Subject: Re: Inner experience vs. Descartes
Date: Thu, 18 May 2000 13:33:53 +0200


Hello people.


Short about the inner Cartesian mind:

For Descartes, the mind was essentially inner. For materialists/monists like
Hobbes, mind is inner in the straightforward sense that all mental states
and events are spatially located inside the scull. However, this can’t be
the sense in which mind is inner for Descartes, since in his view the mind
is not in space at all. The Cartesian mind is inner because it is
introspective accessible; the boundaries are exclusive and exhaustive; every
mental entity is introspectively accessible to exactly one mind. In short,
Descartes thought that the mind is an ontologically homogenous inner
representational realm that is causally responsible for human behaviour.

but...

What I am wondering about is the aspect of free will for Descartes. In his
view, we have a rational mind (which God guarantees) but we are finite
beings and often make” ill-considered judgements” because the will tends to
step out of bounds.

In Inner Experience and Erotism Bataille constructs a self that is always
and already split (the dis-continuous being): we want to transgress the
limits set by the rational mind so we can experience the heterogeneous
(become, for a moment, a continuous being).

But we need to maintain the limits in order to experience the transgression.
Bataille writes: ”We want to get across without taking the final step, while
remaining cautiously on the hither side. […] At all costs we need to
transcend them, but we should like to transcend them and maintain them
simultaneously”. Thus, we want to exceed the limits set by the rational
mind, but we need to keep the rationality in order to experience the
transgression. This is just one of the many paradoxes in Bataille’s
philosophy.

But, I’m wondering, isn’t there a strange connection between Descartes and
Bataille here?

PS! I know I’m not clear in expressing my thoughts, but it’s a question and
not an arranged question with a fixed reply.


Have a nice day
Einar Wahlstrøm