A RICH INFINITY OF BLANKS
Note on Wilfred Bion and Knowledge of Infinity

1

The question of ‘thinking the infinite’ is a common concern among philosophers, mathematicians, and theologians. The issue they constantly run into is: How can we know the infinite using finite minds and finite means?

The tendency on the religious side is to place significance on a symbol which links the two sides. The only trouble is that, for the symbol to function, one must believe it. One must believe that one’s symbols, one’s idiom, one’s discourse makes the link. Indeed, that God on the other side of the link “guarantees” that the symbol holds, makes the relationship true. Infinity “funds” it. But where faith is needed, there is doubt; and where there are symbols there is symbol-critique. (One reason why Carl Jung refused to make metaphysical truth claims and restricted himself to seeing how the psyche made use of symbols to connect finite and infinite, in his terms, the conscious and unconscious parts of the self, Atman.)

On the philosophical side, the solutions are diverse and it would be impossible to give a survey. Alain Badiou has attempted to transpose the mathematical theory of infinite sets into the realm of philosophical discourse. Roughly, he says a “truth-event” can erupt from the “known situation” the way infinite exceeds finitude (truth pierces a hole in knowledge); and that “eternal truths” are constructed with the “launch point” of infinity in the situation, the point which does not belong to the situation.

But I am not here to discuss Jung or Badiou, rather one of Wilfred Bion’s theories. The purpose of this post was to share it with you, but there are detours to infinity.

2

As a psychoanalyst influenced by Melanie Klein, Bion takes the relationship between the baby and the mother as the prime analogy of psychic life. (Catholic theologian Hans Urs von Balthasar also takes the baby-mother analogy as the primary one for the believer’s relationship to God, despite his tradition’s Father-centrism and lack of a female God-image.)

For Bion, the mother-baby relationship is essentially one of container-contained. The baby experiences a threatening excess of stimuli (both sensations and proto-thoughts), and there is not yet an adequate structure to handle this excess. The thoughts overwhelm because there is not yet an apparatus to think them. Now this apparatus is what the mother provides. He refers to this as the mother’s “reverie,” and that reverie is basically what the psychoanalyst tries to replicate in the clinic: a sort of open space where the baby/patient’s emotions can be received more or less graciously, so they can be helped in the direction of being “thought through.”

For Bion, the crucial decision is always between thinking-through the excess (developing a thinker for the thoughts), or act out out of frustration, the passage-‘a-l’acte.

Now from the analogy Bion develops a whole theory of “learning from experience.” He formalizes it through the symbols ♂ ♀. Note that these symbols do not intend anything gendered but simply represent the relationship Contained-Container. They are not logical but simply a useful convenience; they are a formalism.

The question then, for Bion, is how ♂ ♀ can grow “commensually,” like how mother and child learn from each other, but also how (for example) the Unthought content of a philosophical system grows as the philosophical system itself advances in its Thinking.

The easiest way to picture this, at a primitive level, is how we “mate” pre-conceptions (♀) with sense-data (♂), simply put: words with the real phenomena. Bion’s idea here is that our awareness of sense impressions could not develop if we had not also developed a mental Container for Contained sense-data. (The benefit of the abstraction is that he does not need to say exactly what that Container is; it simply designates a function empirically observed.)

The Container ♀ he describes as a series of sleeves, of blanks to be filled like blanks in a questionnaire. The connecting threads of the sleeves, the structure of the questionnaire, are emotions. The Contained ♂ he describes as a “medium for suspended contents that protrude from an unknown base.” These elements are not seen to cohere and so are punctuated by doubt. There is an inconsistency there. (Note that the description does not describe ♂ as filling ♀; rather there seems to be two mutually instances: a structure of empty sleeves, and a discrete series of unknowns.)

The process of learning is described as “commensual” growth between ♂ and ♀. For learning to occur, ♀ has to be integrated yet not lose rigidity. Its different moments are held together by emotion, but an emotion that must be capable of changing. The capacity of ♀ for re-formation depends on the receptivity of the emotion(s). Likewise, “penetrability” in ♂ requires that the emotion of doubt be tolerated. Since it represents the element of the unknown, I take this to mean that the unknown cannot be penetrated by thought without a tolerance of doubt that one penetrates it. In other words, there’s no knowing it without highly doubting one knows it: such is the paradoxical non-knowledge we encounter everywhere in the thinking of infinity.

Bion writes (yes, I have written all this simply to expound upon this quotation): “Tolerance of doubt and tolerance of a sense of infinity are the essential connective tissue in ♂ if Knowledge is to be possible.”

But note also that without ♀, this unknown excess would have no place. ♀ is like the manifestation of the knowledge of ♂, a bit as if it knew it where we don’t. (I think anyone who has labored over some artistic construction having in mind to represent the infinite, will sight a deep breath knowing exactly what I mean.)

3

After advancing far along the path of formalization (see his “Grid”), Bion would later move away from it and write fiction, but still I find all this an interesting construct to think about.

I don’t think it is as simple as describing ♀ as finite and ♂ as infinite. Taking sense-data as the starting point, the latter would simply be chaos without the former. In any case, there is no Knowledge without both.

Two parallels worth noting. One, in religion, the thought of Shakti-Brahman in the Hindu system (see Sri Aurobindo especially. Two, in philosophy, Derrida’s aporetic thinking of the khora (the spacing of space, so to speak) together with messianity (the invincible desire for justice).

Having come to the end, I should reiterate that the symbols Bion uses (aggravated by Facebook’s requiring they be gender-colored) may suggest more than they mean in this context– but they are simply for convenience to represent the Container-Contained function. They are no more gendered than the one who provides reverie for a child, or the analyst who provides a mirror-ear for the patient. Moreover, at that stage of evolution of his thinking, Bion viewed the pinnacle of ♀ as the scientific deductive system which, while highly complex, retains the receptive qualities of ♀.

The draw of this psychoanalytic rendering is to show that ‘thinking the infinite’ requires emotional growth. On the side of ♀, a great flexibility between ♀ + ♀ + ♀, between different moments of emotion (+) as it changes, is required; otherwise it will not be integrated and capacious enough to receive. On the side of ♂, a great tolerance of doubt ( . ) between ♂ . ♂ . ♂, between instances of the Unknown, is required; otherwise it simply cannot be known as unknown, it will be “believed” to be something it is not.

Abstract as the schema may be, I think anyone who works with a material to create with something unknown in mind will recognize this pattern of growth.

How then, would Bion answer the question: How can we know the infinite using finite minds and finite means? Clearly, there is no method of ‘how’ to give here, but the schema he provides is a helpful tool — for the construction of, and the filling in of, our own blanks.