8. Death Wish

“The dilemma is escaped only by those willing to discard personality.”
Norman O. Brown

Thanotos, Freud’s death instinct, is the creator of the ego. It alienates man from nature and his own natural self by giving him the sense of being special. Specialness, in turn, exempts man from the laws of change that dominate all of nature, giving man the hope for an individualistic immortality. The trees and rocks of nature may come and go because of their lack of specialness, but historical man will live on because he has a special self – the ego that was ironically generated by his will to die.

The specialness in man’s ego allows him to transcend the boundaries of space and time. Man has a body that belongs to nature, obeying its laws of growth and decay in time, but man’s individual ego is separate from his vulnerable body, existing unchanged as his body ages and becomes frail. The ego of man is immortal and ageless because it is special, being exempt from nature and her laws.

However, man’s sense of specialness is the product of thanatos, his destructive wish to kill his natural self. The sense of being something apart is really alienation, the nightmare of isolation, fear, and guilt. Because he is special, man experiences a sense of regret for a past that shouldn’t have been and a fear of the future that might be. Because he is special and the father of himself, he must bear the responsibility for a guilty past and a fearful future.

See p. 127, Being and the End of History.

History as Necrophilia

The distinction between prehistoric man and his historic successors is that prehistoric man escaped from nature by turning within the tribe or group that he belongs to, while man from the historic era uses his individual ego to isolate him from nature. Prehistoric man did not need an historical identity as a fixed definition that made him separate and special because prehistoric man had a special place within a tribe that, in turn, had a special place in the universe. His life might ebb and flow, but the specialness of his group and his contribution to that specialness survived by promising him an island of immortality in the swirling sea of flowing time.

The man without a nation, clan, family, tribe, or individual ego is isolated from everything but nature, and, faced with the terror of the all-destroying nature, must either join one of these units in their war on the universe or he must have the courage to accept his role in the flow, finding his immortality in being part of the flow itself. For all but the few, perhaps an occasional Lao Tzu, Buddha, or Jesus, men have needed to belong and acquire a history.

While nature, with its dynamic flow, is immortal, the man of the prehistoric tribe or the historic memory creates only mortal death.