The Daimōn of the Ancients is Jung's Shadow. Jung's Persona, a person's outward presentation, is Heidegger's Das Man. For Jung, Sartre's Bad Faith, his beautiful expression mauvaise foi, is the ego denying the shadow, or attempting to deny the shadow a voice role in the public square. Jung's Individuation, is an often heated negotiation between the control freak that is Ego who wants a persona that makes no ripples and the "what about me's" of the often disruptive Minority interests of the Shadow.
Inauthenticity and Bad Faith are the Ego’s attempt to live a half-life, holding up a polite, sterile mask, aligator skin shoes and a bowtie, while pretending the dark cellar beneath the house doesn't exist.
Authenticity and Individuation require an act of bravery. The Ego stepping out of the crowd, listening to the uncomfortable, disruption of the Daimōn, going down into the cellar to shake hands with the Shadow, and owning the total, messy, finite reality of one's existence.
With straight faces Sartre and Heidegger acknowledge the existential demands of freedom and honesty. Jung in his turn gives us the internal map of the territory we have to traverse to achieve freedom and honesty.
But all is not well in this world of clever boys pontificating on this existence of Das Man. Men do that to girls, mother life, the womb of all things and then men claim credit because men have the larger Adam's Apple and like girls we have twenty four ribs.
We've talked about Arendt and Heidegger. How her Martin left her to rot in the stew of his own authenticity. Tomorrow we'll look at Sartre's reaction to a mescaline trip and at Sartre's Simone de Beauvoir, who wrote her book the Second Sex, in it she took apart her Jean-Paul's ice cold approach to a theory of emotions, and, by so doing took the Daimōn out of the interstitial spaces through her understanding of emotion, passivity and the body.
No comments:
Post a Comment