When we understand that man is the only animal who must create meaning, who must open a wedge into neutral nature, we already understand the essence of love. Love is the problem of an animal who must find life, create a dialogue with nature in order to experience his own being.
"Ernest Becker" was a Jewish-American cultural anthropology/cultural anthropologist and writer. He is noted for his 1974 Pulitzer Prize-winning book, The Denial of Death.
More Ernest Becker on Wikipedia.The idea of death, the fear of it, haunts the human animal like nothing else; it is a mainspring of human activity - designed largely to avoid the fatality of death, to overcome it by denying in some way that it is the final destiny of man.
It is not so much that man is a herd animal, said Freud, but that he is a horde animal led by a chief.
Ecological devastation is the excrement, so to speak, of man's power worship.
For man, maximum excitement is the confrontation of death and the skillful defiance of it by watching others fed to it as he survives transfixed with rapture.
The irony of man's condition is that the deepest need is to be free of the anxiety of death and annihilation; but it is life itself which awakens it, and so we must shrink from being fully alive.
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