Alone with my Self



Revolt of solitary instincts against social bonds is the key to the philosophy, the politics, and the sentiments, not only of what is commonly called the romantic movement, but of its progeny down to the present day.

In order to continue to feel solitary, [the romantic] must be able to prevent those who serve him from impinging upon his ego, which is best accomplished if they are slaves.

Passionate love, however, is a more difficult matter. So long as passionate lovers are regarded as in revolt against social trammels, they are admired; but in real life the love-relation itself quickly becomes a social trammel, and the partner in love comes to be hated, all the more vehemently if the love is strong enough to make the bond difficult to break.

Not only passionate love, but every friendly relation to others, is only possible, to this way of feeling, in so far as the others can be regarded as a projection of one's own Self.

By encouraging a new lawless Ego [the romantic movement] made social co-operation impossible, and left its disciples faced with the alternative of anarchy or despotism.

Egoism, at first, made men expect from others a parental tenderness; but when they discovered, with indignation, that others had their own Ego, the disappointed desire for tenderness turned to hatred and violence.

Man is not a solitary animal, and so long as social life survives, self-realization cannot be the supreme principle of ethics.

[Bertrand Russell]
History of Western Philosophy ('The Romantic Movement'), p.620-2




For the introvert the idea of the ego is the continuous and dominant note of consciousness, and its antithesis for him is relatedness or proneness to affect.

For the extravert, on the contrary, the accent lies more on the continuity of his relation to the object and less on the idea of the ego.

[...] only with the introvert is the "person" exclusively the ego; with the extravert it lies in his affectivity and not in the affected ego. His ego is, as it were, of less importance than his affectivity, i.e., his relatedness.

The extravert discovers himself in the fluctuating and changeable, the introvert in the constant.

Schiller at once reveals himself as an introvert in the following formulation:

To remain constantly himself throughout all change, to turn every perception into experience, that is, into the unity of knowledge, and to make each of his manifestations in time a law for all time, that is the rule which is prescribed for him by his rational nature.

[C. J. Jung]
Psychological Types, p. 90



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