KONSHUU | Volume 56, Issue 5
MODELS OF XVI ABOUT THREE IDEAL TYPES ALEXANDRE HAÏOUN-PERDRIX
Writer
3rd Year, Philosophy
13/08, the eighth of Undecimber; a great day, since it is the position of that wonderful episode.
Warning: Although this article would hardly be considered as a real spoiler, it is precisely hard to read without having seen (or read) the 16th episode of Neon Genesis Evangelion. Watching it right before, right after or while reading it, albeit not necessary, is politely advised. Neon Genesis Evangelion is more than often presented – sometimes sincerely, sometimes in a caricatural manner – as a series trying to make a philosophical or psychological use of its 26 episodes. One may therefore ask, why to select the 16th of them rather than any other. Which question is easy to answer: its very specific action is such that it illustrates maybe at best a crucial, albeit paradoxically also only possible, gradation between the three initial “children” – that is, our protagonists. Whereof gradation the subject is not easy to express, but might be assimilated to their main desires, or rather even the core of their ethics – the way they act, almost the way they “exist”. This gradation, it is unexpected, does not have Rei and Asuka as its extreme points with Shinji at the middle, but Rei between Asuka and Shinji. The first of them to be approached will be the last named, for being the “true” protagonist of Evangelion, he is the one with whom the series spends most of its time, and to whom more happens – especially in that 16th episode, in which he stays absolutely cut off from the rest of the characters and the whole world, in a situation of panic which rapidly (… as always in Evangelion) turns out to be an opportunity for the character to think – and especially about himself. The Shinjian modus is at the end of this gradation because it its the most open to the “outside world” – meaning Shinji’s outside world, which is made up, above all, of persons. On the one hand, the Asukan
modus is concerned with its sole person as an objective – which does not mean a Machiavellian picture in which all the others have no reason to be but to be used, but a much more complex and emotional scheme in which the instance of judgement regarding success and goals is the inner self, influenced and shaped by the outside as it may still be. It is important to remember that this Asukan modus is the way Miss Langley herself puts it, not necessarily the way she really thinks, feels and behaves – much closer to the Shinjian modus than she would willingly admit. On the other side, that instance is to be found at least partly elsewhere: for Rei, it is one person, Ikari Gendô – whose judgements and goals are almost automatically adopted by Rei; for Shinji, it is “the whole world”. That stance has two possible meanings, which fortunately happen to be here both true: he is desiring to be complimented, reassured by others as a whole or at least by one (for others are the world, or at least the part of the world which is able to approve or reject your person and actions). When he gets trapped, which occupies most of the episode, his words are not: “why am I not able to go out?” but “why does it refuse to open?”, “Open!”; not “Let me out of here”, but “Get me out of here”. Those “others” are summoned nominally (“Misato-San”,