ernest becker the birth and death of meaning

The threat to meaning is created by a person's awareness of his or her own mortality. In the second edition of The Birth and Death of Meaning (1971) and, more elaborately, in The Denial of Death and Escape from Evil, Becker presents the more pessimistic view that the quest for meaning resides not outside but inside the individual. The Denial of Death emerged out of Becker's previous attempts to create a unified 'science of man' that he hoped would provide an understanding of the fundamental strivings of humans and the basis for the formulation of an ideal type of person -one who, being free from external constraints on freedom, might attain 'comprehensive meaning' (Becker 1973). Becker considered the two books to be an expression of his mature thinking.

Escape from Evil is an application to the problem of evil of ideas Becker exposed in The Denial of Death (1973), a book for which he was awarded a Pulitzer Prize. He authored nine books, with the last one, Escape from Evil, appearing after Becker's untimely death in March 1974. His first publication, Zen: A Rational Critique (1961), was a version of his doctoral dissertation at Syracuse University, where he pursued graduate studies in cultural anthropology before becoming a writer and professor at Simon Fraser University in Vancouver, British Columbia, Canada.

Correspondingly, according to Becker, a main function of a culture is to provide ways to engage successfully in death denial.īecker was born on September 27, 1924, in Springfield, Massachusetts, to Jewish immigrants. The anthropologist Ernest Becker is well-known for his thesis that individuals are terrorized by the knowledge of their own mortality and thus seek to deny it in various ways.

Ernest becker the birth and death of meaning