Is there a part of the self that submission cannot reach even in principle?

Contrasting Bataille's loss of self, success is self-erasing, with Steiner's strengthening of self, success is cumulative.

User:

22/7/2026 9:28:39

Not sure yet

I think of the Jesuits; prisoners who never submitted, who always remained free in their minds; and Steiner's own Philosophy of Freedom. Maybe it's about not submitting at all.

Assistant:

22/7/2026 9:28:53

That's a real turn — worth taking seriously rather than folding back into the submission framework.

The counter-tradition you're pointing at

Jesuit formation is a strange case to bring in here, because it looks like maximal submission — obedience even "as a corpse" (perinde ac cadaver, the phrase attributed to Ignatius) — but the Spiritual Exercises are explicitly designed to produce discernment, a strengthened interior faculty for choosing. The obedience is to a rule that was itself freely, repeatedly, deliberately chosen and re-chosen. It's almost the inverse of what it looks like from outside: extreme external submission in service of extreme internal sovereignty.

The prisoner who "never submitted in mind" is a cleaner version of the same structure, minus the institutional machinery — Viktor Frankl's version of this is probably the reference point most people reach for, the claim that the one thing that can't be taken is the choice of one's attitude to given circumstances. Whether or not that's fully true in extremis, it's a claim about an irreducible interior remainder that no external control can reach.

And Steiner's Philosophy of Freedom (Die Philosophie der Freiheit) is arguably his real foundational text underneath all the later esoteric material — an argument that free ethical action arises from intuitive thinking that isn't determined by external law or internal impulse/desire, but from a kind of self-transparent act of the thinking "I" itself. It's a rejection of both heteronomy (obeying outside authority) and mere instinct (obeying inside impulse) in favor of something he thinks is genuinely free.

What this does to the whole conversation

All three examples point to the same claim: there might be an irreducible core that is simply not on the submission/dissolution axis at all — not because it's maintained-consciousness-while-submitting (your variable 2), but because it was never given as the stake in the first place. The Jesuit's body obeys; the prisoner's circumstances are controlled; but something is held back categorically, not just retained-with-effort.

If that's right, it suggests Bataille, the D/s scene, and even the Church's mystical wing are all playing in a much smaller territory than they seem to claim — a territory of the body, behavior, circumstance, even ecstatic experience — while leaving a specific kind of freedom (the thinking "I," in Steiner's terms; the "last of the human freedoms," in Frankl's) categorically untouched, not because it triumphed over the situation, but because it was never actually contested by it.

That would mean the real question isn't "how conscious is the submission" but "is there a part of the self that submission cannot reach even in principle" — which is a claim about the structure of the self, not about degrees of consent or awareness. Bataille would likely deny this outright; Steiner's entire philosophy depends on it being true.

Is that the direction — testing whether such an untouchable core actually exists, or just noting that certain traditions assume it does?

User:

22/7/2026 9:33:25

I think it is Bataille's probable denial that is interesting here because it means that transgression is something we engineer rather than participate in

Assistant:

22/7/2026 9:33:39

That's the sharpest point in the whole conversation — sit with it, because I think it actually breaks something in Bataille rather than just describing him.

Why the denial forces this conclusion

If there's no untouchable core — no Steiner "I," no Frankl remainder — then there's nothing in the subject that could simply encounter the sacred as a given fact about reality. The sacred has to be produced. Continuity, non-savoir, the dissolution of discontinuous being — these can't be discovered like a feature of the world; they have to be manufactured by ritual, by transgression, by controlled violence against the self's own boundaries, because nothing exists prior to the act that could recognize or participate in something beyond itself. You said it exactly right: Bataille's subject can't participate in the sacred, because participation implies something already there capable of contact with it. It can only engineer the experience of contact, from the inside, with no guarantee anything answers back.

This is close to Bataille's own anxiety, not just a criticism of him

He was reading Hegel (via Kojève) obsessively while writing this material, and Kojève's atheistic, "end of history" Hegel is exactly the worldview where there's no transcendent order left to participate in — just human beings and their own self-relation. Bataille's sacred is often read as a deliberately immanent sacred, a sacred with the transcendent guarantee removed. That's precisely why his term is non-savoir and not "gnosis" or "revelation" — those older words imply something is being disclosed to you from outside. Non-savoir is just the engineered absence of your own usual knowing, with nothing confirmed to be on the other side of it.

What this does to every other case in the conversation

• The Jesuit and the prisoner assume a something — an "I," a soul, a remainder — that can meet grace, or meet meaning, because it was never fully at stake. Their freedom is a discovery, even under total external control.

• Bataille's transgressor assumes nothing is waiting. The intensity, the risk, the ritual precision — all of that has to be engineered, not because Bataille is a control freak, but because engineering is the only route available once you deny there's a pre-existing sacred order or a stable inner self to receive it.

That reframes the entire opening list. The Church, in its mystical register, claims participation — grace meets a soul that was already capable of receiving it. Bataille, structurally, can only claim construction — an elaborate machine for producing the feeling of participation with no metaphysical backing for the claim that anything was actually met.

Which raises the question your framing sets up almost too neatly: is transgression-as-engineering a diminished version of transgression-as-participation, or is Bataille making the harder, more honest claim — that participation was always this, for everyone, and traditions that claim otherwise are just better at hiding the machinery?

User:

22/7/2026 9:36:56

Don't traditions lessen the individual effort required?

Assistant:

22/7/2026 9:37:11

Yes — and I think that's the practical payoff of everything we've worked through, so let me be precise about the mechanism rather than just agreeing.

Why traditions cost less effort per person

If Bataille is right that the sacred has to be engineered from nothing, every individual who wants that experience has to do the full engineering work themselves — build the ritual, calibrate the intensity, trust a construction with no external guarantee, and do this more or less from scratch, because there's no pre-existing structure certifying that the machine works. That's enormous overhead, carried alone, every time.

A tradition is essentially accumulated engineering, amortized across generations and inherited for free. The Church didn't invent confession, the Mass, monastic discipline, the Spiritual Exercises in a single lifetime, by one person reasoning it out — it inherited, refined, and validated these structures over centuries, through countless people's trial and error, and now hands you a machine that's already tuned. You don't have to work out whether kneeling, fasting, and repetition produce a state of self-loss — that's already been established as reliable by everyone who came before you. You just have to submit to the procedure.

This is precisely what the Jesuit example was doing structurally

The Exercises aren't a from-scratch existential achievement performed anew by every novice — they're a tested four-week protocol, refined since the 1520s, that reliably produces certain interior states in most people who follow it in order. The individual effort required is real but bounded — follow the instructions — rather than open-ended, the way Bataille's engineering-from-nothing effectively is for someone with no tradition to draw on.

Where this cuts back on Bataille specifically

This might be the actual function of his fascination with Catholicism even in atheism: he's not nostalgic for God, he's recognizing that the Church solved a hard engineering problem extremely well, and secular modernity threw out the solution along with the metaphysics. His own writing — deliberately literary, ritualistic, repetitive, almost liturgical in its intensity — might be his attempt to build a personal tradition, a private machine, precisely because he'd cut himself off from the inherited one and had to do the whole cost himself.

And this reframes narcissism and D/s again

A tradition also supplies the object (your earlier variable) pre-validated — you're not submitting to a private, invented God or a partner whose reliability as a vessel for your dissolution you have to establish from zero. The Church says: submit to this, we've checked, it holds. A D/s relationship without any inherited script has to build that trust and calibration from scratch between two people — which is part of why negotiation, ritual, and repeated scenes matter so much there: it's two people constructing a miniature tradition, in real time, because neither the Church nor Bataille's private machine is available to them.

So: yes, traditions are effort-saving devices, and the cost they save is exactly the cost Bataille pays in full every time he writes.

User:

22/7/2026 9:40:10

So Bataille and Steiner are more similar than first mooted? And differ on dissolution?

Assistant:

22/7/2026 9:40:22

Yes — and I think this is the real payoff of the whole conversation, because it means the two "opposite" thinkers you introduced actually share a premise that's rarer than either position alone.

The shared premise: no free inheritance

Both Bataille and Steiner start from roughly the same starting condition — modern secular subjects with no tradition automatically doing the work for them, no pre-validated machine handed down. Both respond by saying: fine, then the individual has to build the apparatus themselves, deliberately, through disciplined effort. Neither trusts an inherited institution to do this for free — Steiner broke from Theosophy precisely because he thought it borrowed uncritically from Eastern and occult traditions instead of building a genuinely Western, individually-verified path; Bataille couldn't return to the Church he'd abandoned, so he had to construct a private, literary, ritualistic substitute. That's a much stronger similarity than the surface "consciousness up vs. consciousness down" split suggested. They're both engineers, in exactly the sense that came out of the last exchange, and both explicitly reject the "traditions lessen the effort" shortcut — not because they deny it works, but because they don't trust the result, or don't have access to it, or think a self-constructed path is the only legitimate one.

Where they genuinely split: what the engineering is for

• Bataille engineers toward loss — his apparatus exists to produce a state where the effortful, deliberate, controlling self can, for a moment, stop being in charge. The machine's purpose is its own temporary switching-off.

• Steiner engineers toward retention and expansion — his apparatus (meditative exercises, the disciplines in Knowledge of the Higher Worlds) exists to produce a self that has more control, more clarity, more waking presence in territory that's normally unconscious. The machine's purpose is to never switch off, and to extend how much it can illuminate.

So it's not that one wants effort and the other doesn't — both want a lot of effort, both distrust free inheritance. The split is in the telos of that effort: does the disciplined engineering culminate in the engineer disappearing, or in the engineer becoming maximally, permanently present?

One more asymmetry worth naming

Bataille's model has an inherent instability that Steiner's doesn't: because the goal is self-loss, success is self-erasing and has to be redone — you can't bank a dissolution, you have to keep re-engineering the rupture, which is part of why his work reads as compulsive and repetitive. Steiner's model is cumulative — each exercise is supposed to build on the last, retained faculty stacking on retained faculty, more like training than ritual. That difference in whether the result is durable might matter more than either the entry-consciousness or the dissolution/reinforcement axis you started with.