They both have the similarity of providing a critique of instrumental reason, only Bataille was more flamboyant about that.
Bataille was very suspicious, although not altogether hostile, toward transcendence. To take that path seems to implicate you more in society’s mores, even as you seek to transcend them. Bataille’s views were let’s cut out the middle man, and transgress. We don’t need to transcend the DOXA (presuming this means the morality of mores) when we can just horizontally oppose this.
A lot of Bataille’s attacks are on transcendence, instrumental reason and narrow empiricism.
In effect, and listen closely to this, he seemed to want to destroy trust in these things – that is, to destroy the “I” – which was also an anti-rational conquest, to destroy the “eye” as an instrument of reason.
I guess these were just ideas he had at the time.
In place of the “I’” (the narrow, instrumental sense of selfhood), he wanted to put the pineal eye.
The pineal eye is directly attuned to the sun, and thus is a primeval eye.
You can see the pattern here: destroy the narrowed and overly civilised “ I” and recover the primeval basis for experience – not that one has to become narrowly primeval: this is a means of negation on the way to a negation of the commanding system of consciousness so that one may live without being commanded by one’s narrowly conditioned mind.
But Bataille’s strained relationship with transcendence was also his attitude to the entire bourgeois order. There were some things to admire, but he didn’t want to play their game. He thoughtNietzsche played it as well as can be – and lost.
One has to wonder, when one destroys the limitations imposed by the social order and incites an uprising of primeval sensations and reactions, what the consequences could be.
But this is an overall picture of Bataille’s philosophy and the political agenda that underlies it.
Heidegger seemed a bit superficial, then, in approving of Bataille so readily.
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