Question

“Though so profound a double dealer, I was in no sense a hypocrite; both sides of me were in dead earnest; I was no more myself when I laid aside restraint and plunged in shame, than when I labored, in the eye of day, at the furtherance of knowledge or the relief of sorrow and suffering… With every day, and from both sides of my intelligence, the moral and the intellectual, I thus drew steadily nearer to that truth, by whose partial discovery I have been doomed to such a dreadful shipwreck: that man is not truly one, but truly two.”

Explain how this quote connects to the theme of the wild human.

Answer 1

If we look at the quote through the lens of the Freudian paradigm, we can be quick to realize that man is truly not what (s)he portrays to be. Freud was of the belief that the mind could be dissected into three layers of behavior, one was the id, the primitive man; the ego, which was the cultured man; and the superego, who was the morally superior.

Within the paradigm we can see that Freud tried to expose the inherent natural way of being that each human possess, the harboring of to personas, which is quite often mistaken for hypocrisy. A man cannot truly be unknown for the mere reason that when he is ruled by the ego, he is truly experiencing the pain that all in the material realm causes, and when he is governed by the needs of the primitive man, he is truly vulnerable and raw as well; now these two men, that reside within one individual, may fester varying and contrasting desires, but them being different, do not in any way, insinuate them being wrong.

Humans are innately wild in nature, the societal construct, in order to keep their inner apparent harmful desires at bay, tends to create constructs such as that of hypocrisy.