Deracinating Delusion and Malice: The Existential-Psychoanalytic Work of Walter A. Davis*

Walter Davis (1989) starts off his chapter on “Existentialism: The Once and Future Philosophy” with two important quotes. The first is a famous one from Plato's Symposium: “For herein is the evil of ignorance; that he who is neither good nor wise is nevertheless pleased with himself.” That should be a stark warning to readers. It's all too easy and seductive to imagine that one understands the world and sees it as it is; that what one sees is all there is; that there's nothing that eludes your grasp because your assessment reflects reality; that your perception, knowledge, and understanding are sufficient. For Plato and Davis, these are themselves the epitome of ignorance. The only way to be complacent, self-satisfied, and smug is if you are so ludicrously ignorant that you entirely lack any awareness of how dizzyingly complex reality is, and how fallible our own minds are. To put it another way, egoism is the antithesis of self-awareness, as it impels unwarranted fantasies of superior knowledge and impedes the capacity to perceive how little one knows, or that one even needs to learn more. So Davis is quoting Plato as a warning not to fall into the narcissistic trap of thinking you really understand things. For that to happen, you need to put aside those narcissistic fantasies, and you need to engage in another kind of existential process that is agonizingly painful.

And that is why he follows the Plato quote with Heidegger: “Along with the sober anxiety which brings us face to face with our individualized potentiality-for-being, there goes an unshakable joy in this possibility” (107). Davis interpolates this quote not because Heidegger is the bastion of existential wisdom, but because he would detach us from agonizing existential engagement and throw us into risible abstraction and abstruseness to actually obscure what causes us the most horrific dread. Davis sees Heidegger as spinning obscure abstract