[Anime Review] Hedgehog Dilemma 20 years later

The Hedgehog dilemma as presented in Neon Genesis Evangelion seems to be uniquely adolescent and to the extent that it can be said to apply to humanity as such, it may be so on account of the extension of adolescence into adulthood. There is, of course, a sweet irony to the fact that an anime targeted at a younger demographic might be teaching us this.

Are the premises of the hedgehog dilemma conditional? Does the experience really boil down to that sense of inadequacy and seclusion mixed with shame that sometimes mark budding adolescent relations between boys and girls, or is the dilemma more fundamental to human nature? Does it signify a deep handicap which leads to atomization in the extreme and makes the concept of a human family impracticable?

Given that the story plays out between adolescent protagonists surrounded by a smattering of young professionals, it is easy to conclude that the dilemma is in fact conditional. As soon as we imagine Shinji finding a wife and settling into family life, the intense anxiety inherent in the dilemma diminishes. Is family the practical intermediary between the solitude of the hedgehog and the universality of the ideal of humanity?

Perhaps we are getting ahead of ourselves. The hedgehog dilemma somewhat presumes that the kind of intimate relationship inherent in family life is on the whole impossible or at least fraught with an equal amount of pleasure and pain. In essence the hedgehog dilemma is the insoluble problem of the human person. The fact that he needs others and at the same time can't stand them. In Polish there is a good word for the resultant state : 'miotanie', to be thrown around (as in flame thrower, miotacz ognia).

When I first saw Neon Genesis Evangelion, the Hedgehog dilemma seemed very significant to me. Was it so only because it is the essential dilemma of those twenty years younger? Or is it still significant? Shinji's father seems to think so, which is why the project to unite all human consciousness progresses apace. The project is the most radical sort of science fiction, but it's basis is a very real human yearning represented by many major religions which believe in the melding of individual conscious into an eventual community of souls united in God. Christianity (or more readily Catholicism) retains and exalts the human person, but the 'spiritual body' is distinct from our current forms and presupposes a kind of community between us that is inconceivable on Earth. Abstracting from the validity of religious solutions to the hedgehog dilemma, the yearning for a solution is very real.

What is truly spectacular about Evangelion is that like Ideon it is absolutely symbolic while retaining those aspects which make it a super robot Anime (although perhaps by now it is time to stop writing such sentences as super robot Anime is by definition symbolic and it is hard to find an example to contradict this statement). In any case the questions posed by the hedgehog dilemma remain. Perhaps twenty years later we simply understand them better?