The Denial of Death | Ernest Becker

The Denial of Death | Ernest Becker | Becker is my Hero

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The Denial of Death

	The Denial of Death Ernest Becker Free Press, 1997 - 336 pages average customer review:based on 53 reviews view larger image
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highly recommended

As Good As It Gets

There's not a time when I read one of Becker's books--or even quotations which I've excerpted from them--without feeling a sense of loss. If only he had lived longer! He died at the peak of his powers, in 1974. His superb book, Escape from Evil, was published posthumously in 1975. We can only guess what other works he might have tackled had he lived another 20-30 years!

There's not a philosopher or psychologist in our time who could synthesize the disciplines that Becker seemed capable of doing with such ease. He was trained as a cultural anthropologist but was truly a master of the humanities, having a good footing in all the major fields and the ability to weave them together to create fresh insights.

The Denial of Death is surely his masterpiece; in it he convincingly portrays mankind's challenging relationship with mortality--and the fruits of this confrontation. Following up this book with Escape from Evil is a powerful way to understand 'why people do what they do,' the simple question that drove so much of Becker's analysis.

Because he was able to write so well--and with such poignancy--virtually anyone with a high school education can appreciate these 'ultimate' thoughts. Further, even the most refined will encounter a new take on things to drive their curiosity.

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Becker is my Hero

This tour de force is Becker's immortality project, his fitting gift to all mankind. In it, he tackles the preeminent problem of mankind. What he refers to as "the vital lie": man's refusal to accept his own lack of immortality. The author brilliantly, passionately, honestly and convincingly analyzes man's failure to confront his own finititude.

Man's denial of the inevitability of death is an attempt to escape the terror of the ultimate fear, to escape the ultimate human psychological debilitation, to evade the ultimate human dilemma. It is the fear of death that drives him into an existential and ontological black hole, all escapes from which are either temporary or existentially incomplete or dishonest.

Since he cannot transcend his mortality, man can only maintain denial at tremendous cost to himself: his mind. He is forced to live a life of either meaninglessness or a lie, psychological delusion. In either case his only choice is the brand of neurosis he will choose.

Man, ever the narcissistic being, can assign value and meaning to his life only by making himself a hero in his own symbolically created world, the most important of which is society itself. In this self-defined, self-created self-contained drama (society's cultural system), man proceeds to create a script for his heroism in his own life project.

From the start, this project is doomed to an ignominious existential failure for man has no respectable escapes other than that of facing the truth of his condition and then having to endure the abject terror that implies; or remaining in denial by choosing an appropriate role as hero in his own symbolically created drama.

Whether that drama is religious or not is somewhat beside the point since the escape is through the same delusional door. In either case, achieving heroism in his own self-defined fantasized world, leaves man with the false feeling that he has somehow transcended mortality. It is a monumental lie.

In the process of unfolding this drama of man's confrontation with the fear of death, Becker explains a great deal about what we currently understand about the basic human condition.

Few books possess the power and clarity of this one. Six stars!!!!!!

Since we actually had at least one President who could and did read, please allow me to share with you the following:

Bill Clinton's Review of The Denial of Death
(From page 235 of his "My Life:")

"I read one book in Acapulco, Ernest Becker's "The Denial of Death - heavy reading for a honeymoon, but I was also a year older than my father when he died, and I had taken a big step. It seemed like a good time to keep exploring the meaning of life.

According to Becker, as we grow up, at some point we become aware of death, then the fact that people we know and love die, then the fact that someday we, too, will die. Most of us do what we can to avoid it. Meanwhile, in ways we understand only dimly if at all, we embrace identities and the illusion of self-sufficiency. We pursue activities, both positive and negative, that we hope will lift us above the chains of ordinary existence and perhaps endure after we are gone. All this we do in a desperate push against the certainty that death is our ultimate destiny. Some of us seek power and wealth, others romantic love, sex, or some other indulgence. Some want to be great, others to do good and be good. Whether we succeed or fail, we are still going to die. The only solace, of course is to believe that since we were created, there must be a Creator, one to whom we matter and will in some way return.

Where does Becker's analysis leave us? He concludes: "Who knows what form the forward momentum of life will take in the time ahead ... The most that any one of us can seem to do is to fashion something - an object or ourselves - and drop it into the confusion, make an offering of it, so to speak, to the life force." Ernest Becker died shortly before the Denial of Death was published, but seemed to have met Immanuel Kant's test of life: "How to occupy properly that place in creation that is assigned to man, and how to learn from it what one must be in order to be a man. I've spent a lifetime trying to do that. Becker's book helped convince me it was an effort worth making.

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For Whom Doth That Bell Toll?

Stanley Hauerwas, the famed professor of Christian Ethics at Duke Divinity School, once labelled modern medicine a "death deferral industry." In his Pulitzer Prize winning book The Denial of Death Becker contends that medicine is not alone. According to Becker's thesis in fact all human enterprises are derivative of the Promethean will to tame death and rob it of its sting.

The great protagonist of Becker's work is Soren Kierkegaard. Kierkegaard's "Knight of Faith" embodies for Becker all that both ancient religion and 20th century psychoanalysis set out to attain - total consciousness in the face of the collective human tragedy we call death. Denial is in this respect a call to faith - a call for humanity to admit the limits of its own creatureliness and drink its hemlock with Socratic courage.

The great irony of Denial is Becker's analysis of his psychological forebear Freud. Becker harnesses a great deal of the psychoanalytic tradition he inherited from Freud then uses it, in good old Oedipal fashion, to knock the father from the throne. According to Becker, Freud was himself an embodiment of the kind of death denial from which psychoanalysis should have freed him. Becker argues Freud's dogged commitment to his own theories about human sexuality is an embarrassing example of Freud's refusal to let go his aspirations for intellectual immortality. When confronted by contrary evidence or conclusions it was Freud's pattern to simply feint - an example, according to Becker, of Freud's escapist defense mechanics. Or, in Neil Young's own immortal words "it's better to burn out than just fade away."

If Becker's analysis of Freud is correct then we can see in ourselves some startling parallels. We cling to life through all kinds of ways and means until the end comes. And then we hope for a short, painless death. There is little talk of getting right with our maker. No one knows what it means to die well.

Given the fact that we live in an age of genetic manipulation, cryogenic freezing and extreme makeovers the myth of immortality must still be alive. When it is all said and done, however, most of us could care less about discovering why we want our spouse to get a new set of boobs. Freud's old answer - sex - seemed as good as any. But Becker's thesis does have immediate implications for us as we contemplate the virtues of peace, freedom, democracy and whatever else we might be willing to kill and die for. Are modern values nothing more than fetishized expressions of our desire to out ring the bell which doth toll for all? At the very least Becker's book gives us pause to consider the possibility that even our most altruistic actions might be driven by blind self-interest.

Becker seems to want to call the human species to a radical honesty about its place in the cosmos. It is uncertain, however, what coming to terms with the reality of death can alone do to mend the way we live our lives and die our deaths. What, apart from other virtues like courage, peacemaking, hope and love, do we have to gain from admitting that it is indeed from dust that we come and to dust we shall return. It is here that Becker's psychoanalysis seems to fall short. Liberating the unconsciousness is interesting, but not all that edifying - especially if, as Becker asserts, the will of the unconscious is altogether ineluctable anyway.

This is perhaps what made the apostle Paul candidly admit that if Christ were not raised from the dead then all his labors for the gospel were in vain (1 Cor. 15:13). For Paul the resurrection was the gospel and the only thing capable of rescuing us from death's long shadow.

All Becker's heroes, Kierkegaard, Luther, and in acknowledged ambivalence even Jung, point toward a resurrection. The Kierkegaardian Leap is always occasioned by the hope for a soft landing. It is a shame that Becker's life was so dramatically cut short. He may well have gone on to develop a theory of the resurrection. As it stands, however, Becker's thesis leaves us perhaps exactly where he had intended - naked before our God and finally conscious of our sin.

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