In praise of extroversion
Silence is not the path. I'm doubtful of oriental resignation. The exercise of introspection is healthy, but it is an exercise and not a mode of life. I am not the first to say true happiness lies outwards. And one can fill the outer space with silence or with voice. And silence knows not of forgiveness nor of love; and lacks the warmth of all that is existing, even of all that which is terrible and grieves the soul.
Who looks outside, dreams; who looks inside, awakes. Such was the —rather pretentious— claim of Dr. Jung, whose works were the intellectual capital of the last two years of my life. When the darkest facets of human condition revealed before me, like a deafening roar, I fell prey to a kind of spiritual isolation, and tried to find in my soul an answer to —a reflection of— the new, menacing visage of existence —and took his work as guidance with the hope that it would aid me in making sense of what was then a confused existence. I shall not provide scientific or intellectual insight into the work of Dr. Jung. I shall only speak of its usefulness as an antidote to suffering, and this only insomuch as it advises the profoundest introspection. This may be very well interpreted, then, not as much a critique of his ideas, but a general opinion against reverie and absorption.
Unrestricted introspection, I come to think, can truly become a morbid form of satisfaction, an exquisite and obscure fetish. There is no soul on earth that would not surely find dread and terror and excitement if solely occupied with the honest examination of itself. One of Jung's conceptions was that one should become aware of the unconscious, inferior aspects of oneself, and integrate them into consciousness, and this seems —psychoanalytic assumptions aside— very sound advice. But the discovery of one's shadow, as he puts it, can hardly demand that much introspection, for any honest examination readily reveals within us countless selfish, violent, and despicable impulses, so much that the very observation that one "has a shadow" is very close to trivial. And although it may be useful to discover unknown facets of one’s personality, what is the use of making such discovery the purpose of one’s life? Indeed, if our own selves are filled with such nightmarish realities, it seems very easy that many a wandering explorer might be lost or worse devoured by the monsters therein laying.
While it is true that anyone oblivious to his inferior sides is psychologically undeveloped, I find the antidote to be precisely not to devote so much energy to the disentanglement of our souls. Our existence is best suited for outward projection. It is undoubtedly the case that I am richer after studying mathematics, or in acquiring understanding about the natural world, than wandering along the corridors of thought or writing pages and pages of interpretations in a dream log. There is a difference between devoting one's attention and one's life to the "inner world", and the line that separates wise self-reflection from vulgar solipsism is a thin one.