Talk:Norman O. Brown

Brown's Life Against Death begins "All men dream. Dreaming is a neurotic symptom. Therefore all men are neurotic." Sorry Norm, but if all men dream then dreaming is normal. The logical flaw in his work is right there at the begining. I mean besides the flaw of both Freudianism and Marxism as guides to human nature. Besides, all mammals dream and probably birds also. Brain wave patterns match those of dreaming humans and simple observation shows it. Are all border collies neurotic? Perhaps all parakeets? There are other errors. Brown can't be taken seriously. Calypsoparakeet 03:46, 3 January 2007 (UTC)

Sheesh. Brown is just summarizing Freud here (and in the whole first chapter of Life Against Death). You make it seem like these are his ideas. The whole book is a long complex look at this tricky formula. He's hardly treating it as naively as you suggest here. Of course, Brown does go on to say that "the universal neurosis of mankind" is "the pons asinorum of Psychoanalysis" which, combined with your simplistic dismissal, says pretty much all that needs to be said. Aglie 23:01, 6 May 2007 (UTC)

Well, Freud can't be taken all that seriously, either. At least he has the excuse of being a bit of a pioneer, synthesizing traditional knowledge (which he ignored was traditional) with scientific findings. Jung was smarter (he realized the traditional nature of much of psychoanalysis and became incredibly rich using it), but he, too, was limited by the knowledge of the times. There's little excuse for Brown, who was obviously smart but uncritical of the cultural fossil that psychoanalysis, especially freudianism, had already become. At least he achieved a measure of fame and gained followers while acquiring critics. Dreams, however, seem to be a function of information processing and memory formation and not the secret expression of a burning desire to crap your pants. --Calypsoparakeet 20:32, 5 June 2007 (UTC)

Description of Love's Body

The article reads, 'Brown's Love's Body, written in an unorthodox and creative style that was as much poetry as prose, was a synthesis of Freudian and Marxist ideas, with Nietzsche thrown into the mix.' This isn't accurate - whatever else it is, that book is hardly a 'synthesis of Freudian and Marxist ideas.' I suppose whoever wrote that must have been thinking of the fact that Freud and Marx are part of Brown's intellectual background - that's true, but that doesn't make that description of that book accurate. Skoojal (talk) 02:26, 17 September 2008 (UTC)

Reword lede

The first sentence of the article states that Brown, "was an American intellectual of wide ranging interests." I'm afraid this prompts a response of, so what? It's fine to have wide ranging interests, but this surely can't be the most important thing about Brown. Can't a better description be found? Also, I feel that this description is redundant. Anyone who is a genuine intellectual must by definition have wide ranging interests. Skoojal (talk) 03:55, 17 September 2008 (UTC)

stay at the University of Rochester

Can someone add more information about his "stay at the University of Rochester?" Kingturtle (talk) 16:33, 23 September 2008 (UTC)

So what was he?

The lead says Brown was, as his primary description, "an American classicist". I don't think that best describes him, at all, but another editor is saying that it does, so let's think this through.

Yes he was educated in classical studies, with a PhD in classics, and had interesting things to say about that. But that's not his main source of notability, and not what's most important about him. Looking over his books:

• 1947: Hermes the Thief: The Evolution of a Myth. This is pretty clearly a work of classics scholarship.
• 1953: Hesiod, Theogony. Translated and with an introduction by Norman O. Brown. More classics. But it's "just" a translation, granting that translating is an art and he wrote an intro.
• 1959: Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning of History. Our article Life Against Death describes it as "A radical analysis and critique of the work of Sigmund Freud... has been compared to works such as Frankfurt school philosopher Herbert Marcuse's Eros and Civilization and French philosopher Michel Foucault's Madness and Civilization... It explores parallels between psychoanalysis and Martin Luther's theology, and also draws on revolutionary themes in western religious thought, especially the body mysticism of Jakob Böhme and William Blake... the book's arguments imply that sexual repression is biologically inevitable." What has any of that do with classics studies? It doesn't have anything to do with classics studies. While Browns educational and scholarly background in the classics must inform Brown's thought to some extent, that's distinctly a minor point here. He studied Freud and psychology and other modern concepts and thinkers to come up with this work.
• 1966: Love's Body. Our article Love's Body is kind of an unclear mess, but says "[it features] aphorism, poetry, and free association. Playfully and with abundant exaggeration Brown paints a portrait of the divinely inspired schizophrenic who transforms the world by poetic imagination and by his refusal to accept the boundaries that define the normal (or average) sense of reality... Love's Body 'makes quite clear that psychoanalysis was only a stage in Brown's development toward a rather curious (and radical) brand of religious mysticism'... Brown make[s] explicit the pronounced antipolitical assumptions which were only implicit in Life Against Death. He now argues that politics can never be the vehicle of liberation, not merely because political action is invariably corrupt, but also because politics don't really exist". It seems quite a stretch to include this work under the rubric of classical studies, n'est-ce pas?
• 1973. Closing Time. Can't find much on this, but his NY Times obit describes it as "[A]n interweaving of quotations from James Joyce's Finnegans Wake with excerpts from the works of the 18th-century philosopher Giambattista Vico". Not seeing this as work of classics scholarship. (The Times obit also characterizes him as a "philosopher".)
• 1991: Apocalypse and/or Metamorphosis. It is a collection of eleven essays. Again not much on this, but Amazon has it as following in the general theme of his Life Against Death and Love's Body, engaging on "humanity's long struggle to master its instincts and the perils that attend that denial of human nature... brings Brown's thinking up to 1990 and the fall of Communism in Eastern Europe... Affiliating himself with prophets from Muhammad to Blake and Emerson, Brown offers further meditations on what's wrong with Western civilization and what we might do about it... Brown's attention ranges over Greek mythology, Islam, Spinoza, and Finnegan's Wake. The collection includes an autobiographical essay musing on Brown's own intellectual development. The final piece, "Dionysus in 1990," draws on Freud and the work of Georges Bataille to link the recent changes in the world's economies with mankind's primordial drive to accumulation, waste, and death"

Sure as heck doesn't sound like a classicist to me. I am willing to grant that:

1. He studied classics as a student, up through the PhD level.
2. He wrote a book -- one book -- that can clearly be described as a work of classics scholarship. It was his first book (it was really an expansion of his PhD thesis), it is not especially well-known, and it has little bearing on his notability.
3. He certainly was informed by his studies of classical civilization. It formed part of his intellectual undepinnings.

But he was also informed by Freud, Joyce, and many many other post-classical writers and thinkers. He was a very smart guy and widely read.

Brown taught classics for a living. Well Wallace Stevens ran an insurance company for a living, but we don't describe him as primarily "an American insurance executive". Brown got his doctorate in classics. Well Tony LaRussa passed the bar but we don't describe him as primarily "an American lawyer".

When someone says "Norman O. Brown" does the average person say "Oh yeah, that guy who wrote about Hesiod and Hermes and stuff like that"? No, she doesn't. She says "Oh yeah, Life Against Death and Love's Body" or something similar. It's these works, and his other output -- essays, reviews, and so forth -- for which he is notable, and noted.

I'm not sure exactly how to describe him, but I think "...an American public intellectual" is best. (I had also suggested "an American scholar, writer, and social philosopher" and that'd possibly be OK too.) The N Y Times has him as "philosopher", but that's a confusing word that means different things to different people, so I dunno about that. A quick google gives me "thinker", "scholar, poet and revolutionary", and "historian" right off the bat, but none of those are reliable sources. I would say public intellectual, but any rate not primarily a classicist. Herostratus (talk) 06:25, 5 November 2012 (UTC)

Not having received any counter-argument, I've gone ahead and made this change. Herostratus (talk) 04:07, 23 December 2012 (UTC)

Please stop ruining this page by stripping Brown of his status as a classicist. It's so stupid to call Brown a "public intellectual." You might use that kind of expression to describe someone whose main business was to comment on issues such as inflation, the civil rights movement, labor unions, or the war in Vietnam, but that simply wasn't Brown's role at all (even if one can find rare allusions to contemporary events in his work, they weren't what mainly interested him). Besides, Brown had a very low public profile, which makes him very different from other, apparently similar figures. The Ku Klux Klan might have made death threats against Herbert Marcuse, but nobody would bother to make death threats against Brown. Barnabas2000 (talk) 05:45, 23 December 2012 (UTC)