Human Character as a Vital Lie

I dont know if you ever have looked at an animal and just kinda been like "thats an animal, it has no idea about anything, it just sits there and eats that, it just flys around or walks, eats stuff off the ground, jumps from tree to tree, sits on a wire" then ask yourself, "whats that things purpose" and bascially wonder and question its existence and wonder if it also has any idea of itself. Of course by the examples I gave im talking more of "City" animals right now, not so much the lions and zebras of Africa. However, in the end its still all the same, since those animals have their own daily routine, sit under that tree, go kill that gazelle, you get the idea? But back to the oirginal point, I always have wondered this at times. Leaning more towards "it has no idea about anything" and "wonder if it has any idea of itself" statements.

I've been reading "The Denial of Death" by a man named Ernest Becker. The book as a whole isnt exactly what I thought it was so im not completely into it. Its kinda like reading a text book. Though I have come across a few parts that have turned my head and made me go, "hmmm". What im talking about here, is one of those things. The chapter its from is "Human Character as a Vital Lie" and its obviously more about humans, but it has some stuff about the difference between animals and humans which answered my silly question completely and a WHOLE lot more.

"The great boon of repression is that it makes it possible to live decisively in an overwhelmingly miraculous and incomprehensible world, a world so full of beauty, majesty and terror that if animals perceived it all they would be paralyzed to act.

But nature has protected the lower animal by endowing them with instincts. An instinct is a programmed perception that calls into play a programmed reaction. it is very simple. Animals are not moved by what they cannot react to. They live in a tiny world, a sliver of reality, one neuro-chemical program that keeps them walking behind their nose and shuts out everything else. But look at man, the impossible creature! Here nature seems to have thrown caution to the winds along with the programmed instincts. She created an animal who has no defense against full perception of the external world, an animal completely open to experience. Not only in front of his nose, in his umwelt, but in many other umwelten. He can relate not only to animals in his own species, but in some ways to all other species. He can contemplate not only what is edible for him, but everything that grows. He not only lives in this moment, but expands his inner self to yesterday, his curiosity to centuries ago, his fears to five billion years from now when the sun will cool, his hopes to an enternity from now. He lives not only on a tiny territory, nor even on an entire planet, but in a galaxy, in a universe and in dimensions beyond visible universes. It is appalling, the burden man bears, the experiential burden.

As we saw in the last chapter, man cant even take his own body for granted as can other animals. It is not just hind feet, a tail that he drags, that are just "there", limbs to be used and taken for granted or chewed off when caught in a trap and when they give pain and prevent movement. Mans body is a problem to him that has to be explained. Not only his body is strange, but also its inner landscape, the memories and dreams. Mans very insides--his self--are foreign to him. He doesnt know who he is, why he was born, what he is doing on the planet, what he is supposed to do, what he can expect. His own existence is incomprehensible to him, a miracle just like the rest of creation, closer to him, right near his pounding heart, but for that reason all the more strange. Each thing is a problem and man can shut out nothing. As Maslow has well said, "its precisely the god like in ourselves that we are ambivalent about, fascinated by and fearful of, motivated to and defensive against. This one aspect the basic human predicament, that we are simultaneously worms and gods"

The historic value of Freuds work is that it came to grips with the peculiar animal that man was, the animal that was not programmed by instincts to close off perception and assure automatic equanimity and forceful action. Man had to invent and create out of himself the limitations of perception and the equanimity to live on this planet. And so the core of psychodynamics, the formation of the human character, is a study in human self-limitaion and in the terrifying costs of that limitation. The hostility to the psychoanalysis in the past, today, and in the future, will always be a hostility against admitting that man lives by lying to himself about himself and about his world, and that character, to follow Ferenczi and Brown, is a vital lie"