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Structure of Evil an Essay on the Unifi
The author reviews the history of the science of man in relation to contemporary problems and offers proposals for a true merger of science and philosophy
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About the author
Ernest Becker
16books875followersErnest Becker was an American cultural anthropologist and author of the 1974 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Denial of Death.
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Displaying 1 - 3 of 3 reviews
August 2, 2014
To me, Ernest Becker is a seldom seen giant, a thinker of the highest order, a tragically under-read, under-appreciated source of vital understanding in a world overfull with trivia. It’s not that he deserves to be as well known as Freud or Kant. It’s that the world needs him to be so well known. Every time I read him I copy down page upon page of quotes. Sometimes a mere phrase will send me off, utterly compelled, to write an essay. I am convinced that no one can dismiss him unless they are threatened by the truth he invariably reveals. The fact that he lived only a half century is an inestimably loss for mankind.
“Man is the only animal who is not ‘built into’ his world instinctually. An animal with an instinctive set of responses suffers limitations because its world is already ‘ready-made’ for it. Evolution has built up the proper response patterns and sealed the animal firmly into its adaptational mold. Man alone among the animals gradually develops his own perceptual response world by means of imaginative guiding concepts. He is actually in this way, continually creating his own reality.”
Homo poeta - man, the creator of meaning. Thus the problem of man. How to live. How to understand. When all the while he is trapped in the reality of his own creation.
“Every thinker reaches beyond his competence by the very act of thought.”
Because our position in existence is utterly contingent upon the forces that we are born into, because, “…society can function as a huge drama of the creation of meaning, which continues on under its own complex momentum”, because, “in the unity of the world of the mind the whole precedes the part,” Becker stresses the necessity of taking a historical account of man’s ‘problem’ in order to shed some light on our present plight and perspective. Like the Ghost of Anthropology Past, he takes us on a dazzling tour through the readings and misreadings of centuries of great thinkers, enlightening us by first, revealing the ‘Copernican shift’ in the human sciences as the necessity to treat science as a means and man as an end (something we are still not doing), and second, to delineate the social science equivalent of physical science’s superordinating law of gravity.
How audaciously ambitious. And, I’d say, unless you take the ride that is this book, you may find a way to dismiss or depreciate the answer that Becker eventually gives.
We, as a society, compulsively fail to understand how we are now following science as blindly as our ancestors, a millennium ago, followed God. In both cases we are slaves to the securities and gratifications the meanings we derive from these superordinating forces provide us. Capitalists have replaced the church as the intermediary power.
“when a country is run on the principle of a blind and wishful national lottery, held daily in Wall Street, the stakes for the lottery may be nothing less than the end of the world–and this, whether the people who are playing know it or not.”
“the problem of investing meaning in a narrow segment of the total environmental field in order to facilitate some kind of control, some kind of self-assertion–‘fetishizing of the field’, a clumsy but intense attempt to pinpoint some manageable locus of activity, when one is swimming in a sea of meaninglessness.”
Understanding this helps one understand that man has no business investigating or claiming knowledge to anything before he understands himself. That is to say, whether it is science or God, such an aspiration can be nothing more than another means to reveal to ourselves something of the ultimate mystery: Ourselves! Thus we should warily shun anything but our human being as such an end.
“To be aware of a man therefore, means in particular to perceive his wholeness as a person determined by the spirit; it means to perceive the dynamic center which stamps his every utterance, action and attitude with the recognizable sign of uniqueness. Such an awareness is impossible, however, if and so long as the other is the separated object of my contemplation or even observation, for this wholeness and its center do not let themselves be known to contemplation or observation;” says Martin Buber. “In other words,” Becker adds, “man is an infinite unknowable whom we destroy and make finite, by objectifying him in social roles, by using him as a role-playing source of cues to our own uncritical cultural performance.”
Is this not more or less what Derrida taught us about language and what Einstein taught us about physical phenomena? All that we do is a means to elicit returns of meaning from the arbitrary world that is our culture. This is how Becker concludes that self-esteem is the superordinating force of man.
“like the principle of gravity, our principle must explain apparently contradictory phenomena: it explains the most disparate life styles as variations around the single theme of self-esteem maintenance. Just as gravity explains both the northward course of the Rhine and the southward course of the Rhone, so the principle of self-esteem maintenance ‘explains’ both schizophrenia and depression, sadism and masochism, hypersexuality and homosexuality, passivity and aggressivity, and so on.”
Ultimately what Becker is proposing is a wake-up call, to understand that ‘evil’ is all that keeps us impoverished of understanding and fulfillment, and the primary ‘evil’ is the combination of our willingness to be certain–whether in God, in science or elsewhere–and our willingness to forsake the ultimate mystery of our own being. Becker’s ‘evil’, I’d say, is remarkably, indistinguishable to all that Siddhārtha Gautama meant by ignorance. Indeed his urge, to use the power of science to free man from his ignorance is just as consistent, especially in light of the fact that the scientific method’s paradigmatic maxim ‘Nullius in verba’, ‘on the word of no one’ i.e. ‘see for yourself’, can be attributed to the Buddha some 2,000 years before the birth of science.
September 3, 2022
How did Becker manage to carry on? He must have felt very lonely much of the time. I read his work: it strikes me as far too prescient, far too penetrating for our times.
In The Structure of Evil, Becker makes a plea for humans to get a grip on themselves. To shake free of their cultural training, sacrifice their complacent comfort, and to come into their inheritance as potentially free-thinking creators of their own destiny.
It boils down to education, as always.
"We can educate for true critical awareness, which enables the individual to draw his pride from cultural criticism, a criticism that aims for the well-being of all others as equal ends ... Even if one day we finally do begin to plan and work from a definite design, it will still have to be tentative and modifiable: the truly free man is something we will always have to work toward; choices can never be as broad as we would like, nor fear and constriction ever banished."
I'd say this: humans find System 2 thinking difficult and, whenever possible, switch to System 1. System 1 is scripted, conditioned, trammelled, canalised by cultural training. Cultural training is inherently conservative (small c, but also, often, big C) and resistant to change. It has been resisting change for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Accordingly, we still live in a cultural stew quite as much ancient Greek and scholastic as it is Enlightened and post-modern. We are superstitious and experience exploratory thought as irksome. The task at hand, as Becker tells us, is to view this impasse honestly and to work toward the basis of some new orientation for idle, conventional thought that points us in less a destructive direction. Scale will play a vital part, I believe.
In The Structure of Evil, Becker makes a plea for humans to get a grip on themselves. To shake free of their cultural training, sacrifice their complacent comfort, and to come into their inheritance as potentially free-thinking creators of their own destiny.
It boils down to education, as always.
"We can educate for true critical awareness, which enables the individual to draw his pride from cultural criticism, a criticism that aims for the well-being of all others as equal ends ... Even if one day we finally do begin to plan and work from a definite design, it will still have to be tentative and modifiable: the truly free man is something we will always have to work toward; choices can never be as broad as we would like, nor fear and constriction ever banished."
I'd say this: humans find System 2 thinking difficult and, whenever possible, switch to System 1. System 1 is scripted, conditioned, trammelled, canalised by cultural training. Cultural training is inherently conservative (small c, but also, often, big C) and resistant to change. It has been resisting change for hundreds, if not thousands, of years. Accordingly, we still live in a cultural stew quite as much ancient Greek and scholastic as it is Enlightened and post-modern. We are superstitious and experience exploratory thought as irksome. The task at hand, as Becker tells us, is to view this impasse honestly and to work toward the basis of some new orientation for idle, conventional thought that points us in less a destructive direction. Scale will play a vital part, I believe.
May 10, 2016
This is not his best work.
If new to Becker, I would recommend The Denial of Death or Escape from Evil. This book, in comparison to the others, is mostly forgettable.
If new to Becker, I would recommend The Denial of Death or Escape from Evil. This book, in comparison to the others, is mostly forgettable.
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