Purpose, Attention, Discernment
Purpose and Discernment
Scientific language doesn’t like to cross its streams with ‘religious’ or ‘philosophical’ terms, perhaps because they lack the scientist’s precision. But read St. Ignatius’ Spiritual Exercises, or James’ Martin’s discussion of discernment in Learning to Pray, and you’ll find a level of exactitude that science simply does not achieve.
We must broaden our understanding of purpose to include the ability to cultivate discernment—to see multiple paths into the future, to move decisively when needed, and to step back, slow down, and listen for signals our reflexes would dismiss as noise.
It is also contagious: the capacity to draw others into the same work—not as imitation, but as emulation of discernment itself.
All of this is scientifically explainable, but experientially dead if we leave it at that.
Purpose does not automatically yield ethics or morality. I’m not asking (or telling) what your (or my) purpose should be. I’m arguing that purpose is unavoidable, given the kind of creatures we have become—given the way our particular brand of intelligence has evolved.
Purpose is the eternally recurring now of living. Just as we cannot shut off time, we cannot abdicate purpose. It is the water in which we swim.
But the assertion of purpose—always in pursuit of some perceived good—walks us up to the brink of evil.
Bataille: ‘The good, in whatever way one envisions it, is the good of beings, but in wanting to attain it, we must ourselves question—in the night, through evil—the very beings in relation to which we want it’ (On Nietzsche, 33).
To assert purpose, in other words, is to define and embrace being—individual or collective—and to seek to shape the future accordingly. It is therefore to intervene in the course of causality—to intervene into a course of events that would otherwise go on without you.
Purpose and Eternal Return
Time weaves the threads of the past into the expanding possibilities of the future. At that intersection is purpose—whether we embrace it or not. Discernment keeps purpose from ossifying into rigid determinism; it keeps us from wandering into a future someone else defines.
Motivation and the Will to Power
I’ve been reading Georges Bataille’s On Nietzsche (Stuart Kendall’s translation). It is a remarkable set of meditations on the complexity of Nietzsche’s moral vision. It gets to the heart of what I’ve been calling purpose and discernment: the ability to hold open the hardening power of purpose so as to perceive and experience more.
Such a morality risks nihilism, however. Bataille captures it well at the end of his Preface where he takes on the problem of unmotivated motivation, which is at the heart of the will to power and eternal recurrence.
In a sense, I think it’s necessary to invert the idea of eternal return. It is not the promise of infinite repetition that lacerates but this: that the moments caught in the immanence of the return suddenly appear as ends. That one not forget that the moments are in every system envisioned and assigned as means: every morality claims: “that every moment of your life should be motivated.” The return unmotivates the moment, frees life of ends and thereby initially destroys it. The return is the dramatic mode and mask of the whole man: it is the desert of a man in which each moment henceforth finds itself unmotivated. (14)
The eternal return is not only and solely the infinite repetition of the past in the present. Such a repetition would foreclose the openness of time to possibility. Rather, the inversion of eternal return that Bataille seeks is one that respects possibility while realizing that it is never completely and radically open.
We should note the centrality of ‘life’ and ‘freedom’ to this passage. These are crucial to Bataille’s reading of Nietzsche. Freedom here is the ability to find motivation in a will to power that is fundamentally lacking motivation. But if this were simply the end point of Nietzsche’s philosophy, then it would be of no lasting importance. This conundrum is the beginning of the experience of living, and according to Bataille, ‘not a word of Nietzsche’s work can be understood before having lived this dazzling dissolution into totality; outside of that this philosophy is only a maze of contradictions…’ (13).
The eternal return and the will to power—taken together—yield a form of freedom that dances at the ridge of expanding time. Such freedom requires finding motivation, but equally it requires keeping that motivation from becoming a hardened and inflexible purpose—an ‘end’ versus a ‘means’.
Yet we can’t end up like the tightrope walker whose end and purpose has become a weak equilibrium suspended between towers as an entertainer. Equilibrium, in other words, cannot become our hardened motivation. When this happens, we actually weaken our will to power and life becomes decadence. The will to power, then, must be understood not as the will to domination and tyranny; it must be understood as the capacity to embrace chance and to move with purpose and intent, but to also hold open discernment so that the requirements and calling of any given situation can be absorbed, processed, and calculated.
Suspended in the void, extreme moments are followed by depressions that no hope can alleviate. If however I come to a clear understanding of what is lived in this way, I give up looking for a way out where there isn’t one (for that, I hold to my critique). How can the absence of goal inherent in Nietzsche’s desire not have consequences? Inexorably, chance—and the search for chance—represents a unique recourse (of which this book describes the vicissitudes). But to advance this way, with rigor, implies a necessary dislocation of the movement itself. (14).
This is affirmation and yes-saying, though Bataille does not call them out here: ‘the search for chance’ is ‘a unique recourse’. Such a search must respect the inheritances afforded us by eternal recurrence: one of its dynamics is the automatic perseveration of the past in the present. But it must use those inheritances as opportunities for new motivations, all the while realizing that motivations harden into purposive ends that seek the foreclosure of chance.
If I have been understood, the “will to power,” considered as an end [hardened purpose or goal], would be a step back. Following it, I would return to a servile fragmentation. Once again I would give myself a [permanent] responsibility, and the good that is the desired power would control me. (13)
When temporary motivation becomes hardened purpose—an assumed good that controls the will to power—we end up with totalitarianism running through our lives: ‘the temptation to elaborate a goal and a politics lead only into a maze’ (13).
And here is where we end up at ‘the tragic’. While we cannot let motivation harden into inflexible purpose, we cannot embrace ‘unmotivation’ as our purpose. This is the difficulty of Nietzsche’s philosophy, but it is a difficulty that exists in the absence of trying to live it. If we treat it as a conceptual system, we lose the thread that weaves together eternal recurrence, will to power, the overman, affirmation, morality, yes-saying and no-saying. The tragic is the acknowledgement of the condition of our unmotivated motivations. The abyss opens in two ways: 1) when we let unmotivation rule we become subject to random motivation, ‘annihilated by the gears of motivation’; 2) when we let a single motivation become our inflexible purpose, we treat time and chance as enemies, which risks the recurrence of evil cloaked as morally justified purpose.
Thus the tragic gets its definition. Though Bataille will not yet embrace the term, we find his formulation in the final sentences of the Preface as substantially the same as Nietzsche articulated it in The Birth of Tragedy:
A distinction must be made between, on the one side, the world of motives, wherein each is sensible (rational), and the world of nonsense (free of all sense). Each of us belongs in part to the one, in part to the other . . . Between the two realms, only one relationship is acceptable: action must be limited rationally by a principle of freedom. (15)
For Bataille, as for the Nietzsche of The Birth of Tragedy, we must negotiate both the Apollonian (rational individuality) and the Dionysian (exuberant collectivity). To seek permanence in either realm is to risk different forms of violent nihilism.
Such a tightrope walk, if it is not to become a weak decadence, must learn both discernment and affirmation: the ability to seek motivation and purpose without ever letting them harden into inflexible trajectories of time or grasps at permanent being.
We must hold open our will to power. Recognizing the tragic within this eternal recurrence is to hold open chance as the possibility of ongoing possibility, and it requires ‘giving up looking for a way out where there isn’t one.’
Or perhaps Henri Bergson put it better:
Our freedom, in the very movements by which it is affirmed, creates the growing habits that will stifle it if it fails to renew itself by constant effort: it is dogged by automatism. (Creative Evolution, 127)
Read more from the Wednesdays series.
This essay is also part my series on Rejuvenation and Orientation.
For more on cultivating our power of purpose, see ‘Cultivating Purpose and Discernment in a Computational World’.
Read my Substack posts on Purpose and Discernment and Faster than Nature for deeper dives into these themes.
Bataille’s Theory of Religion is an important background piece for Time as Practice. Read my assessment and summary: ‘Bataille, Religion, Experience’.