Praise:
“A brave work of electrifying intelligence and passion, optimistic and revolutionary, destined to endure…” – New York Times
“The Denial of Death is one of the few great books of the 20th or any other century.” – Albuquerque Journal
“One of those rare masterpieces that will stimulate your thoughts and your intellectual curiosity.” – Elizabeth Kubler-Ross
Awards:
Pulitzer Prize
Rohan Roberts | 2 July 2014
The epithet ‘great’ has lost its significance and impact, shanghaied as it has been by pop culture and teenage vernacular. However, it is in the original sense of “remarkable or out of the ordinary in degree, magnitude, or effect” that I use the word when I refer to The Denial of Death as a ‘Great’ book.
Ernest Becker’s work is so thought-provoking, so enormous in its scope, so profound in its interpretations, and such a masterful exploration of the fields of theology and psychoanalysis, that it is hard to know where to begin with this review of a book that deals with perhaps the most important facet of man’s existence: his impending death.
To put it simply and to simply get it out of the way, The Denial of Death is Ernest’s Becker’s scintillatingly brilliant answer to the question that has been the bane of philosophers and peasants since time immemorial: the “why” of human existence.
Building on the works of psychoanalysts, Søren Kierkegaard, Sigmund Freud, and Otto Rank, the central thesis of the book is that all the sound and fury, weeping and wailing, striving and straining that characterise human civilization and human endeavour is ultimately an elaborate, symbolic defense mechanism against the knowledge of our mortality. This deeply traumatic knowledge in turn acts as the emotional and intellectual response to our basic survival mechanism and to much of our daily behaviour and subconscious drives.
Becker’s philosophy emerges from four strands:
1) The world we are born into is terrifying (nature red in tooth and claw)
2) The basic motivation for human behaviour is our need to control our basic anxiety – which stems from the terror of death.
3) Since our terror of death is so overwhelming the mind conspires to keep it unconscious.
4) All our heroic projects, grand endeavours, and cultural activities are man’s attempts to sublimate this terrifying knowledge of death in an attempt to overcome the effect it has on us.
The book is an exploration of the subject of death from a psychoanalytical perspective: that the fear of death must be present behind all our normal functioning in order for the organism to be armed towards self-preservation. The book doesn’t really endeavour to offer solutions to the problem of death. However, running through the book is a gentle advice to practice dying – to cultivate an awareness and self-analysis of our eventual demise. By doing so, we discover new possibilities of choice and action, and new forms of courage and endurance.
This book brings dying out of the closet. It gives us the wherewithal to contemplate our mortality and discuss the prospect of our ultimate demise in a rational, intelligent, and graceful way – befitting a species of our intellect and potential. It frees us from the stranglehold that superstition and mythologies have had over death and dying. It allows us instead to see the world in all its awe and splendor and to sense one’s own free inner expansion and the miracle of being alive.
Becker points out that we have two selves: a physical self and a symbolic self. When we die we know our physical self decays. However we sublimate this proposition with ideas related to reincarnation, heaven and hell, and other aspects of an after-life. But in our heart of hearts we don’t really believe this. There is a subconscious awareness of the finality of death. So instead we seek to preserve our symbolic self: we achieve pseudo-immortality by identifying with a nation, or supporting a sporting team, or being part of an army, or fighting a great cause, or by creating works of art, or accumulating a fortune, or establishing a family… This is the essential job of culture: to provide intricate symbolic systems that allows its members to transcend the fear of death.
Along the way, Becker addresses the psychoanalytical thinking of everything from sibling rivalry, depression, schizophrenia, “character traits”, fetishes, psychoses, herd mentality, and the urge to heroism. What we have today is the emergence of man as a hyper-anxious animal who constantly invents reasons for anxiety even when there are none.
These symbolic systems alleviate the stress of contemplating death and make living bearable. Living as we do in a world where the consolations of traditional religion no longer mean anything to an increasing number of people, there is an urgent need to grapple with the big issues of life, love, death and the purpose of man’s existence from a scientific and psychoanalytic perspective. This book attempts to do just that. I was profoundly shaken by this book and deeply moved by the insights it offers into the human condition.
I particularly enjoyed reading Becker’s summarisation of Kierkegaard’s “Automatic Cultural Man” – the one who dares not stand up for his own meanings or his own thoughts because this means too much danger, too much exposure. Better not to be one’s self, better to live tucked into others, embedded in a safe frame work of social and cultural obligations and duties. Sadly, a large part of humanity fits this characterisation – in contrast to the man who tries to be a god unto himself, the master of his fate, who will not be the pawn of others. He will not be a passive sufferer and secret dreamer. He will plunge into life.
I end this review with a sublime passage from the book:
Man has a symbolic identity that brings him sharply out of nature. He is a symbolic self, a creature with a name, a life history. He is a creator with a mind that soars out to speculate about atoms and infinity, who can place himself imaginatively at a point in space and contemplate bemusedly his own planet. This immense expansion, this dexterity, this ethereality, this self-consciousness gives to man literally the status of a small god in nature, as the Renaissance thinkers knew.
Yet, at the same time, as the Eastern sages also knew, man is a worm and food for worms. This is the paradox: he is out of nature and hopelessly in it; he is dual: up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body.
