Aura Absorbing Adjacency
What happens when you borrow your sense of self from others
Despair is a Sickness in the Spirit, in the Self, and So It May Assume a Triple Form: in Despair at Not Being Conscious of Having a Self (Despair Improperly So Called); in Despair at Not Willing to Be Oneself; in Despair at Willing to Be Oneself.
- Søren Kierkegaard
It occurred to me that there’s something I might call "aura-absorbing adjacency." The other night, I was listening to my waiter speak in glowing and proud language about the joys of his job and the number of famous people who had visited the restaurant so much so that he was required to sign an NDA to ensure he didn’t disclose their identities. He spoke as if this proximity to fame propped up his own identity, simply because he worked in an establishment that served people we might say have “aura,” as the online folks like to say.
By being in proximity to people with actual aura, he feels that he can absorb it, which in turn boosts his perception of himself. It’s not that he has aura, but being aura-adjacent by virtue of his profession inflates his sense of self. He is not someone whose sense of self arises organically from his own personality; instead, what he perceives as his aura is entirely derivative. In reality, he is in despair.1 I don’t mean to denigrate those who wait tables—I used to wait tables too. The issue arises when one’s sense of self and who he thinks he is, is outsourced by being around people he vaguely perceives as “having it together.”2
The self is so often jerked and yanked around by how it perceives itself to be seen by others that it risks losing itself altogether. This happens because the self constantly shifts its outward performance to craft an image that he believes will be acceptable to others.3 Now, we might experience this as selves to greater or lesser degrees because, as I think Heidegger is right to point out, Dasein cannot wholly eliminate the influence of the dictatorship of the “They,” precisely because its influence is largely constitutive in Dasein’s formation.
What we can do, however, is remember that we participate in God’s being—not only remember, but act in accordance with what that means and all its corollaries. We are only truly ourselves insofar as we are selves before God, à la Kierkegaard’s understanding in Sickness Unto Death. The more we discipline ourselves to be a true self—that self which is transparent before God—the less we are subject to the different strains of despair.4
Here, despair is the inability or unwillingness to embrace oneself as one truly is before God. In fairness to the waiter, though, and apart from his performance of despair, he was a genuinely affable man. His affability, however, stemmed from who he truly was as an individual, rather than from his aura adjacency posturing.
Now if there is something true, good, noble and worthy of imitation in another’s life, this may be a cause for inspiration. Inspiration arises from seeing the excellence in another’s life and inspires a person to strive towards a similar excellence in his own life. This is distinct from aura-adjacency since one suffering in this form of despair deludes himself into thinking his proximity to greatness signals that his own self is also worthy of admiration.
As a Catholic hack, I think that discipline entails prayer, Mass, the sacraments, the cultivation of virtue, and a host of other practices that draw us into the radical inflow of grace and the life-changing encounter with Christ. These practices are not robotic rote practices but rather serve in a transformative process of reorienting our perception and will and habituating us to seek the Good with less difficulty for its own sake. Thus, in doing this we further realign our misaligned self before God. What results from this is a transparent spirit, where one’s inner life coheres more deeply with her outer life.* Her outer life becomes a transparent window into the inner life of her soul. The pretense and performative nature of her outward display is absent (not all at once for us, but over time), because she is not living in performance for others but truly as a self before God. And thus, grace perfects nature.
*A pretentious asterisk to my footnote: I use the female pronoun here to distance this self before God from my own as I’m not yet the fully realigned and transparent self before God I desperately yearn to be. The “her” that serves as the model for the transparent spirit par excellence is the Blessed Virgin Mary. Indeed, it is in Mary’s fiat we see that her outward actions truly become a window into her inner life, the inner life where Christ is revealed for all to see. “Hail Mary, full of grace” indeed.