The Dilemma of Ernest Becker

Ernest Becker was a cultural anthropologist who took seriously the idea that his field, as a social science, should be able to offer a comprehensive theory of human culture, providing broad and verifiable explanations of individual behavior and social life. He understood that human culture is a consequence of the human search for meaning, and that basic functions of culture include defining what our human situation in reality is and what meaningful and dignified living consists of—what we are, and what the right way of doing things is. But in The Denial of Death and subsequent works, he offered a startling new approach to understanding how culture actually fulfills these functions, and what society requires of individuals if they would contribute to cultural meaning and stability. And in providing this new approach to cultural anthropology, he explicitly relied—in an act of philosophical scholarship both rare and courageous in his social scientific tradition—on Kierkegaard’s anthropology of human existence as “a union of opposites,” as a synthesis of the fiinite and the infinite.

Stated with stark brevity, Becker’s central and most original thesis as presented in The Denial of Death is as follows. As animals to whom self-consciousness has been given, we humans are aware that we will die, and this awareness produces in us a basic anxiety, indeed a fundamental terror, about our vulnerability, the violent ways of nature, and the inevitability of death.Therefore, we devise all sorts of strategies for suppressing awareness of our mortality. This denial of death, says Becker, is one of the basic functions of culture. How does culture manage this? First, by explaining human existence to be part of an enduringly meaningful universe, thus giving each of us a sense that our individual lives are signif i cant and valuable; and second, crucially, by controlling our basic anxiety through the devising of “death-denying hero systems,” or “immortality projects,” that enable us to believe and feel that, through our participation in them, our lives transcend mortal perishing. In the summarizing words of Sam Keen, from his foreword to the 1997 edition of The Denial of Death: “We achieve ersatz immortality by sacrifficing ourselves to conquer an empire, to build a temple, to write a book, to establish a family, to accumulate a fortune, to further progress and prosperity, to create an information-society and global free market.” Through participating in “culturally standardized hero systems” that assure us that our selves or our tasks are of imperishable value, we feel immortal, and render our terror of death unconscious.31

Unfortunately, Becker explains, our projects of immortalizing heroism tend to inflate one specific worldview, or group, or institution—this religion, this nation, this type of government—into the only vehicle of human connection with imperishable meaning. Thus, when human beings encounter alternate belief systems or worldviews, they are experienced as threats—first because each argues for an ultimate truth at least somewhat different from one’s own, and second because the very fact of a plurality of belief systems or worldviews indirectly reveals that one’s own “project” is merely a local and arbitrary construct, a “vital lie” of culture and character, built for protection against the terrifying realities of mortality.32 Because of this we are led, according to Becker, to try to defuse the threat that “otherness” poses to our own immortalizing hero systems, and we pursue this in various ways. We may attempt to convert others to our own beliefs. We may seek to accommodate other points of view, by looking for and finding aspects of them that seem compatible with our own. A cruder, but common, strategy is to denigrate others who do not share our belief systems, belittling and dehumanizing the “others.” Then, as a most thorough solution, we can wage war, attempting to vanquish or even annihilate those whose differences threaten to expose the artificial character of our own “system” for transcending death. Through humiliating, damaging, and defeating the enemy; through mass deportations; through ethnic cleansing and genocide, we can at once eliminate threats to our heroic self-esteem and prove that it is we who are living and fighting in the service of everlasting truth. This, Becker argues, must be understood as the principal source of human violence and war: the inability to tolerate people significantly different from ourselves because to do so would betray the arbitrariness and falsehood of our own death-denying immortality systems, take away our psychological protection against our basic terror, and force us to face our true situation as self-conscious creatures who know that we have to die.33

In The Denial of Death, Becker developed this thesis and its implications for psychoanalysis, addressing ideas of Freud and other humanistic psychologists, especially the (in his view) underappreciated Otto Rank. The critical power and sweep of its central arguments were quickly and widely acknowledged; the book became a best-seller and won the 1974 Pulitzer Prize for general nonfiction. Becker had obviously uncovered one of the hidden main-springs of psychological and cultural life, and shaped a powerful new tool both for ideological critique and for analyzing and redefining psychological “health.”

Where does Kierkegaard fits into this analysis? In chapter 5, titled “The Psychoanalyst Kierkegaard,” Becker enthusiastically presents elements of Kierkegaard’s “psychological expositions” in order to deepen and clarify his own arguments, asserting an essential congruence between Kierkegaard’s understanding of human nature and that offered in The Denial of Death. Throughout the chapter he pays tribute to Kierkegaard’s genius, calling him a “master analyst of the human situation,” a psychologist of “uncanny brilliance” engaged in an “unbelievably subtle” existential analysis that has given us “some of the best empirical analyses of the human condition ever fashioned by man’s mind.” Present-day psychiatry, he claims, “lags far behind” Kierkegaard in its theories of human existence. One reason for this is that Kierkegaard’s analysis exploits to the utmost “the basic insight of psychology for all times”: that a human being is a “union of opposites, of self-consciousness and of physical body”; that this conjoining of self-consciousness with a body subject to death and decay constitutes a paradox; and that “this paradox is the really constant thing about man in all periods of history and society.” Kierkegaard understands, says Becker, that being a “spiritual,” that is, self-conscious, animal— a godlike being, who nevertheless decays and dies—produces in us a fundamental anxiety, or dread, induced by our powerlessness to overcome the ambiguity of our ontological situation. Most impressively, Becker says, in Kierkegaard’s two great works of psychological exposition, The Concept of Anxiety and The Sickness unto Death, he has analyzed in “a broad and incredibly rich portrait of types of human failure” variants of the two elementary ways that we flee from the truth about our situation and its attendant anxiety. These are: (1) our denial of the responsibilities of self-conscious freedom, through immersion in bodily experience or in the givens of society, and (2) our denial of our “animal limitations,” through soaring into fantasies of unlimited possibility, including the fantasy of preservation from death and destruction.34 Kierkegaard’s analysis of the many variants of these two basic types of flight from ontological anxiety, Becker states, enables us to understand how widespread is human denial of the human condition. Kierkegaard shows us how the fatalist, the determinist, the social conformist, the happy consumer, the hedonist, the dreamer or fantasist, the worshiper of technology—even the schizophrenic and the clinical depressive—can all be understood as living “vital lies” of denial with regard to human existence in its given structure as an uneasy conjunction of body and spirit (or, as Kierkegaard puts it, “of  finitude and infinitude”). Each of these types tries to escape the anxiety of the human ontological situation by fleeing either creatureliness (body) or self-conscious freedom (spirit). The dreamer and the technology worshiper defy their creaturely dependence on accidents, evil, and decay. The conformist and the happy consumer dissolve their freedoms into the “social hero-systems” into which they were born. The determinist and the fatalist deny, respectively, the fact and the meaning of freedom. The hedonist, through living for the immediacy of sensations, simultaneously flees spiritual responsibility and tries to take control over the meaning of existence.35 Each can be seen to be trying to escape the anxiety of being that union of opposites, a “spiritual animal”— either by blotting out self-conscious freedom or by denying creatureliness.

Kierkegaard has thus provided the anthropological basis, explains Becker, for recognizing how central to the human psyche are both experiences of basic anxiety and psychological defenses against it, and therefore for an appreciation by cultural anthropology of both the origin and ubiquity of death-denying hero systems. In providing this, he continues, Kierkegaard has given us something even more valuable, the “golden fruit of all his tortuous labors”: he has shown what authentic existence—existence without cultural heroism and the vital lies of character—would look like.36Becker approvingly describes, at the end of his chapter “The Psychoanalyst Kierkegaard,” this true “health,” this au-thentic existence that would face into its basic anxiety, accept the paradox of its being, and accept the knowledge of death.

The authentic person, Becker states, is the one who opens up to and em-braces his or her true human situation—which means, most important, breaking away from the “programmed cultural heroics” designed to protect against awareness of mortality, and fully acknowledging creatureliness and the fragility of existence. Authenticity, writes Becker, requires letting aware-ness of mortality penetrate consciousness to the point where one’s habit-ual sense of self, as constituted and sustained by all the fragility-and-death-denying emotional character armor built up since childhood, is “destroyed, brought down to nothing.” In this psychological process, a person honestly and courageously accepts the nothingness implicit in all f i nite being, aban-dons all dependence on personal, cultural, and worldly assurances of en-during meaning, assurances equally empty. And in this extremity of honesty and courage, a transformation occurs. By dying to all “f i nite being,” the self begins to be able “to see beyond it,” and learns “to relate itself to inf i nitude, to absolute transcendence, to the Ultimate Power of Creation which made f i nite creatures.” The self discovers in the dark night of its abandonment of reliance on f i nitude that there is, after all, a legitimate focus of its search for enduring meaning: one can, in hope and courage, aff i rm that “one’s very creatureliness has some meaning to a Creator,” to a transcendent ground that guarantees one’s personal signif i cance within “an eternal and inf i nite scheme of things.” But this aff i rmation is faith. Faith is that opening and reaching out to inf i nitude, to absolute transcendence, whereby one links one’s “secret inner self” to “the very ground of creation.” This, states Becker, is the culmi-nation of Kierkegaard’s anthropological analysis and his ultimate message, with which Becker here concurs: human authenticity, with its full emotional acceptance of mortality, is based upon and impossible without that religious faith through which “the invisible mystery” at the heart of a creature “attains cosmic signif i cance by aff i rming its connection with the invisible mystery at the heart of creation.”37

In his approval of Kierkegaard’s account of genuine religious faith and its role in authentic human living, Becker appears here to have fully embraced Kierkegaard’s anthropology, which affirms precisely that human existence is a union of the finite and the infinite, of time and eternity. If a human being is capable of affirming the connection between his or her own “invisible mystery” and “the invisible mystery at the heart of creation,” then human consciousness is necessarily both immanent and transcendent.

Kierkegaard himself is eloquently detailed on the matter. “A human being,” he explains,

is a synthesis of the infinite and the finite, of the temporal and the eternal, of freedom and necessity. . . . The self is the conscious synthesis of infinitude and finitude that [in self-consciousness] relates itself to itself, whose task is to become itself, which can be done only through the relationship to God. To become oneself is to become concrete. But to become concrete is neither to become finite nor to become infinite, for that which is to become concrete is indeed a synthesis. . . . [From this may be derived] the formula for faith: in relating itself to itself and in willing to be itself, the self rests transparently in the power [God] that established it.38

A self can, Kierkegaard states, through willing to be itself, “rest transparently in God” because human consciousness is the site where eternal being enters time. Each “moment” of conscious experience, of self-presence, is “that ambiguity in which time and eternity touch each other”; human temporality is that flow of conscious presence “whereby time constantly intersects eternity and eternity constantly pervades time.” Therefore, human beings experience anxiety (angst): anxiety proclaims our concern over the possible uses of our freedom in the task of bringing our fragile, sexed, mortal lives into attunement with the eternal ground of our being.39 This is an anthropology that serves as a sharp rebuke, and a therapeutic antidote, to modern immanentist anthropologies, and through his analysis and embrace of Kierkegaard Becker appears to be in a position to usefully exploit it in his own social science. He seems ready to recover a conception of human nature that accounts for our native orientation to transcendent meaning by affirming—along with Jaspers, Scheler, Marcel, Levinas, Lonergan, and Voegelin—that human existence is life in the In-Between of immanence and transcendence.

In fact, though, we find neither the articulation nor the development of such an anthropology either in subsequent chapters of The Denial of Death or in its successor and companion volume, Escape from Evil, Becker’s final work. Kierkegaard’s ontology of human existence is nowhere to be found in their often brilliant discussions of psychology, religion, culture, and the human sources of violence and evil, which instead consistently portray human beings, in typical modernist fashion, as purely immanent animals who just happen to have the productive and ennobling, but also tragic and self-torturing, appurtenance of self-consciousness.

This divergence from Kierkegaard may be seen even in the chapter “The Psychoanalyst Kierkegaard,” where some of Becker’s conclusions about the import of Kierkegaard’s analysis clearly deviate from those drawn by the philosopher himself. For instance, at one point Becker states that, in Kierkegaard’s analysis of anxiety, “the final terror of self-consciousness is the knowledge of one’s own death.” In another place, he indicates that, for Kierkegaard, the “prison” of inauthentic character is “built to deny one thing and one thing alone: one’s creatureliness. The creatureliness is the terror.”40 Neither of these assertions accurately portrays Kierkegaard’s own understanding.

For Kierkegaard, the basic anxiety of consciousness is not over the fact that one is finite and mortal. It is a response to the fact that one is finite and transcends finitude—that one participates in time as a fragile, sexed, and mortal creature and participates in the eternal, nonfinite being that transcends mortality. Human inauthenticity, the “sickness unto death” with which we are all infected, is not simply the result of shrinking from mortality, but of our despair over the task of accepting and reconciling both dimensions of our nature, the temporal and the eternal. The basic anxiety that belongs to the “sickness unto death” is not simply the terror of annihilation and its indignity, but anxiety that wells up from the recognition that we are responsible both for facing up to our creatureliness and to the claims of the eternal upon us, claims that transcend the transitory domain of physical death.41Becker misconstrues Kierkegaard by overstressing one side of his account of the origins of anxiety: the threat of meaninglessness posed by death. Kierkegaard himself emphasizes that an equal, if not greater, source of anxiety and despair is the threat of mismanaged participation in eternal being.

For Kierkegaard, then, a human being is truly a “union of opposites,” a uniting of animal being with the “immortalizing presence” that makes of that very being a paradox. For Becker, on the contrary, a human being is not really a synthesis of temporal and eternal, finite and infinite, but merely a creature that happens to be “self-conscious”—a creature burdened with a secondary or ancillary capacity to have ideas or thoughts, including thoughts of mortality and timelessness. Despite his justified admiration for and use of Kierkegaard’s analyses of existential failure, which offer profound support for Becker’s insight into the extent to which the denial of death—as one pervasive form of the denial of the human condition—shapes human life and culture, Becker does not really take advantage of Kierkegaard’s anthropological exposition. To do so would require a radical break with the immanentist subject of modern social science, for whom transcendent being can be only a mental invention or projection—and this break Becker is not able or willing to engage in.42 Thus, his embrace of Kierkegaard in The Denial of Death involves Becker in a sort of philosophical confusion, or dilemma, that he is unable to resolve. He recognizes Kierkegaard’s genius as a “master analyst of the human situation” whose insights both reveal the origins and extent of death denial and explain what it means to live a life without such denial. He cannot, however, incorporate either Kierkegaard’s actual anthropology or his explication of the authentic life of faith into his own psychological and cultural critique, because immanentist assumptions about human nature and human knowing prevent the Kierkegaardian insights from taking hold.43

Becker’s dilemma is perfectly represented in his approach to the notion of immortality. He shares with Kierkegaard a passionate, derisive criticism of those who are certain of their personal immortality, as if eternal being were their possession, and who often bolster that sense of certitude and possession through the denigration and victimization of others. The idea of immortality is seen by both thinkers as a perennial source of self-delusion, smug egotism, false heroics, and injustice. For all this, though, the symbol immortality clearly has, for Kierkegaard, an authentic and justifable meaning and function. It is one of the symbols we use to make sense of our experiences of eternal and nonfinite being, to stand for the questions and hopes and images that arise from our mysterious participation in transcendence.44 However, in Becker’s Denial of Death and Escape from Evil, notions of immortality are always linked to inauthentic and self-deluded human yearnings to escape mortality. While Becker acknowledges that human beings subscribe to what he calls “immortality ideologies” because of a love of and longing for fuller life, for him any thoughts of imperishable meaning are always in part a “reflex of the death-anxiety,” so that the notion of immortality is always, for him, both a promise and a lie.45 To be true to his own insights into authentic existence in “The Psychoanalyst Kierkegaard,” Becker would have to acknowledge legitimate and salutary—as well as self-delusory and destructive—functions of the symbol immortality. Correspondingly, he would have to incorporate into his work a careful distinction between, on the one hand, the false heroics of inauthentic religious faith, which seeks primarily self-righteous certitude and self-inflation, and, on the other hand, the genuine heroics of authentic faith, which accepts the human condition as it is and stands open to the risks and mysteries of participation in transcendent meaning—the faith exemplifled by Zen masters, Socrates, Gandhi, and Martin Luther King Jr [???]. But these distinctions are not developed, and Becker’s cultural anthropology—with its bold embrace of ideas that challenges the narrow conventions of contemporary social science—leaves human beings still only groping for transcendence, rather than struggling with the mystery of its presence.46

Becker’s dilemma is that of a scientist who knows that the data he has isolated are of profound importance, but who can only interpret them in terms of a familiar but faulty theoretical paradigm. The data pertain to the desire to invest human life with imperishable meaning. Relying as he does on the faulty theoretical model of the modern, immanentist subject—who does not participate in eternal reality but merely has ideas about it—Becker interprets this concern as signifying primarily a denial of mortality. However, what our concern with imperishable meaning signifies primarily is awareness of existing in-between finite being and transcendent divine presence. Becker is not wrong to insist that the human fascination with transcending death is an important key to establishing a new and profound cultural anthropology. But it does not unlock for him the anthropological theory our age needs: one that breaks completely with the immanentist model of consciousness and history, and reestablishes at the core of psychological and social science the fundamental insight that human existence participates in the understanding, freedom, and creativity of divine transcendent being. Becker had amassed many of the clues—especially in Kierkegaard’s psychological expositions— that would have allowed him to make this breakthrough. Why were they not sufficient? What would have enabled him to do so?

Our account of differentiating consciousness indicates at least part of the answer. The history and significance of human grappling with transcendent meaning cannot be understood without a clear grasp of (1) the primary experience of the cosmos, in which the whole of reality including its transcendent ground is experienced as an undifferentiated oneness, and (2) the elementary differentiating process wherein meditative acts lead to the conceptual separation of immanent and transcendent realms. As with most contemporary intellectuals, in Becker there is no theoretical acknowledgment of the primary, predifferentiated experience of the cosmos; no meditative reenactment of the experiences of religious and philosophical genius through which the transcendent realm of meaning was first conceptually distinguished and the mystery of our participation in it clarified; no critical apprehension that the realms of science and human interiority become accessible only because of the prior differentiation between divine transcendence and a conceptually autonomous immanent universe; and consequently, no solution to the anthropological dilemmas of our age, which require a theory of human consciousness that explicitly recognizes that transcendent meaning cannot be understood without a clear grasp of (1) the primary experience of the cosmos, in which the whole of reality including its transcendent ground is experienced as an undifferentiated oneness, and (2) the elementary differentiating process wherein meditative acts lead to the conceptual separation of immanent and transcendent realms. As with most contemporary intellectuals, in Becker there is no theoretical acknowledgment of the primary, predifferentiated experience of the cosmos; no meditative reenactment of the experiences of religious and philosophical genius through which the transcendent realm of meaning was first conceptually distinguished and the mystery of our participation in it clarified; no critical apprehension that the realms of science and human interiority become accessible only because of the prior differentiation between divine transcendence and a conceptually autonomous immanent universe; and consequently, no solution to the anthropological dilemmas of our age, which require a theory of human consciousness that explicitly recognizes that transcendent meaning is a given presence in consciousness—that our longing for transcendence is not an act of desperation, as Becker proclaims, but rather the natural longing to clarify what we already experience.

A psychology or cultural anthropology (or any other science, or philosophy) that truly addresses the needs of our times requires above all a critical appreciation of the differentiating process, without which science cannot understand what it itself is: the uncovering of one of the realms of meaning—the realm of systematic explanations of things, of their intrinsic properties and uniform interactions—by a human consciousness whose questioning is created and drawn by the ground of being, the divine partner whose presence both permeates the finite world and illuminates that very consciousness with the revelation of divine transcendence.

from the book Transcendence and History The Search for Ultimacy from Ancient Societies to Postmodernity by Glenn Hughes