doppelgänger

This interesting article came from Clarissa's blog. It's particularly appealing for me since, the doppelgänger concept was part of my theoretical platform for my thesis. I said that shamanism functions by means of creating doppelgängers in a state of dissociation. The difference between shamanism and pathology would be that the dissociation is intentional and is carefully observed and studied by the other half of the self. It’s a means of acquiring knowledge, but not in the normal sense of western epistemology, where knowledge is supposed to be divorced from experience and emotion. As Nietzsche points out, that kind of objectivity would be useless in terms of enhancing the human experience of life, and is part of the ascetic ideal — which he was trying to conquer in order to make human life meaningful. Thus Bataille (Nietzsche’s 20th Century student) avoids the trap of the wrong kind of knowledge-seeking by referring to mystical experience as ‘non-knowledge’.