To adopt a Jungian approach, I interpret the modern intelle…

To adopt a Jungian approach, I interpret the modern intellectual as having Aristotle as his persona and Plato as his shadow. The persona is how we see ourselves and the shadow is that which we deny in ourselves. This is how we can say that Plato's influence is so enormous even though later thinkers appear to be so much more like Aristotle, even the ones that are called "platonists". Intellectuals are all platonists in the way that they covertly pursue their addiction, in the way they are drawn to alluring promises of sheltering themselves from reality in order to remain in a world of ideas, and in the way they fawn over totalitarians. Jung's treatment of mental illness is to integrate the shadow into the persona, which means to become aware of the behaviors which we fail to recognize in ourselves. Thus, my program to call out idea addiction points toward an intellectual movement that is more integrated with its own exploitative drives. In Aristotle we may see an early autistic intellectual type who who fails to detect double talk and reads it in a literal way. This is how he discusses Plato. However, Aristotle is known to have employed an esoteric/exoteric approach to his own Acadamy, but unlike Plato, whose works can be read as if the exoteric and esoteric existed in the same document, Aristotle had separate works for initiates and non-initiates. Unfortunately, we do not have any of his exoteric writings, so we don't know what kind of noble lies he might have written for outsiders so he may have been much more like Plato than he appears from a modern standpoint. It might be that his failure to address Plato's duplicitous character was not blindness, but professionalism.