Intimacy and Its Discontents | An Essay On Evangelion's Human Instrumentality Project

this video essay is a literal masterpiece

is the part in "anxiety is the dizziness of freedom" supposed to be mute halfway through it?

Sorry Im gonna comment early i watched Eva from day one and became obsessed, lost and confused but then came understanding. Im gonna keep this very short as anyone knows Eva's many themes but in the end to me it was embrace life and get out there and embrace it all rejections and success don't embrace a life of procrastination (media,drugs and other vices) but grow and share then take joy in death as you have lived a full life with as many little regrets. Well i haven't done even half of what i think i learnt but im gonna keep trying. And i will watch this in full when im in a better state of mind. Peace and love to all on this little blue ball.❤😊

This is too much psychology for my brain

I know i'm kinda late but this is the best nge video essay i have encountered. I was literally hypnotized and it made me understand the anime so much better. Really really cool, thank you!

I found this video by an unimaginable sheer amount of luck, and by God I'm so glad to ever see this work.

Thank you for making the world a better place.

Art imitates life, evangelions instrumentality exists everywhere

Shinji slaps on the cello

This is a great video. I think it accurately, in as much as that word can be used, the aw(e)ful nature of human nature especially in regards to intimacy - the impossibly revolting and enticing concept of knowing and being known. It seems to me that the only 'escape' is nonexistence; not sublimation of the self into the other or total isolation alone, not even suicide - but simply to never have existed at all. It seems I was doomed from the start.

This show honest to a fault makes me feel awful

Anno is literally a hyper autist that locked himself in his work place's bathroom. He's not as deep as people give him credit for

Human efforts were in vain, apocalypse happened. What they felt means nothing. There's a joke:
"- Did patient sweated prior death?
- Yes.
- That's good."
Absurd. I hate all of them. Sick bastards. There's only one true way of life: keep calm, do the job and carry on.

Neon Genesis Evangelion ©

♻️♻️♻️♻️♻️♻️♻️♻️♻️♻️ - 💱💱💱💱💱💱💱💱💱💱💱💱💱

✨🎬 [as] ©

Hi can I bookbind your essay? I find it very interesting and I want to make it into a book for my own personal reading.

Dialectics!!!

I don't even know how to say it, but this video is a masterpiece, thanks for the incredible work

Well, that was a long spew of words.

I was absolutely blown away by the video!

🥸

This feels and looks way more high quality then your channels sub number gives this is something that should be a million views video good job on the research and editing and writing this is phenomenal

I didn't understand that well

this deserves more views, its excellent!!!

“For God so loved the world, that He gave His only Son, so that everyone who believes in Him will not perish, but have eternal life. For God did not send the Son into the world to judge the world, but so that the world might be saved through Him. The one who believes in Him is not judged; the one who does not believe has been judged already, because he has not believed in the name of the only Son of God.
John 3:16‭-‬18
But if any of you lacks wisdom, let him ask of God, who gives to all generously and without reproach, and it will be given to him. But he must ask in faith without any doubting, for the one who doubts is like the surf of the sea, driven and tossed by the wind.
James 1:5‭-‬6
for “Everyone who calls on the name of the Lord will be saved.”
Romans 10:13

Thanks for putting the pdf out too, I just read it. If you have patreon or put the tip-button here, I'll throw a few dollary-doos your way

We lost immortality because Adam and Eve breached God term of service agreement they sign with God by eating from all tree’s except one.

The nothingness didn’t create god or gave him wisdom God created him self to be the person he is today.
he always existed and one day he figured out how to speak and count because intelligence start with knowing how to express oneself.

Nitpick on behalf of German being my mother language: "Besetzung" is in fact not the equivalent of the English term "occupation", that would be "Besatzung". But they are obviously very closely related.

The Human Instrumentality Project, or as we like to call it: Communism. No, I'm not joking.

what's the point of analyzing the meaning of an old cartoon with a narrative based on outdated and incorrect psychological speculations?

I love the parts when I can get the most from this video just so you don’t step on the toes of franchise that has concluded because of 2 minutes of piano

Song during the sickness unto health?

I don’t know if you mentioned the being-nothing dialectic just because it segued into the Kierkegaard stuff, but I don’t think it’s really an applicable criticism of the Instrumentality project. In other words, I think Gendo is right in saying that it being a “return to nothing” is a misunderstanding.

For one, the only real link it has to some ideal of Henosis is through the Kabbalistic symbolism. And I’d say that’s significantly weakened by the fact that the show’s lore is ultimately about alien lifeforms with no actual transcendence occurring in any way at any point. After all, even in Instrumentality you can see individual souls flowing in the LCL soup, which clearly implies they’re all still spatiotemporally bounded.
So, other than that symbolic relation, I think it should be emphasized that “pure being” is never expressed as an ideal by Seele or Gendo.

More importantly, Instrumentality doesn’t depict anyone going out of existence. Everyone who lived still exists, they just don’t have the firm boundaries the AT fields provided.
This is not just evidenced by the fact that Shinji is able to return back into a fleshly form at all (instead of completely losing any sense of sense which would be a requirement for that), but also by every time that we see characters talk in Instrumentality both in EoE as well as episodes 25 and 26.

All of that leads me to believe that, if you really want to use Hegelian metaphysics to understand Instrumentality, you really ought to be looking at the category of Limit.
I think then one could understand the AT field as a person’s limit, and Instrumentality as a return to an original state where beings had no such limits between each other. This doesn’t mean the beings don’t exist, just that they aren’t discretized. As Rei says, where one person ends and other begins is ambiguous (and I think this is also suggested by her body being presented as fused into Shinji’s somewhat).

While After The Flood's video uses a "literary analysis" approach to dissect NGE and its symbolisms, you used philosophical and psychoanalytical theories proposed by experts, supported by evidence from NGE scenes and quotes to make your arguments. I really appreciate both approaches as their different lenses highlight different aspects of NGE. This video also feels like an elaborated and more "formalized" argumentative version of Wisecrack's video on NGE, which felt more like a "summarised" version (nothing bad with both approaches, of course). Thank you for putting in the work for this video.

Although I am not a formal psychoanalyst, philosopher, or social scientist by training, I had some experience writing humanities essays in university and hence, I can somewhat understand that using relevant theories to support the arguments that you are making while keeping the video's flow coherent and not bland required a lot of work. The references to and explanations of the various theories (as well as the memes) are much appreciated!

Marvelous Video Kiwic, you're talented !

Great video

Kaworu appeared in episode 24, not 26

brilliant. and thorough. thank you for this

I find myself coming back to this every now and again.

Do you plan on making more content in the future?

I come back to this video often. Hope there’s more to come!

This is the most pretentious thing I've ever seen