Life Anxiety, Part Five: Inheritance

(Part One.)(Part Four.)

Regroup: the simplest expression of what I've been writing about is that "man transcends death not only by continuing to feed his appetites, but especially by finding a meaning for his life, some kind of larger scheme into which he fits."

To get that larger meaning we've "erected cultural symbols which do not age or decay."

We do this "to quiet ... fear of [the] ultimate end."

Ok, these are really two ideas, or at least two versions of one idea, and I think sometimes Becker doesn't discriminate enough between them.

The first idea is about fear. The root of fear is death. This Becker emphasizes. We have to do something with that fear. We need to put death in its place -- this is fundamental to our survival.

We need a view, a pose, a "vital lie," a sustaining fiction. We need to control that primal instinct which senses the danger of the "overwhelmingly miraculous and incomprehensible world."

(That primal instinct we might call "life anxiety," if we were into burying ledes.)

This means we invent character to protect ourselves from the world. This puts fear at the root of all we create.

"A silence already filled with noises"

But the other side of the coin is in that "man transcends death" bit. I don't think Becker means that ironically. Even if it may be correct, in one sense, to call character a "lie," that lie is still "vital." It's a fiction, really. An art at the heart of who we are.

Our stories are vehicles to overcoming the limits of mortality. Stories are the only kind of power we have over the world.

It's easy to get caught up in the idea that everyone else is living a lie, especially if their story conflicts with ours. In the same way, "at heart one doesn't feel that he will die, he only feels sorry for the man next to him." Or woman. Ahem!

We all participate. We are all creators. Faced with the disabling presence of disease and death, we either write our own way out, or we lean on stories co-authored by others. Stories powerful enough to combat finitude.

This is not something we can opt out of. We can't call out others for having a "vital lie" without hypocrisy -- though we can certainly question a lie's effectiveness or call out its effects.

This shared project of confabulation is part of our unique human inheritance.

Next: Composing