The Denial of Death
by Ernest Becker
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Book Summary Information
Author: Ernest BeckerEdition: Hardcover
Audio: English (Unknown); English (Original Language); English (Published)
Published: 1998-11
ISBN: 0844669326
Number of pages: 314
Publisher: Free Press Paperbacks
Book Reviews of The Denial of Death
Book Review: A Soul Centering Work
Summary: 5 Stars
This book gave me two lessons. First Becker masterfully shows us how and why our society is now driven by our fear of death. Second, he reaffirms the imperative of inter-disciplinary learning, even as hyper-specialization becomes more common.
I first stumbled on this book as a young Psychology and Philosophy major in university; its intersection with my studies seemed beyond coincidence. I had just completed work on Kierkegaard, and I was personally reading up on Rollo May and Carl Rogers. Freud had left me feeling like a loser, a dark product of repression since birth and yearning to kill my father ever since. These writers gave me some hope.
But Becker went beyond psychotherapy for me. He tied together what I was embracing in Philosophy as well as my life experience, synthesizing important constructs in a way I hadn't seen before. He re-arranged thoughts in my mind until my heart plummeted downward and found roots in my soul. I remember not sleeping much in the three days it took to ingest this incredible work.
Becker's main premise is that modern man is lost in a mountain of knowledge, useless to him not only because it's impossible to ingest it all, but because he no longer has a "throbbing vital center" with which to synthesize it. The age of specialization has brought a multitude of competing fractured data, while the major insights of our age are ignored. Modern man, in rejecting a central core, has allowed the fear of death to become his central impetus for activity for the simple reason that he has stripped away his understanding of it, and can no longer face its implications.
In such a world, our powers of rational thought hold little sway over this one devastating truth, magnified by our conscious self-awareness. Others have argued that our rejection of a quest for meaning has allowed our narcissism to overtake us, sentencing us to immaturity and moral vacuity. Becker crystallizes these thoughts by spanning traditional scholastic models and challenging us with implications to our daily lives and society of living under the fear of death.
Becker's answer is really twofold. We must personally integrate our knowledge in order to make sense of it. Science in and of itself can never be a sustaining answer to the human mind. There is always something more. Second, Becker posits that something more naturally becomes a quest for something outside himself; a religious experience and affiliation with God, (or "Life" or "Nature" if you will) that brings some order and answer to the human spirit.
Many readers view "The Denial of Death" as one of the most important books written in the twentieth century. Unlike some others, I found it neither depressing nor difficult to read. The challenge of the book lies in its disruption of your world view and readers may find it helpful to allow some passages to ruminate in their minds for a couple days before venturing onward.
Becker was a genius. Don't miss him.
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