Important Nonsense: Norman O. Brown
Abel, Lionel
TO AN AUDIENCE of Parisians, in 1950, Bertrand Russell insisted that the philosophy of Hegel (which he had always said he could not understand) was responsible for German fascism: it was...
...Important nonsense: I propose this rubric to cover many of the general ideas which have swept unresisted across our epoch, and which, since they are nonsensical, ought to be destroyed...
...Any ef fort to do so, in the interest of clarity, can only lead to that kind of "false boundary" which schizophrenics and Mr...
...For, whether or not the historian, sociologist, or philosopher of history is constantly aware of it, each historical doctrine is based on a particular kind of anthropology...
...For what we want, anyway, is not some new notion—novelty and originality are here of absolutely no interest—but a notion that conforms to or expresses some tradition that has influenced us powerfully...
...but in a note to the passage authorship is referred to three different writers: Ryle, Jones, and Aristotle...
...NORMAN O. BROWN'S LIFE AGAINST DEATH is no exception to this rule...
...We will not fail to note that, behind the three other views, there is the power and meaning of historical experience extending through long periods of time...
...one cannot simply transfer terms appropriate for the judgment of individuals to the judgment of groups...
...but I must grant that it is impossible to make such a characterization of what he has said in Love's Body...
...Brown is saying on any of these topics since having distinguished these matters, he merges them even as he merges his statements about them with statements made by others...
...Brown's utterances and outcries...
...Man may have been a mistake—but then it is a mistake for any critic to assert this on the basis of Freud's theory of sublimation...
...The German notion, and Mr...
...Moreover, there is the statement of a doctrine and of a purpose which the doctrine is to serve...
...From which it follows that no particular judgments about man can be made which are not paradoxical...
...Making this thing other: "We already and first of all discern him making this thing other...
...Scheler writes: First, however, a word concerning the relationship between anthropology and history...
...Brown is also "the essential activity of soul divorced from body," whatever that might be...
...As in totemism, we participate in each other as we participate in the object...
...Schizophrenia testifies to "experiences in which the discrimination between the consciousness of self and the consciousness of the object was entirely suspended, the ego being no longer distinct from the object...
...But given Freud's premise, one must ask how the existence of "moral ideas" is in general possible...
...But what one understands even less is the source of those "moral norms" which "from outside," from "society" and from "the state," try to influence the libido, seeking to repress it...
...Then let me quote from the analyst Harry B. Levey's extraordinary essay, "Critique of the Theory of Sublimation," appearing in Psychiatry for May 1939, and recently cited by the French Philosopher Paul Ricoeur, in his sympathetic work on Freud, De l'interpretation, essai sur Freud (to be issued in English translation by Yale University Press) . Dr...
...He does, however, have another purpose in view and this purpose he has articulated clearly in his provocative praise of schizophrenia: It is not schizophrenia but normality that is split-minded...
...Every one knows' the patient's thoughts: a regression to a stage before the first lie...
...are mere substitutions for really vital qualities and activities which could be developed...
...lack of egoboundaries makes it impossible to set limits to the process of identification with the environment...
...A A DMIRERS OF LIFE AGAINST DEATH— the book has a surprising number of intelligent partisans—will, of course, not be satisfied with the argument I have given for the superiority of the German anthropological view...
...yet Life Against Death tells us on almost every page that history can only be understood psychoanalytically...
...Brown's discussion of it and anyone who wants to defend him will have to assert that even if all he says on the matter is purely literary, and from a scientific point of view worthless, he has nevertheless pointed the way to connecting Freud's theory of sublimation with the conclusions of German romantic anthropology...
...Why did Mr...
...on the other hand, psychoanalysis for him is to be understood as the completion of the Romantic movement and "is understood only if interpreted in that light...
...The supporters of Mr...
...But is there someone to be challenged first...
...There would be no contradiction here, however, if the author had the clarity to concede that he is interpreting both history and psychoanalysis in terms of some prior-held notion about the "nature, structure, and origin of man...
...Brown LIONEL ABEL will no doubt argue that the German theory is purely speculative...
...currents of electricity, or sexual attraction—action at a distance...
...to really speak, one has to say everything—and at once...
...And the answer is, I submit, no...
...Sometimes Mr...
...If this were really true, the situation of man would indeed be tragic...
...It is unquestionable that, given the rigorously limited quantity of energy man has at his disposal, he cannot devote himself to any effective action of a spiritual, cultural or professional kind, and show himself capable of sympathy and love in their more elevated forms, except insofar as his sexual instinct is subjected to a certain order, and enclosed in certain limits...
...In the very first chapter of the book, entitled "The Disease Called Man," Mr...
...And again: "Genital organization is the tyranny of the genital...
...studying the world of dreams, of primitive magic, of madness, but not participating in dreams or magic, or madness...
...For example, on the orgasm he writes: "In orgasm, all the splendor and misery of representative government...
...Brown defines sublimation as follows: Sublimation is the use made of bodily energy by a soul which sets itself apart from the body...
...for then man could only conform in practical life to the values imposed upon him by his conscience by destroying a living part of himself...
...And again:1 Thus according to this theory, man, first of all, is not, like some species of plants or animals, some deadend road of evolution in which life can no longer evolve in a chosen direction, and w here the species therefore dies...
...Brown in Love's Body has set himself not so much to attack directly, as to undermine in his utterances...
...Scheler noted: IF THEREFORE the word "sublimation" has clear meaning, it can only signify that the repression of the libido has the effect of favoring a flow of energy towards pre-existing aptitudes and aspirations which are, so to speak, constitutional...
...neurosis is not an occasional aberration...
...But can Freud's theory of sublimation, in Freud's own version of it, be upheld...
...and Leo Frobenius, the ethnologist: Scheler could have been writing about Norman O. Brown...
...abolishes repression...
...Brown's notion as set forth in Life Against Death and with the earlier theory of which his own represents a merely rhetorical revision...
...Metaphor is mistake or impropriety...
...critics have pointed out that Freud's references to art and artists in the statement of his theory are no substitute for the clinical data which he in fact failed to provide...
...EXCEPT FOR SOME SLIGHT DIFFERENCE in rhetoric—the terms "sublimation" and "repression" are not employed in the theory outlined by Scheler—this is the philosophical anthropology which founds and gives IMPORTANT NONSENSE: NORMAN O. BROWN meaning to Mr...
...Brown rejects all past experience, which means that he denies any ground for his own judgment...
...From pathology we have come to know a large number of states in N hich the boundary lines between ego and outside world become uncertain...
...I must allow also that it is an unusual work since in this country philosophy of history has seldom attracted much interest and very little has been done in the field by American scholars, certainly nothing comparable to the subtle and refined investigations by such German thinkers as Simmel, Dilthey, Scheler, and Weber...
...Mathematics," says Bertrand Russell, "rightly viewed, possesses not only truth, but extreme beauty—a beauty cold and austere, like that of sculpture, without any appeal to our weaker nature . . . The true spirit of delight, the exaltation, the sense of being more than man, which is the touchstone of the highest excellence, is to be found in mathematics as surely as in poetry...
...the presentation of facts of one category in the idiom appropriate to another...
...To say, as Mr...
...a little madness...
...Are these boundaries not false ones, according to Mr...
...A king is an erection of the body politic...
...The French, among whom there were not a few philosophers, were by no means delighted— the works of Hippolyte and Kojeve on Hegel were then enjoying a vogue in Paris—and when the time for questioning Russell came, Aimee Patri asked him: "Aren't you making philosophy much too important...
...Moreover, what does it mean to say that man's existence is or precedes his essence other than to say that to form any conclusions about a given individual one has to observe him independently of any theories accounting for the acts of other individuals...
...One hardly knows with whom to begin...
...And the famous authors are cited in such a way as to make it seem that Mr...
...Brown's idea that man is a disease and his history neurosis...
...First of all, the German theory (one may refer to it as such) is not a psychological theory and so it has sufficient generality to be intelligible as a judgment (even if false) of the species -man...
...In other words, Dionysian man, with special techniques, excludes the influence of the spirit, that demon, usurper, and despot of life, in order to feel himself part of the great forces of life and to regain his lost unity with them...
...Between "normality" and "abnormality" there is no qualitative difference, based largely on the practical question of whether our neurosis is serious enough to incapacitate us for work...
...There are so many braggart forms of nonsense—each with its champion...
...a faux pas, or slip of the tongue...
...Brown thinks it has, and while its asides are often better documented and sometimes more interesting than the unfolding of the peculiar vision of history Mr...
...Perhaps it will be said that these are the objections of a philosopher...
...or to give himself to spiritual activity, cultivate his intellectual aptitudes, but at the price of renouncing the utilization of his most central vital energy and of the happiness which is attached to this use...
...Brown is surely not to be reproved for having undertaken to work in a discipline American scholars and thinkers on the whole neglected (until very recently, so did scholars in England and in France), he is not to be congratulated on the casualness, and I will even venture to use the word unconsciousness, of his method of procedure...
...Brown does hold out the possibility of cure for the neurotic illness of humanity, and it is precisely the same cure offered by the original proponents of sickness as the key to human history...
...He has more reason than other animals, but they have a kind of rudimentary reason too...
...Man is sick...
...What particularly characterizes his view is, that according to it, none of the forms of our activity possesses its own energy...
...But, on the other hand, if the enemy is so strong, will not the struggle have excitement...
...For Mr...
...Scheler writes: To the simple question, "What kind of a thing is man...
...Thus seen, the libido appears as a mythological entity...
...Three of the five ideas are quite familiar in circles of general culture, even though we rarely find them in sharply delineated form...
...Once again, the psychological conception of neurosis which Mr...
...Brown's outcries and utterances are continuations of statements made by them, or contrariwise, that their statements are continuations of Mr...
...Here is an example: The original mistake in every sentence: metaphor...
...The original sentence, the original metaphor: Tat Tvam Asi, Thou art that...
...But surely this notion of man is implicit in our literature...
...In fact, Mr...
...It is a disturbance of the balance of body and mind...
...Levey is right—his criticisms have not yet been answered—then the theory of sublimation (still in the state in which Freud left it) is surely no theory on which to base any far-reaching hypothesis...
...Brown has extended it still further, to cover the race...
...Brown's general view—the book does make a definite judgment of what human life has been and urges us to take up IMPORTANT NONSENSE: NORMAN O. BROWN a definite posture toward what it can be now...
...Freud too, finally, but not the Freud of Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex, the only work in which Freud directly addressed himself to the problem of sublimation, and in which he set forth the theory he held to, unchanged, throughout his life...
...Man is the dead-end road of life altogether...
...Still, I think the earlier theory a foolish one, too: the folly of which can best be shown by contrasting it with the other basic notions about man's nature set forth by Scheler...
...This is Scheler on the anthropological notions of the publicist Theodore Lessing...
...It is a speculative work on the philosophy of history, that is to say, instead of retelling any particular series of events in the human past as historians do, it tries to recapitulate or sum up the meaning of all the events we call historical in which men were involved since they appeared on earth...
...His only liberty thus would be to choose between the following: either to renounce all spiritual activity and abandon himself to a kind of primitivism which pushed to the extreme would assimilate him completely to the animal...
...and the instrument he relies on is the psychoanalytical method, basically of Freud, but implemented by various discoveries or insights of other analysts since Freud...
...At the outset, I did refer to a doctrine set forth by Mr...
...are alive today in our occidental civilization...
...The epistemological difficulties which have to be resolved in a serious philosophy of history he simply ignores, though he in no way gives any argument to show that they are irrelevant...
...Now the sense of all this is that the sexual and the political are indistinguishable and cannot be talked about separately...
...Perhaps Mr...
...Two of them, the newest and most recent, are still unknown to those trained in the field because they are so unusual and different...
...Such a confession is of course useless to Mr...
...And the following passage is referred in a note to Jean-Paul Sartre's Critique de la Raison Diatectique: All flesh shall see it together...
...To be sure, this is easier said than done, and not because it is difficult to find inconsistencies in such ideas, but because they often gain assent through their very inconsistencies...
...And, finally, behind the naturalistic notion of man there is the massive experience ordered, refined, and synthesized in our positive sciences...
...Now one of the five basic anthropological ideas Scheler goes on to discuss resembles point for point Mr...
...Brown's doctrine, and the German doctrine, are much too intellectual IMPORTANT NONSENSE: NORMAN O. BROWN istic for my taste...
...One can hardly say that the notion of sublimation asserted here is Freud's...
...Brown writes: "Dionysius, the mad god, breaks down the boundaries, releases the prisoners...
...But he also relies on a more subtle and even more confusing procedure, using quotation marks to defeat the purpose for which these marks are intended...
...Brown as developed in Life Against Death rest entirely on some theory of sublimation...
...And it strikes me, too, that the many quotations with which he has larded his text, quotations from Augustine and Aquinas down to moderns such as Roheim, Whitehead, and Freud, must, from his point of view, be regarded as without authority...
...and also the thought and expression of the greatest minds of the West...
...Brown's too, have behind them nothing more than the experiences, perhaps strong ones, of the personal disgust and disillusionment of a few intellectuals—not of the first caliber...
...Thus Mr...
...Brown, "Dionysian consciousness...
...society" and "the state," are these not rooted in the human soul...
...Brown claims to have it...
...Once again, let us look at Scheler's essay, published in 1925...
...There will of course be difficulty in dispatching him...
...Brown quotes with approval Nietzsche's remark that the Dionysian "is no longer an artist, he has become a work of art...
...Brown...
...Brown's reformulation of it...
...for if animals have reason, man cannot be defined as a rational animal...
...Brown's intellect, we have already observed...
...The limitations of Mr...
...Brown seeks to elucidate and interpret for us...
...Can one sum up the meaning of humanly caused events in one single judgment...
...And third, there is the posi tivistic or naturalistic notion of man, based on the positive sciences, according to which he is an animal like other animals, and his faculty of reason is not distinctive and does not make him totally different from the other biological species...
...to repressing it...
...One thinks: they can't last forever— they must die of the very paradoxes which have bemused and fascinated the many, and to which they owe their prominence...
...or rather, since the body physical, everything is constitutional, let us not say tyranny...
...On Freud's theory of sublimation...
...The very great difficulties in the field of philosophy of history scarcely exist for him...
...More importantly, he seems not aware that philosophy of history is a dependent discipline, by which I mean it cannot provide its own foundation, but is founded on yet another discipline, namely, philosophical anthropology...
...Now, original sin is not just theological doctrine...
...But the terms Mr...
...Scheler does mention—rather sketchily—a fifth basic notion of man's nature...
...I want to stress here that, in determining the origin, nature, and destiny of the human species, some wider-ranging, more total experience is required than any individual could encompass in the short span of his life...
...But seeing that the libido ends up [according to Freud] by turning to its advantage all the psychic energy it possesses, it becomes difficult to understand how it can give birth to forces destined precisely...
...IT WILL BE SEEN that there are two statements here given between quotation marks...
...One cannot say just one thing at one time...
...This whole matter has been bril liantly explored by Max Scheler in his essay Man and History...
...uncanny feelings of reference...
...But it is impossible to determine what Mr...
...One can't overrate the power of nonsense...
...my sublimation will exalt me to the stars (sublimi feriam sidera vertice...
...Now the sense of this passage has nothing whatever in common with anything said by Sartre himself in his still untranslated work...
...All moral ideas, all moral tasks, and consequently all moral motives themselves are produced from the "sublimated libido," but to make this "sublimation" comprehensible Freud supposes the existence of a "morality" whose commandments would repress the libido and thrust it toward higher purposes...
...Wouldn't it be best to engage the very latest-comer one's glance has fallen on...
...Brown might use the Freudian theory of sublimation to back the conclusions of the German anthropological view...
...Brown's earlier work...
...Mr...
...The incident is interesting, not because of Russell's extreme charge against Hegel, which he might not have maintained in a full discussion, but because of his reply to M. Patri, which at once made a point with the Parisians...
...Now this notion too is implied in and supported by our literature: in fact, this notion may be properly called literature's reason for being...
...moreover, his is a sickness unto death...
...Evidently, if we are going to accept any general judgment of the nature of man, we have no alternative but to make some selection from the notions about him which have already been advanced...
...Moreover he finds on turning to the descriptive writings of psychoanalysts on sublimation "a voluminous literature consisting of endless and often incorrect paraphrasing of Freud's original descriptive formulation...
...Then too, the anthropology outlined by Scheler asserting that man is a disease and a false step taken by life, does not have to assert, as Scheler noted, that each particular member of the human race is diseased or sick, or that each action of each individual human is involved in error and bound to be self-defeating...
...Brown—that individual psychology is something different from group psychology...
...Past experience, he says, has been madness: then what can be gained by citing the mad...
...Within the order of his species, he can even be healthy, but man is a disease...
...The most important reason that so many and such different conceptions of history and sociology are in such bitter struggles with each other today, is that these conceptions of history are based on fundamentally different ideas of the nature, structure and origin of man...
...The culminating nonsensicality of Norman O. Brown's view is that it refuses to accept any tradition in its judgment of what man is...
...L L IFE AGAINST DEATH, subtitled The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History, is intended to convince the reader of something, and is cast in the form of an argument which can be followed, comprehended, and judged...
...And alas, we do not know what that is...
...Brown cite anyone but himself...
...and if man is an animal, like others, then he is not the one creature singled out by God for freedom and faith...
...The very distinguishing of this from that, the procedure of abstraction by which we separate out the various matters we have to be concerned with, the principle of distinction itself, the basis of all learning and creation, with the humble acceptance of our own limitedness and finiteness, this, I take it, is what Mr...
...The significant world is one of mystical participation...
...Psychoanalysis began as a further advance of civilized [scientific] objectivity...
...FIRST, A LOOK AT LOVE'S BODY...
...Now if Dr...
...Then, there is the notion of man derived from Greek philosophy, man as "a rational animal," distinct from all else in nature by his possession of the divine faculty, reason...
...Apocalypse is the dissolution of the group as numerical series, as in representative democracy, and its replacement by the group as fusion, as communion...
...And perhaps that is why in his second book, Love's Body, his quotations of others make up so much of his discourse...
...What Mr...
...Brown, and one which I characterized as nonsensical...
...An attempt to ". • • give psychoanalysis a philosophy of history," it too is based on a philosophical anthropology, though the author is, as I noted, hardly conscious of the fact and makes no effort to proceed in an orderly way from his notions about the psychic structure of man to his conclusions about the structure of history...
...Elsewhere: "Psychoanalysis shows the sexual organization of the body physical to be a political organization...
...The meaning or essence of human history is what Mr...
...Not so, it will be said, his view is backed up by a scientific theory...
...What is a cure for repressed, neurotic man, or man destroyed by his own spirituality...
...Brown himself...
...The term neurotic, for instance, has to imply, to be comprehensible, a distinction between some who are neurotic and others who are not...
...The significant statement in the above passage is...
...Now there can be no doubt that the views of Mr...
...For Dionysius "is not dream but drunkenness, not life kept at a distance and seen through a veil, but life complete and immediate...
...study what ideas concerning man...
...it is also anthropological doctrine, asserting the notion basic to Christian anthropology...
...Levey concedes that Freud did succeed "in establishing some degree of order in the known facts concerning sublimation," but judges that the theory as a whole "must be evaluated as inconsistent, incomplete, obscure, confused, undemonstrated, and static...
...Brown carries this procedure to such a point that it is as if his own words and the words of others were summed up in each of his utterances, forming a single word, uttered perhaps, by all of them...
...This question is never even raised by Mr...
...Is there any other possible view of man...
...Brown by many decades were committed likewise to Dionysian man, the man of drives who stands closer to metaphysical reality and appears here as an ideal strongly opposed to the Greek invention of homo sapiens, the Apollonian man...
...That is to say, to prevent the reader from making any clear separation between what Mr...
...the anatomist Louis Bolk...
...On the one hand, he interprets all history in the light of the most recent deliverances of psychoanalysis...
...Brown did not want to quote this particular work because in it, speaking of sublimation, Freud admits: "The inner determinations of the process are totally unknown to us...
...One cannot talk about any matter in separation from any other matter...
...And the European theorists who preceded Mr...
...When I say this about Mr...
...It is the existentialist notion that man is fundamentally "being-in-the-world," that his existence is, or precedes, his essence...
...Man has acted out a desire for death and destruction, the reason being the repression of his animal drives, a repression imposed by the society he created...
...the ego of Fichte, which "sets up obstacles to itself...
...something no historian could possibly know...
...This is by no means clear...
...the body is a body politic...
...Brown, too, refuse to accept...
...The Christian will try to hold to the Judeo-Christian view...
...It is a series of gnomic utterances and outcries supplemented by quotations from philosophers, poets, and scientists, among others, Augustine, Nietzsche, Swift, Ferenzci, Blake, Roheim, Freud...
...However objectionable this anthropology, which, as Scheler notes, derives from "Savigny and the later (Heidelberg) school of German romanticism," it is certainly far less nonsensical than the psychoanalytically accoutered version of it presented by Mr...
...it is a "lifting up of the soul or its Faculties above Matter" (Swift's definition of religious enthusiasm...
...the intellectual wounds inflicted on the monsters of the nonsensical nay make them dearer and more cherished...
...and behind the Greek notion of man as homo sapiens, there is the power and authority and the charm, too, of Greek civilization and Greek philosophy...
...To be clear to the point of platitude, each philosophy of history is the elaboration of a particular philosophic anthropology, that is to say, a particular judgment of the "nature, structure, and origin of man...
...In Chapter Twelve of Life Against Death, a chapter with a very literary title, Apollo and Dionysius, Mr...
...Levey writes: My criticisms are that the theory of sublimation is a generalization which has remained essentially static since its formulation in 1905, that it does not comprehensively describe the source of the energy involved nor the process of its modification, that it has remained unsupported by adequate clinical demonstrations of its operation, and that we have not behaved with a critical attitude towards the concept...
...and self and the world were fused in an inseparable total complex...
...This notion he has in fact derived not directly from the Romantic movement and LIONEL ABEL not from psychoanalysis either, but from a strain of German anthropological thinking no doubt influenced by the Romantic movement...
...Evidently, from such a work as Love's Body, no reader could cull anything like a doctrine or a statement of purpose beyond the purely negative one of denying the dis-tinctiveness of any particular doctrine or any particular statement of purpose...
...Let us reduce them to the sharpest and most understandable basic types...
...Mine has fallen on Norman O. Brown...
...Brown and statements made in the past by other very differentminded writers "false boundaries...
...But without quotation marks in the passage, one cannot know what is said by Roheim, what by Mr...
...Behind the Judeo-Christian conception of man, there is the power and authority of Christian experience...
...monarchy...
...But this should more than make up for the too great facility with which he can be hurt...
...But it is not of this old and well known truth that Freud is thinking, and it is not this rational and reasonable meaning that he attaches to the word "sublimation...
...But though Mr...
...Brown finally choose to divide the matter of his book under the headings, "Liberty," "Nature," "Trinity," "Unity," "Person," "Head," "Food," "Fraction," "Fulfillment," and "Nothing...
...And it will be said further that Mr...
...Brown, I do not mean that his view is clear or coherent—I think I have sufficiently argued that it is not...
...I want to ask now if there are experiences of any comparable power behind either the German theory or Mr...
...He writes: Let us...
...It will be remembered that Mallarme thought all the words of a poem should have the effect of just one word...
...in schizophrenia the false boundaries are disintegrating...
...The goal cannot be the elimination of magical thinking, or madness...
...And dreaming while awake...
...All sorts of matters are treated in Love's Body: politics, the apocalypse, love, suffering, animism, orgasm, silence, and death...
...Why even speculate on the adversary's importance, no doubt relative any way...
...There is the further point too —it was raised validly against Freud, but applies even more strongly against Mr...
...This must have occurred to him too...
...Now, in his earlier book, Life Against Death, there is some attempt at lucidity, the separation of one topic from another, and also a definite criticism of what other writers said on the same matters...
...Brown's vision of history...
...Brown in his book...
...Brown's praise and advocacy of schizophrenia amounts to an attack on meaning as such, which, if justified, would of course give him the right to destroy, by merging with his own discourse, statements others once have made clearly...
...Brown's doctrine, as expressed in Life Against Death, is utterly nonsensical...
...But perhaps they are a concession on his part to those of his readers not yet "suffering from truth," that is to say, to those readers who have not yet reached the heights or the depths—aren't they the same anyway?—of schizophrenia...
...The relations between the libido and spiritual activity, according to Freud, will therefore be such that any increase of energy realized by the one would mean an equivalent loss of energy to the other...
...The truth of the matter is that there is no intelligible notion of sublimation in Mr...
...and the scientist very probably to the naturalistic or positivistic one...
...Schizophrenics are suffering from the truth...
...In view of this, man is a complete deserter from life, its fundamental values, laws, its holy cosmic sense, and lives on a diseased exaggeration of his ego...
...it resembles...
...and "indescribable extension of inner sense...
...And could it not be the case that a cleverer writer than Mr...
...Mr...
...First of all, there is the Judeo-Christian notion of man as created by a personal god, as suffering from original sin, and only to be redeemed through the intervention of the savior...
...And Scheler went on to raise a question still unanswered: from where could the en ergy for suppressing the libido come...
...he would have to, in order to assert "The mechanism of sublimation is the dream...
...Brown is saying and what was said by others...
...Brown's theory must remain intact if the theory of sublimation with which he supports it is not disposed of by criticism...
...A judgment of the species is something quite different from a judgment of each particular instance of the species...
...The individual is not sick...
...Brown...
...And, like the doctrine of a soul distinct from the body, sublimation, as an attempt to be more than man, aims at immortality...
...T T RUE, I FOUND THE GERMAN ROMANTIC anthropology which Scheler called "strange" less vulnerable than Norman 0. Brown's new version of it...
...Mr...
...it is not just in other people...
...It should be remembered, too, that Freud him self has been seriously criticized for relating his theory of sublimation to artistic processes...
...this anthropology gives the answer: man's capabilities (use of speech, tools, etc...
...Brown's earlier work...
...But I was sent his second book, Love's Body, to review, was shocked by its contents, surprised even that it could find a publisher and readers, and impelled by my desire to understand its vogue to read Mr...
...The effect of all this is calculated to make the reader suppose that Jones, Aristotle, and Ryle, or Aristotle, Ryle, and Jones, or maybe Ryle, Jones, and IMPORTANT NONSENSE: NORMAN O. BROWN Aristotle said the same thing as Mr...
...Let us compare these three very different notions about man's nature, both with Mr...
...and its appeal, which my aim must be to blight or at least diminish, can only lie, as far as I can see, in its very nonsensicality...
...He is the man who carries in him the "images" of the world...
...This ratio is precisely the aspect which, according to Aristotle, Descartes, Kant, and Hegel, makes him into homo sapiens and partly divine, and, also, the aspect which constitutes his particular "intellectualization," i.e., the fact that so great an amount of accumulated energy is spent, not for the whole of his organized self, but solely for his cerebrum and its maintenance ("slave of the cortex...
...Perhaps...
...Brown wants to leave us with—I'm thinking of the very interesting chapter on Swift which is totally irrelevant to the truth or falsity of Mr...
...in schizophrenia the false boundaries are disintegrated...
...Mr...
...But it is not only sex and LIONEL ABEL politics that are wrongly distinguished...
...Or, to put it another way, the doctrine of the universal neurosis of mankind is the psychoanalytical analogue of the theological doctrine of original sin...
...Brown achieves the effect of merging his own notions with what has been said by others by this very simple method of referring to statements made by others without direct quotations...
...Secondly, man is by no means in genere (generically) feeble-minded (only few men are that), but his so-called mind itself, his so-called ratio is a disease, a diseased basic trend of universal life itself...
...No directly quoted statement of Sartre's would serve this purpose...
...But the outcome of psychoanalysis is the discovery that magic and madness are everywhere, and dreams is what we are made of...
...TO AN AUDIENCE of Parisians, in 1950, Bertrand Russell insisted that the philosophy of Hegel (which he had always said he could not understand) was responsible for German fascism: it was Hegel, not Gobineau, Haeckel, or Stewart Chamberlain who had fathered Hitler...
...In regarding these boundaries as false, we lose sight of what Aristotle and Freud, for instance, meant to say, and begin to think that their meaning lies in what Mr...
...Brown has to say about sublimation, though obviously dependent on Freud, is presented in such literary terms that it is hard to say just what the theory is...
...Here Freud clearly falls into circular explanation...
...Each activity derives the energy it needs from one common source represented by the libido...
...or, put it the opposite way, so much of the discourse of others is made up of quotations from him...
...Brown applies to man, neurotic, or repressed, are purely psychological terms, not general enough to cover the entire species...
...Thus the temptation to ignore them becomes almost overwhelming...
...Should we not hear from a theorist with analytic competence...
...Brown means to say...
...the chief idea of Freud's on which Mr...
...Ludwig Klages, the philosopher and psychologist...
...Brown's...
...Whatever view we choose to hold of man we must hold, I contend, not merely because of what we have thought, but also, and more importantly, because of what we have been...
...While other, and often less important, aspects of psychoanalytic theory have been frequently revised with increased knowledge, our atti LIONEL ABEL tude towards the theory of sublimation has been one of laissez-faire and has lacked the perpetual tentativeness which characterizes our orientation to the remainder of psychoanalytic theory...
...Thus when Freud expressed the view that religions can be regarded as collective neuroses, he was obviously stretching the meaning of the term neurosis beyond intelligible limits: Mr...
...Schizophrenic thought is "adualistic...
...and those drawn to rational philosophy—which is the same thing as philosophy, for there is no genuine philosophy which is not rational—will try to hold to some modified form of the view that man is a rational animal...
...As far back as 1913 none other than Max IMPORTANT NONSENSE: NORMAN O. BROWN Scheler, in his great book, The Nature of Sympathy, raised objections to Freud's theory which to this day have not been met by its defenders...
...This is a work calculated to mystify anyone who has not read Mr...
...a little seizure or inspiration...
...Brown has simply lifted Sartre's clear concept of "the group in fusion," and altered it to read "group as fusion," in order to merge it, I suggest, with his own utterances about communion, totemism, apocalypse...
...Brown tells us: We are all therefore neurotics...
...He is inextricably enclosed in what he him self has fashioned...
...or hoc est corpus meum, this is my body...
...I shall not altogether die," says Horace...
...It is certainly not a theory on which to base any pejorative judgment of humanity...
...That the odds are in his favor makes it the more sporting to engage him...
...The anthropology of science excludes Christian anthropology, and also the anthropology based on Greek philosophy...
...In addition to Swift and Spender and Russell and Horace, he calls up Cornford, Pythagoras, Parmenides, and Plato...
...we should, on the contrary, think: since it has become so important, it might well be nonsense...
...And how could any such single judgment be backed against the countless number of events which might lead to the very contrary judgment...
...So the would-be critic has to be aware from the start that his weapons may very well prove inadequate...
...This was partly due to accident, for I had not looked into his Life Against Death and had not even noticed how many there are who swear by it...
...The author's aim, since he also declares that the truth is with the schizophrenics ("Schizophrenics are suffering from the truth") is clearly to disintegrate the "false boundaries" between what he is trying to say and what Aristotle, Ryle, Jones, Matthew, Luke, Blake, Sartre, Freud have succeeded in saying...
...It is, says Mr...
...I myself should like to suggest that this notion is the one which has been expressed since Scheler's death by Heidegger and by Sartre, but to the formulation of which Scheler himself contributed not a little...
...Brown...
...Dr...
...Brown has taken over from Freud can apply only to members of the species, not to the species as such...
...We have grounds, I should say, for thinking better of man than of the theory which condemns him...
...Sublimation for Mr...
...And in fact, every philosophy of history so far set forth can be regarded as one detailed development of some decision as to the nature of man which has been taken as essential...
...Is this not also true of Mr...
...But if fault is to be found with Freud's procedure, what are we to say of Brown's...
...occult psychosomatic influences and powers...
...While Life Against Death does not proceed systematically, building argument on argument in order to convince us that human history does in fact have the meaning Mr...
...Thus Mr...
...Brown's method of merging the statements of others with what he himself is saying has an aesthetic or poetical purpose...
...the goal can only be conscious magic, or conscious madness...
...to expose remnants of primitive participation, to eliminate them...
...If all past experience is to be rejected, why should Mr...
...Brown's anthropology, which he himself sees as an "analogue" to Christian doctrine, holds that man is a "disease," that he has always been ill, and that what we call history is nothing other than the sequence of events motivated by, or symptomatic of, man's illness...
...The question arises: Are the boundaries between the utterances of Mr...
...Our difficulty today springs from the fact that these three views, each with a tradition of thought behind it, cannot be, reconciled...
...Why is this...
...Russell's "wisdom" amounted to this suggestion: confronted with an idea which has gained great influence, our first thought should not be that since it has become important there must be something to it...
...To which Russell responded: "No, for I've been talking about bad philosophy...
...Each of these ideas is accompanied by a special conception of history...
...So psychoanalysis can only be understood historically...
...This might make one think that Mr...
...Brown relies being Freud's theory of sublimation...
...and abol-• ishes the principium individuationis, substituting for it the unity of man and the unity of man with nature...
...For example, to the following passage, which I quote in its entirety, there is a note indicating that its contents relate to statements in Roheim's Magic and Schizophrenia, and page 83 of that work is indicated...
...Mr...
...Also this: "A king is erected, rex erectus est...
...An arresting and provocative judgment of man, but hardly a new one, and it predates the psychoanalytic method through the application of which Mr...
...the Freudian theory of sublimation, which I have not yet touched on...
...We shall find, as thorough research has led me to see, five fundamental ideas...
...Metaphor consists in giving the thing a name that belongs to something else...
...Writing poetry," says Spender, "is a spiritual activity which makes one completely forget, for the time being, that one has a body...
...In any case, I LIONEL ABEL am content with my choice...
...Or, put differently, the world for man is a peculiar problem, a transcendental problem, and unremittingly that: which is to say that the world for man can never be an entirely objective matter...
...petit mal...
...Brown does, that man's history is neurosis, is to say that each individual human being who participated in history contributed nothing but his own particular content of neurosis to it...
...it is in us, and in us all the time...
...Brown, who thinks he does know the "inner determinations of the process...
...any object of our attention, the implication goes, is wrongly distinguished from any other object, and one person is wrongly distinguished from other persons...
...I mean simply that there is no weight or power behind his view other than his own experience of life—and of a few books perhaps too devoutly read...
...Because, as a moment's reflection must indicate, determining what is essential in history, we have to characterize in some essential way the being who makes that history, namely man...
...All the same, one wonders, why were the various passages in this book not connected into one single sentence, however unintelligible...
...conscious mastery of these fires...
...It is bad philosophy which has influence, this was the gist of Russell's answer, and it elicited from Alexandre Koyre the remark: "Now there's wisdom from a philosopher...
...Edgar Dacque, paleographer and geologist...
Vol. 15 • March 1968 • No. 2
