summit and decline

Here's is an example of the dialectics we can find in Bataille. It has to do with understanding that humans have two important states, one of energy and one of depletion. You know about Potential Energy in physics? When an object goes upward it uses kinetic energy to gain potential energy. That is what it means when we say that humans can reach the moral "summit". But that expenditure and squandering of energy for narrow purposes at the height of experience cannot continue forever. Most people do not even experience a significant event of the moral summit in their lifetimes. Most are taught to embrace the morality of the decline (self-preservation through morality) at all costs.