Ernest Becker was seen as an academic outcast before he won the Pulitzer Prize in 1974.
Although a cultural anthropologist by trade, the questions he asked were bigger and broader, probing much deeper, than any singular specialization was capable of answering on its own.
He also had a strange way of mixing psychology and philosophy that didn’t sit too well with many of his contemporaries. The ideas that he championed weren’t quite in style at the time.
When his book The Denial of Death won the prize, however, this changed. Unfortunately, by then, Becker had lost his fight with cancer. Fortunately, he left behind a large body of work.
His big idea was that all of human culture is created in response to our persistent fear of death. Due to our ability to think conceptually, we have become the only animal that is self-conscious enough to be fully aware that it ends. As such, we live to defy this destiny.
a symbolic world as we do in a real, tangible physical world. In fact, it is this symbolic world that makes us so different from other animals.
It is why we develop philosophies and ideologies. It is why we build empires, and it is also why we create art. It is the cause of much evil in the world, but it is also what inspires us to fight against it and produce meaning. In Becker’s own words:
“The person is both a self and a body, and from the beginning there is the confusion about where “he” really “is”- in the symbolic inner self or in the physical body. Each phenomenological realm is different. The inner self represents the freedom of thought, imagination, and the infinite reach of symbolism. The body represents determinism and boundness.”