When I work to a late hour, I sometimes don't get to bed easily afterwards. I've taken too many stimulants to stay awake. Such was the case last night.
So I decided to read more of Bataille's THE UNFINISHED SYSTEM OF NONKNOWLEDGE.
The part I was reading was from a symposium, where Bataille discusses his rewriting of Christian theology to accord with his sense of psychological veracity. That Christianity imposes a division between two actions -- the killing of Christ and the worship of Christ -- strikes Bataille as lacking in psychological accuracy. The separation this imposes removes Christianity from being a true religion to one of a lower level of existence, less concerned with a direct relationship with the sacred, but prone to moralizing.
I am, of course, paraphrasing, in terms of my current level of understanding. We know Bataille took a lot from Nietzsche, but here he also seems to draw an analysis partly from Freud. Bataille's view is that one becomes an ontologically closed being, passive and still, unless one actively engages in what he calls sinning.
By contrast with this passive acceptance of existence, a proper relationship with the sacred ought to invoke strong emotional ambivalence. True Christianity would be to embrace that state of mind by accepting the guilt for crucifying Christ, whilst also accepting the benefits of divine sacrifice, an encounter with the divine.
Christianity, though, wants to dissociate itself from the criminal act of killing the Christ. It thereby disowns the negative aspect of the experience of the sacred, which is guilt. Guilt is the sword in the side, the shamanic wound, that keeps you volatile. Without it, you too easily come to rest, in a complacent state. That is a "downward slope" away from true religiosity.
Guilt is important for true religion because it challenges and disrupts a complacent state of being. It encourages a higher level of emotional participation than only embracing the positive side of religion would do. Looked at from a psychoanalytic angle, one must challenge one's comfort zone, which has been formed by the internalization of the Father and his character and his law. This act of sinning produces, in turn, guilt, but also redemption. In effect, one reenacts the killing of the Christ and receives a sense of intimacy with the divine. The reality of the law of the Father is reinforced (on of the one hand) and forced to give up ground (on the other). In all, participation with the divine and the expansion of the mind is achieved as one's very sense of being is first shattered and then reborn.
This is not really good material to read late at night, for sure. It is a little like viewing a horror show, to read and absorb this kind of theory. But the existence of death, violence and guilt cannot be simply shrugged off, because then the negative aspects of reality seem to exist only on the outside of us, and not within us as human beings. I'm sure we would be inclined to project these negative features onto others by making, for instance, the Jews responsible for the killing of Christ, if we were prepared to embrace only the positive benefits and the blessings of religion but not the aspects of historical and human experience we do not like.
Avoiding psychological projection by actively pursuing situations and emotions that produce a sense of guilt would therefore seem to have a therapeutic aspect to it, at least so far as the whole of humanity is concerned.
Acknowledging guilt makes us more realistic, but it can also make us stronger overall, because we come to know ourselves better as human beings, and that could perhaps make us better at actually being human in the fullest sense of what this might imply. We cannot know, yet, what the implications of a full humanity might be, since it is more comforting to take shelter in nice feelings or assurety of redemption.
Now, to be clear I don't mean to advise any form of liberalism. Rather, violence. To challenge oneself by sinning, is to enter the fray where one becomes a sacrificial beast, condemned by the internalization of one's own moral law, which is originally the law of the Father. But it is also to know the ins and outs of suffering, as well as one's limits with regard to it. To keep expanding those limits of participation in all it means to be human means that we participate more fully in both the negative and positive aspects of being divine.
As so often, the shamanic wound -- in this case, the guilt within us -- is also the origin of the release: a fuller soul, and redemption from pettiness and narrow personal obsessions, which is to say the mind is blasted and much less bourgeois nonsense remains.
So I decided to read more of Bataille's THE UNFINISHED SYSTEM OF NONKNOWLEDGE.
The part I was reading was from a symposium, where Bataille discusses his rewriting of Christian theology to accord with his sense of psychological veracity. That Christianity imposes a division between two actions -- the killing of Christ and the worship of Christ -- strikes Bataille as lacking in psychological accuracy. The separation this imposes removes Christianity from being a true religion to one of a lower level of existence, less concerned with a direct relationship with the sacred, but prone to moralizing.
I am, of course, paraphrasing, in terms of my current level of understanding. We know Bataille took a lot from Nietzsche, but here he also seems to draw an analysis partly from Freud. Bataille's view is that one becomes an ontologically closed being, passive and still, unless one actively engages in what he calls sinning.
By contrast with this passive acceptance of existence, a proper relationship with the sacred ought to invoke strong emotional ambivalence. True Christianity would be to embrace that state of mind by accepting the guilt for crucifying Christ, whilst also accepting the benefits of divine sacrifice, an encounter with the divine.
Christianity, though, wants to dissociate itself from the criminal act of killing the Christ. It thereby disowns the negative aspect of the experience of the sacred, which is guilt. Guilt is the sword in the side, the shamanic wound, that keeps you volatile. Without it, you too easily come to rest, in a complacent state. That is a "downward slope" away from true religiosity.
Guilt is important for true religion because it challenges and disrupts a complacent state of being. It encourages a higher level of emotional participation than only embracing the positive side of religion would do. Looked at from a psychoanalytic angle, one must challenge one's comfort zone, which has been formed by the internalization of the Father and his character and his law. This act of sinning produces, in turn, guilt, but also redemption. In effect, one reenacts the killing of the Christ and receives a sense of intimacy with the divine. The reality of the law of the Father is reinforced (on of the one hand) and forced to give up ground (on the other). In all, participation with the divine and the expansion of the mind is achieved as one's very sense of being is first shattered and then reborn.
This is not really good material to read late at night, for sure. It is a little like viewing a horror show, to read and absorb this kind of theory. But the existence of death, violence and guilt cannot be simply shrugged off, because then the negative aspects of reality seem to exist only on the outside of us, and not within us as human beings. I'm sure we would be inclined to project these negative features onto others by making, for instance, the Jews responsible for the killing of Christ, if we were prepared to embrace only the positive benefits and the blessings of religion but not the aspects of historical and human experience we do not like.
Avoiding psychological projection by actively pursuing situations and emotions that produce a sense of guilt would therefore seem to have a therapeutic aspect to it, at least so far as the whole of humanity is concerned.
Acknowledging guilt makes us more realistic, but it can also make us stronger overall, because we come to know ourselves better as human beings, and that could perhaps make us better at actually being human in the fullest sense of what this might imply. We cannot know, yet, what the implications of a full humanity might be, since it is more comforting to take shelter in nice feelings or assurety of redemption.
Now, to be clear I don't mean to advise any form of liberalism. Rather, violence. To challenge oneself by sinning, is to enter the fray where one becomes a sacrificial beast, condemned by the internalization of one's own moral law, which is originally the law of the Father. But it is also to know the ins and outs of suffering, as well as one's limits with regard to it. To keep expanding those limits of participation in all it means to be human means that we participate more fully in both the negative and positive aspects of being divine.
As so often, the shamanic wound -- in this case, the guilt within us -- is also the origin of the release: a fuller soul, and redemption from pettiness and narrow personal obsessions, which is to say the mind is blasted and much less bourgeois nonsense remains.
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