Questions with Becker - series

This is the transcript of a video series - the series can be found here.

I made this video series because I was concerned about my own motivations in everyday life. Did I really want to be a good person for its own sake? I had come to suspect some ulterior motives, for example: looking good, leaving an admirable legacy, attracting others. I read a book in order to perhaps gain some insight into that question. What followed was a journey with some bizarre and fascinating diversions: however, I tried to keep things as focused as possible… documented below.

Introduction

Hello and welcome to Prism Collection, in which I've just decided to ask a whole heap of philosophical questions. Initially I was actually going to do book reviews, but before I got a chance to do that, a question started circling around my head - and the question is: are we more motivated by morality or success? This bothers me, because we like to think of ourselves as having good intentions, but (for example) if I cook a meal for my family, am I doing it because I want to do something good, or because I want to be perceived by myself and by other people around me as a capable and selfless person? 

I'm not so much concerned with that motivation - what I am concerned with is whether there is any motivation whatsoever to do the right thing for its own sake. So i've started reading a book called “The Denial of Death” by Ernest Becker, because apparently it says that one of our main motivations is to “put ourselves out there” in the world as a hero or as someone of note… and I'm concerned that this is all there is, because if it is - I don't know how we decide which heroism to get caught up in, and what role morality plays in this. If morality is not a motivating factor at all, as my definitions of success change I may not end up valuing doing the right thing. 

Part 1

“This is one of the main problems in organ transplants: the organism protects itself against foreign matter, even if it is a new heart that would keep it alive. The protoplasm itself harbors its own; nurtures itself against the world - against invasions of its integrity. It seems to enjoy its own pulsations, expanding into the world and ingesting pieces of it.” 

That was one of the many fantastic passages in The Denial of Death by Ernest Becker. To summarize the book, his point is that we want to propagate ourselves out into the world. but death stops that. And so we're afraid of death, and we act out the role of a hero in some small way in order to convince ourselves that we're powerful compared to the universe and compared to death. 

Alongside the image of a body rejecting the organ transplant Becker gives us the image of a child. And the child is at the same time fragile and narcissistic. The fragility comes from an encounter with the world; for example, a child trying to touch something hot is either going to be rejected by his parents (as they tell him off ,or her off) or the hot thing itself, as the child experiences how hot it indeed is. The narcissism comes from the child's perceptions that they are omnipotent - that’s how Becker describes it, because the child screams and cries, and always gets what they want from the parents who will feed and comfort them. As a result there's this almost miraculous omnipotence! The fragility of the child is the beginning of the concept of death. The narcissism of the child means that they can't come to terms with this emerging concept, because if they are (as they seem to be) the most important being in the universe, then how can they come to terms with their own deaths? Becker also talks a lot about our smallness in the face of the universe. He uses the word “anality” which is a technical term (I'm sure you can guess what that means) and he talks about the fact that we can observe the universe. We're conscious of it, but we're still unable to overcome it. Nature can be lovely and inviting, but it can also be harsh and bleak. These aspects combined with disease and death are continual reminders of our inability to ultimately meet the challenge of the universe.

As a side note - this conversation is getting a little bit morbid, and a lot of people will probably stop at this stage and say, 

“Well, psychologists are… this way! They are morbid because they're continually in the company of people who have a dim view of life.”

I think it's also right to say that we're not being completely honest with our emotions if we portray this fear of death as the dominant force, and forget the love of life that we experience. But there's also the flip side - if you love something, then you don't want to lose it. So I'm open to believing that we do have this fear of death if it's in the background, underlying. According to Becker, the reason that we don't experience this on the surface consciously in our day-to-day lives is because of what he calls “repression”. We'll be looking at what he means by repression in the next video.

Part 2

In his book “The Denial of Death”, Ernest Becker claims that against the backdrop of a terrifying universe we're small, and weak, and afraid - of the universe and of death. But we try to invert the narrative so that we emerge victorious over the universe, and I wonder if this is what drives us, and how morality fits into this picture. In the last video we talked about a fear of death developing in childhood. A possible response to this is to say that as adults we need to learn how to come to terms with this, and ultimately get over our fear of death in order to move on with our lives. Now I don't think it's incredibly helpful to say “get over it” in any situation, if you're not talking about the strategies that you would use to do that. What was surprising to me was that a lot of the strategies that we might use to get over a fear of death, Becker calls “repression”. I think it's important to note that some of these strategies are quite subtle and not easily understood, and some of the consequences are not great. So I think this is why a book like this can be so illuminating and useful.

Becker's version of repression involves people covering themselves with all sorts of protection from the idea of death, including taking on their parents’ confidence, engaging in risk-averse behavior, and basically submerging themselves into the momentum and the concerns of everyday life without thinking too much about it. In a book called “Pensées”, Blaise Pascal talks about the same kind of thing very insightfully. I think he talks about how we really like distracting ourselves from death, and how we'll do anything to distract ourselves or divert ourselves (the word diversions comes to mind). Becker says that this distraction - or this “repression” - is sometimes interrupted by near-death experiences, and of course there's this idea of “your life flashing before your eyes”. I think that sort of existential moment is what Becker is talking about. According to Becker, reality is too much for us, and we need to protect ourselves - but this protection is sometimes dangerous, especially if it clamps down too hard. Here's one description of the complexities involved in it.

“We enter symbiotic relationships in order to get the security we need - in order to get relief from our anxieties, our aloneness and helplessness. But these relationships also bind us. They enslave us even further, because they support the lie we have fashioned.”

It's quite the dilemma! We need to shield ourselves from death in order to survive, and that's what culture and comfort do. But there is the danger that we are going to be living in illusion, and also (as we'll see in the next video) the danger of neurosis.

Part 3

Throughout these videos I've been trying to use Ernest Becker's book The Denial of Death to think about whether we are more motivated by morality or success. So far, I think that he thinks that we repress our fear of death by taking part in an experience of heroism and power. There's two ways to do this, and that's what I want to talk about today. 

One of them is taking on the whole world, and the other one is transference. Transference is when you take the universe, and you transfer it into something more manageable. That could be a person or a pursuit, and that thing (whatever it is) becomes your whole world. Becker warns that if we have too much or too little transference, that can lead to neurosis. Some examples of transference are: focusing all our attention on a romantic partner, or a political leader, or a political party, or a group, or a pursuit (something that we want to get really good at). Transference is attractive, because it allows us to experience success - whether we please that person, or whether we experience success vicariously through the leader or the group, or whether we can do something small really well. The danger in excessively “partializing” the universe like this, and focusing too much attention on these things, is that they can develop into neuroses. For example, obsessively tidying your room, or following a leader that leads you into oblivion, or putting too much weight on your romantic partner (so much that they can't possibly carry it as a human being). The degree to which we focus on these things excessively can determine the degree of neuroticism. 

The other way to go about things is to do very little “partialization” or transference of the universe, and in a way, take on the world. This is the way of the artist. When somebody makes art or culture, they're (in a way) synthesizing the world or solving the problem of the world. This can turn into neurosis when it is not expressed in an external work of art or an external product, but instead it's internalized, and it rebounds and becomes more and more fantastical in the person's mind. Schizophrenia is one neurosis that Becker mentions in this context. Basically what Becker is saying is that when you try to take on the world without partializing or transferring it, you also run the risk of getting lost in the chaos and rebounding into yourself.

Overall there are two ways of approaching transference: the narrow, focused way, or the broad, artistic way. Both of these allow us an experience of personal heroism. Either of these - if done poorly - can lead to neurosis. More broadly, I'm satisfied from reading the book that we are tremendously motivated to be successful, and this will inform my question about morality and success. 

Conclusion

I spent this series realizing that we are in a bit of a bind. Ernest Becker's “The Denial of Death” has convinced me that we “transfer” the universe into something smaller and more manageable so that we can experience success over the universe. The problem is: when I'm faced with any situation that demands a response, what I think is a moral motivation may just be a desire to play the hero in my own self-defined narrative. I have some questions about how this might play out. Will an urge towards a personally compelling heroism keep a husband faithful to his wife over the years, and vice versa? Will it keep a twenty-something lawyer from stepping on his peers on the way up? Will it encourage a time-poor student to research effective charities, or will she be happy enough in her self-defined heroism to throw money at an N.G.O. that advertises well (while in effect making matters worse on the ground)?

Although Becker says that religion might not be a live option for people anymore, he does say (non specifically) that belief in God is one of the best forms of “transference” possible, because it orients us around something that is higher and purer than our false and neurotic narratives, and it doesn't leave us alone and confused in the world. But in most religions, there's no guarantee of our own immortality. So we're left to work towards what inevitably becomes our own definition and standard of success, which leaves us in the same sorry hole we started in. The only religion that really fights against our self-glorification and heroism is Christianity. Becker mentions the “Adam and Eve” story, but I disagree with him on the exact interpretation of it. Instead of saying that Adam and Eve ate the fruit and became self-conscious, I would say they became conscious of the self in context of its declaration of independence from God and it's taking to itself of heroism and glory. In the context of that rebellion, God is more terrifying than the universe, because he created it! It's this rebellious heroism - inviting God's judgment and cutting our own roots off - that the biblical narrative revolves around, until the gospel. The gospel is a way of rooting our identity in God again, without invoking the judgment we deserve for our damaging, “heroic” attempts at complete self-definition. There is a transference here but it's legal as well as psychological. Our old status is transferred to Jesus, and his to us. The effect of this transference is that we don't have to prove ourselves in order to be part of God's ongoing life. We're granted this status - on condition that we let go of our attempts to define ourselves without reference to God.