Tag Archives: Death

Another Look at Georges Bataille’s Obsession With Childishness

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After speaking about pride, power, and “striving to be the best,” George Bataille – in his book Inner Experience – basically gives up and surrenders to childishness.  As I have pointed out before, Bataille goes against the grain – as he usually does – and praises childhood as a form of redemption or “deliverance” from the game of being a “man”:

Childishness, knowing itself to be such, is deliverance.  (44)

However, here, Bataille tells us that if one takes childishness “seriously,” one will be “enmired.”   If one takes childhood seriously, one will turn it into one other habit: “dependent on childishness.”  Rather, the right attitude to take with childishness, which, lest we not forget “is deliverance,” is to “laugh at it.”  But if one has a “heavy heart,” one cannot.  And if one is able to laugh at it, “then ecstasy and madness are within reach.”

But isn’t such laughter a laughter of superiority; that is, the laughter of an adult who looks down at and laughs at childishness?

Anticipating this, Bataille argues that “childishness recognized as such” is the “glory, not the shame of man.”  In other words, even though one laughs at, Bataille suggests that such laughter is respectful!

However, Bataille wants to entertain another view on laughter; namely, the view of the English philosopher Thomas Hobbes, who claims that “laughter degrades.”  If one takes this view, and Bataille doesn’t reject it, then “one reaches the depths of degradation.”  To be sure, Batialle also enjoys this shameful state.  And he argues that “nothing is more childish” since it discloses a kind of blindness to the “glory” of man found in childishness.  However, it seems as if Bataille embraces both: the glory of childishness and the blindness to that glory which is mired in degradation.  He wants both, or so it seems.

Bataille takes his final turn toward childishness by thinking of its limit: death.

How, wonders Bataille, do we see the human being in his last moments of life?  (This question is one that Leo Shestov entertains in his essay “Penultimate Words.” And, like Bataille, Shestov is interested in an approach that doesn’t take death with utmost seriousness as well as a position that does.).  To be sure, Bataille sees him or her as a child.

The most serious seem to me to be children, who don’t know they are children: they separate me from true children who know it and who laugh at being. (44)

In other words, the most serious at death are children who don’t know they are children (they have a blind spot).  And these people “separate me from true children who know it and who laugh at being.”  This claim is ironic because Bataille would have us believe that he can’t be one with “true children” who know and laugh in the face of death because there are people out there who don’t know they are children (when they are facing death)!

A child must know, he says, that the “serious exists.” This knowledge is the basis for true child’s laughter which is, as Bataille says, at the “extreme limit.” It is a knowing laughter, a laughter in the face of the “knowledge” that the “serious exists.”

Bataille’s exercise in meditating on childhood is fascinating because by telling himself that those who don’t know cut him off from “true children,” he is suggesting that their blindness prevents him from laughing while knowing that the serious exists.  In other words, the very thing that limits him most is the blindness people have in the face of death – the knowledge of this blindness, which is the blindness to their own childishness, is what irks him most and keeps him from completing his own exercise of laughing and becoming childish in the face of death.  It is his knowledge of the other’s blindness that keeps him from what he desires most deeply.  And, apparently, he can’t seem to get rid of it.  No matter how beautiful his formulation of childishness is, it cannot be enacted because these kinds of people and this kind of blindness exists.

What I find most striking about this formulation is the fact that Bataille is ultimately saying that his childish project is a failure because of the other who separates him from “true childishness.”  Because of the other’s blindness-to-childishness-in-the-face-of-death, his childish project fails.   Deliverance by way of childishness…fails.

How humiliating! It seems that Bataille will never be delivered from the process of becoming a man and perhaps that makes him, in some way, a schlemiel.

Last Words or Last Laughs? Leon Shestov on Death, Philosophy, and Sarcasm

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Before death, what will our last words be?  This is a timeless question which many of the greatest minds have, throughout the centuries, pondered.   Plato is often cited for his meditation on death in his dialogue entitled “The Phaedo.”  Before his impending death, Socrates tells his followers that he is not afraid because he has renounced his body in the name of his immortal soul (nous).  He comes to this renunciation by way of knowledge and suggests that his knowledge (or intimation) of eternal things (ideas) proves his point; namely, that only an eternal thing (his soul) could know eternal things (ideas).   His love for these eternal things inspires him to renounce his body, which he associates with fear.   Socrates goes so far as to liken his last words to a swan song.  His death will release from his body and it brings him joy to know he will be reunited with the source of all wisdom.

Writing on Ibsen, Turganiev, Socrates, Spinoza, and Schopenhauer’s last words on death, Shestov calls their swan songs “senilia.”  And by doing so, he suggests that their last words are warped:

Ibsen and Turgeniev serve the same God as the swans, according to the Greek belief, the bright God of songs, Apollo.  And their last songs, their senilia, were better than all that had gone before.  In them is a bottomless depth awful to the eye, but how wonderful! There all things are different from what they are with us on the surface….There is a way of escape: there is a word which will destroy the enchantment.  I have already uttered it: senilia.  (108, Chekhov and Other Essays)

In yesterday’s blog entry, I noted that Nietzsche thought of Spinoza and Kant as dishonest and misleading by virtue of the fact that they want us to believe in ideas that are antithetical to life.   Nietzsche goes so far as to call their philosophy “hocus-pocus” and argues that it is unhealthy.  Laughing at them, Nietzsche frees himself up for life.

By sarcastically calling the last words of these philosophers “senilia,” Shestov seems to be saying the same thing as Nietzsche:

Turganev wished to call his Prose Poems by this name (senilia) – manifestations of sickness, infirmity, of old age. These are terrible; one must run away from these! (108)

Adding to this, Shestov says that “all men mistrust old age.”   But then he takes a turn that Nietzsche does not: “But what if all are mistaken?  What if senilia bring us nearer to the truth?  Perhaps the soothsaying birds of Apollo grieve in unearthly anguish for another existence; perhaps their fear is not of death but of life”(109).

This possibility haunts Shestov, but it doesn’t surrender himself to it wholly.  In other words, he wishes to entertain both Nietzsche and Socrates; both senilia and its sarcastic rejection.

But this is not his last word. Taking an interesting tactic, Shestov turns to the distinction between the ordinary man and the philosopher and notes something very interesting.   Philosophers, of course, often go against the grain of society which for them, doesn’t think.  After all, philosophy – for Plato – doesn’t happen in the cave of society; it happens outside the cave, in solitude.

Nonetheless, Shestov argues that while Plato and Spinoza were consistent in aligning their lives with their philosophies, there is a more interesting case to be made for the lives of the philosophers which differ from what is in their books.  He takes Schopenhauer as a case in point: “in life, like many another clever, independent man, he was guided by the most diverse considerations”(111).  Shestov, like Nietzsche, finds he has more in common with Schopenhauer than with Plato or Spinoza.  He is more interested in “freedom than in necessity.”

But for Shestov the “principles” of a philosopher are no greater than that of a the everyday man because “the room of the world is infinite, and will not only contain all those who lived once and those who are yet to be born, but will give to each one of them all that he can desire”(112).  Since there are a “plurality of worlds” and a “plurality of men” amongst these “vast spaces of the vast universe.”   This suggests a kind of relativism.

However, Shestov can’t settle for this.  To be sure, he thinks that, when all the chips are down, he can understand why a philosopher – like Spinoza – would turn to creating the perfect philosophical system.  Shestov calls such philosophizing “art for arts sake.”  He notes that even Naploeon turned to philosophy in his last hours.   What matters is the fact that he came to “philosophy with demands and would not rest until he had received satisfaction.”   In the end, this brings together what interests Shestov most: the relationship of self-renunciation to megalomania.  Napoleon’s turn to philosophy at the end of this life brings the two together.

Even so, Shestov finds the case of Heinrich Heine to be more interesting than Napoleon.  As I noted the other day, Shestov finds great insight in the fact that the German’s misunderstood Heine’s self-deprecating humor.  To be sure, Heine’s last words were not senilia; they didn’t bow down to philosophy when the chips were down.

Shestov tells us that his words, for the Germans, didn’t have the ring of “conviction.”  As proof, he brings a line from one of his poems which, it seems, has no interest in the soul:

I seek the body, the body, the young and tender body.  The soul you may bury deep in the ground – I myself have soul enough.  (128)

Commenting on this Shestov argues that “in it, as in all Heine’s daring and provocative poems, may be heard a sharp and nervous laugh, which must be understood as the expression of the divided soul, as a mockery of himself.”(123).  Heine, Shestov argues, was different from the King David whose psalms show us a man who, “when he believed, did not doubt.”    For this reason, they couldn’t understand this new kind of Jew whose piety was tainted by doubt.

Turning to Heine on his death bed, Shestov notes that, even then, Heine was sarcastic (his words didn’t, like Spinoza or Plato’s, become senilia): “His sarcasms every day became more ruthless, more poisonous, more refined”(125).  And “his thoughts of God, his attitude to God, were so original that serious people of the outer world could only shrug their shoulders. No one every spoke thus to God, either aloud or to himself”(125).

Instead of feeling fear and admiration before the thought of death, “Heine has neither prayer nor praise.  His poems are permeated with a charming and a gracious cynicism, peculiar and proper to himself alone”(125). And, according to Shestov, Heine, because of his sarcasm, “”remains as he was in youth.”  He doesn’t want bliss or heaven; rather, he just wants “God to give him back his health.”  This is the novelty.

Shestov paraphrases Heine’s words at death which sound like the words of a stand-up comedian: “He laughs at morality, at philosophy, at existing religions.  The wise men thing so, the wise men want to live in their own way; let them think, let them live.  But who gave them the right to demand obedience from me?  Can they have the power to compel me to obedience (to necessity)?”(127)

To be sure, Shestov’s reflections on Heine can also be applied to Nietzsche’s approach to death.  They laugh at the formulations made by philosophy and religion and sarcastically face their death; they don’t renounce themselves.   But even so, Shestov still entertains the possibility that Heine is wrong:

I am tempted to think that the metaphysical theories which preach self-renunciation, are by no means empty and idle…In them lies a deep, mystical meaning: in them is  hidden a great truth.  Their only mistake is to pretend to be absolute.  For some reason or other men have decided empirical truths are many but that metaphysical truth is one.  Metaphysical truths are also many, but them does not in the least prevent them from living in harmony one with another.  (128)

Given this reading, he doesn’t think the Germans should be annoyed with Heine.  His “sarcasms will not keep them from their lofty aspirations.”  His last words are comical but that’s the point – they are his.  He – and no one else – lives with them and will die with them.

Sarcasm, in other words, is not merely a matter of entertainment; for Shestov it is an existential decision.