To Look Through a Red Eye
Kaneki is torn up over the humans he’s killed recently, but interestingly, back in Ch 76 of the original series, he seemed ready to kill these CCG soldiers before Noro did it for him. After this initial outburst of violence, Shironeki wasn’t quite as ruthless - he killed and ate ghouls, yes, but post-time-skip Shironeki really didn’t seem to take the same kind of sadistic pleasure in it as he did with half-killing Ayato. See how depressed he looks in the image when his activities are revealed:
Indeed, as he slowly began to realise his actions were little else than self-destructive, he fell more and more back into his old restrictions, until the circle was complete when he became Haise. And then we have Reaper, and the parallel outburst of violence and ruthless decisions when he hurled Shuu off the rooftop expecting Karren to sacrifice herself for him. But then, just like before, his old rules began wrapping themselves around him again, and he refused to kill his enemies on the Goat campaign. Until, once again, a similar outburst of violence, the most graphic and all-consuming yet.
Kaneki’s rules are his humanity. His breaking of those rules, his Ghoulhood.
The function of the Ghoul in this series is to act as the Jungian shadow for both the human characters and the human readers. They are the sins of everyday life brought into explicit vision. The premise that the series revolves around is that “to live we must steal from others” - nothing demonstrates that fact more than a race of people who must devour other people to survive.
Yoshimura’s speech comes fittingly from a chapter titled “Original Sin”, the sin in question being this irremovable part of human nature.
So when Kaneki becomes a Half-Ghoul, it’s the beginning of his connection with his shadow self - those parts of his mind and soul that terrify him. It’s only through this forced collision with his Shadow that he uncovers many of the base secrets of his psychology, like his mother’s abuse. Ishida is definitely familiar with Jung’s concept of the Shadow, as he has been name-dropped in the manga itself.
Jung’s argument was that the qualities we hate in others are the same qualities that we fear in ourselves - we project them onto other people, but it’s really ourselves that terrify and repulse us. Just take a look at the CCG’s hatred of Ghouls for snatching away people’s lives for survival. Look at the Ghouls’ hatred of the CCG for doing exactly the same. Look at how Takizawa transformed into what he feared, and Amon into what he hated. Look at how the man who aimed to be a Hero of Justice was complicit in the destruction of Tokyo, or how the woman who fought to live up to her father’s legacy now abandons it entirely. In the words of @hamliet, in Tokyo Ghoul you become what you fear - and this, I believe, is how we develop.
The failings of shadow projection are expressed nowhere so well as in the also aptly named Chapter 25 of the original series, Enlightenment, where Amon lecturing Kaneki on the injustice of Ghouls is juxtaposed with Touka lecturing Mado on the injustice of Doves. Every character in that chapter is looking through events, literally, through one eye - Kaneki and Amon’s eyepatches and Touka and Mado’s hair obscure their total vision of the world.
The path to the enlightenment comes not from running from or despising but embracing the Shadow. This is something we’re beginning to see with the CCG-Ghoul alliance, the Ghouls throwing off their monstrous masks to reveal that there is no real difference between them.
Kaneki’s struggle between the maintenance of his principles and the casting of them aside, his struggle between what he identifies as his humanity and his Ghoulishness, is the struggle between his Shadow and his Ego (his conscious self). Because the Shadow is so utterly terrifying to behold, whenever it bursts out due to enormous pressure Kaneki will gradually begin to re-impose his old principles to make it once again comfortable for him to behold.
This is why the introductions of Shironeki and Reaper are so much more violent and without boundaries than they are post-time-skip. Post-time-skip they’re still considerably more Ghoulish than before, but they are gradually returning to another more Humane state of being; Shironeki became Haise, and Reaper became the King. Kaneki returning to his human ways in Haise is reflected by him being a member of the CCG, that Human organisation that seeks to exterminate its own Shadow. Haise and the Kaneki in his mind embody the very archetype of the Shadow: he’s frightened of it and refuses to look at it, only to find when he does it is in reality the incarnation of his vulnerabilities, until slowly his Ego loses control and the Shadow takes over, its very blackness running down his face.
The King meanwhile is on a mission to unite Humans and Ghouls, but this proves difficult to do when he has yet to reconcile those parts of himself.
The caption almost sounds like self-mockery. Kaneki is attempting to solve the problems between Humans and Ghouls in the macrocosm without having solved them within the microcosm - within himself. He can’t make the right decisions while still being blinded to half the problem; he can’t deduce the world through one eye. As such, his motives do not line up with his actions, and his campaign shatters.
Kaneki has no great passion to see that world because he still doesn’t want to co-exist with his Shadow. It’s why Kaneki didn’t panic at killing Ghouls in the same way he is doing now with humans - Ghouls are the projections of his Shadow, so it’s fine to kill them; but humans are projections of his Ego, and if he kills them, that’s not an action of his Ego - it’s an action of his Shadow. To kill humans is to destabilise his control of his own mind. How could this have been more accurately represented than by losing consciousness completely and becoming the monster he feared in Dragon?
The journey towards the acceptance of the Shadow, the final goal Jung called individuation, when every aspect of yourself is known to you and works in harmony, is a gradual process. To preserve his own sanity Kaneki naturally backslides after one Shadow revelation, only to be propelled forwards, further than before, by the next. Eventually, the full acceptance of the Shadow will come. Kaneki is not the same as he was at the start of the manga, he is a great deal further; he understands Ghouls, sympathises with them, empathises with them, falls in love with them, has children with them. Because even while being frightened of the Shadow, we are fascinated by it. It is the unloved part of ourself desperate to receive the same care as the rest, and deep down Kaneki wants to love it as much as he’s frightened of it.
This we can see through Touka (and one of the brilliant parts about this romance is that the same Shadow-Acceptance narrative works from her perspective as well). Touka, who he was at first frightened by, then kept at a distance to spare him from the truth which she twice delivered to him anyway on the bridge and in Cochlea, was what had been missing from his life all along; was the person that he loved most of all. Touka has brought his heart closer to the the Ghouls and closer to his Shadow:
And their hybrid child will be the ultimate expression of acceptance of the Shadow in a world that was torn apart by its fear of it. The series has always prized love over hatred because love is the acceptance of the shadow, and hatred the rejection of it. The former is the only antidote to the latter.
So Kaneki, who has been edging all the time closer and closer to accepting the complete truth of his Shadow, finds himself on an island with no way out until he does. The torii gates give it an air of spirituality as Kaneki reaches his final enlightenment. And who better to demonstrate his Shadow than Rize, who brought him into contact with it in the first place? And who Kaneki for so long projected his own Shadow onto?
The prophet has told her parable, and now it is time for her to explain it. Until now, Kaneki has been struggling between man and beast. It’s time for him to realise that they are the same. When he accepts his Shadow, he will accept Ghouls, and he will accept himself.
His human eye bleeds while his ghoul eye sees. Through suffering, he will have found the courage to look at the world through a red eye.
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