Contribution
It adds no new argument. It is a pop-culture-and-philosophy chapter that maps Neon Genesis Evangelion (the TV series and The End of Evangelion) onto existentialist and relational accounts of meaning and selfhood. It uses Camus on suicide and revolt, Schopenhauer’s porcupine parable, Heidegger’s “They”, and an uncited gesture to Fichte and Hegel on self-consciousness through others.
Key insight
Instrumentality solves the hedgehog’s dilemma by abolishing the distance between selves. That also abolishes the selves, because “You can’t see yourself unless others are with you” (Shinji, quoted p. 9). The chapter’s lesson is that meaning in life comes from connection, and that connection is meaningful only between separate individuals. The pain of separateness is therefore the price of meaning, not a defect to be removed.
Assumptions
- The show’s own statements (Shinji’s and Rei’s lines during Instrumentality) are taken as the work’s thesis. The chapter endorses them rather than arguing for them.
- A relational premise, asserted and attributed loosely to “post-Kantian German idealists”: self-awareness “could only be fully realized through the presence of others” (p. 9).
- An existentialist frame: life has no given purpose. The question is how to respond (Camus: not suicide but revolt, p. 5).
- The characters’ apparent sources of meaning (piloting, achievement, recognition) are “only instrumental” to the real goal, connection with others (p. 5). This is asserted as a reading.
Key results
What it argues, in order:
- pp. 3–5, Duty, Meaning, Loneliness. Shinji, Rei and Asuka each first draw “purpose, … meaning, and … identity” from piloting the EVAs (p. 3). Shinji does it for his father’s praise, Rei because it is “her link” to everyone, and Asuka “To show the whole world how talented I am!” (p. 4). When the role is lost, as with Asuka’s lost sync ratio, identity and the sense of worth collapse (p. 5). The chapter reads the work as instrumental to connection.
- pp. 5–8, The Hedgehog’s Dilemma. It quotes Schopenhauer, Parerga and Paralipomena vol. 2, pp. 651–52. Each character’s abandonment history (Shinji and Gendo, Rei as a clone, Asuka’s mother’s suicide) produces defensive distance. Episodes 3 and 4 state the parable outright. Misato’s “trial and error to work out the right distance” is offered as its resolution (pp. 7–8).
- pp. 8–10, The Human Instrumentality Project. AT fields “arise from possession of a soul” and “hold together the ego” (p. 8). SEELE’s plan merges all souls to end loneliness. The chapter reads this as Heideggerian inauthenticity, “losing the self and giving into the They” (p. 9). Shinji rejects it because the self is “only meaningful through contrast with others”, and “without it, the self cannot exist” (p. 9). His will “to retain his identity through his separation from others” breaks Instrumentality (p. 9). Conclusion: “connection with others can only be made meaningful through the separation of individuals” (p. 10).
- pp. 10–11. Rei’s claim to be “the real me … shaped by my interactions with others” is presented as the relational view of identity. Shinji’s bonds with Misato, Asuka, Rei and Kaworu are what let him “find himself and save humanity” (p. 11).
Claims
| id | claim | strength | support |
|---|---|---|---|
| C1 | The characters’ search for meaning through piloting is instrumental to a search for connection with others (p. 5) | informal argument | interpretation of scenes and dialogue |
| C2 | Evangelion dramatizes Schopenhauer’s porcupine dilemma (pp. 5–8) | informal argument | the show names it explicitly (episode 4 title, Ritsuko–Misato dialogue in episode 3) |
| C3 | Instrumentality is a Heideggerian loss of the self into “the They” (pp. 8–9) | assertion | no Heidegger text cited; the gloss of Dasein as the “authentic form of being” is inaccurate |
| C4 | A self exists only through contrast with others; “without it, the self cannot exist” (p. 9) | assertion | attributed to Fichte and Hegel without citation; illustrated by Shinji’s lines |
| C5 | Meaning is found in connection that keeps some distance between separate individuals (p. 10, closing line p. 11) | informal argument | reading of the ending; not defended against rival accounts of meaning in life |
| C6 | Camus, unlike Sartre, answers meaninglessness with revolt rather than self-created meaning (p. 5) | assertion | one quotation from The Myth of Sisyphus; no page given |
Concepts
- Hedgehog’s (porcupine) dilemma: a need for closeness frustrated by the harm closeness causes. The equilibrium is a “moderate distance” (Schopenhauer).
- AT field: read as the physical form of the psychological boundary that constitutes an individual self.
- Instrumentality: the merging of all selves into one, read as the loss of individual boundaries and of authenticity.
- Relational selfhood: the self is individuated and recognized only through contrast with others.
Connections
- LIT-183 (Hiekel, on Wolf’s hybrid view of meaning in life) is the nearest held work on meaning in life. The chapter does not engage the analytic meaning-in-life literature (Wolf, Metz) at all. Its answer, meaning through relationships, is compatible with a Wolf-style view, but it is not argued for.
- LIT-136 (Floridi on the informational nature of personal identity) and LIT-130 (Dufner, personal identity and ethics) hold the metaphysical questions of personal identity that this chapter does not touch. The link to LIT-136 that the dossier proposed (self-individuation) holds only at the level of the loose idea that a self is constituted relationally.
- Account of identity presupposed: relational individuation of selves. A self is what is bounded off from others, and its “shape” is visible only against them. Personal identity in the persistence sense is not addressed. The Rei passage raises identity across duplicates only to answer it by her history of relationships, and that answer is the show’s, not argued.
Bearing on the record
It is a thin but real bearer for the identity tag, in its “individuality” sense, and a reasonable one for ethics (meaning in life). It carries nothing for ML practice. The analogy one might draw, between merging agents or minds and the loss of individuality, is not made by the chapter and should not be attributed to it.
Limitations
- It is popular philosophy with no references beyond two quotations (Camus, Schopenhauer). Heidegger, Fichte and Hegel are invoked without texts.
- It misdescribes Heidegger. Dasein is not “an authentic form of being” (p. 8). It is Heidegger’s term for the kind of being humans have, which can be authentic or inauthentic. The chapter’s contrast between Dasein and “the They” is therefore garbled.
- Its central thesis (“without [otherness], the self cannot exist”) is stated, not argued. The move from “self-awareness needs others” to “the self needs others” is made without comment.
- It is an uncorrected proof. The text contains a slip, “lead them to be afraid future harms” (p. 7), and the published text may differ.
Open questions
- Does the published version (pp. 3–12) differ from the proof, beyond copy-editing?
- The chapter’s claim that meaning needs separate individuals invites the question it never asks: whether a merged collective could be a self with meaning of its own. That is the individuality question the tag points to, and the chapter leaves it unasked.
Corrections to the seeded skim
- Title. The chapter’s own title, in the proof and in the book’s table of contents (Part I, “Finding meaning in instrumentality”, chapter 1), is “The Desperate Search for Meaning in Life”. So is Veit’s publication list. “Why are We Here? Evangelion and the Desperate Search for Meaning in Life” is the title used on PhilArchive BROWAW-9, ResearchGate, Academia.edu and Browning’s research page. It is not the printed chapter title. The two PhilArchive records (BROWAW-9 under the long title, BROTDS-9 under the printed one) are the same chapter, as the dossier said.
- Publisher. Both authors’ pages give “Chicago: Carus Books”, pp. 3–12. The dossier’s “Open Universe (Pop Culture and Philosophy 2)” is not contradicted but was not verified here. The proof itself ends on p. 11.
- Camus. The dossier’s skim says the chapter has Camus hold that “one revolts by making one’s own meaning”. The chapter separates the two positions (p. 5). Sartre and “many existentialists” hold that we create our own meaning. Camus “argued instead that we need to revolt in the face of a life without purpose and enjoy it anyway”.
- Page placement. Schopenhauer’s porcupines run pp. 5–6. Episodes 3 and 4 (Ritsuko’s and Misato’s dialogue) are pp. 7–8. The AT fields are read as “physical manifestations of the psychological barriers between individuals” on p. 8, in the Instrumentality section, not in the hedgehog pages. The Instrumentality section runs pp. 8–10, Rei’s speech is on p. 10, and the relationships (Misato, Asuka, Kaworu) are on pp. 10–11.
- Fichte and Hegel. The chapter does not have Shinji “following” the idealists. It says his realization echoes “some of the post-Kantian German idealists” (p. 9), with no works cited.
- identity tag: justified, narrowly, as a secondary tag. The chapter’s one substantive thesis is about individuality. A self is individuated only by its boundary with others, and Instrumentality, “the dissolution of the self into the collective, the loss of boundary” (p. 8), would end the self along with it (p. 9). It also touches identity across copies, when Rei claims to be “the real me” apart from her clones through her history of connections (p. 10), but only by quoting the show. It takes no position on persistence or on numerical personal identity, and “identity” elsewhere in the chapter means self-conception (Shinji “owning this as his identity”, p. 4). Someone browsing individuality would find it relevant, but thin.
- primary topic: ethics (keep). Meaning in life is value theory, the chapter’s organizing question. No held topic fits better.