Ernest Becker
The Birth and Death of Meaning
(1970)
[vii]PREFACE
This is an ambitious book. In these times there is hardly any point in writing just for the sake of writing: one has to want to do something really important. What I have tried to do here is to present in a brief, challenging, and readable way the most important things that the various disciplines have discovered about man, about what makes people act the way they do. This is the most intimate question that we know,... One curious thing that separates the social from the natural sciences is that the natural sciences, with much fanfare, immediately communicate to the general public their most exciting new ideas : the social sciences tend to nurse their significant insights in scholarly oblivion . As a result people feel that the social sciences are not doing anything important or exciting. But the opposite is true:...
But we have also known for a long time that one of the reasons the social sciences work in oblivion is that they are not getting at knowledge that instantly makes people feel powerful and satisfied , that gives them the sense that they are taming their world,... The science of man is the science of man's knowledge about himself: it gives a chill in addition to a thrill ... We may be the only species in the universe, for all we know, that has pushed self-exposure to such an advanced point that we are no longer a secret to ourselves. As we will see in these pages the exposure of this secret is in many ways very unsettling,
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... If we could become comfortable with this knowledge and make it the general property of large masses of voters and their political representatives there is no doubt that we would probably become one of the wisest planets in the universe—at least of our form of life, and we would deserve our species title Homo sapiens, Man the Wise. We have a long and improbable way to go to accomplish this personal and political task, but my ambition in writing this book is nothing less than to contribute some small bit to that staggering end: an easily graspable synthesis of what we must know about ourselves if we are to deserve our name.
...
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...
There are two thinkers above all to whom I personally feel specially indebted for this mature psychology and whose vital work I had previously slighted to the real detriment of my own. One of them, Erich Fromm, is well known... The other thinker—Otto Rank—is today almost wholly neglected, and this new edition represents only a first reflection of my ridiculously belated "discovery" of his breathtakingly brilliant work. Rank truly is the brooding genius in the wings of Psychoanalysis, and we have only just begun to hear from him—... I am not trying to absolve myself of brash ignorance, but there is something perverse about our university education when it fails to show us the authentically cumulative tradition of thought. We have to discover the vital thinkers on our own and accidentally; our teachers, if anything, pooh-pooh the very people we should be studying, and we spend needless years just randomly and with luck coming into our own heritage.
...belatedly making peace with Freud and leaning onto Fromm and Rank means accepting into one's thought a truly rounded and less rosy view of human nature;... ...man is mostly innocent, really potentially good, even naturally noble; and as we will stress, society is responsible, largely, for shaping people,
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for giving them opportunities for unfolding more freely and more unafraid. But this unfolding is confused and complicated by man's basic animal fears:... All this gives his life a quality of drivenness, of underlying desperation, an obsession with the meaning of it and with his own significance as a creature. And this is what drives him to try to make his mark on the world, to try to twist it and turn it to his own designs, to bury over the rumbling anxieties; and this usually means that he tries to twist and turn others,... As Rank put it so bluntly: Man creates "out of freedom a prison." This means everyman, in any society,...
...
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Chapter One
THE MAN-APES
A Lesson for Thomas Hobbes
Probably the most exciting development in modern anthropology is the discovery of the australopithecines,... As far back as over a million years ago the first of these animals roamed the grasslands of southern and eastern Africa, and one of their outstanding features was that they roamed well:...
The important thing about these man-ape finds is that they now give us some long sought-after, basic insights into our own evolution. We can now understand that most of what we call "distinctively human" is based on our taste for meat; and
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meat is elusive and needs to be hunted down. ...
We used to think that a large-brained upright primate arrived on the evolutionary scene, and that this large brain permitted him to learn to use tools, develop complex speech,... But now we see that man's large brain is a rather late development. ... As you read the fossil record, it appears that the man-ape's taste for meat was progressively satisfied by increases in hunting skill:... The hunters seem to be slowly coming of age, taking possession of the world around them more masterfully and surely. ...
But as we said, in order to be efficient hunters these man-apes had to develop new forms of social organization... Popular writers today try to convince us that what we call distinctively human is something that we really share with the baboons:... But to make such analogies is not only cheap journalism, it is all wrong. ...man developed away from the apes precisely because he had to hunt meat; and if you want to hunt meat you cannot afford yourself the luxury of baboon behavior. ...
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...you cannot fight over the kill, or over the females back at the camp... ...you need rules about social relations. The best way to get cooperation among volatile, erotic primates is to regulate sexual relations... ... the result of this , as Marshall Sahlins has so well pointed out, is that you get your recognition from others not on what you take—like the baboons , but on what you give . Among primitives today the main reward of the one who kills the big animal is the prestige of being able to distribute it to his family and to others . Often the hunter himself gets the smallest share or the least desirable part of the animal. Unlike the baboon who gluts himself only on food, man nourishes himself mostly on self-esteem. ...
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Chapter Two
THE ORIGINS OF THE MIND
The Mechanics of the Miraculous
It is fairly simple to understand how an ape who abandons the trees and no longer needs his arms to swing with, gradually becomes a man-ape who walks upright and uses his arms to hunt and carry. ... But in all of this there remains a mystery that has fascinated man since ancient times, a mystery that neither the Greeks, nor Darwin, nor modern anthropologists have been able to unravel with any certainty—I mean, of course, the gift of symbolic language.
We no longer believe... that language was a special creation of God... We can see, rather, how it must have come about gradually,... ...some of the groundwork for the birth of the symbol in man was laid down at much earlier levels of evolution.
The great Charles Sherrington once observed that if the amoeba were the size of a dog we should have to grant it a mind :... ...what we call "mind" is merely the style of reaction of an organism to its environment. ...
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...the world of meaning of any animal is created for it out of the range and subtlety of its reactivity. ...
On the next higher level we have the conditioned reflex. Remember Pavlov's famous experiments... This represents a real liberation from the environment, in a way: the dog is not interested in the intrinsic properties of the bell, but since it has now become a sign of something else, he can enrich his world by responding to it , and not only to the food. ...
On still a higher level,... ...the chimp who uses a stick to knock down a banana, suspended out of reach. We already have, here, a degree of autonomy unusual in the animal kingdom because it is not an experimenter who is establishing the relationship between the stick and the banana, but the chimp himself who figures out a problem situation.
Finally, we have the highest level of reactivity-meaning... : what we call symbolic behavior. Man himself coins a designation for an object, and then responds to that arbitrary designation. ...
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...unlike Pavlov's dog, man creates the relationship between stimuli. And unlike the chimp reaching with a firm pole for a banana, the airy symbol "house" has nothing intrinsic in it that would connect it with the object it stands for.
The development of mind, then, is a progressive freedom of reactivity. ... Mind culminates in the organism's ability to choose what it will react to. White calls this a "traffic in non-sensory meanings." ...
Vertebrate Backgrounds to the Growth of Mind
...the mammalians introduced into evolution a new kind of mother-child relationship. They distinguished themselves from the dominant reptiles, partly by being more helplessly dependent when young. ...
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...
... In our development away from the lower mammals, we have mostly capitalized on the consequences of the initially strong mother-offspring tie of the earliest mammals. In the first place, this close dependence after birth meant that the young had a model for some of their behavior; they were in a position to learn things, and so develop the possibility for choice and a wider repertory of behavior. ... Along with this, and quite naturally, the young had a heightened sensitivity to animals of their own species. The mammal is a group-living animal, for the most part, content in being close to its own kind. A chimpanzee separated from his group will pine pitifully, lose all zest and appetite. One consequence of helpless dependence is that if it is catered to, it seems to increase. ...
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...
...we are understanding that the man-apes themselves owed their complexities to their mammalian heritage,... The sensitivity to gesture is perhaps best seen in the readiness of the chimpanzee to learn by watching a more experienced performance; ... ...[and it] seems to extend to an emotional sensitivity:...
The basis for this kind of alertness is probably laid down in the dominance-subordination hierarchies characteristic of vertebrate society—... some animals are larger, stronger, or more energetic than others, and they
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bluster around and enjoy the advantages of unconditional dominance. This means that all the animals have to be most sensitive to interindividual signals and cues. This sensitivity allows each animal to be cognizant in some way of the part he is to play in the life of the group—... Each individual knows how... to maintain a delicate balance between self-assertion and the demands of living in the group, and he has an implicit awareness of his status vis-à-vis one or more others. ...
But man is a primate, and here an interesting new factor enters the picture. Vertebrates have a "diphasic" sexual cycle. ... The primates, on the other hand... are in heat all the time. This was the really revolutionary new development... ...primate behavior is never free from tonic stimulus by sex hormones.
...there is a thorough confounding of mating phase and nonmating phase: the animals are under constant hormonal tonus and constant group interaction. ... The picture that emerges is truly unique in the animal kingdom: a great variety of animals in various stages of develop-
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ment, possessing rather keen sensitivity to the aggressive and erotic barometers of one another, are thrown together in one group. The result, as Earl Count and M. R. A. Chance have so well argued, is an extremely complex jumble of statuses to which the members must adjust . ...they must have on tap a flexible behavioral repertory, which again puts a premium on plasticity as opposed to instinctual rigidity. At each point in the growing animal's life, he must find a new adjustment to make to those around him:... Nothing is so unpredictable as are other living organisms. ...
And so we can see how primate living laid the basis for the nervous complexity of man. ... Some way had to be found to give an ordered simplification of the interindividual environment. Among the lower primates this simplification is decided by strength and energy differences; man needed a schematization that was symbolic and psychological. ...
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... Coming of age in any society is basically a matter of learning how to act in a massively unpredictable environment, ... The only way to control it in some measure is to play one's part correctly. ... This is why the concepts "status" and "role"... assume such a central place in sociology: they describe what is most necessary for human behavior,...
...
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Chapter Three
THE DISTINCTIVELY HUMAN
The Ego, Language, and the Self
"All things that serve to pick up milk are 'spoons' to the child,
and anyone who sings to him in the dark is 'mamma' . . . The best
that society can do for the individual is to bring him into agreement
with itself; but the result may be right and it may be wrong."
James Mark Baldwin
(1915, pp. 14, 17)
Try repeating "man is an animal" a few times, just to notice how unconvincing it sounds. ... Karl von den Steinen was told by a Xingu that the only difference between them and the monkey was that the monkeys lacked the bow and arrow. And Jules Henry observed on the Kaingang that dogs are not considered as pets, like some of the other animals, but are on a level of emotional equality, like a relative. But in our own Western culture we have, for the most part, set a great distance between ourselves and the rest of nature, and language helps us to do this. ...
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...
The origin of language... is a continuing mystery that will probably never be puzzled together satisfactorily. ...the anthropologist Charles Hockett thinks that language grew up precisely around the hunting activities of the man-apes. ... Others, like Weston La Barre, suggest that language grew up in the family, in the simple play-chatter of infants. ... Lewis Mumford offers a similar theory of language growing up in playfulness and by repetition, rather than in practical and technical activities like hunting.
..one thing we are not in the dark about... is the role of language in making man quintessentially human. ...
The cerebral cortex in man is a gray mass of cells that seems to "spill over" into the frontal area of the skull... The cortex evidently aids man to feed his consciousness from within, and to serve as a complex control panel for reactivity to the environment. ...
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... When we talk about the ego we are referring, simply, to the unique process of central control of behavior in a large-brained animal. ... With the ego the organism can hold constant in awareness several conceptual processes and stimuli at one and the same time. This allows the organism to imagine diverse outcomes without immediately acting; it makes reasoned choice possible; it allows the organism a freedom unknown in nature.
...
Freud discovered the ego partly by focusing his attention on the "id" or the "it",...
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...
The id is a world of pictures, emotions, sensory meanings, stamped on the animal in confusion—"confusion," because it takes an ego to sort memories and sensations, to separate, classify and cognitively hold events steady in awareness. ... Only humans know death because the ego fixes time. ... A deer cannot know yesterday from today, or tomorrow from next week:...
Psychoanalysis points out that the ego creates time by "binding" it; that is, the individual gives the world of events a fixed point of self-reference. This is what allows man to live in a symbolic world of his own creation:...
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... In sleep, the "I" gives up its differentiated alertness, and sinks back to rest into the organic bed of undifferentiated sensation. ...
The ego, then, not only organizes perception and bodily control, it also fulfills a protective function for the organism; it is like an alert sentinel. ... In order to handle anxiety in something other than a mere stimulus-response slavery, there has to exist in consciousness an agent to negate the stimulus. ...
...
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...
... Nissen observes in the chimp some processes of purposive delay of behavior and control by the animal itself, quite similar to human mastery. ... Or, consider the chimps in the Orange Park Zoo who, upon seeing visitors enter through a far door, ran to the drinking fountain, filled their mouths with water, and then waited for the close approach of the visitors to the cages before spewing the water out at them! This latter stunt was observed only once, but it seems to testify to putting together in the central control system several disparate stimuli:...
And Hallowell, who has done the most stimulating and
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careful speculation in this area, thinks there is good evidence for what he calls "intrinsic symbolic processes" on the sub-human level. ...
But intrinsic symbolization is not enough. In order to become a social act, the symbol must be joined to some extrinsic mode;...
What they [the chimps] needed for a true ego was a symbolic rallying point, a personal and social symbol—an "I." ... The "I," in a word, has to take shape linguistically. ...
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... The ego thus builds up a world in which it can act with equanimity, largely by naming names:...
Speech, then, is everything that we call specifically human, precisely because without speech there can be no true ego. ...
...
Besides, the "I" is not airy. It is bolstered by a name, a crying claim for recognition that has nothing airy about it; "Nobody can do that to Fred C. Dobbs," muttered Humphrey Bogart in a film, as he suspected others of ganging up on him.
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...
The Self and Self-Objectification
We can understand, then, that the "I" fills out one's world and gives it form, by giving form to oneself. But now some-
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thing else happens... ; it seems that for every great gain in evolution there is a price to pay . If the "I" gives one self-control and precise form, it does so, paradoxically, by initially taking that form and control away from the individual animal. The animal not only loses its instinctive center within itself; it also becomes somewhat split against itself. ...
... each infant becomes conscious of himself first as "me," and then only as an "I." We have since [Kant] been able to confirm that this order is universal: "mine," "me" and then "I." It means, simply, that the child begins to establish himself as an object of others before he becomes an executive subject . He becomes a point of reference in relation to others before he becomes an agent of action for himself. His own slow development seems to create this unusual situation. ...the child's own body seems to come upon his awareness after he has had sustained contact with another body. There seems to be a "piling up" of the infant on himself,... He becomes, in a word, an object to himself;...
This is what we call "self-objectivity" or "self-reflexivity":
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the individual has a self-awareness that enables him to conceptually "back away from himself." We get a feeling of this in the formula "I can think of me." ... Common actions a cat performs hourly with hardly a realization become, with names, heavy with meaning and thrill: "Look, I'm jumping!" The fact is momentous: Man is the only animal—in the universe, for all we know—who sees himself as an object, who can dwell on his own experiences and on his fate. It is this that makes him fully and truly human; it is the most interesting fact about him. ...
...one of the most vital facts about all objects is that they have both an inside and an outside... But, says [G.H.]Mead, dawning consciousness has no awareness of this dualism; the organism knows its insides by direct experience, but it can know its outside boundaries only in relation to others. ...
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... On the other hand, the infant can know the outside of his mother's breast by vision and touch, but has no way of getting a notion that the mother has an inside. Mead concluded that the only way we can give outsides to ourselves, and confer insides upon others, is by "taking the attitude" of the other person toward ourselves. ...the self cannot come into being without using the other as a lever. As the noted sociologist Franklin Giddings once put it: It is not that two heads are better than one, but that two heads are needed for one .
Consciousness, then, is fundamentally a social experience:... A self-reflexive animal, after all, can only get the full meaning of its acts by observing them after they have happened. This is what led William James to remark that we are sad because we cry; in other words we give the full meaning to our crying by dwelling on it after it happens . ...
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... Self-reflexivity gives us a much greater depth of experience, but we lose the animal directness of it.
And so we see the paradox that evolution has handed us. ...[the child] doesn't unfold into the world, the world unfolds into him. ...he often gives the pathetic impression of being a true social puppet, jerked by alien symbols and sounds. What sensitive parent does not have his satisfaction tinged with sadness as the child repeats with such vital earnestness the little symbols that are taught him?
The Self versus the Body
Let us thicken up our discussion a bit, even at the risk of getting ahead of it. The point is that the matter is not so automatic or simple. ... there is a real dualism in human experience. The social identity is largely symbolic , but the experience of one's powers is at first organic. The child builds up a "sense of himself" with symbols, but he also gets this sense by energetic movement, by perception and excitement. He registers self-experience mostly when his own executive actions have been blocked : it is then that he has to "take the role of the other" to see what his act "means." The more blockage, the more the sense of self is symbolic. One of the fascinating things to see in children is that when they have been allowed to be very active, they follow the flow of their own energetic will, and they may only gradually be "broken" into identification and the learning of restraining social symbols.
If the person's social identity is undermined in later life he always has his organism to fall back on; in fact, this is the
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basis for all psychotherapeutic change, as well as for spiritual self-realization. ... The total striving organism is after all greater than the particular world view imposed on it. Often, under severe stress, an individual saves his sanity by learning to fall back on his body, rely on it; he learns to trust nature as it manifests itself in his life-sustaining bodily processes, and stops the interference of his mind... This is why progressive educators from Rousseau to Dewey and Reich have made self-directed activity by the child a basic cornerstone of mental health.
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