Zen: A Rational Critique

by Ernest Becker

Genres: Philosophy, Buddhism, Zen, Nonfiction

Unknown Binding

First published January 1, 1961

About the author

Ernest Becker was an American cultural anthropologist and author of the 1974 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Denial of Death.

Reviews

[St Fu · Rating 2 out of 5]

There are rational things to say about Zen, a method of consciousness transformation that eschews the rational, but you're not going to get to them by insisting that irrationality is ipso facto a bad thing. If you want to understand how rationality imprisons you, the koan you should look at is "show me your original face." You weren't originally rational but now it's hard to be otherwise, though it's less about rationality, ultimately and more about convention and pattern and fear of change.

Becker acknowledges his fear of death and his fear of losing the gains of western civilization which he sees under attack. This "attachment" as Buddhists would have it is what Zen aims to get you to give up--not to replace with an attachment to irrationalism but to surrender. Becker sees surrender in the old political way as giving in to a tyranny. He see's all change as a change from one attachment to another. If you're attached by therapy, that can help you but because the therapists does it all for you (as they put it at McDonalds). Otherwise, you're attached to someone doing it all for themselves--a dictator--a brain washer. That's not really rational but looks that way to someone with his attachments.
We all have our attachments--things we identify with--things we believe ourselves to be--ways we claim to be hard wired.

Satori is the experience that we needn't be wired at all.

[Ксения Чистопольская · Rating 5 out of 5]

I do love Becker, so I am biased :) I think it's definitely worth knowing this view on psychotherapy and Zen that he is promoting, both thinking of the period when it was written and even of the contemporary situation, and besides I love his style of writing: clever, witty and just sparkling.

[Mr. Davies · Rating 3 out of 5]

I quickly read select chapters of this book. I had previ0usly fought through Becker's "Beyond Alienation," and two aspects of "Rational Critique" struck me. First, I found it much easier to read than "Beyond Alienation." Second, though, and in light of the naturalist, Rousseau-centered arguments of the 1967 "Beyond Alienation," I was surprised by how defensive this 1961 Becker was about the central tenets of Zen Buddhism.