A. But to live a life with the fate of death haunting one's dreams makes a huge difference. B. He is a creator with a mind that soars out the speculate about atoms and infinity. C. Man's body was a curse of fate and culture was built upon repression not because he was a seeker of pleasure, but because he was primarily an avoider of death. D. Yet at the same time, man is a worm and food for worms. AB. Man is born free, and everywhere he is in chains. AC. It was something that had to go right to his core, something that made him suffer his peculiar fate, that made it impossible to escape. |
Man's Existential Dilemma
We always knew that there was something peculiar about man, something deep down that characterized him and set him apart from the other animals. For ages, when philosophers talked about the the core of man they referred to it as his "essence," something fixed in his nature, deep down, some special quality or substance. But nothing like it was ever found and man's peculiarity still remained a dilemma. The reason it was never found, as Erich Fromm（艾瑞克·弗洛姆，精神分析心理学家和人本主义哲学家）put it in an excellent discussion, was that there was no essence, that the essence of man is really his paradoxical（悖论的）nature, the fact that he is half animal and half symbolic.
We might call this existential paradox the condition of individuality within finitude（有限性）. Man has a symbolic identity that brings him sharply out of nature. He is a symbolic self, a creature with a name, a life history. He can place himself imaginatively at a point in space and contemplate bemusedly his own planet. This immerse expansion, this competence, this self-consciousness gives to man almost the status a small god in nature.
This is the paradox: he is out of nature and hopelessly in it: he is dual, up in the stars' and yet housed in a heart-pumping, breath-gasping body that once belonged to a fish and still carries the gill-marks to prove it. His body is a material fleshy casing that is alien to him in many ways -- the strangest and most unpleasant way being that is aches and bleeds and will decay and die. Man is literally split in two: he has an awareness of his own splendid uniqueness in that he sticks out of nature with a towering majesty, and yet he goes back into the ground a few feet in order blindly and dumbly to rot and disappear forever.
The lower animals are, of course, spared this painful contradiction, as they lack a symbolic identity and the self-consciousness that goes with it. They merely act and move reflexively as they are driven by their instincts. They live in a world without time, pulsating, as it were, in a state of dumb beings. This is what has made it so simple to shoot down whole herds of buffalo or elephants. The animals don't know that death is happening and continue gazing while others drop alongside them. The knowledge of death is reflective and conceptual, and animals are spared it. They live and they disappear with the same thoughtlessness: a few minutes of fear, a few seconds of anguish, and it is over.
Quoted from Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death
