Chapter Three Ongoing Undifferentiation
2. Continuity among Oppositions
As the pure counterpart of Bataille’s loss of individuality, the sense of breaking through one’s sense of ego is described as a spiritual experience in Christianity as well. The following is a Christian follower’s testimony on his mystical experience. With metaphors similar to Bataille’s idea of “la continuité de l’être”, he expresses the universal unity with which the released individual becomes one. Like Hollier’s questioning of philosophy with the example of Plato (see Chapter
One), in the following the “rational” and “argumentation” is regarded as “irrelevant.
When the sense of estrangement [which fence] man about in a narrowly limited ego breaks down, the individual finds himself “at one with all creation.” He lives in the universal life; he and man, he and nature, he and God, are one. That state of confidence, trust, union with all things, following upon the achievement of moral
unity, is the
Faith-state. Various dogmatic beliefs suddenly, on the advent of the
faith-state, acquire a character of certainty, assume a new reality, become an object of faith. As the ground of assurance here is not rational, argumentation is irrelevant.But such conviction being a mere casual offshoot of the faith-state, it is a gross error to imagine that the chief practical value of the faith-state is its power to stamp with the seal of reality certain particular theological conceptions. On the contrary, its value lies solely in the fact that it is the psychic correlate of a biological growth reducing contending desires to one direction; a growth which expresses itself in new affective states and new reactions; in larger, nobler, more Christ-like activities. The ground of the specific assurance in religious dogmas is then an affective experience.
The objects of faith may even be preposterous; the affective stream will float them along, and invest them with unshakable certitude. The more startling the affective experience, the less explicable it seems, the easier it is to make it the carrier of unsubstantiated notions (James 247).
The above testimony shows that in the Christian sacred, it is not the reality, nor the world of things, nor theological conceptions that matter. It is “the psychic correlate of a growth reducing contending desires to one direction,” similar to the “universal one” Bataille proposes, that melts “the sense of estrangement” and pacifies “the narrowly limited ego.”
Bataille’s notion of the destruction of ego has another esteemed counterpart in Hermann Hesse’s Siddhartha which questions the importance of the “ego” and points out a state worth pursuit: this ideal state is similar to Bataille’s “nothing” or “la continuité de l’être” which will ultimately lead to the conclusion that contradictions are nullified. Inspired by the flow of a river, the protagonist of Siddhartha describes in his epiphany:
It was the self, the purpose and essence of which I sought to learn. It was the self, I wanted to free myself from, which I sought to overcome. But I was not able to
overcome it, could only deceive it, could only flee from it, only hide from it. Truly, nothing in this world has kept my thoughts thus busy, as this my very own self, this mystery of me being alive, of me being one and being separated and isolated from all others, of me being Siddhartha! And there is no thing in this world I know less about than about me, about Siddhartha!"
Both Hesse and Bataille attempt to demolish the common notion that there is a “ego” being the base or center of everything. Similar to Bataille, Hesse asserts the importance of escaping the notion ego
— by “killing the random self of the sense” in order for transcending the impasse resulted from the
“ego”:
… With the body definitely not being the self, and not the spectacle of the senses, so it also was not the thought, not the rational mind, not the learned wisdom, not the learned ability to draw conclusions and to develop previous thoughts into new ones.
No, this world of thought was also still on this side, and nothing could be achieved by killing the random self of the senses, if the random self of thoughts and learned knowledge was fattened on the other hand.
Hesse is in concordance with Bataille in his negation of the sense of ego, a notion weaved out of nothing. What Hesse wishes is to destroy the obsession of the preeminence of ego because all that is developed on the foundation of it: senses, thoughts, rational mind, learned wisdom, learned ability, belong to the secular, to the realm of individual discontinuity. Compared to the world of the sacred, the finite individual discontinuity is unimportant. God belongs to the sphere transcending “the world of thought,” as the religious, the erotic, and the unclean do. Since the sacred aspect is not subjected to “the world of thought,” Hesse has to describe it by a number of negative sentences instead of affirmative ones. He continues to describe the “ultimate meaning” — the state of sacred continuity:
Both, the thoughts as well as the senses, were pretty things, the ultimate meaning was hidden behind both of them, both had to be listened to, both had to be played
with, both neither had to be scorned nor overestimated, from both the secret voices of the innermost truth had to be attentively perceived. [Siddhartha] wanted to strive for nothing, except for what the voice commanded him to strive for, dwell on nothing, except where the voice would advise him to do so.
In Hesse’s state of epiphany, contradictions give way to the universal one. He writes:
Siddhartha listened. He was now nothing but a listener, completely concentrated on listening, completely empty, he felt, that he had now finished learning to listen.
Often before, he had heard all this, these many voices in the river, today it sounded new. Already, he could no longer tell the many voices apart, not the happy ones from the weeping ones, not the ones of children from those of men, they all belonged together, the lamentation of yearning and the laughter of the knowledgeable one, the scream of rage and the moaning of the dying ones, everything was one, everything was intertwined and connected, entangled a thousand times. And everything together, all voices, all goals, all yearning, all suffering, all pleasure, all that was good and evil, all of this together was the world. All of it together was the flow of events, was the music of life. And when Siddhartha was listening attentively to this river, this song of a thousand voices, when he neither listened to the suffering nor the laughter, when he did not tie his soul to any particular voice and submerged his self into it, but when he heard them all, perceived the whole, the oneness, then the great song of the thousand voices consisted of a single word, which was Om 29: the perfection.
…
! The “Om,” a sacred sound in Sanskrit, meaning “entirety of the universe,” is said to be “the sound of all creation” and “a prayer
29
itself,” a sound that includes ”the past, present, and future” (Das). Its pronunciation is similar to the phoneme a: “the first vocalic phoneme used by the child in learning the language. [The first words everywhere are ones like papa, mama. etc.]… For Bataille, there are a certain number of significant usages of a that refer, however, to Latin, where it is the mark of the feminine, as opposed to the -us of many masculine endings. Thus there is the -us of Dianus, the four a’s of Madame Edwarda. Latin here performs less as a dead, classical language, than as religious language. This is not Cicero’s language, but the language of the mass. The same letter, therefore, designates [in Latin] femininity…and absence: Edwarda is, simultaneously, a woman and the absence of Edward, as a theology is the negation of theology. Acephalus the absence of a head…” (Hollier 119-20). The sound Om or a manifests the relation of nothingness (the phoneme a as absence) and religion, and of nothingness and entirety (Das).
In this hour, Siddhartha stopped fighting his fate, stopped suffering. On his face flourished the cheerfulness of a knowledge, which is no longer opposed by any will, which knows perfection, which is in agreement with the flow of events, with the current of life, full of sympathy for the pain of others, full of sympathy for the pleasure of others, devoted to the flow, belonging to the oneness.
The reason why Siddhartha “fought his fate” and “suffered” is that he regarded himself as an distinct individual, having an ego of his own. When he realizes the transcendent nothingness/
continuity (in listening to the river’s flow that suggests a never-ending universal continuity), he is incorporated into the sacred continuum which is revealed in various wonder-struck moments:
beauty, glory, sacrificial rituals.
Let us go back to Bataille’s emphasis on the dualism of the sacred. Quoting the words of André Breton, Bataille asserts that violence and religious experience (considered separately as the impure and pure) overlap in the state of “the universal flow of all that is”:
‘Everything leads us to believe,’ wrote André Breton, ‘that there is a certain point in the mind where life and death, the real and the imaginary, the past and the future, the communicable and the incommunicable, are no longer perceived in contradiction to one another.’ I shall add: Good and Evil, pain and joy. This point is indicated both by violence literature and by the violence of a mystical experience: only the point matters (Literature 20).
By indicating “only the point [(where opposite ideas compromise)] matters,” Bataille asserts again the importance of la continuité de l'être. In La Tombe de Louis XXX, he expresses the same opinion from another angle — that the essence of la continuité de l'être is “nothingness”:
When I carefully seek out, in deepest anguish… an eye opens up at the top, in the middle of my skull. This eye opening up onto the sun in all its glory, to contemplate it in its nakedness, privately, is not the work of my reason: it is a cry escaping from me. For at the moment, when the flash binds me I am the splintering brilliance of a
shattered life, and this life—agony and vertigo—opening up onto an infinite void, bursts and exhausts itself all at once in this void (qtd. Hollier 131).
“A cry escaping from [the self]” being the focus of the speaker’s contemplation, thus what is left is an opening continuous with the “infinite void.” From this point of view, the narrator becomes no longer alone. By scattering his idea of self (“being headless,” as Bataille may termed), he acquires the universal whole.