If there is any science man really needs it is the one I teach, of how to occupy properly that place in creation that is assigned to man, and how to learn from it what one must be in order to be a man.
– Immanuel Kant
When we are young, we are puzzled by how each person has a different idea of how to live. This idea even disturbs and disheartens us. As young people, we look for people to follow, so we follow whoever is the loudest or the most charismatic, we look from answers from whoever seems to be the most confident among us.
But then, as we get older, we realize how pathetic each person’s version of the truth is, how profoundly limited each idea is. Today, people try so hard to win converts to their ideology because it is more than merely an outlook on life, it is an immortality formula.
The great psychoanalysts of the past, including Freud, Jung, Rank, Adler, and others all saw holes in each other’s theories. Even great intellectuals are imperfect, biased, and wrong about fundamental things. This puts the average lay person in a bleak situation. That is the essential problem of the artist – he needs to create a vision of reality that sustains him by providing him with meaning.
Freud’s formula was to live life as an agnostic. Kierkegaard’s formula was to become a Knight of faith. Both were flawed. Freud was too focused on the visible, while Kierkegaard was too focused on the unknown. Becker argues that it is impossible to say that either one was superior. Kierkegaard did not choose to accept death because he had free will and power, but because he was helpless. As for Freud, he never analyzed away his own Oedipal Complex, he could never manage to emotionally yield to the transcendental dimension.
Only a true saint can stand above others, and even they can only do so from grace, and not of their own human effort.
But this again is because it is impossible to live two opposing lives. It is impossible to lead a scientific movement of historic importance and then give it up to the invisible.
Norman Brown, author of Life Against Death, argues that the human being should return to his animal nature and live an unrepressed life. This recommendation of rebelling against the trap man has built for himself is based on Freud’s insight that modern man has enslaved his animal instincts in the serve of culture. But Becker argues that the identification of the ego with the body will result in subhumans, not superhumans.
Rank’s solution, on the other hand, is to engage in creative possibilities. The hard-headed realist, by refusing action, is refusing life’s task, because everything that exists in civilization is the result of the realization of creative possibilities. This is the same recommendation Becker makes at the end of the book.
The most that any one of us can seem to do is to fashion something— an object or ourselves—and drop it into the confusion, make an offering of it, so to speak, to the life force.
If you are interested in reading books about unmasking human nature, consider reading The Dichotomy of the Self, a book that explores the great psychoanalytic and philosophical ideas of our time, and what they can reveal to us about the nature of the self.