From Art to Life and Back Again
In 1932, a peculiar and extraordinary piece of scholarship appeared, the work of a very unusual author. In English translated from the original German it is entitled Art and Artist, and for many years it was published only in English but not in German. The author, Otto Rank, long of Vienna but recently of Paris, pursued his formal higher education only in adulthood and had become a close associate of Freud during the heroic period of the psychoanalytic movement, in which capacity he remained until the mid-1920s when he and Freud could no longer reconcile their views.
Art and Artist appears, then, in the wake of Rank's defection. If it is clearly more than just emblematic, it also does not quite "smell" like the visionary work that it is. Rank is eclectic, verbose, uneven, and often inscrutable, deadly sins all of them in the rare academic air which has blown ever harder through the windows of the intervening century. It is a long way for the reader to travel from, say, the "building sacrifice," the immuring of live children in the cornerstones of ancient buildings, only to arrive, a long while later, at those modern artists who wear a "uniform" even though they are proudly self-employed. It is a long way indeed, because Rank begins at the beginning, such as it was understood in the 1920s at least, and he travels all the way to the bleeding edge of his own time, and by the time he has finished he has indeed had visions, so to speak; and visions they have not yet ceased to be.
Rank had doggedly pursued the "problem" of art and artist for many years, but his observations strictly about art, though they are important in their own right, are ultimately means to a far broader end. What he concluded, ultimately, is that "all human problems are, in the last resort, problems of the soul," a conclusion which, already, evinces both the superficial banality and general unclarity which has turned away most of the readers and writers who would best thrive in the space that Rank opened up. Like most geniuses, Rank struggled terribly to verbalize his insights fully and comprehensibly, and for English-language readers there are the obvious added difficulties. But here he means exactly what he says: when some "human" has a serious enough "problem," either the cause of the problem or its solution (or both) have been or will soon be sacralized; and this latter not in some knowing postmodern sense wherein all bets are hedged, but rather in the full terror of absolute belief and "soulish" gait. And that is why, among other things, artists still wear their "uniforms" as if some other soul had gained absolute powers of coercion over them; it is why some of them still wear exactly what artists wore in Vienna in 1884 or Paris in 1932; whereas for those who work just to pay the bills, marking time in a world which has lost its purpose right along with its soul, uniforms have been on the way out for a long time already.
Rank has never entirely lacked for disciples, but he has had no more worthy or more sheerly brilliant disciple than Ernest Becker. Becker was born in Massachussets in 1924, served as an infantryman in World War II, and went on to pursue an academic career as a cultural anthropologist, a career that was cut short by his unfathomably young death in 1974 but which nonetheless packed in several lifetimes worth of achievement. According to Becker himself, he was only ever on the cusp of something significant until he "belatedly" discovered Rank and was finally able to make his synthesis. Rank became Becker's scholarly muse, the detonator on myriad explosive insights into human existence; and the relationship now extends in the other direction too, since Becker understands Rank's more inscrutable passages as well as they can be understood and is able to make everything out of them that must be made.
There is much to be unpacked and repacked here, but it is necessary, already, to state clearly from the outset one use that this study does not aim to make of this work, and one use that it does aim for.
This body of knowledge has its very origins in the problem of art, but it does not map onto mere anecdotal observation quite as directly as the problem of the uniforms suggests. It is not sufficient merely to conclude, as a third and fourth and fifth person enter a theater all wearing sportcoats with sneakers, that one has had some kind of penetrating insight into the people, or into the artwork being produced and presented to them. The larger point about uniforms may eventually stand, of course, but not on such a flimsy basis as this.
The reason Rank's work is so powerful is that it originates in precisely this kind of parochial question, it seeks the answers, and it ends with those answers, once they are found, demanding to be seen as universal rather than parochial. Hence, before attempting the long passage back from life to art, it is important to proceed here by way of a very specific route: it is necessary, namely, to first get a handle on the universal claims that these two authors make and to situate these claims in the wider world of which contemporary art is just one small facet. It is necessary to understand, as Rank did, that a priest, a politician and a painter may have much (indeed, almost everything) in common psychologically, and they may appear on the stage of culture as very nearly the same character, and yet they may have entirely incommensurable biographies; or, obversely, three people may come from the same town, schools, faith, and even family and yet diverge into three lifeways which are absolutely incommensurable.
On the latter point Jung became such an authority that Rank was put in the shade; but as Becker, the encyclopedic anthropologist and no small authority himself, says bluntly, "although Rank's thought is difficult, it is always right on the central problems, Jung's is not." Further, though "biographies" and "lifeways" per se are in some sense two sides of the same coin, they are observed from incommensurable standpoints, no matter if the observer is a learned scholar, a platitudinous newspaper critic, or a bourgeois parent who wishes their child would become a doctor instead of an artist. Almost anyone who tries to write anything at all about the life of an artist therein evinces some residual ignorance of this problem, or perhaps evinces total ignorance of it, or perhaps just slips up when their guard is down. Most anytime artists "write" about their own lives for publicity purposes, distortions of one or both sides of the problem will be in evidence. At times this collective dissociation rises to the level of temporary insanity, and a writer can suffer from it all the same if they have in fact read all of the authors named here as if they have never heard any of their names.
So, Rank could thus dispense with very nearly the entire institution of criticism as it existed in his time, in its mania for "mechanistic" biography, and yet he could be rather unconcerned, seemingly, about all of the merely parochial implications. He would remain a hero to artists (though still not to critics) if he had made this single searing insight and explained just a little bit about how he arrived there; but this is merely what he does in the introduction to his great work, and then he really gets on with it. And so there is a whole sidebar to this central Rankian insight which is of great concern to almost any upstanding citizen of the artworld, a tremendously important sidebar for them and for their world to come to terms with, and yet it is not the fifth most important thing that art people, and any other people, really ought to understand about the "existentialism" of Rank and Becker. Instead, it is necessary, here and anywhere else, to follow these two men all the way to the full consummation of their learning, in all its breadth and depth; it is necessary to do this first, no matter what one's own life project is; and only then to ask: "What can I, the artist, the audience, the critic, learn about my entire social world, which I view from the standpoint of an artist, audience, critic?" And only then, thusly situated, will it be profitable to ask: "What can I learn that can be applied, in one sense or another, to my art, my connoisseurship, my criticism?" Only by that time has one made a full circle from the origins of Rank's work in the art problem, through the synthesis by Becker with existentialism and with the contemporary social sciences, and finally back to one's own "soulish" concerns. It is not easy to know those concerns, but they ought to be known somewhat better by the end of this journey than they previously were.
For contemporary workers who have no work clothes, who wear whatever is clean while they are working and save their uniforms for the various rituals of the common life, this full circle sounds more like a death spiral. Technically they are correct to think so, since everybody dies eventually and in the end there is nothing. But traversing this expanse really is not half as difficult as the above might imply, because past generations have already done all of the hard work. It is merely up to later generations to put this work to the uses for which it is intended. If this is done then things will be alright, even if things are not good.
So, self-knowledge is a profitable byproduct, perhaps, of taking this journey with Rank and Becker, but even this is not the point of the present study. The first point to be elaborated here, rather, is more of the airless academic variety: Rank and Becker are not populists and do not even use the word, but there is much populism implicit in their broader conclusions. This is populism, of course, in a distinctly contemporary sense which may not apply to 1970 or to 1932, but if these are truly visionary thinkers then this contextual dissonance is not too hard to understand.
That is one sort of claim. The second major claim of this study is yet more dissonant: it is possible even for high modernist and for uncompromising experimentalist art also to be "populist" art in at least one important and thoroughgoing sense; this all the same if there are no people in the audience as if there are hundreds in the room or billions online.
Full-circle Rankianism is made necessary by circumstance, namely by the circumstance that art people have worse critical habits (and more of them) than mere "mechanstic" biography. A great many people are so very concerned to show that art itself "matters." They are concerned to show this, of course, because art matters to them and they too must matter, somehow, to someone or something bigger than them, just as Becker says is true of all human beings; and so they are concerned to show this (all of it at once) by way of beginning with the art and then asking: "What are the ways that art matters?" . . . "To what and to whom does it matter, and how?" . . . "Can art change the world?" As has already been suggested, this is just one of two sides, and when there are only two of them then one is closer to none.
Finally, it will be seen straightaway that the above preliminaries do not "smell" much at all like a polemic in defense of "pure" art, of modernism, and of the smallest possible role (ideally none whatsoever) for criticism and critics as intermediary priests between the believers in an art form and various art-gods. The concern so far seems to be, instead, with precisely everything that makes art first and foremost a social phenomenon and only incidentally (or not at all) an aesthetic, psychological or recreational one. Things have started out this way, it is true, but they will not end this way.
It is indeed the entire "social" world which is, paradoxically, both the absolute essence and the absolute negation of art itself. Any so-called "social theory of art," then, is nothing but an absolutely one-sided thesis. But then there must be an entire antithesis, complete in itself, lurking unstated on the flipside; and so it is the ultimate task here to elaborate as much as possible everything lying on the antithetical side of the social theories, and then to stare down those theories, to look them straight in the eyes with the glare of a worthy adversary, and to then see if those theories do not actually begin to flinch back ever so slightly from the ground they have so long occupied and from the cocksure pose they have struck and held there.
Incidentally and ultimately, it is to be argued here that this antithesis can quite reasonably and literally be called a
populist
antithesis, no matter how many tickets are sold (or unsold). And then, finally, it is necessary to notice merely in passing what this says, by unstated implication, about the social theses and theories themselves. It is best that this implication remain largely unstated, and it is best that it be implied as much and as often as possible.
Do It By Me and To Me
It will be noticed in the hypothetical of "biographies" and "lifeways" that things are done by the painters and politicians: these people have appeared on the stage of culture and indeed have made culture; or perhaps what is noticed is that something has been done to them: they have started out each in their own places, but circumstances intervened and caused them to converge upon some common patch of ground. The estranged siblings also can be rendered either way; or, ideally, both ways, or neither. That is the point. There is always a bit of both things in any human matter, and so this points again to the readymade opportunities enjoyed by critics and other literary folks who wish to deploy only one side or the other, depending on whatever point they already want to make; or, if they are hard up against a deadline, to pick a side and reach a conclusion only about that side, thereby neglecting half (really all) of their critical duties.
Faced with art criticism which makes such a hash of causality, as most all of it does, a philosopher of science might say that the "degrees of freedom" are very large here, almost certainly too large to lead to any valid and definite conclusions. As they get to know the art people, the philosophy people brush off more and more of their old Latin phrases, and eventually they grow fatigued of issuing the same ones over and over. Art is not science, certainly, nor is criticism, nor historiography; but if not then it is quite unclear just what the historians and the critics of the world think they are achieving with such "mechanistic" methods as they so often deploy. This sentiment often is implicit or even explicit when philosophers write about art. Here it is again, coming from an artist, just for good measure.
Typically it is the first kind of doing, doing by, which is the domain of criticism per se. It is likely that a work which delves more than superficially into everything that has been done to an artist is something more than mere criticism; perhaps Art History or Musicology or any of the various art-ologies and -ographies; perhaps it is baldly polemical or speculative and just barely critical; or perhaps the writer is essentially an artist at heart and none of this really applies, and so nor does the faintest conceit to have achieved "criticism" or "art history" in the resulting piece of work. Critics themselves would be the first ones to point that out and to congratulate themselves for keeping their side of the street clean.
In any event, while criticism of the done by variety is usually harmless and diverting enough, there is grave hazard in saying that someone has done something if they have not certainly done it. It is true that there is always both some doing by and some doing to whenever art is made, but false ascriptions to either effect are not commensurate. False ascriptions of done by and done to are absolutely equivalent only abstractly or rhetorically. Pragmatically they are not commensurate. This is not obvious, though, least of all pragmatically, most of the time, because it is also true that saddling someone with mere stigma of the act-of-another that is done to them can and often is pragmatically equivalent to a "false accusation" of something done by them. "Pragmatically" means that the full gamut of causal variables is in play, including human vicissitudes, and no human being can observe the full gamut for themselves. They are lucky to snatch any suprainfinitesimal glance at it at all. This can be very bad indeed for the victim; indeed, it can be the worst. That is all true, and unfortunately it happens all the time.
In spite of all the chaos of pragmatic variables, or perhaps because of it, no causal variable really can modulate the semantics of "victim" and "perpetrator." Once the distinction between done by and done to has so much as flickered in the dim recesses of the human mind, the problem has been manifested in absolute "semantics," and it will be seen straightaway that the two sides of the duality are semantically irreconcilable, period. Why? Because human beings generally prefer being in control to being controlled. And why is that? Selection pressures? Toxic ideologies? Social media? But then, why . . . ? And then, why . . . ? At that point it is enough to grant the skeptic their skepticism, wish them the best, and advise them to quit while they are ahead.
It is necessary to lay all of this out in the very heaviest language, comprehensively, because it is a subtle point which grates so hard against everyday human experience that it is very difficult to grasp it entirely through observation, and even then it remains very difficult to articulate it. It will be noticed, certainly, but it takes hard thinking just to notice that it has been noticed. Once it is so much as noticed this leads much more easily to the realization that thinking is inferior to doing; on which more in due time.
From here, however, if the finest points are grasped, then all of this can very safely be reduced. Hence: to saddle people with things they have not done puts them on the defensive; whereas to saddle people with the stigma of having had something done to them that has not actually been done at all, this can go wrong in a thousand and one different ways, certainly, but it also represents the plaintiff position, perhaps not pragmatically, or not always, but semantically, at the very least; and semantic qualities alone are more than enough to make the two sides of this contradiction incommensurable, and to make the contradiction itself, therefore, pragmatically underdetermined.
In this respect, then, the question of free will and determinism is
not
dialectical; or at least it is not dialectical when it is viewed pragmatically as against abstractly. That is why so many enlightened Westerners maintain that a person can invite a playful barb or a stubbed toe into their life but cannot invite an assault. And
that
is why thinking is absolutely inferior to doing.
"The Closure of Psychoanalysis on Kierkegaard"
Rank's central insight is that
all human problems are, in the last resort, problems of the soul.
Becker's work is essentially a fleshing-out of the above capsule statement and an effort to account for all of its many implications.
For Becker, first and foremost,
what man really fears is not so much extinction, but extinction with insignifcance.
This thesis is reiterated many times, in mildly varied form, throughout Becker's mature work. It is the thesis for which he is most remembered.
Societies, therefore, must allay this endemic human fear by affording subjects some opportunity for achieving "significance." In other words, every society is
a symbolic action system, a structure of statuses and roles, customs and rules for behavior, designed to serve as a vehicle for earthly heroism.
Becker's last book, published only after his untimely death and against his wishes, is his fullest account of social life per se. In this formulation,
social life is the saga of the working out of one's problems and ambitions on others,
which reflects
a "social contract" forged in desire and fear.
Hence the second of Becker's great existential theses, that
man's natural and inevitable urge to deny mortality and achieve a heroic self-image are
not merely form-giving to societies, but in fact are
the root causes of human evil.
Becker's untimely death unfortunately precluded him from any further elaboration of this latter thesis. As viscerally unsettling as certain passages in The Denial of Death may be, this account of the roots of human "evil" is yet more difficult to reconcile. It would seem to preclude concerted social progressivism tout court and to reveal even mundane social life to be a zero-sum struggle for existence.
The conceit of a mere theory of art to intervene in questions of such breadth and severity can only come down to a ham-handed breach of disciplinary consilience. The consilient direction of application is the other way: there are myriad granular details of Becker's account which any contemporary theory of art would do well to account for, if only for its own good.
Foremost: as Becker develops the notion of "working out of one's problems and ambitions on others," he lands not merely on mundane or altruistic gestures (e.g. Goffman's "facework") but also on such malign social epiphenomena as "priestcraft," "scapegoating," and "transference." He uncovers "cosmic heroism" in the common life, and he uncovers nothing less than "the origins of inequality" in the very fabric of human association. For Becker it is all in the mix, as it must be for someone who mined the anthropological record so thoroughly. Becker attacked his questions from all angles and so his work is well-suited to confront one-sided social theorists of art and stare them straight in the eyes.
To use a contemporary term, priestcraft is "transactional," but with a twist. The currency in which priestcraft transacts is what Becker calls "sacred power." It is at root an existential rather than straightforwardly economic transaction.
All power is, as [Norman O.] Brown says, sacred power, because it begins in the hunger for immortality; and it ends in the absolute subjection to people and things which represent immortality power.
And again,
men are always dissatisfied and guilty in small and large ways, and this is what drives them to a search for purity where all dissatisfaction can come to a head and be wiped away.
But this sacralizing of mere human objects is bound to miscarry.
No human relationship can bear the burden of godhood, and the attempt has to take its toll in some way on both parties. The reasons are not far to seek. The thing that makes God the perfect spiritual object is precisely that he is abstract—as Hegel saw. He is not a concrete individuality, and so He does not limit our development by His own personal will and needs. When we look for the "perfect" human object we are looking for someone who allows us to express our will completely, without any frustration or false notes. We want an object that reflects a truly ideal image of ourselves. But no human object can do this...
Of course art also is typically thought unable to "bear the burden of godhood," the occasional bohemian ruse notwithstanding. Art is not thought able to support this kind of weight precisely because it seems to consist, largely if not entirely, of mere "human relationships" and man-made object-idols; that is, it seems to consist of "concrete individualities" rather than "abstract spiritual objects." To sum things up this way is more or less to recapitulate the one-sided "social theory of art" in esoteric terms.
However, there is an art practice, which, though it may incidentally produce social relationships and material artefacts, does locate "sacred power" in the "invisible" rather than the "visible" realm. This practice is known, variously, as Art for Art's Sake or Pure Art. It has been rejected on just about every imaginable pragmatic and consequentialist basis. It pines to be (re-)considered on a soulish basis.
What Has 'Pure Art' Been Purified Of?
To start, it is necessary to distinguish two sorts of arguments against Art for Art's Sake: those which hold that it is a bad idea, and those which hold that it is impossible.
As for whether it is a bad idea, this short preliminary aims only at one narrow aspect, i.e. at the question of "sacred power" as a vehicle of "heroic death denial." Per Becker, all societies (religious and secular alike) must afford their subjects something of this kind; generally art comes off as among the least bad ways of doing so. Art that is more or less "pure" may, for all anyone knows, prove better or worse as a means for people subsumed in a given culture to "earn a feeling of primary value." Making art is a good enough way for a person to feel, at once, that they have done something and also had something done to them. Things will probably be okay for them if they can pull off this simple trick; or maybe things will not be okay for them if they are too absolute about it, or not absolute enough.
This is one way (at most) to approach the question: to enter Becker's existential riddle through the back door thinking that one will soon come out the front. This may work out, but it often does not; more importantly, there is no way to anticipate if or how it will work out without simply making the declaration and taking things from there, and this is, at minimum, rather obnoxious "social" comportment, the same on the macro as on the micro level. This line of approach starts with the art and only then tries to confer sacred power upon it prospectively. This is not really coherent with the larger thrust of Becker's (and certainly not Rank's) arguments. This line may in fact be, literally, the root of all evil. Enough has been said about that already.
Anyway, in the collective discourse on pure art there are nearly as many of these consequentialist arguments waiting in line to be serviced as there are theorists writing on the subject, and so it is beyond the scope of any single study to meet each of them where they live.
The thesis of impossibility, on the other hand, is a "conventionalist sulk." It holds the entire argument to be moot because there simply is no Pure Art: even if that is what an artist thinks they are doing, they are simply mistaken. The reasoning here also varies, but not as widely as the consequentialist arguments, and it can be met not just abstractly but also empirically. If it can be met successfully, the mere possibility of Pure Art would at least be established.
Most likely this negotiation begins with both sides proposing to abandon the hideous term "pure art." Absolute purity regresses to absolute nothingness. There is no "pure purity," so to speak. If there is any purity at all it is found only at some pragmatic node or waystation (or several of them) located on a scale from contaminated to pure; it must be granted that a waystation is all that is being sought, or unsought, and that the regression to absolute nothingness which is the basis of the conventionalist's sulking fit is certainly not what the aspiring pure artist is seeking, either.
This is how the coinage "pure art" might be abandoned by the side of the road. It cannot be abandoned, however, for reasons presently to be explained, and for additional reasons to emerge later on, piecemeal. The word "pure" itself and all of its derivatives have something in common with words like "plaintiff" and "defendant" or with whatever equivalents those words might have in any other language practice: once the corresponding synapse fires, once the Jungian gods of absolute semantics hear the alarm and start tossing their lightning bolts, then lightning will strike and there is no going back from there. The conventionalist holds that the purist has got their semantics all mixed up. There is no rejoinder to that argument. But just try to think of all the ways human beings have invoked purity throughout the millennia. Think about just how semantically pervasive this idea really is. Then, think about everything that is said above about the dual nature of causality as it is seen from the human standpoint. It does not need to be argued or accepted that anything here is "essential." To say something is pervasive is plenty good enough, perhaps actually better, than to say that it is essential. Of course mere pervasiveness could be a towering coincidence, but this is very unlikely. The really serious objection is that being pervasive does not make something good, or bad for that matter. That point is happily conceded here. But if something is pervasive then it must be accounted for, one way or another, and sulking is not the way.
So, the phrase "pure art" is not abandoned by the side of the road after all. It has to ride in the back seat, or maybe in the trunk, but it rides on. It is hideous and misleading, but this does not mean that all who have ever spoken this way have spoken in error about every aspect of the problem, and it does not mean that whatever it was they were trying to speak of actually is "impossible." To hold either of these latter positions is not even conventionalist. It is simply and obviously wrong.
If there is a scale or continuum of purity, then, with the waystations distributed along its breadth, then life itself runs concurrently along infinite continua, all at once, parallel about the depths, each representing a different aspect of human life. A single analog knob is thus dimensionalized into an analog mixing board with infinite channels and infinite sliders, the sliders sliding along the breadth and also running infinitely from nothingness to saturation.
The assignment of channels is arbitrary, because assignments must first be imaginable to the human being who makes them. That is a very real limitation of the metaphor. Channels cannot be assigned in any absolutely "correct" or hedonically optimized way, but assignments and reassignments are made as needed, and channels can be muted or unmuted; all of this depending specifically on what sort of human matter one is trying to understand. The way of purity, then, in art as in life, is familiar to all viewers of "The Price Is Right": the goal is to name life's prices as closely as possible without going over.
This is what is meant by pure art anywhere that term appears below. It is not quite the right term, but nothing is. "Absolute art" or "artistic absolutism" would be only slightly better, and they are confounded by the lexicon. "Art for art's sake" is the right term, but it is unwieldy. L'art pour l'art would, for various reasons, communicate the utter contrary intention as is actually the intention of this study. Peter Kivy proposes that absolute music might be referred to as a "decorative" art, which is a very promising insight but also is badly confounded by the lexicon. By this time options are running low. Also, there are good as well as bad reasons to reach for purity and this is a useful frame for the broader discussion.
It must also be said, in passing, that the advent of the Rankian mixing board well and truly walks off Mencken's infamous epithet on Puritanism, walks it off the collective property and escorts it to the office to fill and file the papers on its mandatory retirement. It is far better to say that Puritanism is nothing but the effort to name life's prices without going over, and it is truly beside the point whether the historical Puritans have figured out how to play the game, or if they have ever actually come on down to play it in the first place. As David Funder puts it, "process" must be distinguished from "content" in all such matters.
if you want to understand completely how a chess player thinks, and in particular if you want to be able to predict his or her next move, it will not suffice to garner knowledge, no matter how extensive, about the chess player's cognitive processes... You will also have to acquire an understanding of chess.
The most ardent reiterators of Mencken's dictum thereby reveal that they have not thought much about this.
Be it granted straightaway, also, that there is constant danger here of merely reducing the search for waystations back into consequentialism or even tautology: now that there are many continua with many waystations located somewhere along them, the waystations have become targets at which consequentialism sprays its buckshot, hoping to hit something. Straining the analogy to the point of farce, it might be said that children, e.g., will not know quite what a mixing board is for, though they can amuse themselves beautifully in between takes by silently sliding the sliders; or they can nip a burgeoning masterpiece in the bud this way, cause it to rot on the vine, or simply blow out everyone's ears and speakers. All of which to say: Rankian existentialism cannot come down to the mere spraying of buckshot at invisible targets or the naive sliding of sliders while Papa has the monitors muted; and so when it comes time to try to say more precisely where the waystations are and what sorts of art parties are being thrown at each one, things must proceed methodically, and methods must proceed comprehensively and rigorously. There is only one way to proceed here without blowing anyone's ears out, and that is scientifically. And because art is not science, is anathema to it in one meaningful way, it is unusual for art people to feel this way.
The present task is not to make "art" but to make (some) sense.
Becker, above, refers to the purity problem as a social and existential problem: it is precisely the "search for purity" which drives people into the waiting arms of malign social actors, be they therapists, bureaucrats, or demagogues. Other people, meanwhile, may mix life's many channels like a playful child rather than a worldly-wise studio engineer. In other words, "evil is a robust child." Children are
"blustering organisms who must take some toll of their environment, who seek activity and self-expansion in an innocent way," who do not realize the destruction they do in this way.
Similarly,
all through history it is the "normal, average men" who, like locusts, have laid waste to the world in order to forget themselves.
These are significant challenges, indeed ultimate challenges, for any human being to confront, no matter how mature, and no matter how skilled in life's strictly hedonic matters; but at the very least it ought to be possible to say something robust about just what is required of artist, audiences, and yes, of critics too, in order to transcend Becker's "social" and "secular" levels of power, to reach for "cosmic heroism" on the "sacred" level, and to do less evil if they cannot actually do more good. That is the ultimate goal of this study.
There is a simple procedural explanation for why Becker's account particularly supports such an arrogation on behalf of such a hideous term as "pure art." The explanation is not that either he or Rank before him are particularly apt to exalt art's "sacred" aspects above those of anything else human beings might do just to pass the time. Rank, very explicitly, bootstaps himself out of this sort of evangelism for art; and Becker develops aspects of this problem which Rank could not, develops them brilliantly, but he ends up back at something of an impasse when it comes time to ground any of it in decisive judgments (on which a bit more below). Anyway, none of this is to be taken as ammunition for aspiring pure artists to spray in the general direction of the conventionalists, hoping to hit something without even knowing what is out there to be hit. Rather, the simple fact is that Becker has attacked the topic of religion with detachment, irreverence and rare erudition. That is all. He treats religion in the manner of a disinterested social scientist rather than a believer. Any particular religion is thus reduced, in one sense, to a mere artifact of cultural relativity, whereas the human needs driving the religious impulse are revealed to be nothing less than universal. If the present arrogation seems unthinkably vulgar, then, perhaps that is because these peculiar human needs have not been construed with the rigor and disinterestedness with which Rank and Becker construe them.
Recently it is particularly in vogue among conservatives to understand progressivist activism as a "secular religion," with an occasional explicit nod to Becker alongside myriad other social scientists. The upshot is of course to call out bad behavior, but more in the manner of an art critic than a social critic: to observe post hoc that whatever malign "gods" certain people do worship must be leading them astray; or, more severely, that the human being
is not just a naturally and lustily destructive animal who lays waste around him because he feels omnipotent and impregnable. Rather, he is a trembling animal who pulls the world down around his shoulders as he clutches for protection and support and tries to affirm in a cowardly way his feeble powers.
Becker's ultimate question is,
How empirically true is the cultural hero system that sustains and drives men?
But he is aware that his project stumbles somewhat on this question. Namely, it seems possible to answer it only consequentialistically, or, worse yet, prejudicially, and not "empirically," for the fact is: not all priests were raised in devout households, and not all progressives riot in the streets. These simplest of "empirical" facts elude most writers on art as well as they elude political combatants, but they are facts nonetheless, facts so simple as to be useless most but not all of the time. A seemingly useless fact is the answer to some question, but probably not to whatever question happens to be asked today or next week. If something really is a fact then it withstands all prejudices equally well, and if it crumbles in the face of mere prejudice then it was never really a fact. What this suggests, unfortunately for Becker and his ecstatic digressive passagework, is that a bird's-eye-view "science of man" was not as close by as he thought. But there is far too much of value in Becker to allow this problem, though it is severe, to capsize the entire vessel. The boat is well afloat.
Even under the sway of prejudice, then, it is not so easy for the apostle of pure art to point "empirically" to artists in their midst who are of truly devout bearing and constitution, who are devout vis-a-vis their art practice itself ("for its own sake") and not towards some other master practice which their art serves. Rather, just as adherents of great religions-of-peace often go to war with each other, most contemporary artists reject the "invisible god" of pure art in favor of the social conception, the one which better permits them the working out of their problems and ambitions on others. Like the religionists and their demagogues, social artists have lacked neither for social theories nor for social theorists of art to assist them in rationalizing one particular variety of "transactional" behavior while other varieties are condemned in the same breath.
The analogy between art and religion is a vulgar analogy, certainly, such as tends to attach to
differences of degree and not of kind.
It is vulgar aesthetically and semantically both, and it cannot be a so-called "perfect analogy." Still, the time has come, finally, to broach it sincerely, because it suggests just which contaminants pure art must be purified of in order to be a plausible aspiration; and
that
may well be, to be even bolder on behalf the ideal, finally something that the social practice of art
can
help to clarify for all the rest of the world.
NOTES
. . . "building sacrifice" . . .
Otto Rank, translated by Charles Francis Atkinson, Art and Artist (p. 199).
This age-old custom, still practised...consisted in immuring living human beings—new-born children for choice—under the foundation-walls of new buildings. No clue is found to the origin of this custom... Rudolf Kleinpaul refuses to regard these built-in persons as "sacrifices" in the true sense, on the ground that there would not at that stage be any protecting demons and gods in the new building who would require victims; the intention, he holds, was to create spirits, to make a beginning. In the deeper sense of creative force these "house-spirits" may resonably be called victims, however, as they embody the idea that every created thing, if it is to be capable of life, owes its existence to some life destroyed. Whichever way one looks at it, the building-sacrifice affirms once more the dualistic nature of the problem of architecture, and, in principle, of all other art-creation. ...the custom further reveals the fact that the building is not intended as a mere copy (imitation) of natural processes, but represents a spiritual re-creation, and this is made possible by the death of the walled-in person, which sets free his spirit to animate the building.
. . . "uniform" . . .
ibid (pp. 30-31).
Among the American Indians as well as the Australians and other peoples, a typical form of painting is, in fact, the sign of the tribe, which indicates membership of a particular totem, and is therefore in a sense a collective badge of the individual which robs him of his personality in order to include him in a community, and yet on the other hand does not merely label him, but enhances his individual significance by marking it off from certain others. ... On the other hand, the belief held by the Fijians and the Eskimos alike that to remain untatooed is to hazard one's future happiness in the world beyond throws a light on the religious significance of tatooing, a significance that inheres also in membership of a particular totem-society. We have thus along with the enhancement of (and even emphasis on) the self its levelling-down by means of the collective symbol; so that in fact we should find the fundamental dualism of art even at the primary stage of human creative instinct. ...
From this point of view, of course, we cannot admit it to be mere chance that the "Bohemian" artist of modern times, even as late as the close of last century, had a definite costume, even a conventional mode of doing the hair and the beard, which were to mark him out as a "genius." The proper artist, who had chosen art as his profession, had a special manner, almost a special life, laid down for him; and in actual fact he had to play a definite part determined by an ideology; so also, according to Dessoir, the actor nowadays represents this pristine type of artist, where object and subject coincide, and the body forms the material in which and through which the artist creates.
. . . "all human problems are, in the last resort, problems of the soul" . . .
ibid (p. xv).
even though the various human civilizations may each arise from the combination of a certain environment and a certain type of humanity, all human problems are, in the last resort, problems of the soul. By this we mean, not to say that the soul can be wholly explained in terms of modern psychology, as our mechanistic science would claim, but, on the contrary, to stress the autonomy of the spiritual, which not only works creatively in the religious, artistic, and social realms, but also determines the ideology which colours the psychology of the time.
. . . "belatedly" . . .
Ernest Becker, The Birth and Death of Meaning: An Interdisciplinary Perspective on the Problem of Man (p. ix).
There are two thinkers above all to whom I personally feel specially indebted for this mature psychology and whose vital work I had previously slighted to the real detriment of my own. One of them, Erich Fromm, is well known... The other thinker—Otto Rank—is today almost wholly neglected, and this new edition represents only a first reflection of my ridiculously belated "discovery" of his breathtakingly brilliant work. Rank truly is the brooding genius in the wings of Psychoanalysis, and we have only just begun to hear from him—... I am not trying to absolve myself of brash ignorance, but there is something perverse about our university education when it fails to show us the authentically cumulative tradition of thought. We have to discover the vital thinkers on our own and accidentally; our teachers, if anything, pooh-pooh the very people we should be studying, and we spend needless years just randomly and with luck coming into our own heritage.
. . . "although Rank's thought is difficult, it is always right on the central problems, Jung's is not" . . .
Becker, The Denial of Death (p. xxii).
Even a book of broad scope has to be very selective of the truths it picks out of the mountain of truth that is stifling us. ...the reader may wonder, for example, why I lean so much on Rank and hardly mention Jung in a book that has as a major aim the closure of psychoanalysis on religion. One reason is that Jung is so prominent and has so many effective interpreters, while Rank is hardly known and has had hardly anyone to speak for him. Another reason is that although Rank's thought is difficult, it is always right on the central problems, Jung's is not, and a good part of it wanders into needless esotericism; the result is that he often obscures on the one hand what he reveals on the other.
. . . "The Closure of Psychoanalysis on Kierkegaard" . . .
Becker, Denial (p. 159).
Chapter Eight of Becker's pulitzer-winner is entitled, in full, "Otto Rank and the Closure of Psychoanalysis on Kierkegaard."
. . . "what man really fears is not so much extinction, but extinction with insignifcance" . . .
Becker, Escape from Evil (pp. 3-4).
man transcends death via culture not only in simple (or simple-minded) visions like gorging himself with lamb in a perfumed heaven full of dancing girls, but in much more complex and symbolic ways. Man transcends death not only by continuing to feed his appetites, but especially by finding a meaning for his life, some kind of larger scheme into which he fits: ...the "immortal self" can take very spiritual forms, and spirituality is not a simple reflex of hunger and fear. It is an expression of the will to live, the burning desire of the creature to count, to make a difference on the planet because he has lived, has emerged on it, and has worked suffered, and died.
When Tolstoy came to face death, what he really experienced was anxiety about the meaning of his life. As he lamented in his Confession:
What will come of my whole life. . . . Is there any meaning in my life that the inevitable death awaiting me does not destroy?This is mankind's age-old dilemma in the face of death: it is the meaning of the thing that is of paramount importance; what man really fears is not so much extinction, but extinction with insignifcance. Man wants to know that his life has somehow counted, if not for himself, then at least in a larger scheme of things, that it has left a trace, a trace that has meaning. And in order for anything once alive to have meaning, its effects must remain alive in eternity in some way. Or, if there is to be a "final" tally of the scurrying of man on earth—a "judgment day"—then this trace of one's life must enter that tally and put on record who one was and that what one did was significant.
. . . "a symbolic action system, a structure of statuses and roles, customs and rules for behavior, designed to serve as a vehicle for earthly heroism" . . .
Becker, Denial (pp. 4-5).
this is what society is and always has been: a symbolic action system, a structure of statuses and roles, customs and rules for behavior, designed to serve as a vehicle for earthly heroism. Each script is somewhat unique, each culture has a different hero system. What the anthropologists call "cultural relativity" is thus really the relativity of hero-systems the world over. But each cultural system is a dramatization of earthly heroics; each system cuts out roles for performances of various degrees of heroism: from the "high" heroism of a Churchill, a Mao, or a Buddha, to the "low" heroism of the coal miner, the peasant, the simple priest; the plain, everyday, earthy heroism wrought by gnarled hands guiding a family through hunger and disease.
It doesn't matter whether the cultural hero-system is frankly magical, religious, and primitive or secular, scientific, and civilized. It is still a mythical hero-system in which people serve in order to earn a feeling of primary value, of cosmic specialness, of ultimate usefulness to creation, of unshakable meaning. ... The hope and belief is that the things that man creates in society are of lasting worth and meaning, that they outlive or outshine death and decay, that man and his products count.
. . . "social life is the saga of the working out of one's problems and ambitions on others . . . "
. . . "a "social contract" forged in desire and fear" . . .
. . . "the origins of inequality" . . .
Becker, Escape (pp. 48-50).
I linger on [Paul] Radin's views for a good reason. They put closure on the very beginnings of the modern debate on the origins of inequality. Adam Ferguson had argued that the primitive world had to break up because of man's burning ambition to improve himself to compete and stand out in a ceaseless struggle for perfection. Ferguson's was a very straightforward and unburdened view of man. As we would put it, the frail human creature tries to change his position from one of insignificance in the face of nature to one of central importance; from one of inability to cope with the overwhelming world to one of absolute control and mastery of nature. Each organism is in a struggle for more life and tries to expand and aggrandize itself as much as possible. And the most immediate way to do this is in one's immediate social situation—vis-à-vis others. This is what Hobbes meant with his famous observation that evil is a robust child. Rousseau quoted this in his essay on inequality, and his whole intent was to show that this isn't true, that the child is innocent and does evil in a number of clumsy and unintentional ways. But this is just what Hobbes was driving at, that the organism expands itself in the ways open to it and that this has destructive consequences for the world around it. Rousseau and Hobbes were right, evil is "neutral" in origin, it derives from organismic robustness—but its consequences are real and painful.
What Radin did was to bring all this up to date with an acute understanding of personality types and interpersonal dynamics and a frankly materialistic perspective on society. This is already the makings of a union of Marx and Freud. Seen in this way, social life is the saga of the working out of one's problems and ambitions on others. What else could it be, what else are human objects for? I think it is along lines such as these that we would find the psychological dynamics for a sophisticated Marxist philosophy of history; it would be based on power, but it would include individual deviance and interpersonal psychology, and it would reflect a "social contract" forged in desire and fear. The central question of such a sophisticated Marxist philosophy of history would be, Who has the power to mystify, how did he get it, and how does he keep it? We can see how naive the traditional Marxist view of simple coercion is: it doesn't begin to take into account what we must now call the sacredness of class distinctions. There is no other accurate way to speak. What began in religion remains religious. All power is, as Brown says, sacred power, because it begins in the hunger for immortality; and it ends in the absolute subjection to people and things which represent immortality power.
And so Brown could offer his own biting criticism of Rousseau:
If the emergence of social privilege marks the Fall of Man, the Fall took place not in the transition from "primitive communism" to "private property" but in the transition from ape to man .That is, from a type of animal that had no notion of the sacred to one that did. And if sacredness is embodied in persons, then they dominate by a psychological spell, not by physical coercion. As Brown puts it, "Privilege is prestige, and prestige in its fundamental nature as in the etymology of the word, means deception and enchantment." Thus Brown could conclude—in the epigraph we have borrowed for this chapter—that the chains that bind men are self-imposed.
. . . "man's natural and inevitable urge to deny mortality and achieve a heroic self-image are the root causes of human evil" . . .
Becker, Escape (p. xxvi).
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. In this book I attempt to show that man's natural and inevitable urge to deny mortality and achieve a heroic self-image are the root causes of human evil.
. . . "men are always dissatisfied and guilty in small and large ways, and this is what drives them to a search for purity where all dissatisfaction can come to a head and be wiped away" . . .
Becker, Escape (pp. 114-116).
[Kenneth] Burke recognized that guilt and expiation were fundamental categories of sociological explanation, and he proposed a simple formula: guilt must be canceled in society, and it is absolved by "victimage." So universal and regular is the dynamic that Burke wondered "whether human society could possibly cohere without symbolic victims which the individual members of the group share in common." He saw "the civic enactment of redemption through the sacrificial victim" as the center of man's social motivation.
Burke was led to the central idea of victimage and redemption through Greek tragedy and Christianity; he saw that this fundamentally religious notion is a basic characteristic of any social order. Again we are brought back to our initial point that all culture is in essence sacred—supernatural, as Rank put it. The miraculousness of creation is after all magnified in social life; it is contained in persons and given color, form, drama. The natural mystery of birth, growth, consciousness, and death is taken over by society; and as [Hugh Dalziel] Duncan so well says, this interweaving of social form and natural terror becomes an inextricable mystification; the individual can only gape in awe and guilt. This religious guilt, then, is also a characteristic of so-called secular societies; and anyone who would lead a society must provide for some form of sacred absolution, regardless of the particular historical disguise that this absolution may wear. Otherwise society is not possible. In Burke's generation it was above all Hitler, Stalin, and Mussolini who understood this and acted on it.
If there is one thing that the tragic wars of our time have taught us, it is that the enemy has a ritual role to play, by means of which evil is redeemed. All "wars are conducted as 'holy' wars" in a double sense then—as a revelation of fate, a testing of divine favor, and as a means of purging evil from the world at the same time. This explains why we are dedicated to war precisely in its most horrifying aspects: it is a passion of human purgation. Nietzsche observed that "whoever is dissatisfied with himself is always ready to revenge himself therefore; we others will be his victims. . . . [sic; missing unquote in orig.] But the irony is that men are always dissatisfied and guilty in small and large ways, and this is what drives them to a search for purity where all dissatisfaction can come to a head and be wiped away. Men try to qualify for eternalization by being clean and by cleansing the world around them of the evil, the dirty; in this way they show that they are on the side of purity, even if they themselves are impure. The striving for perfection reflects man's effort to get some human grip on his eligibility for immortality. And he can only know if he is good if the authorities tell him so; this is why it is so vital for him emotionally to know whether he is liked or disliked, why he will do anything the group wants in order to meet its standards of "good": his eternal life depends on it. Good and bad relate to strength and weakness, to self-perpetuatíon, to indefinite duration. And so we can understand that all ideology, as Rank said, is about one's qualification for eternity; and so are all disputes about who really is dirty. The target of one's righteous hatred is always called "dirt"; in our day the short-hairs call the long-hairs "filthy" and are called in turn "pigs." Since everyone feels dissatisfied with himself (dirty), victimage is a universal human need. And the highest heroism is the stamping out of those who are tainted. The logic is terrifying. The psychoanalytic grouping of guilt, anality, and sadism is translatable in this way to the highest levels of human striving and to the age-old problem of good and evil.
. . . "No human relationship can bear the burden of godhood" . . .
Becker, Denial (p. 166).
. . . "conventionalist sulk" . . .
Peter Kivy, Antithetical Arts: On the Ancient Quarrel between Literature and Music (pp. 146-147).
it should be perfectly obvious that although the "meaning," as construed above, of King Lear is certainly there for the culturally prepared and attentive viewer, that is by no means the case for the "meaning" of the Mahler movement. For whom—for how many—of culturally prepared and attentive listeners is [Anthony] Newcomb's agency, and the rest of the story, there? The first person I have run across for whom it is there is Newcomb himself. And it is no good to say that after Newcomb points it out, lots of people will hear it and it will be there for them. For one thing, lots of people who read Newcomb's message will continue, like me and other formalists, not to hear agents or agencies in the music. For another, if "meaning," as construed above, were really in the Mahler, we wouldn't need assistance in hearing it. It would be as apparent to us as the plot of King Lear. What are there for all culturally prepared and attentive listeners are the expressive and other phenomenological properties that the music possesses, the clumsiness among them, as the enhanced formalist admits. But to go from there to "meaning," as construed above, is an unjustified step. And if it be claimed that not hearing what Newcomb hears simply eo ipso disqualifies one as a culturally prepared and attentive listener, then the claim simply becomes true by fiat—what is sometimes called the "conventionalist sulk."
. . . ""decorative" art" . . .
ibid (p. 248).
I have been arguing in this section, that if one chooses the right comparison class of decorative art, namely that art in its highest manifestations, there is no reason to believe that it does not have the same ability to produce the kind of mind-uplifting ecstasy in the susceptible viewer that absolute music, in its highest manifestations, does in its appreciative audiences. Of course it does not follow from this that absolute music is a decorative art—merely that the experience of it is, in the way described, consistent with the hypothesis.
. . ."if you want to understand completely how a chess player thinks". . .
David C. Funder, "Process and Content in the Study of Judgmental Accuracy" (p. 207).
. . . "Evil is a robust child" . . .
Becker, Escape (pp. 132-134).
The Nature of Man
The question of the origins of inequality is only half of the problem of a sophisticated Marxist philosophy of history. The other half is that Rousseau's argument with Hobbes has never been satisfactorily settled. The Marxists have said, with Rousseau, that human nature is a blank slate, neutral, even good; evil exists because of social institutions that encourage it, because of social classes and the hate, envy, competition, degradation, and scapegoating that stem from them; change society and man's natural goodness will flower. Not so, say the conservatives, and they point for proof at those revolutionary societies which have abolished social class but which continue to express personal and social evil; evil, then, must be in the heart of the creature; the best that social institutions can do is to keep it blunted;...This question has been the central one of the science of man, and as such the knottiest in its whole career; thus it is logical that it is the last problem to be solved. I myself have been coming back to it again and again for a dozen years now, and each time I thought there was a clear solution I later discovered that vital things had been left unsaid. At first it seemed to me that Rousseau had already won the argument with Hobbes: had he said that evil is a robust child? Then, as Rousseau argued, children are clumsy, blustering organisms who must take some toll of their environment, who seek activity and self-expansion in an innocent way, but who cannot yet control themselves. Their intentions are not evil, even if their acts cause damage. In this view, man is an energy-converting organism who must exert his manipulative powers, who must damage his world in some ways, who must make it uncomfortable for others, etc., by his own nature as an active being. He seeks self-expansion from a very uncertain power base. Even if man hurts others, it is because he is weak and afraid, not because he is confident and cruel. Rousseau summed up this point of view with the idea that only the strong person can be ethical, not the weak one.
Later I agreed too with the Marxists, that hate and violent aggression could be developed in man as a special kind of cultural orientation, something people learned to do in order to be big and important—as some primitive tribes learned warfare and won social esteem because of their cruelty to enemies, etc. It was not, as Freud had imagined, that man had instincts of hate and aggression, but rather that he could easily be molded in that way by the society which rewarded them. The thing that characterized man was his need for self-esteem, and he would do anything his society wanted in order to earn it.
From this point of view, even scapegoating and the terrible toll it has taken historically seemed to be explainable in Rousseau's terms: the thing that man wanted most was to be part of a close and loving ingroup, to feel at peace and harmony with others of his kind. And to achieve this intimate identification it was necessary to strike at strangers, pull the group together by focusing it on an outside target. So even Hugh Duncan's analysis of the sacrificial ravages of the Nazis could be approached in terms of neutral motives or even altruistic ones: love, harmony, unity. And Hannah Arendt's famous analysis of Eichmann would also fit in with this:... We could even, as we have seen, subsume this under the Agape motive: man wants to merge with a larger whole, have something to dedicate his existence to in trustfulness and in humility; he wants to serve the cosmic powers. The most noble human motive, then, would cause the greatest damage because it would lead men to find their highest use as part of an obedient mass, to give their complete devotion and their lives to their leaders.
. . . "all through history it is the "normal, average men" who, like locusts, have laid waste to the world in order to forget themselves" . . .
Becker, Denial (p. 187).
Rank makes a special type out of the hypersensitive, open neurotic; and if we put him on the schizoid continuum this is probably true. But it is very risky to try to be hard and fast about types of personality; there are all kinds of blends and combinations that defy precise compartmentalization. ...if we say that the average man narrows down "just about right," we have to ask who this average man is. He may avoid the psychiatric clinic, but somebody around has to pay for it. ... Even if the average man lives in a kind of obliviousness of anxiety, it is because he has erected a massive wall of repressions to hide the problem of life and death. His anality may protect him, but all through history it is the "normal, average men" who, like locusts, have laid waste to the world in order to forget themselves.
. . . "social ... secular ... sacred" . . .
Becker, Birth (p. 185-187).
Levels of Power and Meaning
...we have...evolutionarily and historically, a common problem for men of good will in all fields to work on: in their own lives if they so choose, and in the social and political sphere. Basically,... it is a problem of the identification of idols. To what powers has a man given himself in order to solve the paradoxes of his life? On what kind of objective structure has he strung out his meanings and fenced off his own free energies? ...he lives his version of the real without knowing it, by giving his whole uncritical allegiance to some kind of model of power. So long as he does this he is truly a slave, and Scheler's point is that not only is he unconsciously living a slavish life but he is deluding himself too: he thinks he is living on a model of the true absolute, the really real, when actually he is living a second-rate real, a fetish of truth, an idol of power.
We might say that there were roughly four levels of power and meaning that an individual could "choose" to live by:
1. The first, most intimate, basic level, is what we could call the Personal one. It is the level of what one is oneself, his "true" self, his special gift or talent, what he feels himself to be deep down inside, the person he talks to when he is alone, the secret hero of his inner scenario.
2. The second or next highest level we could call the Social. It represents the most immediate extension of oneself to a select few intimate others: one's spouse, his friends, his relatives, perhaps even his pets.
3. The third and next higher level we could call the Secular. It consists of symbols of allegiance at a greater personal distance and often higher in power and compellingness: the corporation, the party, the nation, science, history, humanity.
4. The fourth and highest level of power and meaning we would call the Sacred: it is the invisible and unknown level of power, the insides of nature, the source of creation, God.
These levels, of course, are not discrete for most people: most of us live in several of them,... I said that the individual could "choose" the levels he would live by, and it is obvious why I put the word in quotation marks: usually the person doesn't ask himself this basic question: this is decided for him by the accidents of his birth and training and by the energies of his heredity, his constitution. ... The great tragedy of our lives is that the major question of our existence is never put by us—it is put by personal and social impulsions for us. ... Very few of us ever find our authentic talent—usually it is found for us, as we stumble into a way of life that society rewards us for. The way things are set up we are rewarded, so to speak, for not finding our authentic talent. The result is that most of our life is in large part a rationalization of our failure to find out who we really are, ... The question of what one's talent is must always be related to how he works it on the world: "Into what hero-system do I fit the expression of my talent?" It is worked on some combination of the four levels of power and meaning.
. . . "he is a trembling animal who pulls the world down around his shoulders" . . .
Becker, Denial (p. 139).
. . . "How empirically true is the cultural hero system that sustains and drives men?" . . .
ibid (p. 6).
. . . "prejudice" . . .
Stephen Alexander, "When Even the Flies Leave You Alone: Ernest Becker's 'The Denial of Death' as Interpreted by Sebastian Horsley"
https://torpedotheark.blogspot.com/2022/07/when-even-flies-leave-you-alone-ernest.html
All forms of human culture and civilisation, argues Becker, constitute an elaborate defence mechanism against biological reality. That's what we, as symbolic animals, are extremely good at; defiantly creating a world of meaning which allows us to transcend the fact that we end up as worm food or a few pounds of ash.
Becker seems to find this ability heroic, but that's not the term I'd use. For a fantasy of immortality remains just that and, ultimately, no life matters and no great work will be remembered.
In other words, in the grand scheme of things, there is no grand scheme and Becker's privileging of religious illusion in which our animal and mortal nature is given spiritual significance - over what he dismisses as hedonistic pursuits and petty concerns - is just conventional moral prejudice.
Becker "dismisses" very little, actually; the flipside of "conventional moral prejudice" is conventional moral relativism. But the larger point is what matters and it is unusually well articulated here.
Becker also, to reiterate, is himself aware of the problem. He does not articulate it as ruthlessly as the above, and it is easy to imagine why; but even so, all three books do land here, and the occasion is never entirely missed, although certainly more could be made of it.
e.g. Towards the end of The Denial of Death,
As [Suzanne] Langer explained, some myths are vegetative, they generate real conceptual power, real apprehension of a dim truth, some kind of global adumbration of what we miss by sharp, analytic reason. Most of all, as William James and Tillich have argued, beliefs about reality affect people's real actions: they help introduce the new into the world. Especially is this true for beliefs about man, about human nature, and about what man may yet become. If something influences our efforts to change the world, then to some extent it must change that world. This helps explain one of the things that perplex us about psychoanalytic prophets like Erich Fromm; we wonder how they can so easily forget about the dilemmas of the human condition that tragically limit man's efforts. The answer is, on one level, that they have to leave tragedy behind as part of a program to awaken some kind of hopeful creative effort by men. Fromm has nicely argued the Deweyan thesis that, as reality is partly the result of human effort, the person who prides himself on being a "hard-headed realist" and refrains from hopeful action is really abdicating the human task. This accent on human effort, vision, and hope in order to help shape reality seems to me largely to exonerate Fromm from the charges that he really is a "rabbi at heart" who is impelled to redeem man and cannot let the world be. If the alternative is fatalistic acceptance of the present human con-dition, then each of us is a rabbi—or had better be.
But once we say this, once we make a pragmatic argument for creative myth, it does not let us off the hook so easily about the nature of the real world. It only makes us more uncomfortable with the therapeutic religionists. If you are going to have a myth of New Being, then, like Tillich, you have to use this myth as a call to the highest and most difficult effort—and not to simple joy. A creative myth is not simply a relapse into comfortable illusion; it has to be as bold as possible in order to be truly generative.
(pp. 278-279)
And again, in the Conclusion to Escape From Evil:
If I wanted to give in weakly to the most utopian fantasy I know, it would be one that pictures a world-scientific body composed of leading minds in all fields, working under an agreed general theory of human unhappiness. They would reveal to mankind the reasons for its self-created unhappiness and self-induced defeat; they would explain how each society is a hero system which embodies in itself a dramatization of power and expiation; how this is at once its peculiar beauty and its destructive demonism; how men defeat themselves by trying to bring absolute purity and goodness into the world. ...
Yet I know that this is a fantasy; I can imagine how popular and influential such a body would be on the planet; it would be the perfect scapegoat for all nations. And so, like a true Enlightenment dreamer, now supposedly sobered by experience, I turn my gaze to the stars and imagine how wiser visitors from some other planet would admire such a world-scientific body. But nothing, then, changes: must we scientists still despair of the masses of men and forever turn our yearnings to the Fredericks and the Catherines—but now in outer-space garb? ...
Fortunately, no one mind can pose as an authority on the future; the manifold of events is so complex that it is fraud for the intellectual to want to be taken seriously as prophet, either in his fantasies or in his realities. One of the last thoughts of the great William James was that when all is said and done there is no advice to be given. And if a man of Freud's stature shrank back before prophecy, I surely am not going to peep any note of it at all.
(pp. 168-169)
It can only be speculated that, had Becker lived a few more good years, he may well have found his way back around to nihilism proper, as Stephen Alexander clearly has. But by then Becker would have passed through all of the searing insights contained in his last three books, including all of the references to Nietzsche, and through who knows what else subsequently. Becker made the insights rather than just reading about them, and he must have made myriad unknown-and-unknowable others that came and went without finding their way into print.
A person who has read the books may easily remain unchanged, and there is indeed nothing wrong (or right) with that; but no person could write what Becker wrote without being changed by the experience. This is itself a serviceable one-sentence summation of Rank's entire argument. True enough, the "change" could be an unfashionable prejudice as easily as a spiritual awakening or a spiritual narcosis. Who knows what the change will be, or if it will be, until after it has happened? Nobody can know this, just as a music critic cannot know post hoc that a turn toward atonality was precipitated by some grave misfortune of the composer. Becker himself was perfectly able to see this Rankian side of things, because he had read Rank and had thought deeply through it all. He wrote the books anyway, knowing full well that somebody, somewhere, would find "prejudice" in them. That is the most that any human being can do after running up against the impasse. That is transcending one's prejudices, not consolodating them.
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