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Summary: Immortalist Manifesto Great Companion for Becker
Review: I love Becker's Denial of Death. And I'll let you in on a big secret. An undiscovered gem called THE IMMORTALIST MANIFESTO by ELIXXIR (available on Amazon) takes Becker's thesis to its rational conclusion. Find out why CORNEL WEST, HARVARD (NOW PRINCETON) philosophy professor calls the author Elixxir FIRST RATE! ORIGINAL...RAZOR-SHARP." If indeed our fear of Death and our desire for Immortality are as unquenchable as Becker rightly points out, then we shall never reconcile with Death, The Immortalist Manifesto argues. But instead humanity will track it down as "the last enemy" to be conquered. Only when Death is vanquished shall we be free from the bondage of Alienation, Repression, and Oppression. The Big Book we've been waiting for. Unlike Becker's book, The immortalist Manifesto has the potential to really change the way you see the world. And the world itself.
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Summary: most important book i've ever read
Review: I think all the reviews say this but I will reiterate it again: this book changed my life. It forced to ponder every important question in life, for me and for all of mankind, in new, difficult yet enlightening ways. I think it's completely undervalued and underrated by academia (at least at the school I teach at) not only as psychological text, but as a philosophical and spiritual text as well. It's writing is both honest and impassioned, written with the ardous care of a man who has forced himself to face life and death in a magnanimous and sober way. This is easily my favorite book.
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Summary: ...
Review: I ve read lots of books i dont understand and quite a few wich were "cool" to Read (neitche) this is probably the only book i have read wich is almost always in my mind and in my observations on life. This is the only book wich can save humanity from destruction read it and prepare for the emptiness. This book is not cool or trendy in any way these are the last words of a dying man. I said that because everyone listens to you when they know youre dying instead of just waiting for there turn to speak. thanks for the book mike trying to get in touch with you to get it back to you.
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Summary: Profound and wise
Review: I write only because I am concerned that some of the other reviews are going to scare away those with strong religious beliefs or at least a genuine interest in life after death. No one could be more deeply steeped in the study of paranormal phenomena than myself, yet this book ranks among the most profound and wise I have ever read. Even if you have little background in psychology or philosophy, you will recognize the deep truth of what Becker has to say. If you haven't read this book, you don't understand how the world works -- it is that important.
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Summary: Author correction accomplished
Review: I wrote previously to complain that you were erroneously listing Daniel Goleman as an additional or co-author of this book. You have now corrected this problem as best I can tell so please remove that complaint from the reviews you are printing. Thanks.
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Summary: Why is Daniel Goleman listed as an author
Review: I wrote some months ago and this peculiar erroneous listing of Goleman persists. How come?
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Summary: Kind of makes me smile...
Review: I've an interesting story to tell: I bought a copy of this book from a second-hand bookshop, and I could tell that the previous owner of it had relished it with passion since some chapters of the book had been marked with various notes and underscores. But I discovered later that there were no more of these marks after the eighth chapter. Meaning, he/she stopped reading the book after this. I could only smile as to why it had to be that way. Readers and admirers of this book, do you see what I mean?
As I read the early chapters of the book, I was seized by the thought that the author must be a very learned man. Here is a work of ingenious anthropology! Here is a scholar who has devoted his life to the pursuit of self-knowledge, and the result of which he was now putting into a book: Wow! And how he lambasted Emerson and Nietzsche and the entire Buddhism in the first pages!
"I am arguing," the author says in the preface, "for the merger of psychology and mythico-religious perspective." I should have taken this a warning, but as I reached the last chapters, it was too late to realize this: the author had by now put on the robe of a priest as an attire, and his sermon had begun!
To tell the truth, it really freaked me out. How the author synthesizes Otto Rank-ian and Freudian psychology with Kierkegaard's philosophy was awesome to behold. How he concludes this brilliant conception, beginning with the ninth chapter, fills me with so much aversion and repugnance that I had to muster all my remaining strength to finish reading this peculiar theologian's book.
And to think they gave it the Pulitzer Prize! I could only imagine the previous owner of this book reeling with disgust and abhorrence. And every time I imagine him/her this way, it kind of makes me smile.
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Summary: HONESTY: a terrifying black well, even for Becker.
Review: In Becker's The Denial Of Death, death, as it turns out in the book, equals ultimate helplessness , that is to say, man is a creature who lives in fantasizing denial of the fact that he is incapable of freeing himself from the cage of his mortality which is not only physical, but ontological, without a transcendent escape-hatch.
Throughout the book Becker skillfully and powerfully accumulates empirical and logical evidence, including a very strong analysis of infant and child psychology as well as one of adult society, to support his premise. As one approaches the end of the book the effect of all this is quite powerful and I enjoyed it immensely, but the conclusion of the book was for me rather anti-climactic and somewhat annoying and I will give the precise reason for why I feel this way. I would ask any reader who admires and takes Becker's book seriously, to please consider my viewpoint and understand that I too take very seriously what Becker struggled with in this book which, in spite of my qualification, I highly recommend.
First of all, my problem is not that Becker did not supply an 'answer' for all the dark difficulties he heaped up in front of us throughout the book. If he had attempted such an answer, I don't know how it could have looked anything but ludicrous. The word ludicrous comes from the Latin, ludus (game) and implies that one is playing a game. Becker carefully avoids the game of facile answers and prides himself on this. In fact, I think he prides himself a little too much and this pride hides what is a deeper game.
Please note how frequently Becker speaks favorably, positively and admiringly of the 'fall from grace' metaphysics of Augustine and Kierkegaard as representatives of a certain strain of Christian belief. This metaphysical position holds that man is incapable of essentially altering his condition for the good and is absolutely dependent in his fallen state on the grace and mercy of God. Becker has only scorn for any metaphysical position that allows for human consciousness having any access to anything transcendent, such as is found in the later works of Brown, Fromm, Jung and even Tillich, among others. He continually praises the insight shown by Augustine and especially Kierkegaard into human psychology, particularly the human tendency toward fantasizing false realities into existence. And even at the end of the book he praises the "beauty" of this religion. Now, the very serious problem with this is that there is no indication that Becker has the slightest belief in the reality of this religious metaphysics which he strangely uses to defend his own view of reality. And his own view seems to be, in part, that man is incapable of even formulating a valid metaphysics precisely because he has no transcendent capacity, he is helplessly mortal and that is exactly what he is in denial of. Something is clearly amiss here. Is Becker saying that Augustine and Kierkegaard had remarkable insights into human psychology but were both typical human fantasizing failures in regards to their religious belief? Or does Becker believe that maybe these men really did receive the grace of transcendent revelations from a transcendent deity? Becker is absolutely silent on these questions. What is so important about this is that after Becker does such an admirable job of laying out the human problem of the 'denial of death', he then implies that we must take this seriously and address it. But address it with what? Borrowed metaphysics? Well, presumably not. We suppose his answer would be to address it with honesty. Well, I would like an honest answer to the question of why Becker uses religious beliefs that he does not even hold to reveal and support the truth of his own viewpoint? There is something not quite forthright about this and it belies his criticism at the end of the book of what he considers Norman O. Brown's lapse into facile mysticism. And what exactly is Becker's viewpoint? That humans are generally terrified into denial and fantasy by the reality of guilt and death? That is a profound fact, but in the end I don't really need Becker to know that and it tells me nothing about how Becker himself approached his guilt and death. I am not asking Becker to tell us something that he does not know, but precisely rather to attempt to describe what he does not know instead of covering it up with the grandiose religious fantasies of Augustine. I simply wish that at the conclusion of his book he would have given a more personal vision of what he believed he was "offering... to the life force."
I recommend the book strongly, but give it only four stars because of its conclusion.
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Summary: Beyond the Denial of Death.
Review: It is difficult to understand all the praise that is lavished upon this book. I appreciate Becker's insights into the human condition and his elucidations of the role that awareness of death plays in the creation of human culture. This book is undoubtably an important one due to those insights.
I have 3 main criticisms of this book:
1) Becker focuses almost exclusively on the role of the "terror of death" in motivating the human animal - thus his interpretations of behavior and experience are almost always "existential." He mostly ignores more prosaic explanations like sexuality, cognition, meeting survival needs, and group dynamics. His writing could be supplemented (and modified) quite nicely by well documented evolutionary psychology. Simply, he goes overboard by using the "terror of death" to explain too much.
2) Becker calls himself and "empiricist," yet this book contains very little discussion of empirical studies - it mostly references studies that are supposed to have been "empirical" - and is quite uncritical in his acceptance (and reinterpretation) of Freud, Rank, Kierkegaard, etc. His uncritical praise of Sartre is questionable as well. Becker would do well to question his own "hero project" as well as his "hero worship" of these supposed "giants" of our intellectual history.
3) Though Becker has useful insights on how the awareness of death influences the human animal - his prognosis is entirely unacceptable and bleak. Becker recommends accepting a "life-enhancing" illusion, which basically puts us back where we started. Becker thinks that we benefit if we can do such a thing reflectively, if we know that endorsing a good illusion is needed to cope with life's challenges - it just might keep people from taking the illusions seriously enough to continue killing other people for them. I don't buy it. Even if Becker trades more anxiety for less bloodshed, it is hardly an enhancement for the human being - and there is no guarantee that taking Becker's recommendations seriously would actually result in less bloodshed - it may very well result increased numbers of people who take their own lives, or live a greatly diminished quality of life due to Becker's dreary vision of the possibilities of mankind.
Becker's prognosis for humanity is built upon the premise that we are "stuck with" human nature and that it cannot be changed. This premise is simply wrong. For an alternative, visit http://www.actualfreedom.com.au.
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Summary: Death: Still Relevant Today
Review: Poets and philosophers have observed long before Freud that man can only tolerate small doses of reality. Reality is measured by the terminal limits of death reflected in time, our bodies, and the myriad of daily events that happen beyond our control. We are set apart from the rest of the animal kingdom not only by our capacity for language but also by our capacity to contemplate our inevitable demise. Such contemplation can be experienced as overwhelming, paralyzing, and to have its own deadening effect. The solution seems necessarily one of denial and relegating death to the repressive depths of the unconscious.
To understand the inherent fear of death and the inherent need to deny its reality, Backer contends, is to begin to appreciate the roles served by religion, cultural ideology, nationalism, "heroic" self-promotion, neurosis/psychosis/depression, and as he was to detail in his follow-up, posthumously published work, evil. Socrates helped start Western civilization on this path of collective denial by suggesting that this present life was merely a preparation for a more glorious afterlife. History since has been a catalogue of efforts to strive toward some comforting illusion of immortality while making as much distance as possible from the worms. Religion, of course, can be singled out as the most obvious mechanism for denying one's own mortal limits but this primitive urge to deny death is ubiquitous throughout all endeavors, even the scientific.
Becker approached religious faith and vital attachments to social constructions of "character" and "heroism" with a sense of humility and empathy that appreciates both their function as well as their futility, and all too frequently, their destructive consequence for others. Are we psychologically equipped, Becker asks, to face the stark realities of mortal life without some semblance of religious faith, ideation or at the very least a secret magical assurance that our unique specialness somehow sets us securely apart from the same mortal fate of others? Do we ever outgrow the need for an internalized parent who is there to fall back on during times of threat and uncertainty? When we are running toward heroic recognition, losing ourselves in addiction, the psychosis of romantic love or the euphoria of belonging to a tribe or a cause, what are we running from? Stripped of these illusions how do we move on? If mechanisms of denial as commonly practiced through most religions and cultures serve to keep us "sane," then what is the complaint? Perhaps answers are so few and incomplete because it has been so rare that the question has been formulated with the courage and clarity posed by Becker. We resist asking the questions.
The invariable conclusion argued by most theologians and philosophers is that we cannot resist what appears to be an inherent religious instinct and hope to maintain our sanity without sliding into nihilism or a depressive despair that Kierkegaard referred to as "sickness unto death." Becker appears to draw the same conclusion: as individuals we have to depend and draw upon something greater then ourselves. But Becker also suggests that perhaps the problem lies with the socially constructed self ("character") we aspire to live up to in the first place--that part of self defined by social "reality" (of which the definition of god is a significant part) which so typically eclipses authentic, spontaneous aspects of our innate beingness that initiates, creates, and experiences things as they are.
Becker appreciated a core of human nature that Nietzsche once described as "will to power" or "becoming who you are" and what evolutionary biologist Richard Dawkins was to later imply in seeing all living organisms as "survival machines." The awareness of death, conscious or unconscious, is what drives us on toward optimal survival. Accordingly, every individual requires a "causa sui project," a meaningful quest in life that engages one's talents, creative energies, and inspires imagination. Pursuit of such projects for good or ill appears to hing upon what kind of acceptance and peace we can find in our own mortal limitations in the process. It seems that we are left in a paradox: to strive to live fully each moment as creative gods while simultaneously drawing humility and inspiration from the fact that we are gods who "sh-t" and are destined to die.
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