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The Denial of Death Pdf FREE THE DENIAL OF DEATH PDF Ernest Becker,Daniel Goleman | 336 pages | 04 Aug 1997 | Simon & Schuster Ltd | 9780684832401 | English | London, United Kingdom The Denial of Death - Ernest Becker - Google книги Socrates is urging us to face into our mortality and to let an awareness of death purify our motives. I think that Becker and Socrates The Denial of Death both on the money. So I want here to investigate these two responses and follow out some of their consequences. As a cultural anthropologist, Becker was searching for explanations of why human society develops in the way that it does, and he was particularly interested in why human society is so violent, why different social groups are so intolerant and hateful of each other. By the time of writing The Denial of Death, his ninth book, he had reached the conclusion that he had found a very important explanatory principle for understanding human behavior and human culture. This principle, summarized with extreme brevity, is as follows. Human beings are mortal, and we know it. Our sense of vulnerability and mortality gives rise to a basic The Denial of Death, even a terror, about our situation. So we devise all sorts of strategies to escape awareness of The Denial of Death mortality and vulnerability, as well as our anxious awareness of it. This psychological denial of death, Becker claims, is one of the most basic drives in individual behavior, and is reflected throughout human culture. Indeed, one of the main functions of culture, according to Becker, is The Denial of Death help us successfully avoid awareness of our mortality. And how does culture perform this crucial function? By making The Denial of Death feel certain that we, or realities we are part of, are permanent, invulnerable, eternal. First, at the personal level, by ignoring our mortality and vulnerability we build up an unreal sense of self, and we act out of a false sense of who and what we are. That is, we identify with a religious group, or a political group, or engage in some kind of cultural activity, or adopt a certain culturally sanctioned viewpoint, that we invest with ultimate meaning, and to which we ascribe absolute and permanent truth. This inflates us with a sense of invulnerable righteousness. And then, we have to protect ourselves against the exposure of our absolute truth being just one more mortality-denying system among others, which we can only do by insisting that all other absolute truths are false. So we attack and degrade—preferably kill—the adherents of different mortality- denying-absolute-truth systems. So the Protestants kill the Catholics; the Muslims vilify the Christians and vice The Denial of Death upholders of the American way of life denounce Communists; the Communist Khmer Rouge slaughters all the intellectuals in Cambodia; the Spanish Inquisition tortures heretics; and all good students of the Enlightenment demonize religion as the source of all evil. The list could go on and on. In my view, Ernest Becker was right about this core thesis. I think it is accurate to say that a denial of death pervades human culture, and that it is one of the deepest sources of The Denial of Death, aggression, and human evil. The notion of immortality systems is an especially useful diagnostic tool. It is easy to spot people including oneself, of course clinging to absolute truths in the way he describe—and it is not hard to understand why they do. It is not just anxiety over physical vulnerability. It goes deeper than that. We all want out lives to have meaning, and death suggests that life adds up to nothing. People want desperately for their lives to really count, to be finally real. If you think about it, most all of us try to found our identities on something whose meaning seems permanent or enduring: the nation, the race, the revolutionary vision; the timelessness of art, the truths of science, immutable philosophical verities, the law of self-interest, the pursuit of happiness, the law of survival; cosmic energy, the rhythms of nature, the gods, Gaia, the Tao, Brahman, Krishna, Buddha-consciousness, the Torah, Jesus. But then again: is this true for every person with a passionate commitment to a meaning that endures? Are there Buddhists or Christians, for example, whose convictions and commitments do not constitute an evasion of mortality—who on the contrary face up to and embrace their mortality? In The Denial of Death, Becker tells us that there certainly are such people. Becker affirms, then, that it is possible to face up to the human situation. The denial of death is not inevitable. But what must be done, how The Denial of Death one proceed, to engage in this process of courageous self-realization? And he describes the The Denial of Death of self-transcendence this way:. Man breaks through The Denial of Death bounds of merely cultural heroism; he destroys the character lie that had him perform as a hero in the everyday social scheme of things; 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 ultimate significance. This, then, is what we The Denial of Death call good faith, not a flight into some immortality system. So Becker is suggesting a difference between The Denial of Death inauthentic clinging to the supposed absolute truth of an immortality system; and 2 authentic faith in a mystery of enduring meaning. One can get the impression from much of his work that any affirmation of enduring meaning is simply a denial of death and the embrace of a lie. But I believe the view expressed in The Denial of Death fifth chapter of The Denial of Death is his more nuanced and genuine position. When Socrates was brought to trial in BC before a jury of Athenian citizens on charges that included The Denial of Death and corrupting the youth, he disappointed most of the jurors and irritated many of them by not petitioning for leniency, or appearing intimidated by the penalties The Denial of Death might face if found guilty. And when the jury condemned him to death, he remained composed, and spoke carefully about the consequences of the judgment first for himself, and then for Athens. What accounts for it? Let us look at what he had to say about death to the jurors at his trial immediately after his condemnation. Either it is annihilation, and the dead have no consciousness of anything; or … it is really a change: a migration of the soul from this place to another Plato, Apology, 40c-d. Socrates shows himself prepared for either eventuality. Note well: there is no dogmatic assertion of an immortal afterlife here. Death is a mystery. Maybe it is annihilation. Socrates is psychologically open to his physical death and possible utter annihilation. But still this does not unnerve him. And if we pursue the question: why not? Let us consider this life of the philosophos as Socrates understands it. The Denial of Death it is a life The Denial of Death to the ongoing search for The Denial of Death best to live. In the Gorgias Plato makes The Denial of Death character Callicles a wonderfully eloquent spokesman for this outlook. Perhaps the true man should ignore this question of living for a certain span of years and should not be so enamored of life. Socrates is indicating to Callicles that really caring about goodness—genuinely desiring to do what is good, as one understands it—inevitably shifts the value of physical comfort and even physical survival, demoting them somewhat. Too much concern with avoiding pain or with physical survival gets in the way of doing the right thing. A real effort to become good means: keeping attention focused on the things that help one to be good, and learning to avoid distractions. What are the main distractions that keep us from making ourselves morally better? Socrates lists the obvious: material prosperity i. Naturally, Socrates observes, we love these things when we are children. But to cling to them as the highest priorities once we become morally conscious adults is sad—in fact, this is what is a truly shameful way of life. And this effort, says Socrates, is the true struggle, the true agon, of human existence. People think the real problem in life is to escape harm and death. Now there is a key point in the Socratic testimony that must be considered carefully. He indicates that when a person does take goodness seriously, he or she finds that this is only possible on the assumption that goodness is not ephemeral—not an illusion, not just a reality constituted by personal opinion. Does this mean that, if you decide to really commit yourself to being ethical, suddenly you are claiming to be in possession of absolute truth and eternal meaning? No—it means that you trustingly affirm that the ultimate basis of your moral decisions and actions is an enduring dimension of meaning, The Denial of Death not like the latest fashions, the things that come and go. He describes the transformation The Denial of Death a catharsis, a cleansing, in which the soul is purged of false opinions about what is really real and The Denial of Death of value. This is the only way we can break free of the power of those bodily and social distractions which otherwise keep us enslaved and turned away from the good.
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