@Soupie, I've been thinking about your statement above that "while phenomenology has many strengths, it alone cannot be used to resolve the MBP." What would it be or mean, in your view, to 'resolve' the MPB? Do you mean that such a 'resolution' of the mind/body problem would overcome and dissolve the inescapable interacting poles of subjectivity and objectivity recognized in phenomenological philosophy to ground and enable human experience of being in a world? Is it possible for us to escape the tension arising in reflective consciousness between the ontological primitives of mind and world?
A while back I linked a paper on Bataille by Ben Brewer entitled "Unsaying Non-Knowledge: Georges Bataille and the Mysticism of Writing" and want to call attention to it again for its clarification of Bataille's contributions to our understanding of human consciousness. Here is a significant extract, but the whole of the paper should be read for a full appreciation of what Bataille has to offer us in our attempt here to develop an understanding of consciousness and mind:
". . . Despite the insistence that inner experience cannot tolerate the structures of utility, project, or rationality, Bataille also insists that inner experience must emerge “from the realm of project through project” (Inner Experience 46). Literally just paragraphs after demonstrating the impossibility of the coexistence of discursive reason and inner experience, Bataille claims that, “inner experience is lead by discursive reason. Reason alone has the power to undo its work, to hurl down what it has built up….Natural exaltation or intoxication have a certain ‘flash in the pan’ quality. Without the support of reason, we don’t reach ‘dark incandescence’” (46).
The critique of asceticism is instructive here again. Bataille describes asceticism as “that…anemic, taciturn particle of life, showing reluctance before the excess of joy, lacking freedom.” Whereas in the context of the critique of project, asceticism retains the structures it tries to overcome, here it suffers from renouncing the very principle it should be lauding: life. While ascetics have their hearts in the right place—to be rid of desire—they misunderstand what it would mean to actually live without desire or ego. The destruction of desire is a Dionysian embracing of life, not a dry renouncing of its pleasures. The loss of the self and the destruction of desire are instead “possible from a movement of drunken revelry; in no way is it possible without emotion. Being without emotion on the contrary is necessary for ascesis. One must choose” (23). This is not merely a critique of ascesis: the two-sided critique of ascetics demonstrates the impossibility of either renouncing or retaining the structures of project and everyday experience. One feels the openings for inner experience closing off.
Having shown that project is fundamentally incompatible with inner experience, Bataille now argues, “nevertheless inner experience is project, no matter what” (22). Insofar as inner experience is the complete continuity of subject and object such that both are abolished, such conclusions are only possible through language. Human subjectivity, which is the precondition of inner experience, is “entirely so through language, [and] in essence…is project” (22). Language is both the condition of the possibility of human subjectivity (and therefore of inner experience) and the condition of the impossibility of overcoming that subjectivity. The very thing that allows for inner experience to emerge, also blocks any full access to it.
This aporia at the heart of inner experience illustrates precisely why it is not a return to animality. Animality, as described in Theory of Religion, exists prior to the discontinuity introduced by language—as far as Bataille is concerned, the goshawk does not think or communicate linguistically. Inner experience, however, arises along the edges of the discontinuity of project. Inner experience, though similar in description, must be a fundamentally different experience from animality.
Experience of Aporia
The concurrent logical necessity and incompatibility of these arguments about the relation of project and inner experience is the determining factor in the movement of Bataille’s philosophical project: engagement with aporia. In forcing the reader to confront the ultimately aporetic nature of inner experience, Bataille asserts the sovereignty of experience and fundamentally rewrites what it means to do ethics.
An aporia, in contrast to a paradox, is an ontological blockage. The word comes from the Greek “poros,” meaning “passage.” An aporia, then, is “without passage.” A proper aporia has no solution, logical or otherwise.
The insistence on and revelation of aporetic experience asserts the sovereignty of experience itself. Most basically, this deployment of aporia refutes the possibility of replacing experience with argumentation or rational summary. Rather than summarizing arguments about inner experience, Bataille’s writings bring the reader through “L’tourment”—the torturous process of grasping at inner experience, finding the continuity of immanence in fits and spurts, all the while being pulled back into project and durational time. Bataille presents aporias not in order to prove or demonstrate, but rather to force the reader to undergo them.
Bataille and Kant
Though Bataille certainly situated himself in the lineage of mysticism, he also situated himself in the more canonical lineage of Kant and Hegel. Indeed, this resistance of the singularity of experience to conceptual or rational explanation appears quite vividly in Kant’s third Critique. For Kant, the beauty necessarily cannot be a concept. Judgments of beauty are not “logical but…aesthetic, by which we mean a judgment whose determining basis cannot be other than subjective” (204). Specifically, this means that a judgment of taste has nothing to do with applying a pre-given concept of “beauty” to an object or measuring an object against a conceptual standard of “beauty.” Furthermore, this judgment “does not contribute anything to cognition, but merely compares the given presentation in the subject with the entire presentational power, of which the mind becomes conscious when it feels its own state” (Kant 204). Kant unequivocally claims that beauty is not a concept in which an object participates or which it represents. Rather, beauty is the experience of the play of our cognitive faculties. The experience of the beauty is neither replaceable with nor reducible to rational description. Beauty cannot be described; it must be undergone. Consequently, the power of the beautiful must be in the subject rather than the object, since an object can be beautiful when from one angle, while wholly unremarkable when viewed from another.
Of course, Kant’s other famous assertion of the singularity of experience in the Critique of Judgment is the Kantian sublime. For Kant, the experience of the sublime is experience of a “formless object, insofar as we present unboundedness” (Kant 245). The experience of the sublime, as opposed to the experience of beauty, consists in a mental state of “agitation” (247). Standing on a cliff before a “gloomy raging sea,” for example, one feels overwhelmed by the seemingly infinite dynamism of nature (254). The key move for Kant, however, comes when the experiencing subject then realizes that she has a (bounded) concept for this very unboundedness: the idea of “totality” (113). Human reason saves the day and transforms awe of our own finitude into “respect for our own vocation…[that] makes intuitable for us the superiority of the rational vocation of our cognitive powers over the greatest power of sensibility” (257).
Is Bataille’s “inner experience” not, then, a surrender to the Kantian sublime? The difference that makes a difference between Kant and Bataille is that Kant’s experience of the sublime is ultimately a victory of the human intellect through the application of the concept of infinity. For Bataille, the confrontation with the subliminality of inner experience is always a wholesale annihilation of concepts and the subject as such. Whereas Kant reasserts the power of human reason, Bataille leaps without abandon into this moment of the death of reason: “I am open, yawning gap, to the unintelligible sky and everything in me rushes forth, is reconciled in a final irreconciliation” (Inner Experience 59). With this important modification, Bataille carries Kant’s legacy of asserting the necessity of the particularity of experience. The Kantian sublime, despite the descriptions from Kant, the great systemizer, cannot be merely described—it must be experienced, and, for Bataille, surrendered to. Said otherwise, one must approach the sublime with the comportment of the beautiful. The Kantian experience of the beautiful must be “disinterested”—it is an experience of an object of “a liking…devoid of all interest” (Kant 211). We must approach the beautiful as something perfectly superfluous, something in which we find no nourishment or victory. In Oscar Wilde’s words, “beautiful things mean only beauty” (Wilde 3). In contrast, the sublime, for Kant, must always be experienced as that which reinforces the unbounded power of the human intellect; we are quite interested in the sublime. If we approach the sublime, however, without an eye towards the reassertion of human reason, if we approach the sublime as an experience to undergo for no reason other than itself, we find Bataille’s inner experience lurking already in the Kantian system. . . . ."
http://commons.pacificu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1082&context=rescogitans
A while back I linked a paper on Bataille by Ben Brewer entitled "Unsaying Non-Knowledge: Georges Bataille and the Mysticism of Writing" and want to call attention to it again for its clarification of Bataille's contributions to our understanding of human consciousness. Here is a significant extract, but the whole of the paper should be read for a full appreciation of what Bataille has to offer us in our attempt here to develop an understanding of consciousness and mind:
". . . Despite the insistence that inner experience cannot tolerate the structures of utility, project, or rationality, Bataille also insists that inner experience must emerge “from the realm of project through project” (Inner Experience 46). Literally just paragraphs after demonstrating the impossibility of the coexistence of discursive reason and inner experience, Bataille claims that, “inner experience is lead by discursive reason. Reason alone has the power to undo its work, to hurl down what it has built up….Natural exaltation or intoxication have a certain ‘flash in the pan’ quality. Without the support of reason, we don’t reach ‘dark incandescence’” (46).
The critique of asceticism is instructive here again. Bataille describes asceticism as “that…anemic, taciturn particle of life, showing reluctance before the excess of joy, lacking freedom.” Whereas in the context of the critique of project, asceticism retains the structures it tries to overcome, here it suffers from renouncing the very principle it should be lauding: life. While ascetics have their hearts in the right place—to be rid of desire—they misunderstand what it would mean to actually live without desire or ego. The destruction of desire is a Dionysian embracing of life, not a dry renouncing of its pleasures. The loss of the self and the destruction of desire are instead “possible from a movement of drunken revelry; in no way is it possible without emotion. Being without emotion on the contrary is necessary for ascesis. One must choose” (23). This is not merely a critique of ascesis: the two-sided critique of ascetics demonstrates the impossibility of either renouncing or retaining the structures of project and everyday experience. One feels the openings for inner experience closing off.
Having shown that project is fundamentally incompatible with inner experience, Bataille now argues, “nevertheless inner experience is project, no matter what” (22). Insofar as inner experience is the complete continuity of subject and object such that both are abolished, such conclusions are only possible through language. Human subjectivity, which is the precondition of inner experience, is “entirely so through language, [and] in essence…is project” (22). Language is both the condition of the possibility of human subjectivity (and therefore of inner experience) and the condition of the impossibility of overcoming that subjectivity. The very thing that allows for inner experience to emerge, also blocks any full access to it.
This aporia at the heart of inner experience illustrates precisely why it is not a return to animality. Animality, as described in Theory of Religion, exists prior to the discontinuity introduced by language—as far as Bataille is concerned, the goshawk does not think or communicate linguistically. Inner experience, however, arises along the edges of the discontinuity of project. Inner experience, though similar in description, must be a fundamentally different experience from animality.
Experience of Aporia
The concurrent logical necessity and incompatibility of these arguments about the relation of project and inner experience is the determining factor in the movement of Bataille’s philosophical project: engagement with aporia. In forcing the reader to confront the ultimately aporetic nature of inner experience, Bataille asserts the sovereignty of experience and fundamentally rewrites what it means to do ethics.
An aporia, in contrast to a paradox, is an ontological blockage. The word comes from the Greek “poros,” meaning “passage.” An aporia, then, is “without passage.” A proper aporia has no solution, logical or otherwise.
The insistence on and revelation of aporetic experience asserts the sovereignty of experience itself. Most basically, this deployment of aporia refutes the possibility of replacing experience with argumentation or rational summary. Rather than summarizing arguments about inner experience, Bataille’s writings bring the reader through “L’tourment”—the torturous process of grasping at inner experience, finding the continuity of immanence in fits and spurts, all the while being pulled back into project and durational time. Bataille presents aporias not in order to prove or demonstrate, but rather to force the reader to undergo them.
Bataille and Kant
Though Bataille certainly situated himself in the lineage of mysticism, he also situated himself in the more canonical lineage of Kant and Hegel. Indeed, this resistance of the singularity of experience to conceptual or rational explanation appears quite vividly in Kant’s third Critique. For Kant, the beauty necessarily cannot be a concept. Judgments of beauty are not “logical but…aesthetic, by which we mean a judgment whose determining basis cannot be other than subjective” (204). Specifically, this means that a judgment of taste has nothing to do with applying a pre-given concept of “beauty” to an object or measuring an object against a conceptual standard of “beauty.” Furthermore, this judgment “does not contribute anything to cognition, but merely compares the given presentation in the subject with the entire presentational power, of which the mind becomes conscious when it feels its own state” (Kant 204). Kant unequivocally claims that beauty is not a concept in which an object participates or which it represents. Rather, beauty is the experience of the play of our cognitive faculties. The experience of the beauty is neither replaceable with nor reducible to rational description. Beauty cannot be described; it must be undergone. Consequently, the power of the beautiful must be in the subject rather than the object, since an object can be beautiful when from one angle, while wholly unremarkable when viewed from another.
Of course, Kant’s other famous assertion of the singularity of experience in the Critique of Judgment is the Kantian sublime. For Kant, the experience of the sublime is experience of a “formless object, insofar as we present unboundedness” (Kant 245). The experience of the sublime, as opposed to the experience of beauty, consists in a mental state of “agitation” (247). Standing on a cliff before a “gloomy raging sea,” for example, one feels overwhelmed by the seemingly infinite dynamism of nature (254). The key move for Kant, however, comes when the experiencing subject then realizes that she has a (bounded) concept for this very unboundedness: the idea of “totality” (113). Human reason saves the day and transforms awe of our own finitude into “respect for our own vocation…[that] makes intuitable for us the superiority of the rational vocation of our cognitive powers over the greatest power of sensibility” (257).
Is Bataille’s “inner experience” not, then, a surrender to the Kantian sublime? The difference that makes a difference between Kant and Bataille is that Kant’s experience of the sublime is ultimately a victory of the human intellect through the application of the concept of infinity. For Bataille, the confrontation with the subliminality of inner experience is always a wholesale annihilation of concepts and the subject as such. Whereas Kant reasserts the power of human reason, Bataille leaps without abandon into this moment of the death of reason: “I am open, yawning gap, to the unintelligible sky and everything in me rushes forth, is reconciled in a final irreconciliation” (Inner Experience 59). With this important modification, Bataille carries Kant’s legacy of asserting the necessity of the particularity of experience. The Kantian sublime, despite the descriptions from Kant, the great systemizer, cannot be merely described—it must be experienced, and, for Bataille, surrendered to. Said otherwise, one must approach the sublime with the comportment of the beautiful. The Kantian experience of the beautiful must be “disinterested”—it is an experience of an object of “a liking…devoid of all interest” (Kant 211). We must approach the beautiful as something perfectly superfluous, something in which we find no nourishment or victory. In Oscar Wilde’s words, “beautiful things mean only beauty” (Wilde 3). In contrast, the sublime, for Kant, must always be experienced as that which reinforces the unbounded power of the human intellect; we are quite interested in the sublime. If we approach the sublime, however, without an eye towards the reassertion of human reason, if we approach the sublime as an experience to undergo for no reason other than itself, we find Bataille’s inner experience lurking already in the Kantian system. . . . ."
http://commons.pacificu.edu/cgi/viewcontent.cgi?article=1082&context=rescogitans
