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Angel in Armor: A Post-Freudian Perspective on the Nature of Man
Angel in Armor. Free Press Paperback Edition, issued 1975. Includes essays the pathology of normalcy; the Oedipus complex; the demonic; paranoia; and “What is Basic Human Nature?: Further Notes on the Central Problem of the Science of Man.”
208 pages, Paperback
First published January 1, 1969
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About the author
Ernest Becker
18 books912 followersErnest Becker was an American cultural anthropologist and author of the 1974 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Denial of Death.
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Displaying 1 - 2 of 2 reviews
November 18, 2013
Table of Contents:
I. Everyman as Pervert: An Essay on the Pathology of Normalcy
II. Kafka on the Oedipus Complex: An Essay for S.
III. The Pawnbroker: A Study in Basic Psychology
IV. Buñuel and the Demonic
V. Paranoia: The Poetics of the Human Condition
VI. What is Basic Human Nature?: Further Notes on the Central Problem of the Science of Man
November 14, 2015
Took over a year to finish reading this, but hey I finished!
We constitute a fuller object to the extent that we develop a broader spectrum of behaviours towards it. One's whole life is just such an education, an education in broadening the range of one's behaviours toward objects.
An individual, then, with fewer dependable behaviour patterns has less meaning in his world: fewer, poorer, shallower, more fragmentary objects.
[On sadism] A completely sadistic catharsis elevates the individual organism at the expense of the social world, but precisely in this elevation there is a violation of his basic social nature.
The history of a human life is largely a learning to disregard the outer appearance of human objects, and to try and divine inner intentions.
Some of us prefer to relate to the outside of people's bodies, others to the insides. A workingman cannot be comfortable with what the consciousness of an intellectual represents; he has no way of coping with it. He prefers an organism with rough hands, and one who can hold a lot of whiskey. He cannot go far beyond the body. A sensitive intellectual, on the other hand, sees no value in a rough exterior, and cannot deal with a shallow interiority; he is literally stopped dead, has nothing to take hold of.
Where does the slave stand when he loses his master; when he loses the firm locus of superordinate authority on which the power of his being rests? In the void of dread, as both Kafka and Kiekegaard knew.
Organisms live by bread, but man lives by meaning (echoed by Frankl's logotherapy)
Love draws one out, breaks down barriers, places the human relationship on more mutual terms: in a word, takes it somewhat out of the control of the armoured person. It takes strength to love, simply because it takes strength to stand exposes without armour, open to the needs of others.
The terrible twofold burden of man, a burden that has weighed him down down self-conscious life emerged over a million years ago: to witness suffering without being able to overcome it; and to bear the guilt of causing suffering, by the fact that one's life has unintended yet unavoidable repercussions on others, simply because one takes up space and moves about as an organism.
The paranoid delusion can give one's world form, but a rigid and false form that destroys it. The moral of the story is that homo sapiens is an animal who is fated to seek the causes and interrelationships of things, and if he reads them entirely in the wrong place, it brings his world down around his shoulders.
If I were asked for the single most striking insight into human nature and the human condition, it would be this: that no person is strong enough to support the meaning of his life unaided by something outside him. But this is the last thing the individual will admit to himself, because to admit it means to break away the amroured mask of righteous self-assurance that surrounds his whole life-striving.
Outmoded institutions can be more dangerous than wishful innovations. History is strewn with examples of the failure of whole civilisations because of incrusted habitual ways. If nature endures, she endures in order to change. Innovation is a fact of the natural world; the generations last in order to give birth to new generations, to unknown energies.
We constitute a fuller object to the extent that we develop a broader spectrum of behaviours towards it. One's whole life is just such an education, an education in broadening the range of one's behaviours toward objects.
An individual, then, with fewer dependable behaviour patterns has less meaning in his world: fewer, poorer, shallower, more fragmentary objects.
[On sadism] A completely sadistic catharsis elevates the individual organism at the expense of the social world, but precisely in this elevation there is a violation of his basic social nature.
The history of a human life is largely a learning to disregard the outer appearance of human objects, and to try and divine inner intentions.
Some of us prefer to relate to the outside of people's bodies, others to the insides. A workingman cannot be comfortable with what the consciousness of an intellectual represents; he has no way of coping with it. He prefers an organism with rough hands, and one who can hold a lot of whiskey. He cannot go far beyond the body. A sensitive intellectual, on the other hand, sees no value in a rough exterior, and cannot deal with a shallow interiority; he is literally stopped dead, has nothing to take hold of.
Where does the slave stand when he loses his master; when he loses the firm locus of superordinate authority on which the power of his being rests? In the void of dread, as both Kafka and Kiekegaard knew.
Organisms live by bread, but man lives by meaning (echoed by Frankl's logotherapy)
Love draws one out, breaks down barriers, places the human relationship on more mutual terms: in a word, takes it somewhat out of the control of the armoured person. It takes strength to love, simply because it takes strength to stand exposes without armour, open to the needs of others.
The terrible twofold burden of man, a burden that has weighed him down down self-conscious life emerged over a million years ago: to witness suffering without being able to overcome it; and to bear the guilt of causing suffering, by the fact that one's life has unintended yet unavoidable repercussions on others, simply because one takes up space and moves about as an organism.
The paranoid delusion can give one's world form, but a rigid and false form that destroys it. The moral of the story is that homo sapiens is an animal who is fated to seek the causes and interrelationships of things, and if he reads them entirely in the wrong place, it brings his world down around his shoulders.
If I were asked for the single most striking insight into human nature and the human condition, it would be this: that no person is strong enough to support the meaning of his life unaided by something outside him. But this is the last thing the individual will admit to himself, because to admit it means to break away the amroured mask of righteous self-assurance that surrounds his whole life-striving.
Outmoded institutions can be more dangerous than wishful innovations. History is strewn with examples of the failure of whole civilisations because of incrusted habitual ways. If nature endures, she endures in order to change. Innovation is a fact of the natural world; the generations last in order to give birth to new generations, to unknown energies.
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