unnecessary violence. Here, though, I can add that the particular structure of thought in point does its disturbing work by obscuring the fact that our life depends not only on our separation from but also on our connection to the chronically inchoate world that we all have in common. The story of the binding of Isaac frames the abhorrent but perfect ethical enormity of Abraham's act as a measure of his faith. But it is just plain stupid to give credence to a man who is about to slaughter any child, let alone his own, on the grounds that the unrepresentable other is making him do it.
Abraham too is being stupid, although his stupidity is allied with madness. As I see it, in keeping with my ‘theory’ of sacrifice, the madness stems from anxiety of displacement, a fear that is fed by the critical focus on Isaac as the promise of Abraham's immortality. That immortality is fundamentally compromised, since it proceeds most concretely by Isaac's displacement of Abraham. When it is considered that Abraham is no ordinary father but the father of us all, a singularly potent patriarch, it becomes comprehensible in human terms why he might be moved to embark on the sacrifice of his son. He wants to displace the otherness of Isaac, his other and future self, before that otherness can displace him in his immediate and exceptional concreteness. An anxiety the object of which is so perfectly full and vital is enough to drive anybody mad.
That Abraham should exhibit this terrible anxiety is hardly surprising in view of the fact that the story pictures God himself as similarly stricken. The existential force of this anxiety mimetically pervades the story. God's menacing command to Abraham, no less than Abraham's sacrificial assault on Isaac, constitutes a shocking reminder of belatedness to the son, of the son's vital dependence on the father. Both the Father and the father of us all—God and Abraham—display a grave concern for their own continuation as a function of the filial piety of their offspring. This concern is not unrealistic. For inasmuch as the father's continuing existence is a matter of the son's continuing acknowledgement of the father's priority, it is the son who creates the father. But once the son exists on his own account, what is there to guarantee that he will continue to pay his filial dues in this way?
Abraham is driven mad by this anxiety. He is moved to divorce himself from the world of limits and compromise, thus creating his world as self-certain. The nature and logic of the command to kill his own son is an enabling expression of such madness. For one thing, the command is utterly uncompromising in what it prescribes. Abraham is asked to offer up his son, neither surrogatively nor synecdochally, but whole, as a holocaust. The command leaves no room for compromise, placing Abraham out of the human world and into an absolute one. For another thing, given its purpose as a test, the command asks Abraham to choose, as against life and choice, to obey. In so choosing, however, Abraham cannot help but revitalize, aggrandize even, his power of choice. For the fact that the choice confronting him is absolute—a matter of life and death—redefines that power in turn as absolute, implicitly representing him as godlike.
Abraham fails to conclude that the horrifying words he hears as coming from out-side himself, but which, inaudible to others, resound in his head alone, must be his own. Can this failure define him as other than a madman? His actions stem from the fact that he has cut himself off from the world as it allows us to come to viable terms with one another as well as with otherness in itself. Notwithstanding the story's own obvious intentionality and the gist of so much exegesis, it is not really the temporal world (Kierkegaard's objective world) from which he withdraws, the world as it blinds us to our own basic limitedness. On the contrary, inasmuch as he forgets that he is participant in a primary world, the common ground of which makes it possible for each of us to meet and compromise and communicate with others, Abraham in fact succumbs to the temptation to regard himself one-sidedly in terms of his own worldly autonomy and subjectivity. And insofar as we choose to countenance his determined, lethal violence against Isaac, his beloved but most threatening other, we are displaying a lack of sensibility so egregious as to be nothing short of stupid.
Faith vs. Life
The argument from faith addresses only those whose subjectivity is sufficiently advanced along the road to dualism to make intelligible the idea of inner commitment. But the argument does not appeal to the world as we find it in our capacity as self-conscious bodily beings always already materially committed to—that is, constituent of and compromised by—one another in a dynamic and open whole. On this world all norms ultimately rest, since it amounts to the inherently indeterminate foundation by virtue of which norming itself, in an endless repetition of difference, takes place.
In connection with this world, the argument from faith can occlude but not dispel the conclusion to the malevolence of Abraham's actions. For this world is quintessentially vital. It expresses itself above all as life, and presents life as good, in a singularly ambiguous sense. Life is good both because it constitutes its own end and because it constitutes its own end. Put another way, the world in question presents itself primarily as bent toward life—it has life as its good. At the same time, however, it presents life as peculiarly capacitated to determine its own good. In practice this ambiguity amounts to ethical existence, a uniquely tensile form of life wherein any overarching good leaves other goods fundamentally open to creative choice. The tension results, then, not simply from the power of choice, whereby the good is always subject to question, but from the paradoxical fact that this power is limited by life, that it necessarily has life as its prepossessing good. In other words, the good of life is no ordinary norm, but that by which all norms are constructed and judged. For this reason, although under the conditions of ethical existence death can be determined as a good, when death is granted dominion not as a function of life but in its own right, it is bound to sponsor malevolence.
That is why, despite the proven metaphysical attraction of the argument from faith, we remain uncomfortable in the face of Abraham's actions. Indeed, even Kierkegaard, in one of four possible projections of Abraham's afterthoughts, considers that the patriarch might have entertained the conclusion of malevolence (1985: 47): “It was a tranquil evening when Abraham rode out alone, and he rode to the mountain in Moriah; he threw himself on his face, he begged God to forgive his sin at having been willing to sacrifice Isaac, at the father's having forgotten his duty to his son…He could not comprehend that it was a sin to have been willing to sacrifice to God the best he owned; that for which he would many a time have gladly laid down his own life; and if it was a sin, if he had not so loved Isaac, then he could not understand that it could be forgiven; for what sin was more terrible?” The killing of one's own offspring, the arresting of biological continuity, insofar as it cannot be justified by reference to human vitality, qualifies representatively as a senseless act of death. Abraham is in no position to justify his conduct as life-giving—his faith depends on precisely his inability to do this. If his faith is to be proven, it has to be blind.
To be sure, the story justifies this justification of Abraham's conduct (justification by faith) by rewarding him in fact with life. But there is something fishy about the logic of this reward. Perhaps the story implies that although Abraham can know God's order only as death-dealing, because it issues from God he can trust that the order is issued actually on behalf of life. But even in this interpretation, the fundamental good of life is given short shrift. It is subordinated to the interest in God, but a god depicted as concerned primarily with the preservation of his position as God and only secondarily with the principle of vitality. In this narrative figure, God speaks in the language of men and is concerned to test their faith. The anthropocentric reductionism here is registered in the story's treatment of the principle of vitality, which, in the cause of securing faith, is patently instrumentalized.
Notice that the trouble is not that God is pictured in the dual terms of both life and death. Such a picture only stands to reason. Rather, the trouble is that owing to the story's elevation of faith over life as the ‘first principle, the relationship between these two sides of the same