Anthropology as Ethics. T. M. S. (Terry) Evens
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But this very necessity is one key meaning of my thesis of the primacy of ethics, for, paradoxically, it virtually condemns us to conduct ourselves in terms of meanings and values. In turn, it entails yet a second key aspect of ethics: human existence is necessarily mediatory. By virtue of our finite capacity to determine our own good or ends, we are, to an exemplary degree, our own medium.
In effect, then, the force of ethics is not a question of the power of being but of our ability to determine our own worth, which is to say, to mediate our lives in terms of value qua value. On the basis of this ability (and taking direction from Levinas), we might reformulate the second meaning of the primacy of ethics as follows: because it enables us to take advantage of the mediatory possibility of the good, ethics is better, not more powerful, than ontic necessity (R. Cohen 1986). To speak in terms of ‘better’ evokes the ordinary meaning of ethics as a matter of relative good and evil. I mention this here because it explains the paradox of why—regardless of the truth of the other meaning of the primacy of ethics (that one's conduct cannot help but describe ethical process)—it remains possible to conduct oneself unethically, that is, to choose against ethicality. Choices of this kind enfeeble the human capacity for self-mediation.
Power
The exhortation ‘to speak truth to power’ distinguishes the sense of power I stress here. It opposes what is ‘right’ (in the sense of fair, or just, or good, all of which are, like ‘right, enabling and relatively open terms) to what can simply be imposed without regard to what is right. In Nietzschean usage, ‘power’ signifies both sides of this opposition: the side of right as well as the side of might. Here I identify the right in terms of the concern to preserve and enhance humankind's capacity to make and remake itself continuously, which, apart perhaps from my insistence on this capacity's dependence on the other, I believe is similar to what Nietzsche had in mind by the positive, life-affirming side of power. More often than not, it is easier to spot what threatens rather than what fosters this side. From my perspective, which means to advance onto-epistemological nondualism, Nietzsche's purposely ambiguous usage—which has come to inform the theories of some of the most influential and celebrated thinkers of our age, such as Foucault and Bourdieu—is importantly salutary, since it brings into relief the fundamentally relative nature of power, the way in which the two sides of power help to define each other. Nevertheless, since I find that when it is used in this double-sided way, ‘power’ tends (perhaps because in the context of political economy, the relatively negative side has been so presumptive an acceptation) to reduce, and in this sense corrupt, the positive side, I prefer to use different terms for the two sides. I thus refer to the two sides as ‘power’ and ‘ethics’, respectively, the latter term serving as not only the opposed but also the inclusive rubric. By seeing power as both a counterpart to and a form of ethics, I make room for the relativistic nature of power while calling attention to the primacy of the positive side, which primacy is a question of power as a function of discretion, and of discretion or the principle of negative freedom as the pre-eminently distinguishing mark of being human.
Value-as-Such
I use ‘value’ loosely to mean end or good. By ‘value-as-such’ I am propounding a narrower meaning, in order to point to what it is about value that distinguishes the desirable from the merely desired. This usage follows from nondualism and the conception of ethics by reference to human existence as fundamentally a creative or mediatory dynamic. I do not intend by it value in itself, as if value could obtain without an element of practicality; rather, I am presenting the idea of a value that does not inherently lend itself to instrumental reduction. Put another way, value-as-such remains a relative usage, but one whose own relativity is itself relativized. Judging any given value is situationally dependent, but every such judgment is itself necessarily predicated on the idea of value, in the sense in which value is opposed to fact. Some values display this sense so representatively as to reaffirm critically the very idea of value. For example, because the value of ‘turn the other cheek’ transcends, eo ipso, the demonstrative economic function of reciprocity (in this instance, revenge), it veritably creates value-as-such. By contrast, the values of, say, racism and slavery, lending themselves as they do to economization and dehumanization, tend, paradoxically, to undermine or even deny the idea of value. I do not mean to suggest that any given value is in practice immune to all attempts to instrumentalize it, for depending on how it is deployed, it can always have its measure as value qua value vitiated. The rhetoric of values can serve well to conceal and justify instrumental conduct. Thus, a value such as ‘freedom’—which surely is construable as a value-as-such—can be used to justify all sorts of perfectly instrumental and ethically vile practices (such as, for example, torturing human beings in order to extract information). Even so, I propose that inasmuch as a value-as-such logically is based on its own opposition to the instrumental, it differs significantly from values whose internal logic directly cultivates reduction to instrumentality. And for this reason, in my view, values-as-such, although hardly foolproof, may be regarded as crucial components and conditions of social arrangements and practices that furnish the interpretative and rhetorical resources to resist virulent instrumentalization.
INTRODUCTION
Nondualism, Ontology, and Anthropology
The crisis of modern man…can be put in these terms. Reason triumphant through science has destroyed the faith in revelation, without, however, replacing revelation in the office of guiding our ultimate choices. Reason disqualified itself from that office…precisely when it installed itself…as sole authority in matters of truth. Its abdication in that native province is the corollary of its triumph in other spheres: its success there is predicated upon that redefinition of the possible objects and methods of knowledge that leaves whole ranges of other objects outside its domain. This situation is reflected in the failure of contemporary philosophy to offer an ethical theory, i.e., to validate ethical norms as part of our universe of knowledge.
— Hans Jonas, Philosophical Essays
Ontology and Anthropology
I offer here ontological reflections for the practice of anthropology. These reflections center around two key theses: first, that when it is seen from the ontological perspective of nondualism instead of dualism, the distinctively human condition is, above and beyond all else, a condition of choice and a question of ‘ethics’; and, second, that in its defining and intrinsically revolutionary quest to understand others or otherness, to break the bonds of the self, anthropology has been profoundly hampered (if also epistemologically motivated) by its logico-philosophical foundations in Western dualism.
In effect, I want to demonstrate the limits of ontological dualism and explore the intelligibility of nondualism. In dualism, the distinction between, say, subject and object is complete. In nondualism, the distinction is neither negated nor finally subsumed (as it is in monism); rather, it is preserved as ambiguous or imperfect, such that subject and object are still seen as distinct from each other, but only relatively so.1 Put another way, whereas dualism determines absolute boundaries alone, the boundaries predicated by nondualism both separate and connect, such that the distinctions these boundaries make are essentially fuzzy. As a result, the distinctions are definitively situational (‘now you see them, now you don't’), depending on whether it is the boundary's power to cut or to bond that emerges as relevant in any given context. Put still another way, by making entitativity relative rather than absolute, nondualism betrays the oxymoron of an ‘ontology’ in which all ‘things’, because they somehow participate in one another, both are and are not.
Jerusalem, writes Derrida (1995: 70), is “a holy place, but also a place that is in dispute, radically and rabidly, fought over by all the monotheisms, by all the religions of the unique and transcendent God, of the absolute other.” Here, in an apparently unbreakable nutshell, we see the trouble with dualism, as it spawns both monism and pluralism. We have three absolute, monotheistic religions, each declaring itself the one and only ‘One’, yet all three are also implicated, by force of vital circumstance, in the hope of co-existing together, pluralistically. But how can this hope make any sense if the definitive monism