Becker explores a topic as long as he feels like it, and if enough has been said, simply decides it’s time for a new chapter. Whereas other nonfiction works attempt to adhere to a meticulous structure and spacing of ideas, Becker’s writing feels completely free flowing. And while that made him something of an outcast at times during his professional life, it’s a huge part of what makes his writing so enjoyable. Becker was a wonderful brand of academic, who was passionate about his work and not afraid to romanticize it. But as my reading of The Birth and Death of Meaning came to a close, what interested me perhaps even more than the content of the work was the personality of Ernest Becker, which can’t help but bleed through into the fabric of his writing style. The subject matter of the book was of extreme interest to me, and first and foremost what motivated me to keep up with Becker’s intense discussions. But regardless of the extent one think his proposed “science of man” is accurate, or the end-all say on human nature, the insight into the matter that Becker’s cross-disciplinary perspective offers is extremely valuable and cannot be easily dismissed. There’s certainly room for criticism of Becker’s theory, I myself didn’t buy into every idea he put forth.
Instead, the Becker delivers an open-ended and honest examination of his subject of passionate interest: the research and philosophies that taken together represent what he considers a wholistic science of human nature. The Birth and Death of Meaning simply doesn’t read like a calculated anatomy of human society with razor sharp insight, and it doesn’t really pay to read it like it is. Not that the fish in the aquarium being the butt of the joke represent the laughability of this book’s subject matter, they don’t. The simple answer is yes, this was incredibly fun to read, but less as in the fun you’d have on a lovely first date and more like the kind you’d have making dumb jokes about fishes at an aquarium with friends. Hopefully one of the things this review can offer is a meaningful explanation of what the hell this book exactly is for anyone interested in it. The book’s content very much threw me for a curve ball I had zero clue going into it that I’d be getting a crash course on Freud. If that sounds like a bewildering discussion to read about, that’s because it is. To summarize this book’s content as concisely as possible: what The Birth and Death of Meaning delivers is a discussion of human nature through the lens of psychoanalysis that eventually explores the importance of existentialism to the social sciences. That’s mostly I think because it’s not easy to tell what the hell this book is about. I thought I knew what I was getting into when I started reading this book (I didn’t).
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