Immortality Project Analysis

3.8—Becker’s “Immortality Project” as Denial of Death and False Heroism The non-theist, Ernest Becker, has written about secular man’s “Denial of Death” through symbolic defense systems which seek “immortality projects”. Becker sees human civilization as a “symbolic defense mechanism” against the truth of our mortality, Humanity has both physical selves and symbolic selves. Through our symbolic selves we can transcend our mortality through the (false) “heroism” of our "immortality project" in which people believe that they become part of something that will last forever. When people "become" heroic, they become part of something eternal, something that will never die which in turn, gives people the feeling that their lives have significance in the grand scheme of things. (Becker, p ). When our hero system fails us, we live in the shadow of death and become mentally ill with depression or anxiety and when immortality projects contradict each other, quasi-religious wars develop.

Becker claims that the traditional "hero-systems" of religion, are no longer convincing in the age of reason but that science will never be able to solve the problem of our mortality. Instead we need new convincing "illusions" that enable us to feel heroic and immortal but Becker has no solution except to say that we must face that there is
Existentialism encourages a realistic awareness of the death, especially one’s own death, wherein something ultimate and absolute is encountered in its negative form which is the destruction of the body in physical death. To offset the tragic impact of death, man must find something that is equally ultimate and absolute. In all the major religions, this ultimacy is a God whose love and power is greater than physical death. One existential answer is attempted by Paul