philosophical conversations

emotion and reason

I guess I should have read Bataille's Inner Experience before reading the latter On Nietzsche. But that's the way with bookshops in Australia is it not? They had one text --On Nietzsche--- but not Inner Experience. So I bought the former, ordered the latter, and discovered that Guilty is out of print. So I had little choice but to sit down and start reading On Nietzsche.

And I found that text dam near incomprehensible. Suprise suprise. By the time I had struggled through reading the first two parts, 'Mr Nietzsche' and 'Summit and Decline' I had concluded that this text was about religious feeling. I then mapped this in confessional terms and I understood that Bataille placed these intense, private emotional states in opposition to the public world of work.

I found the juxtaposition naive, given my background in Stoic philosophy of managing the passions ('serpents in the soul') in public life. Naive more than a
alien.

The passions in the Stoic tradition are understood as inclinations of thought, or judgement, and a part of reasoning rather than passion being placed in opposition to thinking; a therapeutic philosophy delves into our subjectivity in order to develop a rich sense of what we are experiencing in our way of life; and it works upon our strange fears and anxieties, our excessive loves and grief, and our crippling angers without dismissing them as irrational, as did Kant.

On this account our passions can be irrational in the sense that the beliefs they rest on may be false, or unjustified. They are not irrational in the sense of having nothing to do with reasoning or argument. The reason? There is a cognitive dimension to our emotions, and this has a close connection to our ethical judgements about what is important or ethically significant in our lives and what is not.

But Bataille, for all his talk about morality, was so religious. What interested him was religious ecstasy.The references to Nietzsche were very misleading. This religious focus is upfront in Inner Experience. He opens by saying:

"By inner experience I understand that which one usually calls mystical experience: the states of ecstasy, of rapture, at least mediated emotion. But I am thinking less of confessional experience, to which one has had to adhere to now, than of an experience laid bare, free of ties, even of origin, of any confession whatsover.This is why I don't like the word mystical."

Fair enough.

It would have been nice to have known that before I started reading On Nietzsche. Then I would have known that Bataille was reading Nietzsche in terms of Nietzsche's own "mystical" states, rather than the more classical themes of the disintegration of a moral community and moral language, the blighting of character or personality from a damaged life, and the need to revalue our values in a nihilistic world so as to live a flourishing life.

So what have I gained from the struggle with On Nietzsche so far? That Bataille is thinking about the emotions and possibly about the emotions as forms of evaluative judgement. Though I am not sure about the latter point of emotions as value judgements.

Posted by Gary Sauer-Thompson at December 14, 2004 12:11 PM | TrackBack