Reviving Becker’s Intellectual Tradition

By Bruce Sheiman | April 29, 2020

In this essay I want to make a broader case for Ernest Becker’s thinking than has hitherto been presented, going beyond the narrow focus on death denial.

I discovered Becker’s Denial of Death as an undergraduate in 1975.  And the book had a profound impact on my writing.  His theory about death denial was certainly part of it.  But there was a larger dimension of Becker’s work that impressed and influenced me.

Understanding the “Nature of Man”

It was always Becker’s aim to understand the “nature of man” or the “science of man.”  Just look at the books Becker published before The Denial of Death:

• Angel in Armor: A Post-Freudian Perspective on the Nature of Man

• The Structure of Evil: An Essay on the Unification of the Science of Man

• The Revolution in Psychiatry: The New Understanding of Man

• The Lost Science of Man

• The Birth and Death of Meaning: An Interdisciplinary Perspective on the Problem of Man

In all his work, Becker was searching for the primary motivation or impetus to explain human behavior.  And after much experimentation Becker embraced death denial as his core unifying concept. 

I understand Becker to be among a group of theorists that also included Erich Fromm, Rollo May, Abraham Maslow and Viktor Frankl, among others.  These thinkers were promulgating an intellectual tradition that I call Human Exceptionalism – that humans possess capacities and motivations that set us apart from all other animals.

Competing Theories Before and After Becker

The significance of the work of Becker, Fromm, Maslow and the others can be understood in the context of the prevailing theories of human nature before and after their work flourished from the 1940s (when Fromm’s Escape from Freedom was published) to the 1950s (when Maslow’s Motivation and Personality was released) through the 1960’s (when Frankl’s Man’s Search for Meaning was published) and to the 1970s (when Becker’s Denial of Death was released).  

What we discover is that the “before” and “after” periods were dominated by deterministic and reductionist theories of human motivation and behavior, with the ultimate conclusion being: Humans are just animals, albeit with bigger brains.

In his work, Janus: A Summing Up, the writer and social philosopher Arthur Koestler critiqued the two theories of human nature that dominated the social sciences in the first half of the 20th century: Behaviorism and Psychoanalysis (Freudianism).  Both theories, Koestler wrote, were ultimately based on biological reductionism: “Reductionism is the philosophical belief that all human activities can be ‘reduced’ to – i.e., explained by – the behavioral responses of lower animals.”  

In the period after Becker, Fromm and the others, right up to the present day, the theory dominating the social sciences and, increasingly, the humanities is another form of biological determinism: evolutionary theory.  The essential message of what is now known as “evolutionary psychology” is that humans are not at all exceptional.  All human behavior and civilization itself is the product of the twin evolutionary imperatives of survival and reproduction. 

The Dominance of Evolutionary Psychology

Thus, in The Accidental Species by science writer Henry Gee we read, “There is nothing special about being human, any more than there is anything special about being a guinea pig or a geranium.”  This is the application of evolutionary theory and biological reductionism at its most absurd.  And theorists such as Stephen Jay Gould and Edward O. Wilson intended in their work to show the extent to which animals are human-like and humans are animal-like, thus erasing any claim to human exceptionalism.  

So what of the mystery of human nature?  Case closed: It’s all in our genes.  Language, religion, morality, mathematics, art, music, altruism, and technology – all are just evolutionary adaptations.   Indeed, even our belief in free will is an illusion, a ruse that evolution programmed into our brains for adaptive advantage.

Edward O. Wilson wrote in On Human Nature: “If the brain evolved by natural selection, even the capacities to select particular esthetic judgments and religious beliefs must have arisen by the same mechanistic process.”  

And David Sloan Wilson (no relation) of the Evolution Institute asserts, “Nothing about X makes sense except in the light of evolution, where X can equal anthropology, art, culture, economics, history, politics, psychology, religion, and sociology in addition to biology” – in other words, all human endeavor.  All our strivings may be worthwhile for the individual, but are ultimately just genetic adaptations chiseled into the human psyche by our ancestors’ struggle for preservation and procreation.  With evolutionary psychology as the hammer, everything looks like a nail.  

Reviving the Becker, Fromm, Maslow et al. Tradition

Certainly, humans are driven by biological imperatives.  We do indeed carry the marks of natural selection in our bodies and minds.  But to reduce all human motivation and behavior to evolutionary adaptation is overly simplistic and ridiculously incomplete.

Becker, Fromm, Maslow and other “human exceptionalists” would strongly oppose today’s prevalence of biological determinism.  And this debate is more than just a version of nature vs. nurture.  The question that presents itself: Is a human being really no different from a guinea pig or a geranium?  I think Becker, Fromm, Maslow and Frankl all proposed in one way or another that humans are truly exceptional.  

I emphasize this aspect of Becker’s work because it has been, since my college days 45 years ago, my foremost intellectual ambition – to understand what drives human behavior.  Becker was thus for me an inspiration to seek a theory of the human condition that goes beyond biological reductionism and determinism.

Ultimately, I want to revive the tradition that I will always associate with such eminent thinkers as Ernest Becker, Erich Fromm, Rollo May and Abraham Maslow – understanding the distinctive “nature of man,” an interdisciplinary pursuit I call Anthro-Ontology: the study of human being.

Bruce Sheiman earned a BA in interdisciplinary studies at Fordham University and an MBA from Northwestern University.  Emulating Becker’s writing style, Sheiman published An Atheist Defends Religion: Why Humanity Is Better Off with Religion than Without It (Alpha/Penguin 2009).  His work, like Becker’s, synthesizes ideas and insights from philosophy, psychology, anthropology, theology, and science. I welcome comments and responses: Bruce4654Sheiman@protonmail.com