One of the main difficulties in reading texts that have a strong shamanic streak in them is that one may very easily mistake their tone. It's not the common one, today. Consider Nietzsche and Bataille, for instance. The most common tendency is to read them as if they were making statements from the point of view of the transcendental imperative: "Thou shalt". We are familiar with this tone from evangelical preachers, and so it seems to be the most natural way to read the characters of these philosophical writers.
Yet both Nietzsche and Bataille take pains to frame their ideas as being the product of their own insights and inspiration. They are honest enough in this, and this quality of their rigour sets them apart from all protestant preachers and their ilk.
The tone of their writing is that appropriate to shamanic inspiration. The writing is supposed to seduce, to hypnotise you into adopting a certain perspective, so that you see things in a different light. The safe-guard against the possibility of readers becoming robots/zombies for the new cause is the intellectual rigour of the writers, which reminds the reader that what they are dealing with is a perspective --one of among, quite possibly, many. Bataille is direct enough to use the term "seduction" to describe what his form of "mystical" initiation involves. Nietzsche, likewise, gives ample warnings about how perspectives tend to vary -- although Nietzsche also loads the die by claiming that his own perspectives are the most noble. Nietzsche, then, deliberately or inadvertently, is more of a direct manipulator of perspectives compared to Bataille. The latter is more rational.
Shamanic texts can be tricky as I've just suggested, and the best way to read them is on the level. That is, you should imagine someone whispering some new ideas into your ear. Do you agree with them or disagree? Accept them or refuse them? You will need to rely upon your own "inner experience" in order to decide. You'll need to make the right decision.
Reading Nietzsche's tone on the basis of granting the reader equality with the writer, what comes across in Nietzsche is a certain paternalistic reassuring quality in his mode of seduction. He wants to reassure his readers that even if they have to die for his ideas, everything will be okay in the end. By contrast, Bataille's tone is icier. (One feels in it the dampness of the French countryside.) He wants to create a deep uneasiness, which will be matched by the reassurance only you can generate for yourself. (Bataille will even tell you how to do it.) Bataille wants you to embrace the worst possibilites imaginable -- and accept them as probably likely.
At bottom, however, which means at the very foundations of their thinking, both Nietzsche and Bataille maintain their stance of intellectual rigour. It is on the basis of acknowledging that there are no transcendental values, that Nietzsche justifies to us his assertion of his own estimation of appropriate values. Bataille, in turn, embraces a thoroughly anti-positivistic version of knowledge. True knowledge is emptied of particularised content. It is Socrates' statement: "I know that I know nothing." Yet the simplicity of this statement betrays a hidden world of complexity -- this is not a positivistic statement by any means, and ought not to be taken as one. Rather, to know "nothing" is to refuse to be satisfied with little piece-meal supplies of information. No knowledge is enough: One's attitude to knowledge is insatiable.
This kind of skepticism at the bottom of both Nietzsche and Bataille's philosophies is thoroughly shamanic. It is key to shamanism to understand that knowledge is created, not discovered. It is known that a shaman with sufficient skill can transport his created values into the real world, and cause them to grow up there. Nietzsche and Bataille, both understanding this shamanic principle, left signs through their works that they knew they were working with experimental modes of knowledge.
Yet both Nietzsche and Bataille take pains to frame their ideas as being the product of their own insights and inspiration. They are honest enough in this, and this quality of their rigour sets them apart from all protestant preachers and their ilk.
The tone of their writing is that appropriate to shamanic inspiration. The writing is supposed to seduce, to hypnotise you into adopting a certain perspective, so that you see things in a different light. The safe-guard against the possibility of readers becoming robots/zombies for the new cause is the intellectual rigour of the writers, which reminds the reader that what they are dealing with is a perspective --one of among, quite possibly, many. Bataille is direct enough to use the term "seduction" to describe what his form of "mystical" initiation involves. Nietzsche, likewise, gives ample warnings about how perspectives tend to vary -- although Nietzsche also loads the die by claiming that his own perspectives are the most noble. Nietzsche, then, deliberately or inadvertently, is more of a direct manipulator of perspectives compared to Bataille. The latter is more rational.
Shamanic texts can be tricky as I've just suggested, and the best way to read them is on the level. That is, you should imagine someone whispering some new ideas into your ear. Do you agree with them or disagree? Accept them or refuse them? You will need to rely upon your own "inner experience" in order to decide. You'll need to make the right decision.
Reading Nietzsche's tone on the basis of granting the reader equality with the writer, what comes across in Nietzsche is a certain paternalistic reassuring quality in his mode of seduction. He wants to reassure his readers that even if they have to die for his ideas, everything will be okay in the end. By contrast, Bataille's tone is icier. (One feels in it the dampness of the French countryside.) He wants to create a deep uneasiness, which will be matched by the reassurance only you can generate for yourself. (Bataille will even tell you how to do it.) Bataille wants you to embrace the worst possibilites imaginable -- and accept them as probably likely.
At bottom, however, which means at the very foundations of their thinking, both Nietzsche and Bataille maintain their stance of intellectual rigour. It is on the basis of acknowledging that there are no transcendental values, that Nietzsche justifies to us his assertion of his own estimation of appropriate values. Bataille, in turn, embraces a thoroughly anti-positivistic version of knowledge. True knowledge is emptied of particularised content. It is Socrates' statement: "I know that I know nothing." Yet the simplicity of this statement betrays a hidden world of complexity -- this is not a positivistic statement by any means, and ought not to be taken as one. Rather, to know "nothing" is to refuse to be satisfied with little piece-meal supplies of information. No knowledge is enough: One's attitude to knowledge is insatiable.
This kind of skepticism at the bottom of both Nietzsche and Bataille's philosophies is thoroughly shamanic. It is key to shamanism to understand that knowledge is created, not discovered. It is known that a shaman with sufficient skill can transport his created values into the real world, and cause them to grow up there. Nietzsche and Bataille, both understanding this shamanic principle, left signs through their works that they knew they were working with experimental modes of knowledge.
2 comments:
Knowledge is both from the past and sublated into the future. What Bataille wants to do is to make the unconscious, conscious. The unconscious is the realm of non-knowledge.
Good essay. Expand and send in for publication.
Apparently Bataille's concern is not entirely with the unconscious. He probably thinks it is useful to make ppl uneasy and thus "wake them up" in the shamanistic sense of bringing ppls consciousness into the present. But more than that, he wants people to respond to the world as if it were real, rather than as if it were somehow removed from them (as one might consider the world to be if one's way of looking at things was guided by mind-body dualism). He sees that in bourgeois society, people respond to all ideas as if they were interchangeable, simply by virtue of being "ideas". He wants us to think that ideas relate to actual events and influence them.
This, too, is shamanic, because it is a holistic way of viewing the world. The mind and "mental processes" are not somehow separated from reality, as we tend to segregate them according to our bourgeois conditioning.
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