The Denial of Death
March 7, 2022
Ethan Maurice
By: Ernest Becker Intro:
Following the “red pill or blue pill” metaphor of The Matrix, The Denial of Death
Ernest Becker takes us on a philosophical journey through the perspectives of some of history’s greatest minds — Kierkegaard, Maslow, Freud, Rank, and others — on the human situation and “why” of human existence, exposing some of our most fundamental illusions. As we grow up, our perceptions narrow and we adopt a few vital lies to shield ourselves from the awesome mystery and terror of being a temporary, living, breathing, eating, pooping creature.
After exposing these illusions, the book stands on the shoulders of giants and examines them, wrestling with the obvious question: where to go from here? It applies a more western, psychological lens to giving oneself over to a Higher Power, why “the road to creativity passes so close to the madhouse,” and delves into handful of other more mystic concepts in a way even the most secular, scientific-minded individual will find approachable.
At sixteen years old, a mosquito bite and bout with meningoencephalitis stripped me of my ability to “deny death,” utterly altering my outlook on life. I suspect The Denial of Death was a particularly powerful read for me, simply because it explained so much. Yet — as the book makes so clear — the main function of the cultural-hero-system we all live by is to “deny death.” I suspect this book will rock the world of just about anyone.
As Aristotle somewhere put it: luck is when the guy next to you gets hit with the arrow.
Heroism is first and foremost a reflex of the terror of death. We admire most the courage to face death; we give such valor our highest and most constant adoration; it moves us deeply in our hearts because we have doubts about how brave we ourselves would be. When we see a man bravely facing his own extinction we rehearse the greatest victory we can imagine. And so the hero has been the center of human honor and acclaim since probably the beginning of human evolution. But even before that our primate ancestors deferred to others who were powerful and courageous and ignored those who were cowardly. Man has elevated animal courage into a cult.
Why does man accept to live a trivial life? Because of the danger of a full horizon of experience of course. This is the deeper motivation of philistinism, that it celebrates the triumph over possibility, over freedom. Philistinism knows its real enemy: freedom is dangerous. If you follow it too willingly it threatens to pull you into the air; if you give it up too wholly, you become a prisoner of necessity. The safest thing is to toe the mark of what is socially possible.
If we put this whole progression in terms of our discussion of the possibilities of heroism, it goes like this: man breaks through the bounds of merely cultural heroism; he destroys the character lie that had him perform as a hero in the everyday social scheme of things; and by doing so he opens himself up to infinity, to the possibility of cosmic heroism, to the very service of God. His life thereby acquires ultimate value instead of merely social and cultural, historic value. He links his secret inner-self, his authentic talent, his deepest feelings of uniqueness, his inner yearning for absolute significance, to the very ground of creation. Out of the ruins of the broken cultural self there remains the mystery of the private, invisible, inner self which yearned for ultimate significance, for cosmic heroism. The invisible mystery at the heart of every creature now attains cosmic significance by affirming its connection with the invisible mystery at the heart of creation. This is the meaning of faith.
But the recognition of such social constraints still leaves unexplained the inner urge of the human being to feel good and right -- the very thing that awed Kant seems to exist independent of any rules: as far as we can tell -- as I put elsewhere -- "all organisms like to 'feel good' about themselves." They push themselves to maximize this feeling. As philosophers have long noted, it is as though the heart of nature is pulsating with its own joyful self-expansion.
If he gives into his natural feeling for cosmic dependence, the desire to be a part of something bigger, it puts him at peace and at oneness, gives him a sense of self-expansion in a larger beyond, and so heightens his being, giving him truly a feeling of transcendent value... He can expand his self-feeling not only by [this] Agape merger but also by the other ontological motive Eros, the urge for more life, for exciting experience, for the development of self-powers, for developing the uniqueness of the individual creature, the impulsion to stick out of nature and shine... it is the urge for individuation: how do I realize my distinctive gifts, make my own contribution to the world through my own self-expansion?
Now we see what we might call the ontological or creature tragedy that is so particular to man: If he gives into Agape he risks failing to develop himself, his active contribution to the rest of life. If he expands Eros too much he risks cutting himself off from natural dependency, from duty to a larger creation.
By pushing the problem of man to its limits, schizophrenia also reveals the nature of creativity. If you are physically unprogrammed in the cultural causa-sui project, then you have to invent your own: you don't vibrate to anyone else's tune. You see that the fabrications of those around you are a lie, a denial of truth -- a truth that usually takes the form of showing the terror of the human condition more fully than most men experience it. The creative person becomes then, in art, literature, and religion the mediator of natural terror and a new way to triumph over it. He reveals the darkness and the dread of the human condition and fabricates a new symbolic transcendence over it. This has been the function of the creative deviant from the shamans through Shakespeare.
When we are young we are often puzzled by the fact that each person we admire seems to have a different version of what life ought to be, what a good man is, how to live, and so on. If we are especially sensitive it seems more than puzzling, it is disheartening. What most people usually do is follow one person's ideas, and then another's, depending on who looms largest on one's horizon at the time. The one with the deepest voice, the strongest appearance, the most authority and success is usually one who gets momentary allegiance; and we try to pattern our ideals after him. But as life goes on we get a perspective on this, and all those different versions of truth become a little pathetic. Each person thinks that he has the formula for triumphing over life's limitations and knows with authority what it means to be a man, and he usually tries to win a following for his particular patent. Today we know that people try so hard to win converts for their point of view because it is more than merely an outlook on life: it is an immortality formula.
Religion is an experience and not merely a set of intellectual concepts to meditate on.
What do we mean by the lived truth of creation? We have to mean the world as it appears to men in a condition of unrepression; that is, as it would appear to creatures who assessed their true puniness in the face of the overwhelmingness and majesty of the universe, of the unspeakable miracle of even the single created object, as it probably appeared to the earliest men on the planet and to those extrasensitive types who have filled the roles of shaman, prophet, saint, poet, and artist.
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