拒斥死亡 (1973)

The Denial of Death is a 1973 book by American cultural anthropologist Ernest Becker which discusses the psychological and philosophical implications of how people and cultures have reacted to the concept of death. The author argues most human action is taken to ignore or avoid the inevitability of death.

It was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction in 1974, two months after the author's death. It is the main work responsible for the development of terror management theory, which provides empirical support for Becker's ideas.

Table of contents

Preface

Chapter One: Introduction: Human Nature and the Heroic

PART I: THE DEPTH PSYCHOLOGY OF HEROISM

Chapter Two: The Terror of Death

Chapter Three: The Recasting of Some Basic Psychoanalytic Ideas

Chapter Four: Human Character as a Vital Lie

Chapter Five: The Psychoanalyst Kierkegaard

Chapter Six: The Problem of Freud's Character, Noch Einmal

PART II: THE FAILURES OF HEROISM

Chapter Seven: The Spell Cast by Persons - The Nexus of Unfreedom

Chapter Eight: Otto Rank and the Closure of Psychoanalysis on Kierkegaard

Chapter Nine: The Present Outcome of Psychoanalysis

Chapter Ten: A General View of Mental Illness

PART III: RETROSPECT AND CONCLUSION: THE DILEMMAS OF HEROISM

Chapter Eleven: Psychology and Religion: What Is the Heroic Individual?

References

Index

Note: Beginning with the 1997 printing, subsequent editions include a new foreword by Sam Keen.

Background

Becker himself claimed that: "In The Denial of Death I argued that man's innate and all-encompassing fear of death drives him to attempt to transcend death through culturally standardized hero systems and symbols."

A premise of The Denial of Death is that human civilization is a defense mechanism against the knowledge of our mortality. In turn, an individual's character is essentially formed around the process of denying one's own mortality, that this denial is a necessary component of functioning in the world, and that this character-armor masks and obscures genuine self-knowledge. Becker would later highlight, in his book Escape from Evil (1975), that much of the evil in the world was a consequence of this need to deny death.

Becker argues that a basic duality in human life exists between the physical world of objects and biology, and a symbolic world of human meaning. Thus, since humanity has a dualistic nature consisting of a physical self and a symbolic self, we are able to transcend the dilemma of mortality by focusing our attention mainly on our symbolic selves, i.e. our culturally based self esteem, which Becker calls "heroism": a "defiant creation of meaning" expressing "the myth of the significance of human life" as compared to other animals. This counters the personal insignificance and finitude that death represents in the human mind.

Such symbolic self-focus takes the form of an individual's "causa sui project", (sometimes called an "immortality project", or a "heroism project"). A person's "causa sui project" acts as their immortality vessel, whereby they subscribe to a particular set of culturally-created meanings and through them gain personal significance beyond that afforded to other mortal animals. This enables the individual to imagine at least some vestige of those meanings continuing beyond their own life-span; thus avoiding the complete "self-negation" we perceive when other biological creatures die in nature.

By being part of symbolic constructs with more significance and longevity than one's body—cultural activities and beliefs—one can gain a sense of legacy or (in the case of religion) an afterlife. In other words, by living up to (or especially exceeding) cultural standards, people feel they can become part of something eternal: something that will never die as compared to their physical body. This feeling that their lives have meaning, a purpose, and significance in the grand scheme of things i.e. that they are "heroic contributors to world life" and thus that their contributions last beyond their biological lifespan is what's referred to as an "immortality project".

Immortality projects are one way that people manage death anxiety. Some people, however, will engage in hedonic pursuits like drugs, alcohol, and entertainment to escape their death anxiety—often to compensate for a lack of "heroism" or culturally based self-esteem—resulting in a lack of contribution to the "immortality project". Others will try to manage the terror of death by "tranquilizing themselves with the trivial" i.e. strongly focusing on trivial matters and exaggerating their importance — often through busyness and frenetic activity. Becker describes the current prevalence of hedonism and triviality as a result of the downfall of religious worldviews such as Christianity that could take "slaves, cripples... imbeciles... the simple and the mighty" and allow them all to accept their animal nature in the context of a spiritual reality and an afterlife.

Humanity's traditional "hero-systems", such as religion, are no longer convincing in the age of reason. Becker argues that the loss of religion leaves humanity with impoverished resources for necessary illusions. Science attempts to serve as an immortality project, something that Becker believes it can never do because it is unable to provide agreeable, absolute meanings to human life. The book states that we need new convincing "illusions" that enable us to feel heroic in ways that are agreeable. Becker, however, does not provide any definitive answer, mainly because he believes that there is no perfect solution. Instead, he hopes that gradual realization of humanity's innate motivations, namely death, can help to bring about a better world.

Becker argues that the conflict between contradictory immortality projects (particularly in religion) is a major source of the violence and misery in the world such as wars, genocide, racism, nationalism and so forth since immortality projects that contradict one another threaten one's core beliefs and sense of security.