Does A Fear Of Death Drive Everything We Do? | Sheldon Solomon | Modern Wisdom Podcast 240

I don't think it is good for us or for humanity to lose track of the fact that in our finest moments, uh, it is just the sheer joy of being alive, the spontaneous exuberance of wallowing (laughs) i- in the mystery of life that I think is what makes life, uh, most worthwhile. But, yeah, but it's also dreadful to be alive and to know it because u- unless you're a child or cognitively impaired, if you're smart enough to know that you're here, you're also smart enough to know that like all living things, you too will someday die. And Ernest Becker's point is that that unwelcome realization, the, the worm at the core of the human experience, as William James put it, that that was the most significant psychodynamic event in the history of the human species.

Are we gonna talk about death today?

Um, I believe that we will. Uh, hopefully not for the sake of death per se, but in the interest of enhancing life.

How does death enhance life?

Well, uh, at our best, the existentialists tell us since time immemorial, um, it is necessary to come to terms, uh, with the most basic fact of human existence, and that is that, uh, l- that we, like all living creatures, are o- are of finite duration. And, um, theologians, philosophers, you know, people just sitting on a rock, uh, back in the... in, in antiquity have wrestled, frankly, uh, with this idea. Um, uh, you know, every other form of life is unperturbed, uh, by the reality that, uh, o- of finitude, um, but we necessarily are. A- and, uh, the claim very simply is that whether we're aware of it or not, death anxiety, um, pervades every aspect of our existence, a- and malignant manifestations of death anxiety are arguably responsible directly or indirectly, uh, for a considerable proportion of human foibles. And so, the claim is that both for the benefit of ourselves as individuals to, to get the most out of life, as well as for the benefit of society in general, yeah, it is necessary both individually and collectively to come to terms with our mortality.

What are some of the manifestations of how they can malignantly manifest?

Yeah. S- so great question. I'll back up a little bit just to give folks, um, some detail that the work that we do, um, is, is derived from a cultural anthropologist, Ernest Becker, who in the 1970s, uh, won a Pulitzer Prize for a book called The Denial of Death. A- and, uh, what Becker argued, uh, you know, very simply i- is that, um, yeah, humans are like all other living things. Uh, you know, Darwinian wise, that, uh, we are biologically predisposed to want to survive in the interest of self-preservation and, and for reproduction. Um, and yet, uh, we're different than other creatures. And without being overly arrogant, the claim is that our, our huge forebrain, uh, gives us the capacity to think abstractly and symbolically, uh, to the point where we can even imagine stuff that doesn't yet exist and then have the audacity to take our dreams and render them real. And that could not be more uplifting, uh, to me. Um, uh, I, like Otto Rank, you know, Freud's boy, who said, "Humans make the unreal real." A- and we don't wanna lose track of the fact that all other creatures, uh, have to, uh, accept the world in the form in which they encounter it. You know, I get it. Spiders, uh, make webs, beavers make dams, bees make hives, a- and they've been doing it quite well for hundreds of millions of years. Yeah, but they don't imagine a flying machine like da Vinci, you know, in the 1500s or 1400s, uh, or, and then actually, you know, centuries later, we're flying around in what was originated in somebody's imagination. All right. All great so far, uh, until... and still great, um, when, when, uh, Ernest Becker says, "Okay. Uh, let's now move to Kierkegaard, the Danish existential philosopher who said, 'You know, people are so smart that we realize that we're here.'" A- and, uh, and of course, humans, w- we take this for granted. You know, you wake up every day and you're like, "Here I am. I woke up." Or, you know, you're walking down the street. You're like, "Here I am, walking down the street." Or it can get even crazier than that. "Here I am, walking down the street, thinking about that I'm walking down the street." So, uh, it... you know, you could be, "Wow. Now I'm thinking about that I'm thinking about that I'm walking down the street," until you have to turn into the nearest pub to extricate yourself from this (laughs) perseverating cycle o- of annoying, uh, self-focus. Well, so what? You know, Kierkegaard said, uh, you know, "If you're smart enough to know that you're here," uh, which he insisted requires a sophisticated cognitive apparatus to render yourself the object of your own subjective inquiry, then you're gonna experience two uniquely human emotions, awe and dread. A- and Kierkegaard's like, "L- wait a minute. It's awesome to be alive and to know it."...that, that's just great. That's why if you get to choose between being a person and a potato-