Becker—The Denial of Death (vi)

Ernest Becker
The Denial of Death
(1973)

---

[255]

CHAPTER ELEVEN

Psychology and Religion:
What Is the Heroic Individual?

...

[259] I am talking matter-of-factly about some of the surest giants in the history of humanity only to say that in the game of life and death no one stands taller than any other,... My point is that for man not everything is possible. What is there to choose between religious creatureliness and scientific creatureliness? The most one can achieve is a certain relaxedness, an openness to experience that makes him less of a driven burden on others. And a lot of this depends on how much talent he has, how much of a daimon is driving him; it is easier to lay down light burdens than heavy ones. How does a man create from all his living energies a system of thought, as Freud did, a system directed wholly to the problems of this world, and then just give it up to the invisible one? How, in other words, can one be a saint and still organize scientific movements of world-historical importance? How does one lean on God and give over everything to Him and still stand on his own feet as a passionate human being? These are not rhetorical questions, they are real ones that go right to the heart of the problem of "how to be a man"—a problem that no one can satisfactorily advise anyone else on, as the wise William James knew. The whole thing is loaded with ambiguity impossible to resolve. As James said, each person sums up a whole range of very personal experiences so that his life is a very unique problem needing very individual kinds of solutions. Kierkegaard had said the same thing when he answered those who objected to his life style: he said it was singular because it was the one singularly designed to be what he needed in order to live; it is as simple and as final as that.

...

[262] [Norman O.] Brown is not the first to claim to see that evolution of the human animal is some kind of mishap; he has prominent predecessors... , and now he has to be included with them for the nonsense as well as the good things they have written. How can we say that evolution has made a mistake with man, that the development of

[263]

the forebrain, the power to symbolize, to delay experience, to bind time, was not "intended" by nature and so represents a self-defeat embodied in an improbable animal? The ego, on the contrary, represents the immense broadening of experience and potential control, a step into a true kind of sub-divinity in nature. Life in the body is not "all we have" if we have an ego. And the ego represents, as far as we can judge, a natural urge by the life force itself toward an expansion of experience, toward more life. If the urge toward more life is an evolutionary blunder, then we are calling into question all of creation and fitting it into the narrow mold of our own preferences about what "more-life" ought to be. Admittedly, when evolution gave man a self, an inner symbolic world of experience, it split him in two , gave him an added burden. But this burden seems to be the price that had to be paid in order for organisms to attain more life, for the development of the life force on the furthest reach of experience and self-consciousness. Brown claims that the "reunification of the ego and the body is not a dissolution but a strengthening of the human ego." But this one phrase in passing rings hollow because it is truly empty chatter that avoids facing everything we know about the ego. To talk about a "new man" whose ego merges wholly with his body is to talk about a subhuman creature, not a superhuman one.

The ego, in order to develop at all, must bind time, must stop the body. In other words, the kind of new man that Brown himself wants would have to have an ego in order to experience his body, which means that the ego has to disengage itself from the body and oppose it. That is another way of saying that the child must be blocked in his experience in order to be able to register that experience. If we don't "stop" the child he develops very little sense of himself, he becomes an automaton, a reflex of the surface of his world playing upon his own surface. Clinically we have huge documentation for this character type whom we call the psychopath; phenomenologically we have understood this since Dewey's Experience and Nature. Brown's whole thesis falls, then, on a twin failure: not only on his failure to understand the real psychodynamics of guilt, but also his turning his back on how the child registers experience on his body: the need to develop in a dualistic way in order to be a rich repository of life.

[264]

For a thinker of Brown's breadth and penetration these failures are rather uncanny, and we realize them with a sense of reluctance, of unwillingness to find such glaring lapses in what is really a thinker of heroic dimensions. I am less upset when I find similar lapses in Marcuse, who is a much less daring reinterpreter of Freud but who puts forth a similar call for a new kind of unrepressed man. On the one hand Marcuse calls for a revolution of unrepression because he knows that it is not enough to change the structure of society in order to bring a new world into being; the psychology of man also has to be changed. But on the other hand, he admits that unrepression is impossible, because there is death: "The brute fact of death denies once and for all the reality of a non-repressive existence." The closing pages of his book are a realistic and regretful admission that the ego has to spread itself beyond the pleasures of the body in order for men to be men. But the dedicated social revolutionary who wants a new world and a new man more than anything else can't accept the reality that he himself sees. He still believes in the possibility of some kind of "final liberation," which also rings like the hollow, passing thought that it is. Marcuse even turns his back wholly on living experience and gets carried away by his abstractions: "Men can die without anxiety if they know that what they love is protected from misery and oblivion [by the new utopian society]." As if men could ever know that,...

Why do brilliant thinkers become so flaccid, dissipate so carelessly their own careful arguments? Probably because they see their task as a serious and gigantic one: the critique of an entire way of life; and they see themselves in an equally gigantic prophetic role: to point to a way out once and for all, in the most uncompromising terms. This is why their popularity is so great: they are prophets and simplifiers . Like Brown, Marcuse wants a sure indicator of alienation, a focal point in nature, and finds it in the ideology and fear of death. Being a true revolutionary he wants to change this in his lifetime , wants to see a new world born. He is so committed to this fulfillment that he cannot allow himself to stop in midstream and follow out the implication of his own reservations on unrepres-

[265]

sion, his own admissions about the inevitable grip of death; fear of death is obviously deeper than ideology. To admit this would make his whole thesis ambiguous—and what revolutionary wants that? He would have to put forth a program that is not totally revolutionary, that allows for repression, that questions what men may become, that sees how inevitably men work against their own better interests, how they must shut out life and pleasure, follow irrational hero-systems—that there is a demonism in human affairs that even the greatest and most sweeping revolution cannot undo. With an admission like this Marcuse would be an anomaly—a "tragic revolutionary"—and would dissipate his role as a straighforward prophet. Who can expect him to do that?

There is no point in lingering on the fallacies of the revolutionaries of unrepression; one could go on, but everything would come back to the same basic thing: the impossibility of living without repression. No one has argued this impossibility with more authority and style than Philip Rieff in his recent work, and so far as I can see it should lay the matter to rest. He turns the whole movement on end: repression is not falsification of the world, it is "truth"—the only truth that man can know, because he cannot experience everything. Rieff is calling us back to basic Freudianism, to a stoical acceptance of the limits of life, the burdens of it and of ourselves. In a particularly beautiful phrase, he puts it this way:

The heaviest crosses are internal and men make them so that, thus skeletally supported, they an bear the burden of their flesh. Under the sign of this inner cross, a certain inner distance is achieved from the infantile desire to be and have everything.

Rieff's point is the classical one: that in order to have a truly human existance there must be limits; and what we call culture or the superego sets such limits. Culture is a compromise with life that makes human life possible. He quotes Marx's defiant revolutionary phrase: "I am nothing and should be everything." For Rieff this is the undiluted infantile unconscious speaking. Or, as I would prefer to say with Rank, the neurotic consciousness—the "all or nothing" of the person who cannot "partialize" his world. One bursts out in boundless megalomania, transcending all limits, or bogs down into

[266]

wormhood like a truly worthless sinner. There is no secure ego balance to limit the intake of reality or to fashion the output of one's own powers.

If there is a tragic limitation in life there is also possibility. What we call maturity is the ability to see the two in some kind of balance into which we can fit creatively. As Rieff put it: "Character is the restrictive shaping of possibility." It all boils down, again, to the fact that the prophets of unrepression simply have not understood human nature ; they envisage a utopia with perfect freedom from inner constraint and from outer authority. This idea flies in the face of the fundamental dynamism of unfreedom that we have discovered in each individual: the universality of transference. This fact is hardly lost on Rieff, who realizes that men need transference because they like to see their morality embodied, need some kind of points of support in the endless flux of nature:

Abstractions will never do. God-terms have to be exemplified. . . . Men crave their principles incarnate in enactable characters, actual selective mediators between themselves and the polytheism of experience.

This failure to push the understanding of psychodynamics to its limits is the hurdle that none of the utopians can get over; it finally vitiates their best arguments. ...

...[in seeking to "abolish death," e.g.] the modern utopians continue the one-sided Enlighten-

[267]

ment dream. Condorcet had already had the identical vision in 1794:

. . . . a period must one day arrive when death will be nothing more than the effect either of extraordinary accidents, or of the slow and gradual decay of the vital powers: and that the duraion of the interval between the birth of man and his decay will have itself no assignable limit.

But Choron offers a caution on this vision that goes right to heart of it and demolishes it: that the "postponement of death is not a solution to the problem of the fear of death . . . there still will remain the fear of dying prematurely." The smallest virus or the stupidest accident would deprive a man not of 90 years but of 900—and would be then 10 times more absurd . Condorcet's failure to understand psychodynamics was forgivable, but not Harrington's today. If something is 10 times more absurd it is 10 times more threatening. In other words, death would be "hyperfetishized" as a source of danger, and men in the utopia of longevity would be even less expansive and peaceful than they are today!

I see this utopia in one way resembling the beliefs of many primitive societies. They denied that death was the total end of experience and believed instead that it was the final ritual promotion to a higher form of life. This meant too that invisible spirits of the dead had power over the living, and if someone died prematurely it was thought to be the result of malevolent spirits or the breach of taboos. Premature death did not come as an impersonal accident. This reasoning meant that primitive man put the highest priority on ways to avoid bad will and bad action, which is why he seems to have circumscribed his activities in often compulsive and phobic ways.

It's impolite but unavoidable to observe here a certain resonance with the ultra-modern, politically centrist Progressive, with scientific rationality standing in for "primitive" animism, to be sure, but leaving all else here, somehow, intact. The point being (donning Becker's hat for a moment) not that rationality is no better or no different than irrationality but that the human motivations underlying the relationship to death remain unchanged under either (or any other) epistemological regime.

Rationality per se is, in this instance, merely another vehicle in the desperate lurch to outrun fate, this time not by abandoning control to spirits and demons but by forcibly wresting control from nature. The only problem being that human beings are not good stewards even of perfect rationality: we "satifice" for the nearest-at-hand way too often. And Becker has mentioned and explained this too, earlier on, reaching similar conclusions as Kahnemann et al by way of totally different scientific (pseudoscientific?) avenues.

...

[275] The fusion of psychology and religion is thus not only logical, it is necessary if the religion is to work. There is no way of standing on one's own center without outside support, only now this support is made to seem to come from the inside. The person is conditioned to function under his own control, from his own center, from the spiritual powers that well up within him. Actually, of course, the support comes from the transference certification by the guru that what the disciple is doing is true and good. Even reconditioning body-therapies like that of the once-noted F.M. Alexander today liberally sprinkle their therapy with ideas from Zen and cite their affinity to people like Gurdjieff. There seems no way to get the body to reintegrate without giving it some kind of magical sustaining power; at least, there is no better way to win full discipleship to a religion than by making it frankly religious.

...

[276]

...there is no need for us to take up the metaphysical aspects of this problem. It is now the center of a passionate and at the same time coolly intellectual review by some of our best minds... It can all be summed up in the simplest and sharpest terms: how can an ego-controlled animal change his structure; how can a self-conscious

[277]

creature change the dilemma of his existence? There is simply no way to transcend the limits of the human condition or to change the psychological structural conditions that make humanity possible. What can it mean for something new to emerge from such an animal and triumph over his nature? Even though men have repeated such a notion since the most ancient times and in the most subtle and weightiest ways, even though whole movements of social action as well as thought have been inspired by such ideas, still they are mere fancy...

If psychotherapists and scientists lapse into metaphysics so easily, we should not blame theologians for doing the same. But ironically, theologians today are often the most sober about immanence and its possibilities. Consider Paul Tillich: he too had his metaphysic of New Being... But Tillich had fewer illusions about this New Being than most of the psychotherapeutic religionists. He saw that the idea was actually a myth, an ideal that might be worked toward and so partly realized. It was not a fixed truth about the insides of nature. This point is crucial. And he so honestly put it: "The only argument for the truth of this

[278]

Gospel of New Being is that the message makes itself true." Or, as we would say in the science of man, it is an ideal-typical enjoinder.

I think the whole question of what is possible for the inner life of man was nicely summed up by Suzanne Langer in the phrase "the myth of inner life." She used this term in reference to the experience of music, but it seems to apply to the whole metaphysic of the unconscious, of the emergence of new energies from the heart of nature. But let us quickly add that this use of the term "myth" is not meant to be disparaging or to reflect simply "illusion." As Langer explained, some myths are vegetative, they generate real conceptual power, real apprehension of a dim truth, some kind of global adumbration of what we miss by sharp, analytic reason.

I am developing a fondness for this general idea. Tellingly, I am most fond of it regarding the things I know the least about. Meanwhile, everyone is an expert in the experience of music , and so it is the same old dim truths of the essentially literary orientation that are clung to dimly. This gives me pause. More to the point, perhaps, Rank himself drops plenty of bread crumbs that lead away from the pillars of literary epistemology, so there is a peculiar irony that the exaltation of the vegetative "myth" would merely lead us back to where we started.

Most of all, as William James and Tillich have argued, beliefs about reality affect people's real actions: they help introduce the new into the world. Especially is this true for beliefs about man, about human nature, and about what man may yet become. If something influences our efforts to change the world, then to some extent it must change that world. This helps explain one of the things that perplex us about psychoanalytic prophets like Erich Fromm; we wonder how they can so easily forget about the dilemmas of the human condition that tragically limit man's efforts. The answer is, on one level, that they have to leave tragedy behind as part of a program to awaken some kind of hopeful creative effort by man. Fromm has nicely argued the Deweyan thesis that, as reality is partly the result of human effort, the person who prides himself on being a "hard-headed realist" and refrains from hopeful action is really abdicating the human task. This accent on human effort, vision, and hope in order to help shape reality seems to me largely to exonerate Fromm from the charges that he really is a "rabbi at heart" who is impelled to redeem man and cannot let the world be. If the alternative is fatalistic acceptance of the present human condition, then each of us is a rabbi—or had better be.

But once we say this, once we make a pragmatic argument for creative myth, it does not let us off the hook so easily about the nature of the real world. It only makes us more uncomfortable with the therapeutic religionists . If you are going to have a myth of New Being, then, like Tillich, you have to use this myth as a call to the

[279]

highest and most difficult effort—and not to simply joy. A creative myth is not simply a relapse into comfortable illusion; it has to be as bold as possible in order to be truly generative .

Well, sure. The literary imperative is far too comfortable . But for a time it was radical. We can't just keep trying to outrun the old ideologies with newer, bolder ones.

...

[281] the second great problem raised by the therapeutic revolution, namely, So What? Even with numerous groups of really liberated people, at their best, we can't imagine that the world will be any pleasanter or less tragic a place. It may even be worse in still unknown ways. As Tillich warned us, New Being, under the conditions and limitations of existence, will only bring into play new and sharper paradoxes, new tensions, and more painful disharmonies—a "more intense demonism." Reality is remorseless because gods do not walk upon the earth; and if men could become noble repositories of great gulfs of nonbeing, they would have even less peace that we oblivious and driven madmen have today. Besides, can any idea of therapeutic revolution touch the vast masses of this globe,...? When one lives in the liberation atmosphere of Berkeley, California, or in the intoxication of small doses of unconstruction in a therapeutic group in one's home town, one is living in a hothouse atmosphere that shuts out the reality of the rest of the planet, the way things really are in this world. It is this therapeutic megalomania that must quickly be seen through if we are not to be perfect fools.

...

[283] The soberest conclusion that we could make about what has actually been taking place on the planet for about three billion years is that it is being turned into a vast pit of fertilizer. But the sun distracts our attention, always baking the blood dry, making things grow over it,...

Science and religion merge in a critique of the deadening of perception of this kind of truth, and science betrays us when it is willing to absorb lived truth all into itself. Here the criticism of all behaviorist psychology, all manipulations of men, and all coercive utopianism comes to rest. These techniques try to make the world other than it is, legislate the grotesque out of it, inaugurate a "proper" human condition. The psychologist Kenneth Clark...[recently] called for a new kind of chemical to deaden man's aggressiveness and so make the world a less dangerous place. The Watsons, the Skinners, the Pavlovians—all have their formulas for smoothing things out. Even Freud—Enlightenment man that he was, after all—wanted to see a saner world and seemed willing to absorb lived truth into science if only it were possible. He once mused that in order to really change things by therapy one would have to get at the masses of men; and that the only way to do this would be to mix the copper of suggestion into the pure gold of psychoanaysis. In other words, to coerce, by transference, a less evil world. But Freud knew better, as he gradually came to see that the evil in the world is not only in the insides of people but on the outside, in nature—which is why he became more realistic and pessimistic in his later work.

The problem with all the scientific manipulators is that somehow they don't take life seriously enough ; in this sense, all science is "bourgeois," an affair of bureaucrats. I think that taking life seriously means something such as this: that whatever man does on this planet has to be done in the lived truth of the terror of creation,

[284]

of the grotesque, of the rumble of panic underneath everything. Otherwise it is false. Whatever is achieved must be achieved from within the subjective energies of creatures, without deadening, with the full exercise of passion, of vision, of pain, of fear, and of sorrow. How do we know—with Rilke—that our part of the meaning of the universe might not be a rhythm in sorrow? Manipulative, utopian science, by deadening human sensitivity, would also deprive men of the heroic in their urge to victory. And we know that in some very important way this falsifies our struggle by emptying us, by preventing us from incorporating the maximum of experience. It means the end of the distinctively human—or even, we must say, the distinctively organismic.