Chapters
Shownotes Transcript
Hello! If you value the show as an educational resource and you want to be a part of keeping philosophy available for everybody out there for years to come, support the show at patreon.com slash philosophizethis. Hope you love the show today. So last time, we ended by talking about a key point in Becker's work. He draws our attention to what seems to be several striking resemblances that exist between the functions of religion and culture within society.
And it's interesting because it's not uncommon to think of these two things as completely distinct from one another. You know, it's not uncommon to find on the one hand, someone who believes that religion is the truth. Religion is the bedrock of this reality and that anything created by culture is just the best us mere mortals have managed to cobble together so far. Culture is subservient to religion in this worldview. On the other hand, not uncommon to find someone who believes that culture...
Culture is all that we have. Culture is all that we'll ever have. And that religion is a mere outpouring of culture. One single cultural relic of thousands. That the function of religion in many ways has been to help keep culture together. In other words, religion is subservient to culture in this worldview.
But as we heard, Becker's going to say that both these viewpoints are illusions. That both religion and culture serve as an elaborate mechanism purposefully constructed to help people quell this otherwise constant state of terror that comes along with the fact that we are a type of creature that carries with it a conscious awareness of its death. Now,
There are a lot of different ways that we do this. But if you wanted to break it down into two primary classes that the majority of these death denials fall into, you could break it down into one, the immortality projects we talked about last episode, the set of illusions and cultural ideals that we connect ourselves to. And number two, a class of behaviors that Becker's going to refer to as transference objects.
By using the word "transference," Becker's going to be referring to the phenomenon within the field of psychology when someone who usually has been through some stuff will transfer certain intense feelings they carry inside of themselves onto some sort of object of obsession. A common example people will cite of this is when a patient who is undergoing psychotherapy will fall in love with their therapist, making the therapist in this case, in Becker's words, a "transference object."
But this is not the only way people use transference objects to get rid of intense negative feelings. And you can guess which particular intense negative feelings people are trying to get rid of to Becker: death denial.
And as he says, people will do this sort of thing in all kinds of interesting, creative ways. People make leaders into transference objects. This could be the president of your country, leader of a movement, host of a show, author, your boss, your parents. People make careers and lifestyles into transference objects. People will make their lovers into transference objects. People will do this with their online status. You know, how many likes do I have on my post from earlier? How important do the other scared people of the world think I am today?
People will do this with money or with their car. People do this with shoe collections. You know those people that have like 600 pairs of shoes and eight pairs of socks? It's funny. What they're collecting, Becker would say, is essentially a bunch of different Froot Loop colored reminders of their fear of death. They strap them onto their feet, make sure they're looking extra shiny today, and then gallivant around town showing off their fear of death to everyone around them. Point is...
Whatever the transference object, the real point of it is to deify something or someone within our own personal cultural religion. And then like a struggling Sisyphus trying to feel some sort of relief from the weight of this conscious death that we're all carrying around on our back, we push this object up onto this constructed, exalted pedestal where this thing becomes the sole determinant of our legitimacy.
For example, if the grand leader tells me that I'm acting like a good person today in their eyes, then I know I'm behaving in the proper way a person should be behaving. If my partner says I'm making them happy today, look at how good you're doing today. I must be. If I'm climbing the ranks of my career, if I'm being a good vegan, if there's enough zeros in my bank account, the point of all of these is to transfer the moment of judgment that I might otherwise have to have with myself
onto some deified object that serves the exact same function of a god and a religion, an object that will provide me with an eternal judgment of my worth. I turn to this object for direction as to how I should be living, so it helps me with my fear of insignificance. I turn to this object waiting to be judged as to whether I'm worthy of immortality within culture, so it helps me with my fear of impermanence.
Becker thinks all this may have ultimately come from tactics we developed as children to help deal with our fears. The idea is that when you're very little, every problem that comes up can seem like the biggest problem that's ever faced the human species. I mean, when you're five, something being on the counter too high up for you to reach can seem like an existential crisis. And for all intents and purposes, it is.
But then your parents come along. That 5'4", nearsighted dude in his majestic sweatpants comes along. And when he hands you the toy that you wanted off the counter as a five-year-old kid, it can be hard to tell the difference between that man and the Messiah who has returned to save us. The Elohim of the kitchen.
At a certain level, this is how it feels to us as kids. And so when you get older and you move out of the house and you graduate your sixth year of community college and you're faced with the terrorizing fear of insignificance and impermanence, what do you do at that point? Becker's saying maybe you find some other object in your life to transfer these fears onto. Now,
Another very important concept in the structure of most major religions is the idea of human evil. Whether that's a call for people to try to eradicate human evil, or from the perspective of the other side, people doing evil things on behalf of some religious creed that they're immersed in. We've talked on the show a few times about something that's traditionally been known as a theodicy. Which, in this context, the word theodicy is going to translate to mean a justification for God.
But why would God need a justification for anything? It's God. The most common example is that philosophers and theologians over the years have tried to offer a justification for the existence of evil in the world. The question's a basic one that we've all heard before. How could a God that is involved in human affairs allow for such magnitudes of suffering and injustice to go on without choosing to intervene?
Now there have been hundreds of answers to this question offered known as theodicies, but when Becker sets out to write one of his greatest works called "Escape from Evil," the more accurate term for what he's trying to accomplish is to write what you could call an "anthropodicy," meaning that Becker's not interested in coming up with an explanation for why a god that he doesn't believe in would ever allow this kind of stuff to go on in the first place. And yet he remains fascinated by the existence of human evil.
What he's doing is something that he thought was surprisingly underexplored in the sciences during the time that he was doing his work. He's asking the question from an anthropological perspective: Why do people commit evil against other people? Why is it part of our seemingly religious nature to sometimes do horrible things? But the immediate question that comes up after that, that's probably far more important to Becker, is not "why do we do it?"
But how is it possible that people often feel so good when they commit evil acts against other people? The answer, as you've probably guessed by now, is going to be connected to this denial of death. But how he gets there is going to have larger implications in the rest of his work. Remember at the beginning of last episode, human existence to Becker is characterized in terms of a fundamental duality.
We have on one hand a biological existence and on the other a symbolic existence. The creation of immortality projects, the transference of this burden onto other objects, these are ways that we deny the fragile biological side of our existence and retreat purely into the symbolic side of our existence. In other words, the symbolic side of your existence more or less becomes the entire way that you view your identity.
But remember from last episode, the whole symbolic side of your existence and everyone else's is just made up of a set of illusions. That's all your symbolic identity really is. Nobody has a death grip on objectivity. So what your life becomes as you interact with other people and go on about your life
is the ongoing process of your set of illusions coming into contact with other people's sets of illusions. And most of the time your illusions are going to line up nicely with other people's. You guys can roast marshmallows and do whatever it is you're going to do. Everything's going to be fine. But sometimes one person's set of illusions becomes mutually exclusive to another person's set of illusions. Sometimes a person will run into somebody and they're having a conversation with them and they have this moment of realization
Where, if what the other person is saying here is actually true, then it calls into question the core of my identity. It calls into question the core of my existence. If what this other person is saying is true, then my symbolic existence is no longer legitimate.
But remember, the symbolic existence is all that we have left after our denial of death. So what Becker is really saying here is that when someone sufficiently calls into question our set of illusions, it feels to us as though it's become a matter of life and death.
And this of course extends beyond just ourselves directly to our in-groups, our families, our countries, our religions, our political groups, any entity that people work to make sure lives on long after they die and they feel threatened if it doesn't. Becker says, "No wonder men go into a rage over the fine points of belief. If your adversary wins the argument about truth, you die. Your immortality system has been shown to be fallible. Your life becomes fallible."
History, then, can be understood as a succession of ideologies that console for death." What he's saying here is an important point to emphasize further. Because part of the strength of Becker's analysis here is that it is not just a theodicy. It's not merely an explanation for why God allows people to do evil things sometimes. Becker's anthropodicy can explain hostility between people on many different levels of severity.
Because regardless of the stakes, whether it's a declaration of war, all the way down to just a heated disagreement at the dinner table, when one person's set of illusions is at large against another's, there is no official due process to mediate that situation. When somebody's symbolic identity is called into question, their very existence is called into question. And that could be anything. That could be two people in the Walmart parking lot arguing over a container of chili mac from the deli.
That could be two friends intensely debating important political issues. That could be your parents screaming at each other in the middle of the night. All these can seem confusing to an outsider. And it can be easy to misread the situation that's going on. It can be easy to think that these people who are arguing, they just disagree about the issues here. Why are they getting so mad about everything? But it goes much deeper than that. To some people, it starts to feel like a matter of life and death.
To put a gun to the head of my illusions and to pull the trigger becomes an act of murder.
And again to Becker, no wonder we see otherwise perfectly reasonable people that are so willing to dehumanize and silence another group of people whose beliefs threaten their symbolic identity. No wonder we see people out of fear allowing themselves to be molded by people in media who financially benefit from that systematic division. No wonder, Becker thinks, that if you were to sit someone down and you were to ask them to recount the most meaningful moments of their lives, the greatest moments of triumph that they've ever had,
All too frequently, the moments that they're going to mention came about when they were in some sort of conflict with other people. When their set of illusions triumphed over another set of illusions. Becker's going to ask, what does that say about us as human beings? Where do these evil acts truly originate from? Are there just evil babies being born out there? Is all evil just some variation of mental illness?
Was Socrates right in saying that all evil is born of ignorance? None of these theories are a sufficient answer to the question to Becker. The reality about the senseless killing of other people, he says, is that we often kill out of joy.
People kill like they're wiping off the counter at their house. They feel satisfied after having done it. Point is, not everybody who kills in the name of some set of illusions was born an evil mustachioed baby when they flew out of the birth canal. He says, quote, the man who dropped the atomic bomb is the warm, gentle boy who grew up next door, end quote.
Becker would want us to consider that sometimes the things we think are the most valorous to another person in another situation, those exact same acts, are of equal magnitudes heinous and delusional. And once again, it's important to remember that this dehumanization manifests on many different levels of intensity, sometimes within the very institutions that we hold dear within society. For example, there was a group of scientists that did a set of studies setting out to test the theories of Becker's work. The hypothesis was simple.
If Becker's theory about evil is correct, then we might be able to see a difference in people's judgment levels when asked about a group that is usually their perceived "other" in the world, if they are reminded of their death right before being asked to render a verdict. One study was of judges that were asked to set a bond amount for criminals that had committed a crime. The judges reminded of their death directly before making a decision set a higher bond amount for the criminals on average. Another study looked at a group of Christian people and asked them a bunch of questions about people who were Jewish.
Once again, the group reminded of their death had significantly more critical things to say on average. Now of course, one study doesn't prove anything at a scientific level. But it is interesting and it does say something about the rest of Becker's work. And we should probably take a second to pause here and just say a couple things. Ernest Becker. You know, as interesting as his work has been so far throughout these past two episodes, the dude's kinda... the dude's kinda mean. Not mean, but just
You've got to admit that what he's laid out so far seems to be a pretty pessimistic worldview. Like, can I get some relief, Commodore Becker? Can I get a Tylenol, Dr. Becker, for this existential headache? You're beating me over the head with your death book all the time. In other words, what hope does Becker offer in his work? Well, this is where we can start to see it.
Because even if it may be true that a short-term consideration of our death could possibly cause us to feel greater levels of tribalism protecting ourselves and our in-groups, what may also be true, Becker thinks, is that maybe a more thoroughgoing, long-form rumination on our death could produce the opposite effect. Maybe there's a possibility for what Becker and other thinkers have historically referred to as transcendence. There's mixed reviews about this concept of transcendence in Becker's work.
Some people see it as a bit of an afterthought, thrown in near the end of his life as something to put a smile on an otherwise grim, helpless picture. But many scholars of Becker think this idea of transcendence may have always been where Becker intended on going with his work, and that if anything, they lament the fact that he didn't live long enough to elaborate on the concept more.
In any case, what I want to do is give you Becker's words on the matter. They were written in the latter half of the 20th century, so it's not going to require much exegesis on my part as your philosophy podcast sherpa. Plus, I want to have enough respect for the listeners of this show to give people the breathing room to draw their own conclusions sometimes.
Regardless, what I want to do, as Sherpa of this mountain, and in consideration of the fact that this is ultimately an installment in the Creation of Meaning series, I want to compare Becker's idea of transcendence to some of the other philosophers we talked about, namely Albert Camus and Soren Kierkegaard, because I think all three of these thinkers are ultimately treading on similar ground here.
But let's start with Becker. Referencing the cultural heroism and immortality projects we talked about last time, he lays down this famous passage describing self-transcendence. He says, quote,
And by doing so, he opens himself up to infinity, to the possibility of cosmic heroism. He links his secret inner self, his authentic talent, his deepest feelings of uniqueness, to the very ground of creation. Out of the ruins of the broken cultural self, there remains the mystery of the private, invisible inner self, which yearned for the ultimate significance.
"This invisible mystery at the heart of the creature now attains cosmic significance by affirming its connection with the invisible mystery at the heart of creation." End quote. Couple clarifications to help you draw your own conclusions. The primary distinction he's making in that passage is between the cultural heroism that we're typically immersed in and the cosmic heroism that can be found when you achieve a type of transcendence where you destroy those character lies that culture gives you that we talked about last time.
Also important to clarify, what does he mean by this invisible mystery at the heart of the creature that connects with the invisible?
Well, this invisible that we're connecting with through transcendence, no doubt is referring to what people sometimes call God. It's in reference to the idea that we often find ourselves, like the protagonist of this series, caught up in these earthly affairs where we desperately seek the meaning to things. The problem, Becker thinks, is that we have this expectation as we go along in that quest that there can be any sort of coherent, obvious translation of that ultimate significance to us as individuals.
But why do we just assume that that's the case? See, the fact is to Becker, the universe does have some sort of ultimate significance. You'll just never know what it is. And no matter how small, your actions do play a significant part in whatever sort of operation is playing out on a cosmic level. You're just never going to know what that significance is.
You can't know. That ultimate significance doesn't speak to you. It doesn't come to you in your dreams. You don't read it by laying out some tarot cards and lighting some aromatherapy candles in your dining room. It is effectively invisible to you, is what he means. But, important to ask, does that necessarily mean that you can't connect with the invisible?
Part of what he's saying is that it may be the case that by connecting with the invisible, it opens up a mode of existence that is otherwise unavailable to the vast majority of human beings on this planet. A mode of existence where you don't really see yourself as this all-important monkey that's gonna live forever because you figured out the ultimate truth to the universe.
but instead just one monkey of eight billion monkeys that are all in this together. What Becker's saying is that ironically, by abandoning the delusional pursuit towards gaining immortality through our personal set of illusions,
we can actually find a way to feel closer to one another. All equally meaningless, yet together within that dilemma. That world of dehumanization and silencing of the other can potentially turn into a world more interested in empathy and actually trying to view things from all sides. Becker thinks this concept of the invisible is an extremely powerful tool to have on your side as you navigate this chaotic existence.
Remember, he's saying this after making the case that we are fundamentally a religious sort of creature. And he thinks this is why shifting our perspective towards the cosmic, the silent, the invisible, when we do this, this is why something like the archetype of the Christian God in particular has been so effective at dealing with this fear of insignificance and impermanence. He talks about it here, quote, "...religion answers directly to the problem of transference by expanding awe and terror to the cosmos where they belong."
It also takes the problem of self-justification and removes it from the objects near at hand. We no longer have to please those around us, but the very source of creation. The powers that created us, not those into whose lives we accidentally fell. Our life ceases to be a reflexive dialogue with the standards of our wives, husbands, friends, and leaders, and becomes instead measured by standards of the highest heroism. Ideals truly fit to lead us on and beyond ourselves.
In this way we fill ourselves with independent values, can make free decisions, and most important, can lean on powers that really support us and do not oppose us. The personality can truly begin to emerge in religion because God, as an abstraction, does not oppose the individual as others do, but instead provides the individual with all the powers necessary for independent self-justification.
Ultimately, what Becker's offering here, by way of hope in this otherwise grim picture that he's painting, is a path that lies beyond cultural heroism, beyond self-justification.
And the reason the archetype of a god has been so helpful to people throughout human history is because it can get us out of that reflexive dialogue with the culture around us and instead gives us an abstraction to relate to. But more than that, what Becker's saying is that in a way, it is only after you've abandoned this otherwise default pursuit towards finding a way to connect to some ultimate meaning within human culture, it's only then that you can actually start to live with truly independent values.
It's only then that you can start to get a taste of true freedom. And this, this is going to have some similarities to the later work of Camus. We've had a couple episodes of the podcast on Camus, mostly talking about the myth of Sisyphus or his relationship to Sartre. But one thing we didn't talk about is his concept of revolt.
Camus was an absurdist. So he doesn't believe that you can sit down in a library, think about stuff a lot, and then arrive at any sort of ultimate enduring meaning that's going to inform your life no matter what comes your way. No, this universe is fundamentally an absurd universe to Camus.
To try to find meaning is like trying to find Easter eggs on Christmas. And what I mean by that is it's like trying to find some ritualistic human created delusion within yet another ritualistic human created delusion and then being disappointed when you don't find it.
See, if you were the protagonist of this series, and you've more or less spent your life sifting through human culture, looking for the meaning of life, looking for some greater purpose of the universe that's gonna get you springing out of bed into your house slippers every morning, only to get to what seems like the end of the road, disappointed that there doesn't seem to be one, Camus would probably say, "Congratulations, here's your certificate for graduating the first grade of human existence." Because arriving at that conclusion is far from the end of the road. This is inspiring.
In fact, in many ways to Camus, you've only just found your way to the race, and you've only just made it to the starting line. The big question now that you've made it to the starting line is what are you going to do next?
His concept of revolting against this state of affairs is an example of one coherent philosophical response in his work. He says, quote, End quote.
Now what does he mean by revolt? Well, at the risk of sounding redundant for two sentences in relation to the other episodes we've done on him, what he's contrasting this with in his work are obviously the two other possible responses when faced with the absurdity of the universe.
You can either choose to commit suicide, which doesn't actually solve the problem at all to Camus, or you can commit a sort of philosophical suicide by adhering to some transcendent doctrine. Two examples he gives are Christianity and Communism, though there are many others. Once again, both of these don't solve the actual problem. They just allow the believer to live their lives with a blindfold on to all the true complexity and absurdity of human existence. The solution to Camus lies somewhere in the middle.
Somewhere that we can face the absurdity of existence without having to cling on to some sort of ultimate system of meaning. He says, quote, "One of the only coherent philosophical positions is thus revolt. It is a constant confrontation between man and his own obscurity. It is an insistence upon an impossible transparency. It challenges the world anew every second. It is not aspiration, for it is devoid of hope.
"That revolt is the certainty of a crushing fate without the resignation that ought to accompany it." End quote. Now one thing Camus makes very clear is that it is within this state of revolt that you can find a type of freedom in your existence that's just not available to the average person immersed in the traditional search for meaning that most of us find ourselves in. And notice the similarities to Becker's work. You could call this a type of transcendence.
In this place to Camus, the freedom that we're exercising moment to moment is grounded in the absurd. It's grounded in the certainty of our death. Not some immortality project. Not in a transference object. Think of freedom in this way, as a sort of absurdist anchor. People say things all the time like there's nothing certain in life but death and taxes. Here's Camus making a similar claim from an absurdist point of view.
Because ironically, the only thing we can be sure of is the absurdity of the universe and again, that crushing fate as he calls it, our impending demise. And it's only from these two places that we can truly start to live fully. And herein lies the overlap that can be helpful for our protagonist. That you can spend your whole life agonizing over how to create a system of meaning. How do I do it? To worry about which values you want to bring about. What grounds the legitimacy of one set of values over another?
But paradoxically, Camus was saying, the entire process of creating meaning may be the very thing that's preventing you from living fully. That it's not until you abandon all hope of the delusion of human meaning that you can ever start seeing the world clearly, without that constant prejudice of always looking for the meaning of everything, always needing some project that you're working on, ruminating on the question, why does this or that thing matter so much? But as we talked about in the Kierkegaard episode of this series,
The lily of the field and the bird of the air live in a sort of eternal present, where questions concerning why they do what they do, why does the lily bloom, these questions don't even really make sense from that perspective. Well, similar to the lily and the bird, it's only the person that learns to see the world in a wireless sort of way that is ever able to access an extremely important aspect of life that lies outside the realm of human concerns and projects.
Now, I can obviously go much more into Camus if that's something people make me aware would be cool to listen to, but I don't want to get too far off task here. The man of the hour is Ernest Becker, and what's important to realize about Becker's work, I think, is that regardless of whether you ever achieve transcendence or even have the faintest of aspirations in that direction, none of this precludes you from hearing what I think is the larger message that's being transmitted here.
Becker is not saying that we need to be okay with the fact that we're going to die. He doesn't think we should learn to live without illusions. The point that we can take from his work is that maybe just being aware of these illusions can help us learn to contend with them. Maybe by being aware of our very human tendency toward immortality projects of all varieties, maybe that can help us recognize where the desire to dehumanize or silence another group is actually coming from. And maybe if we can get there,
maybe we can learn to differentiate between which of these illusions we cling to are life-affirming, which ones serve others, which ones are not in fact a direct threat to our existence, which of those promote the freedom, dignity, and hope of other people, and then on the other hand, which of these illusions are just about us being immortal? A desperate attempt to calm a scared monkey that doesn't like the idea of not being the most important monkey in the world.
Maybe Becker's analysis is valuable in and of itself, without needing any sort of philosophical antidote prescribed after. But maybe it's even more simple than that. You know, if you're the protagonist of this series, disinterested universe, trying to create a system of meaning, just the mere consideration of death and how present it is in our thoughts and all that it has to teach us, that can be a useful takeaway from Becker's work as well.
And of course death teaches us some things that are just obvious. But aside from any death-related platitudes, I think death is particularly helpful when it comes to the protagonist of this series. Because more so than probably any other event that happens to us in our lives, death is something that is capable of instantly tying a bow on top of a completed work. Your life.
and then giving the events of your life meaning. What I mean is, you know, obviously if you could live forever, then you could do everything in this world. You could actually do every single possible thing that is available to you.
But the very fact that we're going to die someday puts an end point on the events of your life. It puts a period on the end of the sentence. In other words, we move out of the eternal realm of the lily and the bird and instead move into a more temporal realm where our past, present, and future actually become relevant concepts. And it is at this point that all of a sudden, the things we chose to do with our time here begin to take shape.
The fact that someone took the day off and decided to spend it with you doing something fun, all of a sudden that becomes meaningful. The fact that someone would take what little time they have to find some way to live in service to others, all of a sudden that becomes a sacrifice that we all respect. Death reminds us, if nothing else, of the finite nature of our lives. It reminds us that the clock is always ticking, and that when it comes to anything meaningful you decide you want to do with the time that you have left on this planet,
Death reminds us that it is probably better to drink the draining seconds of your life rather than to sit around and die a thirst waiting. Thank you for listening. I'll talk to you next time.