This piece is the culmination of my 550 days in the Korean army where I’ve had plentiful time to read, write, and most importantly, work.
Part 1: The Terrifying Human Condition
Psychoanalysis is an explanation of the entire human condition spearheaded by Sigmund Freud and his obsession with childhood and sexuality as the stem of all human suffering. From birth, man experiences the dualistic contrast between the world around him and his limited flesh. The world is defined by his mother, a God-like figure that nourish all ailments, and his flesh is defined by the human nature of feeling hunger and pain, needing to excrement, and eventually sexuality. Even as a baby, the child knows of its limits as a human being, or its “anality” as Freud puts it.
Therefore, neurosis, the broad term describing human discomforts encompassing anxiety and obsession, is a natural part of being human which stems from our inability to be self-sufficient. From birth, we cannot be ourselves without the existence of another God-like being and this highlights an even more significant problem: our finite choices within a fixed time of existence. To be human is to die, and to live as a human is identical to marching toward inevitable death. We were thrown under this terrifying human condition and all those who face this inevitability reach the Heideggerian conclusion that “Death is the possibility of the absolute impossibility of Dasein”. To recognize one’s beingness, Dasein, but to fully come to terms with certainty of its end is a contradiction that haunts all that explore what it means to be human.
As humans grow up, they no longer have access to the God-like maternal figure. Under psychoanalysis, “transference” is known as the projection of these anxieties that were guarded by the mother toward other figures such as therapists, romantic lovers, and leaders. The problem with this is that those figures too, are human, and there is nothing that they can do to fulfill the infinite void left by the infinite untaken paths of life. In other words, they cannot solve death. The terrifying human condition is that man always needs an external figure whom to existentially rely upon, or to face life in its fullest, overwhelmed by the “dizziness of freedom” as Kierkegaard put it. This results in neurosis at all pages of life, whether one knows it or not.
Part 2: Otto Rank’s Philistine
Although this anxiety effects us all, not everyone is directly aware of of this condition thanks to the immense distractions offered by the world. Those who strive to be heroes of their own stories are blinded by the petty struggles of life that eclipse the infinite paths not taken. Ironically, humans who are driven to be recognized through these worldly struggles are often too busy to question why they need this recognition, why they have this desire to be the hero. Those who do question the desire fall back into the trap of the psychoanalyst, who must bear the burden of knowledge. The unfortunate state of psychology and philosophy is that intelligent men give their fullest to find answers to the problem of life, and in doing so, they perceive life as a problem to be solved. This is why looking at the biography of many great intellectuals, we see severe loneliness and depression. The human condition haunts both the striving worker and the reflective intellectual. However, there is a human archetype who seem to bear this burden less than others: the philistine.
Otto Rank, the psychoanalyst philosopher whom this piece is majorly inspired by, describes philistines as “the average man… [who] demands that life free him from the very freedom which would make him an individual”. In modern terms, they are NPCs of the world, content with the character that they play, far away from the anxieties of individualism and heroism. In standard English, philistinism is a derogatory reference to the rejection of art and intellectualism, but in psychoanalysis, it does not bear any negative sentiments. The term is only used to refer to those who live in a happy illusion, a “character lie” as Ernest Becker describes in “The Denial of Death”.
I believe that there are two types of philistines that exist. The first is the world-generated philistine who have only experienced the petty problems of life and are troubled by the day to day struggles of living in society. These include most working-class people who’s main concerns are sustaining a certain lifestyle. They are not to be confused with the heroic strivers who are also luckily blind from the fullness of the human condition. The second type is the self-made philistine. These are those who have scraped the fullness of life but wisely redirected their life journey out of fear of becoming Icarus. A famous example of such character is Miyamoto Musashi depicted in the manga Vagabond by Takehiko Inoue. Musashi, born as a heroic striver to become the “strongest man under the sun”, reroutes his path to become a content farm worker after familiarizing himself with death and finitude. Vagabond is a story about Musashi as a character changing from the anxious striver to the wise philistine in order to find happiness and is an illustration of a widely followed path in reality. Personally, I believe that there is more to life than reducing one to a blind worker in order to stop at happiness while shushing the internal desire to become more. The petty problems that I faced in the military, while momentarily fulfilling, were not enough for me to completely silence the anxiety of life. Rank also argues that there are other ways to ground oneself against the full force of reality without becoming an NPC or clinically insane.
Part 3: Art, the Productive Neurosis
In his 1932 work “Art and Artist”, Rank defines the artist as a specific human archetype who despite being attacked by the dread of life, converts the neurosis into a productive force of creation. While the artist is not unbothered by the terrifying human condition aligned in Part 1, he is able to stick out of philistine normalcy and also cope with the anxiety of separation by creating himself through independent work. He is almost a Nietzschean character that defines his own existence, but is different, as Rank, unlike Nietzsche, grounds his definition within the realistic human who is bound to struggle with meaning.
The artist uses neurosis as fuel for self-generated meaning and projects his definitions toward the world in order to cope with separation. This is why there are so many great troubled artists, those who channel existential fears into unique work often create art that stand out but are also crippled by the aftermath of the art-creation process. One can find such artists in every medium of creation throughout time: Leo Tolstoy in literature, Picasso in drawing, Kanye West in music. All these figures undoubtedly found meaning in their work, but were still destroyed by the human condition that kept returning to them. One cannot infinitely channel anxiety as artworks have to be finished at some point. During my career as a music artist, I felt a similar cycle of buildup and release that seemed to accumulate as a discography but not toward human fulfillment. Due to this cyclical repetition of validation and neurosis, I realized that there must be more than art to support my existence as a human being.
Part 4: Giving Up on Logic
So is it impossible for a human to come to terms with neurosis once and for all? The more one reasons about the escape from the human condition, the more one is entrapped by it. There seem to be no path that leads outside the maze of flesh that exists within the logical walls of reality. Perhaps the answer to life lies outside reason, in the realm of the unverifiable.
There seems to be a trending topic on the internet where self-improvement gurus have gave up on sound advice and have conceptualized an ideology grotesquely titled “retardmaxxing” in order to tackle the seemingly impossible problem of avoiding terror while living inside flesh by deliberately leaning into carefree stupidity. The Hegelian cycle is traversing against the Enlightenment movement of the 17th century and the modern man, after seeing the horrors of logic, now wants to turn back toward the realm of humble unknowns. In a way, the scientific method of questioning, forming a hypothesis, conducting experiments, has only created more questions to be explored rather than solving anything once and for all. We can make the argument that while doing immense good for flesh, science has severely harmed our soul and further highlighted the dualism.
Incidentally, during the period after my career as an artist, I explored Eastern philosophy through figures such as Jiddu Krishnamurti. His works and those alike reject reason and preach to live purely in the infinite present of awareness. As I’ve argued previously, reason is that of extending the present into the past and the future, bringing man-made time into the picture of reality. Without reason, there is no time. Without time, there is no death. Krishnamurti himself says during his talk in Ojai, “to live in the eternal present there must be death to the past, to memory. In this death there is timeless renewal”. So this is one way of defeating the finite human condition, defeating the inevitability of death by destroying continuity of the self, killing yourself before the universe kills you. Through meditation and practice, I’ve felt a taste of this discipline and can attest to the fact that you can momentarily slip into periods of infinite existence. However, it is almost impossible to practice the complete rejection of reason as a modern man and go about life without returning to conditioned identity. To annihilate neurosis once and for all through this lens would almost certainly mean letting go of all of your responsibilities and turning away from society. While it is a useful tool to subdue anxiety and find momentary bliss, it simply is not a way of life that can be continually practiced for me or most modern men. However, it is a step toward escaping reason, where I think the true answer to life lies.
Part 5: God and Modern Man
“It begins to look as though modern man cannot find his heroism in everyday life any more, as men did in traditional societies just by doing their daily duty of raising children, working, and worshiping” - Ernest Becker
If one were to describe the shift in the spiritual characteristic of man throughout the last century, it would be toward individualism, secularism, and realism. These characteristics all align directly with increased neurosis. Individualism creates greater separation anxiety, secularism removes the figure of transference that one can depend on, and realism, by definition, is the acceptance of reality, which ends with death. This explains the skyrocketing suicide rates and mental illness numbers recorded within recent decades. What caused the modern man to be so lost? I believe that the answer lies within the relationship between God and modern man.
Modern man has lost the ability to expand his reality toward the divine and is entrapped in his guilt of being human, or in Christian terms, his sin. Becker makes the fantastic observation that Rank and Kierkegaard, despite being in different fields, both arrived at the conclusion that the infinitude of God is the solution to all of man’s problems. Back in Part 1, I described “transference” as man’s attempt to solve one’s finitude out of another finite human being. What if one performs transference onto God, an infinite being outside of reality and death? Instead of transference, one calls this “faith”. It is faith that Kierkegaard and Rank both arrived at after exhaustive thought and searching. It is not by chance that the biblical illustration of belief in God as the answer to sin parallels these thinkers’ conclusion that faith is the psychological answer to removing one’s guilt of being in a finite human flesh. By defining one’s existence as a part of a higher infinite being, one reaches figurative immortality that cannot be reached within reason. The “impossibility of Dasein” can be aligned with the impossibility of the existence of God within finite reality and so the haunting contradiction is solved.
This introduces the final archetype of man, the religious man, who is able to live with his terrifying human condition by sacrificing his life to God, who is able to make the leap of faith toward the illogical. The religious man is able to live within society and face neurosis by acting under the command of God, producing immortal work motivated by the will of an infinite being. While this seems like such a simple answer to a seemingly impossible problem of life, to come to this conclusion within the realm of independent thought is almost as impossible as defeating death itself, and so is why only intellectual giants such as Otto Rank and Søren Kierkegaard have reached this thought on their own. One must explore outside of Christianity in order to truly believe in God as the answer to sin and guilt on their own. There are many born into faith or who stumble into faith who do not purposefully venture outside for the fear of corruption. I believe that this is just another leap of faith one must make in order to bring Christ within the realm of reality, or in the opposite perspective, extend one’s reality toward Christ. This is true faith, to unite one’s coping mechanism for death and one’s true belief in what is real. In sum, to psychologically defeat death, the modern man must sacrifice his finite life to earn an infinite one that rids guilt. This is identical to Christianity’s requirement of faith itself as the ultimatum for sin, and I see it as a beautiful attestation to truth where psychology and theology meet to hint that God is real.
Ending Note
The inspiration for this essay was a combination of spiritual gift from God and my recent reading of Ernest Becker’s “The Denial of Death”. I hope that this essay serves as a piece to think about for the modern man. On a personal note, I am writing this 2 days before being discharged from the military. I am grateful for this period of immense growth and am excited to contribute back to society.