the birth and death of meaning by ernest becker

The child learns very quickly to cultivate this private selfīecause it puts a barrier between him and the demands of the world. We are, in reality, somewhat split in two, the self and the body the one hidden, the other open. “We come into contact with people only with our exteriors-physically and externally yet each of us walks about with a great wealth of interior life, a private and secret self. The Birth and Death of Meaning: An Interdisciplinary Perspective on the Problem of Man Yet we have the right to make such distinctions because we assign the meaning to the world by naming names of things we inhabit a different sphere and we capitalize naturally on the privilege.” Thus we say that a sheep “drops' its lamb, but a woman “gives birth'-it’s much more noble. But in our own Western culture we have, for the most part, set a great distance between ourselves and the rest of nature, and language helps us to do this. And Jules Henry observed on the Kningang that dogs are not considered pets, like some of the other animals, but are on a level of emotional equality, like a relative. Karl von den Steinen was told by a Xingu that the only difference between them and the monkey was that they monkeys lacked the bow and arrow.

Primitives sometimes see little difference between themselves and the animals around them. There seems to be no way to get this idea into our heads, except by long rumination over the facts of evolution or perhaps by exposure to a primitive tribe or by being raised on a farm.

“Try repeating “man is an animal' a few times, just to notice how unconvincing it sounds.

The birth and death of meaning by ernest becker