necessabsurd.
necessabsurd (adjective): necessary + absurd = self-discovery’s absurdity emphasising its necessity
The unconscious, composed according to Freud of the 'superego', unconscious censorship of socially unacceptable impulses and the 'id', creator of our desires, is fully responsible for our actions, our thoughts, our darkest dreams... It then seems impossible to be oneself, since we don't even control our mind! However, the many absurdities of the search for oneself only amplify how necessary it is to try to know who we are.
We’ll analyze three absurdities of the search for oneself: human finitude, our perpetual evolution and the existence of the unconscious, and focus on the ways they illustrate how fundemental the quest for oneself is, no matter how absurd and useless it may seem at first.
“Triptych: Three Studies for Self-Portrait” - Francis Bacon, 1976
IN DEPTH: How does the search for oneself’s absurdity illustrate its necessity?
First of all, human finitude testifies to the absurdity of the search for self. Why is it essential to discover ourselves if we are all going to die unavoidably? Well, it's precisely this absurdity that enables us to realize that, as Heidegger stated in "Being and Time" published in 1927, "sum moribundus", meaning I am dying (rather than I will die eventually). Thus, understanding that it is absurd to seek ourselves because we will pass eventually allows us to become aware of our finitude and live fully the little time granted to us.
It is also impossible to discover oneself entirely because of our perpetual evolution, be it physical because of the passage of time on the body or mental because of intellectual maturity and development. Jacques Rivière expresses this sense of constant change in his "Letter to Antonin Artaud", reflecting on the many times when "our most habitual character suddenly appeared to us a fake". The evolution of the 'self' makes us alien to ourselves. However, it is necessary to accept this phenomenon to reject any potential essence that would never really define us, to exist finally. Thus, Sartre, in "Existentialism is a Humanism" published in 1946, when describing the 'free man' as the one who makes his existence come before his essence, indirectly invites us to renounce to seek ourselves, in order to exist and find ourselves.
Finally, the search for oneself seems absurd because of the existence of the unconscious. Indeed, "the self is not master in its own house", claims Freud in his "Introduction to Psychoanalysis" in 1917. Man and his consciousness are only partly responsible for the structure of the ego since the unconscious plays a significant role in the formation of implicit wills and seemingly irrational habits. Thus, Man must accept that he will never be able to know himself entirely because of the existence of his unconscious to try to tame the latter by various practices such as psychoanalysis.