The Denial of Death (36 page)

What is one to say about such an eloquent program when it flies in the face of everything we know about man and most of what Brown himself has written about human character in the preceding almost 300 pages? These few lines contain fallacies so obvious that one is shocked that a thinker of Brown’s power could even let them linger in his mind, much less put them down as reasoned arguments. Once again and always we are back to basic things that we have not shouted loud enough from the rooftops or printed in big-enough block letters: guilt is not a result of infantile fantasy bu
t of self-conscious adult reality. There is no strength that can overcome guilt unless it be the strength of a god; and there is no way to overcome creature anxiety unless one is a god and not a creature. The child denies the reality of his world as miracle and as terror; that’s all there is to it. Wherever we turn we meet this basic fact that we must repeat one final time: guilt is a funct
ion of real overwhelmingness, the stark majesty of the objects in the child’s world. If we, as adults, are well dulled and armored against all this, we have only to read poets such as Thomas Traherne, Sylvia Plath, or R. L. Stevenson, who haven’t blunted their receptors to raw experience:

As I go on in this life, day by day, I become more of a bewildered child; I cannot get used to this world, to procreation, to heredity, to sight, to hearing; the commonest things are a burthen. The prim, obliterated, polite surface of life, and the broad, bawdy, and orgiastic—or maenadic—foundations, form a spectacle to which no habit reconciles me.
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Brown’s whole vision of some future man falls flat on the one failure to understand guilt.
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It does not derive from “infantile fantasy” but from reality.

In other words—and this too is crucial enough to bear stressing one final time—the child “represses himself.” He takes over the control of his own body as a reaction to the totality of experience, not only to his own desires. As Rank so exhaustively and definitively argued, the child’s problems are existential: they refer to his total world—what bodies are for, what to do with them, what is the meaning of all this creation.
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Repression fulfills the vital function of allowing the child to act without anxiety, to take experience in hand and develop dependable responses to it. How could we ev
er get a new man without guilt and anxiety if each child, in order to become human, necessarily put limits on his own ego? There can be no birth in “second innocence”
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because we would get a repetition of the very dynamics that Brown deplores, dynamics that rule out the possibility of the terrors of innocence. These are the necessary dynamics of humanization, of ego development.

Brown plunges with both feet into Aristotelian first causes and claims to know what the human ego “was designed to be in the first place, a body-ego… .” Now Brown is not the first to claim to see that evolution of the human animal is some kind of mishap; he has prominent predecessors like Trigant Burrow and L. L. Whyte, and now he has to be included with them for the nonsense as well as the good things that they have written. How can we say that evolution has made a mistake with man, that the development
of the forebrain, the power to symbolize, to delay experience, to bind time, was not “intended” by nature and so represents a self-defeat embodied in an improbable animal? The ego, on the contrary, represents the immense broadening of experience and potential control, a step into a true kind of sub-divinity in nature. Life in the body is not “all we have”
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if we have an ego. And the ego represents, as far as we can judge, a natural urge by the life force itself toward an expansion of experience, toward more life. If the urge toward more life is an evolutionary blunder, then we are c
alling into question all of creation and fitting it into the narrow mold of our own preferences about what “more-life” ought to be. Admittedly, when evolution gave man a self, an inner symbolic world of experience, it split him in two, gave him an added burden. But this burden seems to be the price that had to be paid in order for organisms to attain more life, for the development of the life force on the furthest reach of experience and self-consciousness. Brown claims that the “reunification of the ego and the body is not a dissolution but a strengthening of the human ego.”
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But this one phrase
in passing rings hollow because it is truly empty chatter that avoids facing everything we know about the ego. To talk about a “new man” whose ego merges wholly with his body is to talk about a subhuman creature, not a superhuman one.

The ego, in order to develop at all, must deny, must bind time, must stop the body. In other words, the kind of new man that Brown himself wants would have to have an ego in order to experience his body, which means that the ego has to disengage itself from the body and oppose it. That is another way of saying that the child must be blocked in his experience in order to be able to register that experience. If we don’t “stop” the child he develops very little sense of himself, he becomes an automaton, a reflex of the surface of his world playing upon his own surface. Clinically we have huge
documentation for this character type whom we call the psychopath; phenomenologically we have understood this since Dewey’s
Experience and Nature
.
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Brown’s whole thesis falls then, on a twin failure: not only on his failure to understand the real psychodynamics of guilt, but also his turning his back on how the child registers experience on his body: the need to develop in a dualistic way in order to be a rich repository of life.
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For a thinker of Brown’s breadth and penetration these failures are rather uncanny, and we realize them with a sense of reluctance, of unwillingness to find such glaring lapses in what is really a thinker of heroic dimensions. I am less upset when I find similar lapses in Marcuse, who is a much less daring reinterpreter of Freud but who puts forth a similar call for a new kind of unrepressed man. On the one hand Marcuse calls for a revolution of unrepression because he knows that it is not enough to change the structure of society in order to bring a new world into being; the
psychology of man also has to be changed. But on the other hand, he admits that unrepression is impossible, because there is death: “The brute fact of death denies once and for all the reality of a non-repressive existence.”
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The closing pages of his book are a realistic and regretful admission that the ego has to spread itself beyond the pleasures of the body in order for men to be men. But the dedicated social revolutionary who wants a new world and a new man more than anything else can’t accept the reality that he himself sees. He still believes in the possibility of some kind of “final liberation,”
which also rings like the hollow, passing thought that it is. Marcuse even turns his back wholly on living experience and gets carried away by his abstractions: “Men can die without anxiety if they know that what they love is protected from misery and oblivion [by the new utopian society].”
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As if men could ever know that, as if you and I can be sure at any instant that our children will not be obliterated by a senseless accident or that the whole planet will not be smashed by a gigantic meteor.

Why do brilliant thinkers become so flaccid, dissipate so carelessly their own careful arguments? Probably because they see their task as a serious and gigantic one: the critique of an entire way of life; and they see themselves in an equally gigantic prophetic role: to point to a way out once and for all, in the most uncompromising terms. This is why their popularity is so great: they are prophets and simplifiers. Like Brown, Marcuse wants a sure indicator of alienation, a focal point in nature, and finds it in the ideology and fear of death. Being a true revolutionary he wants to
change this in his lifetime, wants to see a new world born. He is so committed to this fulfillment that he cannot allow himself to stop in midstream and follow out the implications of his own reservations on u
nrepression, his own admissions about the inevitable grip of death; fear of death is obviously deeper than ideology. To admit this would make his whole thesis ambiguous—and what revolutionary wants that? He would have to put forth a program that is not totally revolutionary, that allows for repression, that questions what men may become, that sees how inevitably men work against their own better interests, how they must shut out life and pleasure, follow irrational hero-systems—that there is a demonism in human affairs that even the greatest and most sweeping revolution cannot undo. With an
admission like this Marcuse would be an anomaly—a “tragic revolutionary”—and would dissipate his role as a straightforward prophet. Who can expect him to do that?

There is no point in lingering on the fallacies of the revolutionaries of unrepression; one could go on and on, but everything would come back to the same basic thing: the impossibility of living without repression. No one has argued this impossibility with more authority and style than Philip Rieff in his recent work, and so far as I can see it should lay the matter to rest.18 He turns the whole movement on end: repression is not falsification of the world, it is “truth”—the only truth that man can know, because he cannot experience everything. Rieff is calling us back to basic Freudianis
m, to a stoical acceptance of the limits of life, the burdens of it and of ourselves. In a particularly beautiful phrase, he puts it this way:

The heaviest crosses are internal and men make them so that, thus skeletally supported, they can bear the burden of their flesh. Under the sign of this inner cross, a certain inner distance is achieved from the infantile desire to be and have everything.
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Rieff’s point is the classical one: that in order to have a truly human existence there must be limits; and what we call culture or the superego sets such limits. Culture is a compromise with life that makes human life possible. He quotes Marx’s defiant revolutionary phrase: “I am nothing and should be everything.” For Rieff this is the undiluted infantile unconscious speaking. Or, as I would prefer to say with Rank, the neurotic consciousness—the “all or nothing” of the person who cannot “partialize” his world. One bursts out in boundless megalomania, transcending all limits
, or bogs down into wormhood like a truly worthless sinner. There is no secure ego balance to limit the intake of reality or to fashion the output of one’s own powers.

If there is tragic limitation in life there is also possibility. What we call maturity is the ability to see the two in some kind of balance into which we can fit creatively. As Rieff put it: “Character is the restrictive shaping of possibility.”
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It all boils down, again, to the fact that the prophets of unrepression simply have not understood human nature; they envisage a utopia with perfect freedom from inner constraint and from outer authority. This idea flies in the face of the fundamental dynamism of unfreedom that we have discovered in each individual: the universality
of transference. This fact is hardly lost on Rieff, who realizes that men need transference because they like to see their morality embodied, need some kind of points of support in the endless flux of nature:

Abstractions will never do. God-terms have to be exemplified… . Men crave their principles incarnate in enactable characters, actual selective mediators between themselves and the polytheism of experience.

This failure to push the understanding of psychodynamics to its limits is the hurdle that none of the utopians can get over; it finally vitiates their best arguments. I am thinking here, too, of Alan Harrington’s tremendously effective writing on fear of death as the mainspring of human conduct. Like Brown he pins an entirely fanciful and self-defeating thesis onto the most penetrating and damaging insights. Is fear of death the enemy? Then the cure is obvious: abolish death. Is this fanciful? No, he answers, science is working on the problem; admittedly, we may not be able t
o abolish death entirely, but we can prolong life to a great extent—who knows how much eventually. We can envisage a utopia wherein people will have such long lives that the fear of death will drop away, and with it the fiendish drivenness that has haunted man so humiliatingly and destructively all through his history and now promises to bring him total self-defeat. Men will then be able to live in an “eternal now” of pure pleasure and peace, become truly the godlike creatures that they have the potential to be.
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Again, the modern utopians continue the on
e-sided Enlightenment dream. Condorcet had already had the identical vision in 1794:

… a period must one day arrive when death will be nothing more than the effect either of extraordinary accidents, or of the slow and gradual decay of the vital powers: and that the duration of the interval between the birth of man and his decay will have itself no assignable limit.
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But Choron offers a caution on this vision that goes right to heart of it and demolishes it: that the “postponement of death is not a solution to the problem of the fear of death … there still will remain the fear of dying prematurely.”
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The smallest virus or the stupidest accident would deprive a man not of 90 years but of 900—and would be then 10 times more absurd. Condorcet’s failure to understand psychodynamics was forgivable, but not Harrington’s today. If something is 10 times more absurd it is 10 times more threatening. In other words, death would be “hyperfetishized” as a so
urce of danger, and men in the utopia of longevity would be even less expansive and peaceful than they are today!

I see this utopia in one way resembling the beliefs of many primitive societies. They denied that death was the total end of experience and believed instead that it was the final ritual promotion to a higher form of life. This meant too that invisible spirits of the dead had power over the living, and if someone died prematurely it was thought to be the result of malevolent spirits or the breach of taboos. Premature death did not come as an impersonal accident. This reasoning meant that primitive man put the highest priority on ways to avoid bad will and bad action, which is why he
seems to have circumscribed his activities in often compulsive and phobic ways.
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Tradition has laid a heavy hand over men everywhere. Utopian man might live in the same “eternal now” of the primitives, but undoubtedly too with the same real compulsivity and phobia. Unless one is talking about real immortality one is talking merely about an intensification of the character defenses and superstitions of man. Curiously, Harrington himself seems to sense this, when he speculates on what kind of gods the utopians would worship: