“One of the questions asked in anguish by many addicts and depressives is, “Why me?” Bataille’s philosophy (particularly his search for and attribution of meaning to the different, deviant, and repulsive) helps answers this question, so providing much needed comfort.
Bataille suggested that the sacred can be found in extreme experiences. These fall into two categories, the external and the internal. It’s helpful to associate these two categories with two stages of addiction. The external experience is akin to the addict’s acting-out experience pre-recovery. Recovery enables the addict to experience the sacred via internal experiences, free of the need to act-out through substances, processes, or other people.” –from Micheal Moccata’s Philosophy Now article ‘George Bataille’s Experience’
“One must still have inner chaos in order to give birth to a dancing star.” –Friedrich Nietzsche
“Don’t give up your vices. Put them to work for you.” –also Friedrich Nietzsche
Please (once again (excuse the dear diary moment; but this particular subject hits close to home as my life, since my teens, has been a weird mix of creative and intellectual curiosity and ambition supplemented by a propensity towards compulsive and addictive behaviors. I have always had my vices, even when I tried to escape them. (And I would note that I generally attempted to escape them due to more practical matters.) But I’ve always been lucky in that my creative and intellectual ambitions always kept my embrace of the chaos in check: an anchor that allows one to embrace the creative chaos (to absorb the edge it can give a process (while not succumbing to it. So while I agree with the point (consider it a valid process:
“Bataille suggested that the sacred can be found in extreme experiences. These fall into two categories, the external and the internal. It’s helpful to associate these two categories with two stages of addiction. The external experience is akin to the addict’s acting-out experience pre-recovery. Recovery enables the addict to experience the sacred via internal experiences, free of the need to act-out through substances, processes, or other people.”
:it’s not the only story out there. Sometimes you can embrace your vices (even your mental illness as John Nash showed through mathematics (and still be happy as long you maintain a healthy respect for the footwork involved. To give a ‘for instance’, Jim Morrison emphasized throughout his process the important influence of shamans and Indian peyote rituals. And it clearly paid off for him. Where he went wrong was in failing to recognize the sober footwork that went into those rituals. The shamans didn’t just go out and take peyote in the valley and consider it a job well done. They rather went through a series of sober approaches towards enlightenment: sweat lodges, meditation, dances, and most notably a ritual in which they hunted down the peyote and shot it with a small bow and arrow.
The main point I am trying to make here is that embracing chaos can be productive as long as one maintains a healthy respect for order (the act of doing a thing (as well. This is implicit in a statistic I came across a long time ago: data that showed that creative people are 6 times more likely to suffer from depression while having the compensation of better resources to deal with that depression -once again: John Nash.
And I am not arguing that this understanding will work for everyone. Bataille’s was clearly a different situation. All I am saying is that there are alternative narratives.