ernest becker
WE ALWAYS KNEW THAT THERE WAS something peculiar about humanity, something deep down that characterized us and set us apart from the other animals. It was something that had to go right to our core, something that made us suffer our peculiar fate, that made it impossible to escape.
For ages, when philosophers talked about the core of humanity, they referred to it as our “essence,” something fixed in our nature, deep down, some special quality or substance. But nothing like it was ever found; humanity’s peculiarity still remained a dilemma. The reason it was never found was that there was no essence, that the essence of humanity is really our paradoxical nature, the fact that we are half animal and half symbolic.
We might call this existential paradox the condition of individuality within finitude. Humanity has a symbolic identity that brings us sharply out of nature. We are symbolic selves, creatures with names, life histories. We are creators with minds that soar out to speculate about atoms and infinity, we can place ourselves imaginatively at a point in space and contemplate bemusedly our own planet. This immense expansion, this dexterity, this ethereality, this self-consciousness gives to humanity literally the status of a small god in nature, as the Renaissance thinkers knew.
Yet, at the same time, as the Eastern sages also knew, humans are worms and food for worms. This is the paradox: we are out of nature and hopelessly in it; we are dual, up in the stars and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body that once belonged to a fish and still carries the gill-marks to prove it. Our bodies are material fleshy casings that are alien to us in many ways—the strangest and most repugnant way being that they ache and bleed and will decay and die.
Humans are not just blind globs of idling protoplasm, but creatures with names who live in a world of symbols and dreams and not merely matter. Our sense of self-worth is constituted symbolically, our cherished narcissism feeds on symbols, on an abstracted idea of our own worth, an idea composed of sounds, words, and images, in the air, in the mind, on paper. And this means that our natural yearning for organismic activity, the pleasures of incorporation and expansion, can be fed limitlessly in the domain of symbols and so into immortality. The single organism can expand into dimensions of worlds and times without moving a physical limb; it can take eternity into itself even as it gaspingly dies.
Other animals are, of course, spared these painful contradictions, as they lack a symbolic identity and the self-consciousness that goes with it. They merely act and move reflexively as they are driven by their instincts. If they pause at all, it is only a physical pause; inside they are anonymous, and even their faces have no name.
Humans are literally split in two: we have an awareness of our own splendid uniqueness in that we stick out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet we go back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever. It is a terrifying dilemma to be in and to have to live with.
Everything that humanity does in its symbolic world is an attempt to deny and overcome our grotesque fate. We literally drive ourselves into a blind obliviousness with social games, psychological tricks, personal preoccupations so far removed from the reality of our situation that they are forms of madness—agreed madness, shared madness, disguised and dignified madness, but madness all the same. Our insides are full of nightmarish memories of impossible battles, terrifying anxieties of blood, pain, aloneness, darkness; mixed with limitless desires, sensations of unspeakable beauty, majesty, awe, mystery; and fantasies and hallucinations of mixtures between the two, the impossible attempt to compromise between bodies and symbols.