How long does it take to read The Structure of Evil?
The Structure of Evil by Ernest Becker takes about 7 hours 53 minutes to read at 250 words a minute.
About 7 hours 53 minutes
A weekend read
First published 1968. 430 pages, about 118,250 words.
16 days at 30 minutes a day
Estimate based on 275 words per page.
At other speeds
| Slow, 150 words a minute | 13 hours 8 minutes |
| Average, 250 words a minute | 7 hours 53 minutes |
| Fast, 400 words a minute | 4 hours 56 minutes |
The page count is the median across 6 editions, so your copy may differ. How we calculate.
About the book
The history of the science of man that I draw in these pages is based on the following assumptions, and seeks to support them: In order to understand the problem of a unified science of man today, we must go back at least to the decline of the medieval cosmology, and to the more or less decisive break from the old order that took the form of the French Enlightenment and, subsequently, the French Revolution. [...] In the second place, each rereading of history is occupied with "new" facts, even if it uses facts that have been used time and time again. [...] The specific vantage point that I use for this rereading of history II is a new, unified theory of human behavior. The theory has been very long and very slow in the making, and it is only now that it has become possible to articulate it. This means that my endeavor is a circular one, but I hope a justified, self-reinforcing circularity: a new reading of history that derives from a new theoretical understanding; and a new theoretical understanding that is substantiated by a new reading of history. The circularity, then, is not a "vicious" or sterile one, but rather an incremental one of enhanced logical consistency, and added insight and meaningfulness. This book, then, is actually the third of a trilogy, which records the development of my ideas and the substantiation of the early perspectives I reached for. In the first work, The Birth and Death of Meaning: A Perspective in Psychiatry and Anthropology, I pulled together an abstract scheme for conceptualizing human behavior, and offered a suggestion for a new orientation for the science of man. The book was directed partly against the ascendancy of medical-psychiatric explanations of human behavior, including Freudian, instinctivist ones. Thus it stressed the largely fictional nature of human meanings, the uniquely linguistic aspects of human experience, and the wholly social-psychological genesis of the self. In a second work, The Revolution in Psychiatry: The…
Subjects: Philosophy, Ethics, Civilization, Philosophical anthropology, Sociale wetenschappen, Anthropology
