The Denial of Death [Paperback]

Winner of the Pulitzer prize in 1974 and the culmination of a life's work,The Denial of Deathis Ernest Becker's brilliant and impassioned answer to the why of human existence. In bold contrast to the predominant Freudian school of thought, Becker tackles the problem of the vital lie -- man's refusal to acknowledge his own mortality. In doing so, he sheds new light on the nature of humanity and issues a call to life and its living that still resonates more than twenty years after its writing.After receiving a Ph.D. in Cultural Anthropology from Syracuse University,Dr. Ernest Becker(1924-1974) taught at the University of California at Berkeley, San Francisco State College, and Simon Fraser University, Canada. He is survived by his wife, Marie, and a foundation that bears his name -- The Ernest Becker Foundation.Chapter One: Introduction: Human Nature and the Heroic

In times such as ours there is a great pressure to come tip with concepts that help men understand their dilemma; there is an urge toward vital ideas, toward a simplification of needless intellectual complexity. Sometimes this makes for big lies that resolve tensions and make it easy for action to move forward with just the rationalizations that people need. But it also makes for the slow disengagement of truths that help men get a grip on what is happening to them, that tell them where the problems really are.

One such vital truth that has long been known is the idea ofheroism;but in normal scholarly times we never thought of making much out of it, of parading it, or of using it as a central concept. Yet the popular mind always knew how important it was: as William James -- who covered just about everything -- remarked at the turn of the century: mankind's common instinct for reality...has always held the world to be essentially a theatre for heroism. Not only the popular mind knew, but philosophers of all ages, and in our culture especially Emerson and Nietzl2