Ernest Becker
The Denial of Death
(1973)
On Kierkegaard:
[81] Most people, of course, avoid the psychotic dead ends out of the existential dilemma. They are fortunate enough to be able to stay on the middle ground of "philistinism." Breakdown occurs either because of too much possibility or too little...
...philistinism is what we would call "normal neurosis." ... The Philistine trusts that by keeping himself at a low level of personal intensity he can avoid being pulled off balance by experience...
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There is [additionally] the type of man who has great contempt for "immediacy," who tries to cultivate his interiority, base his pride on something deeper and inner, create a distance between himself and the average man. Kierkegaard calls this type of man the "introvert." He is a little more concerned with what it means to be a person, with individuality and uniqueness. He enjoys solitude and withdraws periodically to reflect... What is one's true talent, his secret gift, his authentic vocation? In what way is one truly unique...? In adolescence, most of us throb with this dilemma, expressing it either with words and thoughts or with simple numb pain and longing. But usually life sucks us up into standardized activities. ...
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I am not saying that Kierkegaard's "introvert" keeps this inner quest fully alive or conscious, only that it represents somewhat more of a dimly aware problem than it does with the swallowed-up immediate man. Kierkegaard's introvert feels that he is something different from the world, has something in himself that the world cannot reflect, cannot in its immediacy and shallowness appreciate; and so he holds himself somewhat apart from that world. But not too much, not completely. It would be so nice to be the self he wants to be, to realize his vocation, his authentic talent, but it is dangerous, it might upset his world completely. He is after all, basically weak, in a position of compromise: not an immediate man, but not a real man either, even though he gives the appearance of it. ...
...he lives in a kind of "incognito," content to toy—in his periodic solitudes—with the idea of who he might really be; content to insist on a "little difference," to pride himself on a vaguely-felt superiority.
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But this is not an easy position to maintain with equanimity. It is rare, says Kierkegaard, to continue on in it. Once you pose the problem of what it means to be a person, even dumbly, weakly, or with a veneer of pride about your imagined difference from others, you may be in trouble. Introversion is impotence, but an impotence already self-conscious to a degree, and it can become troublesome. It may lead to chafing at one's dependency on his family and his job, an ulcerous gnawing as a reaction to one's embeddedness, a feeling of slavery in one's safety. For a strong person it may become intolerable, and he may try to break out of it, sometimes by suicide, sometimes by drowning himself desperately in the world and in the rush of experience.
And this brings us to our final type of man: the one who asserts himself out of defiance of his own weakness...
...
[86] Kierkegaard was hardly a disinterested scientist. He gave his psychological description because he had a glimpse of freedom for man. He was a theorist of the open personality, of human possibility. In this pursuit, present-day psychiatry lags far behind him. Kierkegaard had no easy idea of what "health" is. But he knew what it was not: it was not normal adjustment — anything but that , as he has taken such excruciating analytical pains to show us. To be a "normal cultural man" is, for Kierkegaard, to be sick—whether one knows it or not: "there is such a thing as fictitious health." Nietzsche later put the same thought: "Are there perhaps—a question for psychiatrists—neuroses of health?" But Kierkegaard not only posed the question, he also answered it. If health is not "cultural normality," then it must refer to something else, must point beyond man's usual situation, his habitual ideas. Mental health , in a word, is not typical , but ideal-typical . It is something far beyond man, to be achieved, striven for, something that leads man beyond himself. The "healthy" person, the true individual, the self-realized soul, the "real" man, is the one who has transcended himself.
How does one transcend himself; how does he open himself to new possibility? By realizing the truth of his situation, by dispelling the lie of his character, by breaking his spirit out of its conditioned prison. The enemy, for Kierkegaard as for Freud, is the Oedipus complex. The child has built up strategies and techniques for keeping his self-esteem in the face of the terror of his situation. These techniques become an armor that hold the person prisoner. The very defenses that he needs in order to move about with self-confidence and self-esteem become his life-long trap. In order to transcend himself he must break down that which he needs in order to live. Like Lear he must throw off all his "cultural lendings" and stand naked in the storm of life. Kierkegaard had no illusions about man's urge to freedom. He knew how comfortable people were inside the prison of their character defenses. Like many prisoners they
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are comfortable in their limited and protected routines, and the idea of a parole into the wide world of chance, accident, and choice terrifies them. We have only to glance back at Kierkegaard's confession in the epigraph to this chapter to see why. In the prison of one's character one can pretend and feel that he is somebody, that the world is manageable, that there is a reason for one's life, a justification for one's action. To live automatically and uncritically is to be assured of at least a minimum share of the programmed cultural heroics—what we might call "prison heroism": the smugness of insiders who "know."
Kierkegaard's torment was the direct result of seeing the world as it really is in relation to his situation as a creature. ... Anxiety is the result of the perception of the truth of one's condition. What does it mean to be a self-conscious animal? The idea is ludicrous, if it is not monstrous. ... It seems like a hoax, which is why one type of cultural man rebels openly against the idea of God. What kind of deity would create such complex and fancy worm food? Cynical deities, said the Greeks, who use man's torment for their own amusement.
But now Kierkegaard seems to have led us into an impasse, and impossible situation. He has told us that by realizing the truth of our condition we can transcend ourselves. And on the other hand he tells us that the truth of our condition is our complete and abject creatureliness, which seems to push us down still further on the scale of self-realization, further away from any possibility of self-transcendence. But this is only an apparent contradiction. The flood of anxiety is not the end for man. It is, rather, a "school" that provides man with the ultimate education, the final maturity. It is a
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better teacher than reality, says Kierkegaard, because reality can be lied about, twisted, and tamed by the tricks of cultural perception and repression. But anxiety cannot be lied about. Once you face up to it, it reveals the truth of your situation; and only by seeing that truth can you open a new possibility for yourself.
He who is educated by dread [anxiety] is educated by possibility. . . . When such a person, therefore, goes out from the school of possibility, and knows more thoroughly than a child knows the alphabet that he demands of life absolutely nothing, and that terror, perdition, annihilation, dwell next door to every man, and has learned the profitable lesson that every dread which alarms may the next instant become a fact, he will then interpret reality differently. . . .No mistake about it: the curriculum in the "school" of anxiety is the unlearning of repression, of everything that the child taught himself to deny so that he could move about with a minimal animal equanimity. Kierkegaard is thus placed directly in the Augustinian-Lutheran tradition. Education for a man means facing up to his natural impotence and death. As Luther urged us: "I say die, i.e., taste death as though it were present." It is only if you "taste" death with the lips of your living body that you can know emotionally that you are a creature who will die.
What Kierkegaard is saying, in other words, is that the school of anxiety leads to possibility only by destroying the vital lie of character. It seems like the ultimate self-defeat, the one thing that one should not do, because then one will have truly nothing left. But rest assured, says Kierkegaard, "the direction is quite normal. . . . the self must be broken in order to become a self. . . ." William James summed up beautifully this Lutheran tradition, in the following words:
This is the salvation through self-despair, the dying to be truly born, of Lutheran theology, the passage into nothing of which Jacob Behmen [Boehme] writes. To get to it, a critical point must usually be passed, a corner turned within one. Something must give way, a native hardness must break down and liquefy. . . .Again—as we saw in the last chapter—this is the destruction of the emotional character armor of Lear, of the Zen Buddhists, of modern[89]
psychotherapy, and in fact of self-realized men in any epoch.
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