In Defense of Norman O. Brown

...also pp...

...Then he said that "otherwise" the theory is pretty much a mess...

...Brown is pronounced "hardly conscious" of what a terrific boner this is...

...but as apparatus for a serious treatment of what Brown is up to, it soon falls apart...

...2 In The Nature of Sympathy (Abel's source), Perhaps aware that his ruling on the inapplicability of sublimation is dogmatic, Abel devotes more effort to discussing its scientific adequacy...

...Instead Brown argues (in part) that "the ultimate essence of our being remains in our unconscious secretly faithful to the principle of pleasure, or as Blake called it, delight...

...Scheler, in the quotation given by Abel, talks about the libido as a "mythological entity" without hayScheler opposes the theory of sublimation because(among other reasons) "The fact of the matter isthat from the outset there are basically diflerent kinds of love in which the most elementary qualitative relationships between man and his fellows areprefigured as it were, within the structure of the soul itself...

...But roughly: as Dewey wrote in The Quest for Certainty, the experiences of the past give us tools or instrumentalities for judging those values which have been held in the past...

...Scheler's notion that "the term 'libido' is ultimately meant to include the whole field of mental forces" turns out to be clumsy and oversimple, applicable more to Jung than Freud . 3 For in 1915 Freud wrote that libido is to be distinguished, by its sexual origin, "from the energy which must be supposed to underlie mental processes in general...

...SCHELER, in 1913, could not even have read Three Contributions in anything like its final version, and as Abel puts it, that is the "only work in which Freud directly addressed" the problem...

...64-66...

...From this prior-held notion —which is not supposed to be psychological— Brown should have proceeded "in an orderly way...

...Now there are real grounds for those who take this position: Brown is aware of those grounds and argues against the Freudian revisionists who have accepted them without adequate awareness of what is thereby lost for our concept of human need...

...His idea that Love's Body might somehow "destroy" statements once made by Aristotle is typical of the desperation with which he tries to demolish that book...

...It is Life Against Death without the life...

...For while he insists that any concept of "the species man" should be a clear judgment concerning the "nature, structure, and origin of man," he thinks that an essential Man with a "structure" and "nature" not psychological would be "intelligible...

...Scheler, though, describes man's "so-called ratio" as "a diseased basic trend of universal life itself...

...and thus fills Abel's demand for "some decision as to the nature of man which has been taken as essential") by saying "Man is the dead-end road of life altogether...

...In Scheler's formula, "man is a complete deserter from life...

...but past experiences must be regarded critically...

...In our next issue: REVISIONIST HISTORIANS & THE COLD WAR —by Henry Pachter COMMUNICATIONS Brown's view is that it refuses to accept any tradition in its judgment of what man is...

...COMMUNICATIONS REALLY CHALLENGING is the problem (and I think it is a problem) of when the canon against circularity is misleading...

...Abel would hardly care whether the concept of sublimation demands the relating of spirit to body...

...Brown's assessment of what -has issued from the West's liking for certain psychological patterns is a case of critical inquiry, which has a negative outcome...

...These two provide his only evidence in the matter, and neither is adequate for the conclusion he wishes to draw—unless you take them uncritically the way Abel does...

...There, Brown's nontraditional position is pronounced worthless, because—well, because nontraditional positions are preconceived to be worthless...

...This is something Abel can attack, but it happens not to be Brown's position...

...For even if the theory of sublimation were perfectly sound, Abel would not allow Brown to use it in his argument...

...124-28...

...That a certain value was widely held tells us, in itself, nothing about its value to us...

...Abel's pose as the rational mind opposing Brown's emotionalism here wears off entirely, and a conservative ideological commitment becomes unmistakable...

...x–xi...

...In the spirit of their logic, I would suggest that the very broad inquiries of history and psychology have no option but to be pursued as mutual controls, mutual corroborations upon one another, and that it is not only proper, but necessary to avoid any delusion of basing one on the other...

...306-14) discusses Scheler's normally atrocious handling of scientific theories...

...Brown is aware, for example, that you can't explain the origin of repression by deducing an anthropology from psychoanalysis and then invoking that anthropology in order "to cover a gap in psychoanalysis itself' (Life Against Death, pp...

...see also pp...

...social sciences are often badgered, they point out, with strictures against vagueness of teams, but these strictures fail to consider the problems involved—for example, the problem of exploring a "situation believed to involve a basic psychological mechanism...

...Serviceable terms are thus rejected on irrelevant grounds...

...Abel doesn't emit a whisper about this...

...No amount of a tradition which has "influenced us powerfully" can be used as a substitute for any amount of the evidence necessary for making such a choice...

...Why should we choose only from the stacked deck of tradition...

...In fact, Brown believes that a reformulation of psychoanalytic insights into childhood gives support to a Romantic vision of the "history of mankind" in which man once was not diseased (Life Against Death, paperback ed., pp...

...As a one-man Committee on Un-Traditional Thought, Abel needs to condemn Brown...

...In what Brown is doing, Abel is not interested...

...note that as support he cites his earlier essay...

...Their validity is ascribed to grounds that would be acceptable to Edmund Burke (for they are backed up by "the power and meaning of historical experience extending through long periods of time"), although Burke was scarcely talking rational philosophy...

...sublimation for him amounts only to rhetoric...

...Scheler's admittedly platitudinous observation that a philosophy of history is an "elaboration" of a judgment of the nature of man is converted by Abel into a procedural law which would, he claims, prevent circularity: Brown should have conceded that he is "interpreting" all of his evidence in terms of some "prior-held notion" about the "psychic structure" of man...

...144...

...What does that mean!'" Not having to work within the conditions of genuine inquiry, Abel is delighted to interpret as mere logical circularity the fact that Life Against Death explains history psychoanalytically and psychoanalysis historically...

...Avon ed., pp...

...For Brown's addition of the concepts of sublimation and repression to that theory is only "some slight difference in rhetoric...

...only Brown is required to jump so arbitrary a hurdle...

...The relationship between two actually interrelated and huge variables is not clarified by presenting one of them as if it were standing still...

...In which case, DISSENT might as well close up shop, or turn its affairs over to anti-empirical philosophers of the spirit, such as Scheler.2 1 Abel doesn't mention why Brown considers Three Contributions not central to his purposes, althoughBrown makes that clear (Life Against Death, p. 111...

...His formula answers the question, "What kind of a thing is man...

...Discussion would be pointless...

...Three Contributions is in any case cited a dozen times or more in the book, despite the impression fostered by Abel...

...But Brown's search for an explanation on scientific grounds of "why man is the restless and discontented animal" necessarily entails, as he points out, the use of the only existing depth psychology which bears directly on this problem (Life Against Death, p. 16...

...But in Abel's paraphrase of Life Against Death, Brown is saying 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...

...Brown's theory, we are advised, is "a merely rhetorical revision...

...Brown is similarly aware that the concept of auniversal neurosis, which Abel dismisses as `obviously...

...He complains of Brown's failure to cite the theory of sublimation in Freud's Three Contributions to the Theory of Sex, 1 but even if Brown were to do a perfect job of recapitulating Freud—something that he is of course trying not to do—he would still be found guilty of "nonsense...

...The same year, too, brought the addition of the section on the libido theory to the third essay...

...Scheler's reasoning in this volumeeventually leads him to a proto-fascist theory of love, according to V. J. McGill, in "Scheler's Theory of Sympathy and Love," Philosophy and Phenomenological Research, II (March 1942...

...The Cultural Lag in Aesthetics," Journal of Aesthetics, VI, 1947...

...to his conclusions about the structure of history...

...But to be not interested in so total a way is to rule out virtually any empirical inquiry (not just Brown's) into history and into the possibilities for qualitative improvement in the relationship of man to society...

...For despite his insistence that "there is no genuine philosophy which is not rational," his own position amounts to little more than an assertion that the traditional prior-held views of human nature must somehow be rational...

...Levey spoke of Freud's "significant contribution" to the theory of sublimation, and listed what he considered to be the "valuable contributions" that Freud had made...

...Now this amounts to a tolerable jacket blurb for Life Against Death, and it could be linked to Scheler's formula...

...Here again his complaints are just abusive...

...Far from being rational, Abel is more than likely offering some variant of what is classed as "logic-chopping" by Fearnside and Holther, in their book Fallacy: the Counterfeit of Argument (Prentice-full, 1959, pp...

...unintelligible," is a paradox which mustbe dealt with...

...Brown's work just doesn't fit the squeeze, and so it cannot be fairly described—much less criticized— in Abel's terms...

...119-20...

...what we have to do is gauge critically both what enabled something to become valued at all, and also "what has issued from the fact that we liked it...

...Is there the slightest indication —and here is a test case—that Abel's own commitment to the validity of certain traditional notions of the essential nature of man makes him even remotely aware of possible counterevidence that can be discerned in Brown's book...

...particularly "the entire sections on the sexual theories of children and on the pregenital organizations of the libido (both in the second essay) were only added in 1915, 10 years after the book was first published...

...COMMUNICATIONS ing seen that section on its theory...

...Sublimation is part of a psychological theory, and Abel believes that no psychological theory can have "sufficient generality to be intelligible" as a judgment of "the species man...

...or of how much he sounds like T. S. Eliot fulminating against Thomas Hardy and D. H. Lawrence in After Strange Gods (1934)—a book Eliot wisely declined to have reprinted...

...Abel's misleading statement that Brown "defines" sublimation in literary teams is supported only by atotal "oontextomy" (Milton Mayer's term) of oneparticular passage (Life Against Death, p. 157...

...But Abel's quotation from the relevant passage (see p. 6 of Life Against Death) ismangled in such a way as to omit the controlling statements...

...Epistemology is here expected to do great tricks, and no doubt it will perform them...

...The result is "the fallacy of requiring an unnecessary precision...

...63, 66, 291...

...Their relations are real, though too complex for any brief statement to be satisfactory...

...See alsoMarvin Farber's chapter, "Max Scheler and theSpiritual Elevation of Man," in Naturalism and Subjectivism (Springfield, Ill., 1959), on the incurable spiritualism of Scheler's approach...

...9 and 242 for further attention to circularity...

...Abel assures us that here Scheler "could have been writing about Norman 0. Brown...

...To be sure, tradition offers important evidence for our consideration, but we are not obliged to settle the "live option" of which concept of human nature (and consequently of ourselves) we shall accept by forcing tradition to do the work that scientific evidence does not do...

...The fallacy is easily recognized in its extreme forms: wholesale rejection of vast areas of human inquiry is 'nonsense,' " along with "the ironical bark in discussion, 'I can't understand that...

...It is in principle rational, while Abel's procedure is in principle rationality limited not by the necessary weaknesses of reason but by a sell-out to authority...

...This is an appeal to authority, not reason...

...In "ultimate essence," man then is not disease...

...For Abel (who makes Levey fit into his own desire to have sublimation "disposed of by criticism" in a few pages), the same findings lead to the opposite conclusion: sublimation "is surely no theory on which to base any far-reaching hypothesis...

...231) ; but Abel ignores what Brown actually says and simply charges him with having "extended" Freud's suggestion...

...Abel offers another contribution to the philosophy of history (or rather to the philosophical anthropology which he insists must He behind its) near the end of his article...

...But Abel implies that "the power and authority of Christian experience" is some sort of rational philosophical ground...

...This procedure is hardly the one followed by Weber, Dilthey and Simmel, Abel's professed models...

...Validity is also asserted in terms reminiscent of Matthew Arnold: "the thought and expression of the greatest minds in the West...

...George Mivart, in Lessons from Nature, as Manifested in Mind and Matter, John Murray, 1876...

...81-86) . And if Freud argued that religions are "nothing other than" collective neuroses, Brown specifically denies Freud on this (pp...

...but for contrast see Farber's chapter, "Philosophical Anthropology and Human Values," in Phenomenology and Existence (New York: Hairper Torchbooks, 1967...

...The s Farber (op.cit., pp...

...Levey realized that there could be good use for a scientific theory which has serious shortcomings...

...see pp...

...Strachey translation, pp...

...Abel does not advise that we choose our concept of human nature on the basis of what human nature actually might in fact be: he instead insists that we choose "because of what we have been...

...No mention is made of Brown's several statements on the need for avoiding circularity in his undertaking...

...The two kinds of evidence are not interchangeable...

...I wonder if Abel is aware of what a compliment he is paying here...

...Knowing and the Known, Boston: Beacon Press, 1949...

...But he is thereby on a par with the following Victorian objection to evolution: "Certainly a theory which requires so many hypothetical props can hardly be deemed itself to have a very secure foundation...

...St...

...In a later article, Levey recommended that the theory be made part of the basis for a scientific aesthetic...

...Freud did not simply hold onto his theory of sublimation "unchanged, throughout his life," that is, from 1905 on, as Abel thinks...

...There are no grounds for finding it impermissible...

...313...

...his rejection is that of the amateur critic of science who finds a couple of authoritative statements in print and willingly falls for them...

...In Abel's paraphrase, this "otherwise" becomes "the theory as a whole...

...But what he does with Life Against Death reveals crippling implications in his own approach which must accompany any acceptance of his conclusions...

...The canon against naive logical circularity is no arcane principle unknown to Americans, though Abel's heavily guided tour of European thought concerning theory of history would lead you to believe that it is brand new—and of course something invokable on all occasion...

...That Brown is plainly not excluding the spirit is shown by his statement that "the concept of sublimation is a command to relate the human spirit (and its creations) to the human body" (p...

...And, in a passage added in 1920, he argues against Jung's equating of libido "with psychical instinctual force in general...

...And we must choose a definition which "conforms to or expresses some tradition that has influenced us powerfully...

...A "prior-held notion" through which you strain all of the evidence would most likely become a selective tool that would be prone both to distortion of the evidence and an inability to benefit from the counter-indications in the evidence...

...Abel has to distort and mangle in order to get the appearance of a fit at all...

...And in chapter 14, Brown clearly recognizes that for a problem in which "the theory of sublimation is at stake," that theory cannot be used as explanation;¢ instead there must be empirical evidence of historical fact to substantiate the theory on the basis of fresh data...

...The Three Contributions is, according to James Strachey, a repeatedly revised book...

...No, you can't just go and plug up a discrete gap by assuming whatever evidence you need, but that isn't what I'm talking about now...

...Yet, what Abel's simplistic formula would accomplish, I suggest, would not be freedom from circularity, but the appearance of such, by means of a certain method of presentation...

...for even if by some sort of saintly teaching one could convince Abel that Brown is coherent and persuasive in his theory of history, Abel would still totally reject him: "The culminating nonsensicality of Norman O. 5 This is for Abel a matter of "a moment's reflection...

...Here the theory is gauged a failure, but not for reasons proper either to science or to Brown's discussion of sublimation...

...his disease is caused by his failure to develop historically in accordance with his essence, but he cannot desert that essence...

...indeed his entire discussion treats only one brief passage on page 6 of Brown's book and a few others out of chapter 12—just enough to bring out superficial resemblances to what Scheler said...

...Abel just buys, in the manner of a bargain hunter who can't be critical of what is being offered to him, the objections raised against the theory in 1913 by Scheler and in 1939 by Harry B. Levey...

...119-20...

...and he argued that Freud's "basic contributions toward understanding the mental process of artistic sublimation are highly significant...

...Preconceptions that can cause this much distortion must be very precious indeed...

...Or, to take another example, notice Brown's approving use of a quotation from Geoffrey Hartman: "for Rilke, the body becomes a spiritual fact" (p...

...In the logic of John Dewey and Arthur Bentley, circularity was even unapologetically posited as a necessary component of knowledge...

...135-41) show...

...Freud makes a distinction "between libidinal and other sources of psychical energy...

...4 Brown is also quite conscious of theoretical problems within the concept of sublimation, as this passage and others (esp...

...True, both Scheler's summary and Brown's argument refer to some sort of Dionysian consciousness as the way out, but in Scheler's summary Dionysian consciousness "excludes the influence of the spirit...

...It is only fair to show that the price Abel pays for "get COMMUNICATIONS ting" Brown—or what he takes to be Brown—is exceedingly high in what it would subtract from our equipment for thinking about man...

...13-14...

...Despite Burke, Arnold, Eliot, and Abel, the majority vote is no tool for deciding intellectual issues, even if it can be made to seem respectable by appeals to majority decisions (whether of civilizations or of "the greatest minds") made over long periods of time...

...Circularity, they wrote, "is in the knowledge...

...The big squeeze is evident in Abel's facile equation of a concept of human nature once discussed by Max Scheler with that in Brown's Life Against Death...

...But the shoddy proceedings used for fulfilling that need would soon clamp a tight restraining order on life...