Ernest Becker
The Birth and Death of Meaning
(1970)
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Chapter Seven
SELF-ESTEEM
The Dominant Motive of Man
"The supreme law [of life] is this: the sense of worth of the
self shall not be allowed to be diminished."
Alfred Adler
(in Ansbacher, 1946, p. 358)
... Whenever psychoanalysts talked about motives they seemed most fallible:... ...people were just not baboons; and even though they entirely lacked self-knowledge, they felt lingering doubts about psychoanalytic interpretations of their deeper desires. Psychoanalysts, of course, seized upon this rebellion as an example of denial based on repression:...
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... And so it went, and still goes, in large part, in "orthodox" Freudian analysis. ...
...if instincts do not drive man, what then, does? ...Alfred Adler... broke with Freud very early on this problem, when he very clearly saw... that the basic law of human life is the urge to self-esteem. ...
Self-esteem, as the psychoanalysts say, begins for the child with the first infusion of mother's milk,... Self-esteem becomes the child's feeling of self-
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warmth that all's right in his action world. It is an inner self-righteousness that arms the individual against anxiety. ...it is the durational extension of an effective anxiety-buffer. the seemingly trite words "self-esteem" are at the very core of human adaptation. They do not represent an extra self-indulgence, or a mere vanity, but a matter of life and death. ...
...the entire early training period of the child is one in which he learns to switch modes of maintaining self-esteem. ...his vital sentiment of self-value no longer derives from the mother's milk, but from the mother's mouth. It comes to be derived from symbols. ...the child's basic sense of self-value has been largely artifcialized. His feeling of human worth has become largely a linguistic contrivance. And it is exactly at this point that we deem that he has been socialized or humanized! ...
Once this has been achieved the rest of the person's entire life becomes animated by the artificial symbolism of self-worth; almost all his time is devoted to the protection, maintenance, and aggrandizement of the symbolic edifice of his self-esteem. ...
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...
The Inner-Newsreel
... We run what I like to call an "inner-newsreel" that passes in constant review the symbols that give self-esteem, make us feel important and good. ...the most minor events are recorded, and the most subtle gradations assume an immense importance. After all, the self-esteem is symbolic, and the main characteristic of symbols is that they cut reality very fine. ...
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...while we are awake we have some control over the scenario. When the newsreel records a negative image... we immediately counter the negative image with a positive one,...
...
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...
When we think about the terror of the nightmare, or the simple disgust of a bad dream, with its confused and degrading images of ourselves, we can see that something really important is at stake here. ... "What is the meaning of my life?" "What value does it have?" And we can only get answers to these questions by reviewing our relationships to others,... Self-esteem depends on our social role, and our inner-newsreel is always packed with faces—it is rarely a nature documentary. ... Nietzsche said of Schopenhauer that he was a model for all men because he could work in isolation and care nothing for the plaudits of the human market-place. ... Yet this same Schopenhauer spent his lonely life scanning the footnotes of learned journals to see whether there was ever going to be recognition of his work.
... The anthropologist Robert Lowie once said that primitive man was a natural peacock, so open was he in self-display and self-glorification. But we play the same game, only not as openly. ...
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...
The Psychoanalytic Characterology
If the reader gets a feeling of pathos in all this, it is only logical: after all the humanization process is one in which we exchange a natural, animal sense of our basic worth, for a contrived, symbolic one. ... Our character has become social. ... Some people work out their urge to superiority by plying their physical and sexual attractiveness—... Others work it out by the superiority of their minds;... ; some work it out by being devoted slaves: "I am a locus of real value because I serve the great man." ... The great variation in character is one of the fascinations and plagues of life:...
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...
We can quibble with plenty of details along the way here, but still it's not obvious to me how we improve upon this rendering of
character
. I like that it's based on
behavior
and not on the groundless ascription of some ultimate (invisible) cause. I too thirst for intimate knowledge of
man's
interiority, but I'm coming around to the realization that we human beings can better handle the behavioral level of observation and explanation. Behavior is an "exterior" phenomenon; it leaves the interior unrevealed; it is
social
and therefore
contrived
;
but nonetheless it reveals most or all of what fellow social actors really need to know about each other. Or at least that seems to be the upshot of the "intentional stance" as
rendered by van Duijn.
Becker's "dualism" has played some part in keeping his work out of (or at least not in) fashion. I confess that when we shift the nomenclature to from mind-body to "bodily" and "symbolic" I find the idea easier and not harder to accept. Basically, he's saying that our eyes are bigger than our stomachs.
I can accept eye-stomach dualism as dualism. I am less sure that it is truly universal. Perhaps it is latent in all of us, but I often wonder if it remains only latent in some people, whose
urge to superiority
is not particularly strong. And then, on the third hand, this effacement sometimes seems
itself
to be a product of the "urge": a self-presentation conspicuously devoid of striving may be "striving" for precisely that effect, thereby concealing the same dark desire as everyone else, but by different methods of concealment and with a different valence. That is part of the answer but it cannot be the whole answer.
The reason scenarios of self-esteem are so opaque even in our closest relationships is embarrassingly simple: we ourselves are largely ignorant of our own life-style, our way of seeking and earning self-esteem. Each of us has a more-or-less unique life-style, formed during our early training. And this formation is largely a process of conditioning that begins even before we learn symbols, it is pre-symbolic. As a result, we have no way of getting on top of this process of conditioning,...
Now, if this mode of being were simply a matter of finding out what symbol-system one had unwittingly chosen in order to get on top of all the burdens of his early situation, we could all fairly easily get self-knowledge. But the sense of right and wrong, our way of perceiving the world, our feelings for it and for who we are, are not a "mental" matter—they are largely a total organismic matter,... We earn our early self-esteem not actively but in large part passively, by having our action blocked and re-oriented to the parents' pleasure. ... As a result, the self is largely a confusion of insides, outsides, boundaries, alien objects, and it is de-centered and split off
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from the body in some measure. ... What we call our character... is a peculiar configuration of self-other and self-body relationships. The thing that makes the study of character so fascinating and so difficult is that it is largely a matter of sorting out bizarre collages. ... Only the person himself can really know what experience means to him, only he can feel the quality of his perceptions; and even he cannot know, because these matters are in large part pre-symbolic, unconscious. ... What makes the psychoanalytic corpus so compelling from a scientific point of view is that it has mastered the general problem of character by finding recurrent types, gross groupings into which everyone more-or-less fits:... ...these groupings are universal because there is a limited spectrum of variation in self-worlds, a limited spectrum of self-body differentiation and confusion, and a limited number of ways we can get satisfaction from others . ...
So,
on one hand,
the
peculiar configuration
or
bizarre collage
;
and
on the other hand,
the
limited spectrum
.
A contradiction? I don't think so. In detail no two people are the same; in totality no one is at all unique. Nothing earth-shattering here. This by itself doesn't even differentiate "people" from any given inanimate object. The difference is that people are a social species, subject to all of the vicissitudes laid out by Becker in the preceding chapters. The traps are laid for us, by us, in our varying interest taken in the details of others. We are
suckers for salience.
To some extent we may gainfully observe a rock, e.g., with the naked eye alone. There may even be properly "scientific" progress that is possible this way. But we may not report our findings as if we had used a microscope.
Such it is,
given our needs of
self-expansion,
that our
interest in others
easily outpaces
our meager epistomological equipage;
i.e.,
we must not confuse
"some beings’ behaviour in their social environments",
with
"the “lower level” mechanisms and physical processes underlying social living".
This warning is issued specifically in the context of
"the intentional stance",
as if to say
:
"the
peculiar configuration
of a person's
"lower level"
cannot be
facilely read off of
mere
"behaviour in their social environment",
no matter how easily
they can be pegged
on the
limited spectrum
of human
character;
i.e.,
"high-level" reading of intention is
pragmatic, not principled. It is good enough to get the job done most of the time.
(van Duijn's and/or Dennett's words in italics)
Let's take a quick look at the opening of Frank Cioffi's paper "Intention and Interpretation in Criticism" (1963) in light of the above.
Cioffi is concerned to
"elucidate the relation in which biographical data about an author, particularly of the kind loosely known as knowledge of his intentions, stand to those issues we call matters of interpretation."
He gives two long lists of examples, one ostensibly "biographical" and the other "interpretation[al]", these being the two types of "questions" whose "relation" he is concerned to establish.
e.g.,
I assume these are offered as questions of interpretation:
"Whether Hamlet in his famous soliloquy is contemplating suicide or assassination."
"Whether we are meant to reflect that Othello becomes jealous very quickly on very little provocation."
"Whether the Moses of Michelangelo is about to hurl the tablets of the law to the ground or has just overcome an impulse to do so."
van Duijn in fact devotes considerable space to the "orders of intentionality" in Othello and refers to other recent "cognitive literary" studies which do the same.
I need to spend more (any) time with Cioffi's paper before going any further into it, but provisionally:
In the world of "ecosemiotics" it seems we are not just allowed but actually expected to parse precisely these sorts of physio-social cues in the normal run of our social business. Selection pressures have made us better at this than the apes, but we are nowhere near perfect. The broad tenets marshaled by more recent ecosemiotic writers are also called upon early and often by Becker here. The thought occurs, then, that one actual gift that so-called "interpretation" of artworks has given to our species is the opportunity to realize in an instant that we are not actually very good at this task of parsing. Not to say that this ambiguity is or ought to be a mandate for art and artist, but many famous artworks (incl. perhaps the single most famous painting ever) present precisely this sort of misdirection.
In the case of those "questions" above which are posed as a choice between exactly two interpretations, I think it will always be possible and necessary to ask: why does it matter? For the rest of us there never seems to be very much riding on the outcome, the less so the narrower the range of outcomes; this all the same even if the personal investment of the critic in their view of things has escalated to a "heroism" of Beckerian dimensions which must be defended as a matter of life-or-death. In any case, when critical and/or interpretational opinions diverge just this decisively specifically regarding a naturalistic and anthropomorphic piece of sculpture, do we not also have a real-life demonstration of divergent physio-social parsing? And does that not precipitously mark the boundary of interpretation's usefulness, a few steps (but
only
a few) beyond the threshhold of its own front door?
Vessel et al report that aesthetic agreement on faces is the strongest; on abstract images it is the weakest; and the intermediate points shake out more or less as you'd expect based on their proximity to these extremes. And, importantly, it is "agreement" which is so implicated, and *not* "preference." (If artists ourselves actually want to play the ecosemiotic game from the beginning of the creative process, here is one way to do it!) But Cioffi's noble critic is not concerned with either "agreement" or "preference" in this sense. The (non-)agreement at issue in the Hamlet and Moses examples is conventionally labeled "aesthetic," but recent cognitive science calls this labeling into question. Cioffi gives at least a few examples (there are many, many more which I have omitted this time around) which actually are straightforward questions of what the Cognitivists like to call "mindreading." Granted I am at the beginning of a research project here and not at the end of one, but I think I could be forgiven for expecting more "agreement" and less "interpretation" about naturalistic art. That is what the Cognitivists seem to expect, and some of them even claim to have demonstrated it in the lab. We can only assume high degrees of both "agreement" and "preference" when it comes to works as famous as those implicated by Cioffi above. But we also find, as always, the critic descending upon the site of this consensus and finding nonetheless that there is no commensurate "agreement" in the area of "mindreading." Agreement is evident precisely where it should be most elusive, and it is absent where it should be most evident. Something is askew here, either in my navigation of the terrain or in the first principles from which different disciplines are proceeding.
And yes, if we accept the full inescapability of our evolved mind as Cognitivist writers seem to, then it's straightfoward to say exactly what happens when we go abstract: it means eliminating the problem of divergent "mindreading" while intensifying the problem of divergent taste.
I assume that these are offered by Cioffi as questions of biography:
"That Henry James in 1895 had his faith in himself shaken by the failure of his plays."
"That Swift was philanthropic and well-loved by his friends."
"That Abraham Cowley had had very little to do with women."
Again I am choosing just a few of the briefest items from a very long list. The latter two at least seem fodder for the "behaviorist" rather than the "cognitivist." They permit of
character
ascriptions which apply strictly to the
exterior
of the human object, as Becker suggests is what we actually do whether or not we realize it is what we do. Or maybe they are those ascriptions, but if so nevertheless they remain behavioral. Plenty of people have been behaviorally "philanthropic" while leaving much question as to their "interior" goodness. If in 2020s America a man has "had very little to do with women", then he can expect to be labeled sexist by one half of the country and gay by the other half. (And no, it's not quite a random or theoretical example this time, eh?)
These are a few of our contemporary failures to parse the interior given only the exterior to work with. There are plenty of unremarkable
drama-sustaining cues we can learn this way, even if it is not the juicy stuff which fascinates us. At least some artistic "expression" seems merely a euphemism for miraculous conveyance of the "interior" to be received by the audience as directly as only the exterior otherwise can be. I'll assume for now that Cioffi steers us clear of those sorts of foibles, or intends to (HAH!), but I'm not sure. There is a reason I have spoken only provisionally of which of the two lists is which: I had to stop and think about it. Having one's faith in oneself shaken, e.g., seems not so easy for anyone on the outside to determine. Hence this list item really belongs in a sub-category: certainly it is "biographical" if there's any reason at all to believe it is true, but right there already we have problems. Can we name a single observable behavior which points unequivocally to shaken self-faith? Or is our construction of shaken self-faith "pragmatic, not principled?" The "frame problem" and the "salience heuristic" beckon. Perhaps James also had
ten fingers
of particular strengths and dimensions and this profoundly shaped his writing, most literally
shaped
his physical actions; but this is not salient, or even interesting, and
good luck
trying to confirm or disconfirm it "scientifically" if somehow it
did
become salient.
I just got done saying (and it felt good!) that the stakes in these interpretation wars never seem to be very high, but critics-and-criticism have insisted upon a "relation" between the interpretation on one hand and biography on the other. This does raise the stakes, not for the audience really, but perhaps for the artist themselves. Suddenly our strictly "pragmatic" faculty of, variously, "mindreading," "physio-social parsing," or whatever else we might label it, this faculty is being asked to some very "principled" work. It is being asked to hit the bullseye on a target, the way a court prosecutor or laboratory scientist must, rather than merely to hit the proverbial broad side of a barn as is more the way of both art itself and the speculative criticism which grows up around it. Bad idea!!
If we merge it ["the psychoanalytic corpus"] with the characterology developed by Dilthey's followers, the modern existentialists, and the data of anthropology, we have a fairly complete cosmography of the inner worlds of men . ... The Nobel people have never rewarded the great innovators in the study of human character, and perhaps rightly
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so: so far there is no proof that this has anything to do with the progress of man on this planet; and if most people knew these things about themselves it would probably throw whole nations into chaos . ... Better to let the matter rest on the fringes of "respectable" science.
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