Norman O. Brown
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| Western Philosophy 20th century philosophy |
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| Full name | Norman O. Brown |
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| School/tradition | Marxism, psychoanalysis, poetry (classical and modernist) |
| Notable ideas | Symbolic Consciousness |
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Influenced by
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Norman Oliver Brown (September 25, 1913, El Oro, Mexico – October 2, 2002, Santa Cruz, California) was an American classicist. Brown's father was an Anglo-Irish mining engineer. His mother was a Cuban of Alsatian and Cuban origin. Brown was educated at Clifton College, then Balliol College, Oxford (BA, MA, Greats; his tutor was Isaiah Berlin), and the University of Wisconsin-Madison (PhD, Classics).
In 1938, Brown married Elizabeth Potter. [1] During the Second World War, Brown worked for the Office of Strategic Services as a specialist on French culture. His supervisor was Carl Schorske and his colleagues included Herbert Marcuse and Franz Neumann. [2] Brown's other friends included the historians Christopher Hill, and Hayden White, and the philosopher Stuart Hampshire. At Wesleyan University, he befriended the composer John Cage, an association that proved fruitful to both. Brown became Professor of Classics at Wesleyan.
Brown's commentary to Hesiod's Theogony and his first monograph, Hermes the Thief: The Evolution of a Myth showed a Marxist tendency. Brown supported Henry A. Wallace's Progressive Party candidacy for President in 1948. [1] Following Brown's disenchantment with politics in the wake of the 1948 presidential election, he studied the works of Sigmund Freud. This culminated in his classic 1959 work Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History. The book's fame was spread when Norman Podhoretz introduced it to Lionel Trilling. [3]
Love's Body, published in 1966, examined "the role of erotic love in human history, describing a struggle between eroticism and civilization." [1] The book was criticized by Herbert Marcuse in Love Mystified: A Critique of Norman O. Brown, an article published in February 1967 in Commentary. Brown's A Reply to Herbert Marcuse was published by Commentary in March 1967. [4]
In the late 1960s, following a stay at the University of Rochester, Brown moved to the University of California, Santa Cruz, as Professor of Humanities, teaching in the Boards of Studies in History of Consciousness and Literature. [2] Brown was a highly popular professor, known to both friends and students as "Nobby". The range of courses taught by Brown, while broadly focused around the themese of poetics, mythology, and psychoanalysis, included classes on Finnegans Wake, Islam, and, with Carl Schorske, Goethe's Faust.
In 1970, Brown was interviewed by Warren Bennis and Sam Keen for Psychology Today. Bennis asked Brown whether he lived out the vision of polymorphous perversity in his books. Brown replied that, "....I perceive a necessary gap between seeing and being. I would not be able to have said certain things if I had been under the obligation to unify the word and the deed. As it is I can let my words reach out and net impossible things - things that are impossible for me to do. And this is a way of paying the price for saying or seeing things. You will remember that I discovered these things as a late learner. Polymorphous perversity in the literal, physical sense is not the real issue. I don't like the suggestion that polymorphous perversity of the imagination is somehow second-best to literal polymorphous perversity." [5]
Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis, published in 1991, was an anthology that collected many of Brown's later writings. It contained Dionysus in 1990, an article in which Brown used the work of Georges Bataille, whom he described as a "fellow traveler on the Dionysian path", to try to develop a post-Marxist critique of political economy. [6]
[edit] References
- ^ a b c Obituary in the New York Times
- ^ a b Obituary in Radical Philosophy by Eli Zaretsky
- ^ Podhoretz, Norman. (1999). Ex-Friends: Falling out with Allen Ginsberg, Lionel and Diana Trilling, Lillian Helman, Hannah Arendt, and Norman Mailer. New York: The Free Press. ISBN 0-684-85594-I.
- ^ Marcuse, Herbert. (1972). Negations: Essays in Critical Theory. Harmondsworth: Penguin Books. ISBN 0 14 060.008 6.
- ^ Keen, Sam. (1974). Voices and Visions. New York: Harper & Row. ISBN 0-06-064260-2.
- ^ Brown, Norman. (1991). Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis. Berkeley: University of California Press. ISBN 0-520-07298-7.
[edit] Books
- 1947. Hermes the Thief: The Evolution of a Myth.
- 1953. Hesiod: Theogony.
- 1959. Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytic Meaning of History.
- 1966. Love's Body.
- 1973. Closing Time.
- 1991. Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis.
[edit] Secondary Literature
- In Memoriam: Norman O. Brown, ed. by Jerome Neu, New Pacific Press, 2007
- David Greenham, The Resurrection of the Body: The Work of Norman O. Brown, Lexington Books, 2006
- Dale Pendell, Walking with Nobby: Conversations with Norman O. Brown, Mercury House, 2008.
