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0N CONCEIVED AS REPRESSION:
AN EXAMINATION OF THE PHILOSOPHY
0F NORMAN 0. BROWN

esis for the Degree of Ph. D.
ICI-IIGAN: STATE UNIVERSITY
R. MICHAEL HOWEY
1972

 

    

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R.Michael Howey

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ABSTRACT

REASON CONCEIVED AS REPRESSION: AN
EXAMINATION OF THE PHILOSOPHY
OF NORMAN 0. BROWN

BY

R. Michael Howey

In his works Norman 0. Brown attempts to provide
the reader, and perhaps all humankind, with a basis from
'which to begin recreating a new and, in Brown's opinion,
more exciting world. His work is meant to be ultimately
ineffable but to provoke change and not merely provide
explication.

He began the work,which is his search for a poem,
by examining the printed works of Sigmund Freud. Brown's

revelations were made public in Life Against Death.

 

Afterwards, he wrote Love's Body, his only other elongated

 

tract. Since the publication of Love's Body, Brown's work

 

has been more in the form of poetry, although his printed
work still retains footnoting as a vestige of the well-
documented work he previously accomplished.

Since Brown's condemnation is of the Western

historical culture and the formal-logical law of

R. Michael Howey

contradiction which has perpetuated it, his body of
thought includes a basis for the refutation of the cul-
ture. This basis is found in a discussion of Freud
which leads Brown to perceive the anal characteristics
of society as necessary to the continuation and progress
of Western culture. The psychoanalytic viewpoint

placed upon history as a whole becomes, in Brown's hands,
a condemnation of the very culture upon which that his-
tory is based.

Brown would call any life-giving process,
including education, an eroticization of the body.
Brown's use of violence as a term leads to the reali-
zation that he considers what has been developed as
culture to be a very rigorous denial of the body of man.
To Brown the primary urgency in education is to regain
what has been denied, which he sees to be essentially a
union with the environment and mankind as a whole.

This union would then lead a man to go beyond
culture, into a world which is not existent, but which
Brown feels could be. This world is yet a vision and
Brown's work shows he is attempting to see it clearly.
His work becomes a working out of some premises of that
world.

Brown sees that humankind has been pure as a

child and that there has been a world which is not the

R. Michael Howey

expression of anal cultural characteristics. But this

world is known in infancy or before. The child is seen
as leading the way back which is the way out of cultural
domination. Education becomes reeducation in this pic-

turing of the world.

REASON CONCEIVED AS REPRESSION: AN
EXAMINATION OF THE PHILOSOPHY

OF NORMAN 0. BROWN

BY

p
Rt‘Michael Howey

A THESIS

Submitted to
Michigan State University
in partial fulfillment of the requirements
for the degree of

DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY
Department of Secondary Education and Curriculum

1972

Jacquelyn

.1
.1

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I would like to express appreciation to all
those people who aided me so greatly in the preparation
and production of this work. Especial appreciation is
expressed to my Doctoral Guidance Committee: Dr. Marvin
Grandstaff, Dr. George Barnett, Dr. Albert Cafagna and

Dr. Dale Alam.

iii

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Chapter
I. INTRODUCTION . . . . . . . . .
II. ANALITY. . . . . . . . . . .
The Imposition of Civilization on
Life: An Introduction . . .
The Effects of Personality (The
Human as Cause). . . . . . .
The World as Excrement . . . . .
Carnal Knowledge . . . . . .
Obscene Violence is Authoritarian .
Violence is Excrement . .

Beyond the Warp and Woof of History.

Brown's Call for History's End: A
Post Historical~Post Cultural
Community. . . . . . . . .

Summary Without Synopsis . . . .

III. EROS AS EDUCATION . . . . . . .

Introduction . . . . . . . .
Art and Psychoanalysis . . . . .
Obliteration of Ideology . . . .
Education as Therapy. . . . . .
Brown's Theory of Dream. . . . .
Symbol as Reality. . . . . . .

The Pun O O O I O O O O O
Metaphor . . . . . . . . .
Symbolism. . . . . . . . .

Education as an End to History . .

iv

Page

15

15

22
24
32
39
43
48

50
55

58

58
60
67
69
74
77

78
79
80

86

Chapter Page

IV. THE CHRISTIC-DIONYSIAN VISION . . . . . 92
Introduction: The Vision. . . . . . 92

Books of Death . . . . . . . . . 96

West and East. . . . . . . . . . lOl

Christ, Freud, Bacchus. . . . . . . 105

The Peaceful War. . . . . . . . . 110

Play is the Way . . . . . . . . . 116
BIBLIOGRAPHY . . . . . . . . . . . . . 123

CHAPTER I

INTRODUCTION

Norman 0. Brown began his search for a poem in a
formal way through an in-depth study of Freud in 1953.
Yet it was in 1948, "almost six years before writing a

line, he began incubating Life Against Death."l He put

 

faith in Henry Wallace's Presidential efforts in that year,
and became very disillusioned at its failure. Analogous

to those political activists who lost faith in the ability
of government to effect change after the Chicago Democratic
Convention of 1968, Brown became aware of the "need to re-
examine the nature and destiny of men in 1948."2 Brown
enters Freud with a non-political bias, therefore it is

not surprising his work differs from the Socialist—minded

neo-Freudian revisionists. Brown was what he calls "'a

typical Thirties radical . . . inspired and kept alive by

 

lThomas Morgan, "In His Little Known Book Life
Against Death, Norman 0. Brown Pushes Beyond Freud to
the Possibility of a Society Without Self-Repression,"
Esguire, March, 1963, p. 105.

2

 

Ibid.

simple political hope.”3 His disillusionment was com-
plete in 1948, and his work became a search for a personal
inSpiration that could replace "simple political hope."
The poem is the answer in Brown's work, and his
work today reflects his total involvement in this poem.

Life Against Death is now a cenotaph to Brown, and the

 

transition from politics to poetry is being made more
complete in his later work.4 This thesis on Brown is to
discover and explain a poem. It is a critic's function as
much as a philosopher's to discover the truth in a body of
thought and clarify this. Yet it is my function in this
paper to avoid criticism and clarify Brown's thought in a
manner which retains the impetus of his body of works.
Therefore, his thought will not be treated as if he has
views with implications for education which are signifi-
cant, but rather in the recognition that his work is an
attempt to restructure the very basis upon which education
occurs. My thesis is that Brown's body of thought is edu-
cation, rather than that his work reflects a certain bias
towards educational thought. Since Brown's poem is re-

flected in the chronological deve10pment of his work, the

 

3Norman 0. Brown in interview as quoted in Morgan,
p. 105.

4"Norman 0. Brown's Body: A Conversation Between
Brown and Warren G. Bennis," Psychology Today, IV (August,
1970), 45.

following exegesis will be, in its underlying structure,
chronological. There will be little or no work expended
on the period previous to his enlightenment through Freud.
Somehow, Brown seems to attain a state known in Zen
Buddhism as satori through going down into Freud, and
empathizing with the poetry in Freud's work. And then he
came back to tell the world what Freud is really all about

in Life Against Death. Through creation and publication

 

of this work, Brown begins to reCOgnize that he has ex-
perienced something different, and is a different man be-
cause of this.

In 1962 he even says, "Nobody has been where I am
5

now . . . so I will have to see it and say it for myself."

In 1966 this self-statement became Love's Body, the second,

 

and, up to now, last major work by Brown. In this work
Brown has begun to reflect on Zen Buddhism and Oriental
mysticism in more detail. It does not seem merely coin-
cidental that he would have been drawn to this work
through recognition that he had experienced a mystical

moment in his study of Freud.6

 

5Norman 0. Brown in interview as quoted in Morgan,
p. 135.

6Thomas Morgan points out that Brown's mother
was herself a mystic. It is, therefore, reasonable to
assume Brown had some experience with mysticism before
the writing of his works. Morgan, p. 135.

Love's Body could be read as the personal develop-

 

ment of a man toward that state of Nothingness that is the

mystics‘ moment of creation, Ex nihilo poetica. (The last

 

chapter in this development is "Nothing"!) The world
Brown foresees is nothingness--pure spontaneity of men
running wild. Repression is seen as being a personal
problem, yet seemingly demanding a political solution.

Yet there remains a strong feeling in Love's Body for non—

 

political collective action. Through constant use of
footnotes there is in this work an undercurrent of the
logician, and the work itself is not yet pure poetry.
Therefore, a second part of the dissertation will be a
description of the embodiment of Brown's logical analysis
of society. At this point, however, Brown's work some-
times leads beyond even the well-documented aphorisms of
Love's Body. He begins to poeticize in a much purer
manner. His work itself becomes non—political. A process
that began in 1948 is still causing turmoil in 1970. He
has become, as he says, "'more attuned to the sensual
speech of art and less attuned to the logomachy of profes-

“.7

sors. The classics professor, like John Andrew Rice,

founder of Black Mountain College, breaks forth into a

more natural ambience. "'My nature hikes, he says, 'have

'"8

become a necessity. The grip of authority is being lost

 

Ibid. Ibid.

 

in the body of spontaneous action which Brown is trying
to bring onto earth.

The final part of an apprOpriate exegesis of
Brown's body of thought will have to consider the very
vision which Brown has. Since that vision is of nothing-
ness and silence, little can be said of the forms of soci-
ety therein called into being. Brown himself says, even

as early as Life Against Death's publication (the follow-

 

ing quote paraphrases);

that anyone who extracts a "new position" from the
book has read it superficially. The book doesn't
take a final position, he maintains, but rather
intends to drive one on.
Thus Brown is to be explained, but not subjected to a
critical analysis of the "culture" he intends to create.
Instead, it is that he intends to go beyond culture and

allow each man to recreate the world for himself.

It is my intention in the following work to allow
the reader to follow the pattern of Brown's thought,
rather than to give a precise delineation of how Brown
would change a particular school habit, how he would react
to a particular educational reform, or to compare his work
to any educational reform system.

Rational exegesis may well demand that Brown's
work be reinterpreted into prosaic terms but this denies

the very force that Brown possesses. His search is into

 

91bid.

mysticism, and an attempt to meld it to politics.10 But

as John Senior points out in The Way Down and Out, "Mysti-

 

cism is the form occultism took in Christendom, as yoga is

the form it took in India."11

Therefore, there is reason
to base the search that Brown has on an occult basis--a
reason that is backed up substantially by Brown's foremost

"12 The work of Brown

speech on education, "Apocalypse.
does not seem to be lonely work as he implies. Rather it
is work done with the company of anyone who has at any
time experienced a moment of artistic break from "realityJ'
Therefore, his writing could be seen to be the extension
into philosophical realms of the moments that cause any
creation to be initiated. An initiatory drama, such as

13 elucidates a

Love's Body, his "A Homage to PrOpertius"
strong feeling from those who read it. It is not irrele-
vant to say that Brown is shocking. (He relates in
Esquire of a woman who verbally attacked him for trying
to change too many things.) If he is not shocking he is

irrelevant. Yet, as Senior points out about Symbolists,

"What the vision brings is not something other than what

 

loIbid.

llJohn Senior, The Way Down and Out: The Occult
in Symbolist Literature (New York: Greenwood Press, 1968),
p. xvii.

 

 

12Norman 0. Brown, "Apocalypse: The Place of
Mystery in the Life of the Mind," Harper's Magazine,
May, 1961, pp. 47-49.

13Brown, "A Homage to PrOpertius," Caterpillar
#13, IV (October, 1970), 92-102.

 

 

we ordinarily see, but the acceptance of the rightness of
things as they really are, as we have not ever before been
able to see them."14 Brown does not force us to discover
anything new, but attempts to allow us to create everything
anew on our own. This is therapeutic, but also very up-
setting. His work moves into the realm of Symbolist
poetry because he desires to reform the world, not merely
inform it. Yet this reformation is not structured--for
the world is already structured in a beautiful way. There

15 which Brown sees

is "the drama of the insistent present"
as the real issue. It is presently relegated to the world
of the imagination, which is the reason that poetry is
necessitated. Senior points out that the occultists
realized the knowledge which the philosopher merely de—
sires and cannot seem to find in the forms of reality.16
As Brown's work is artistic it leads us beyond forms, so
that the reformation is itself the acceptance of what is.
Yet this is the very Hell most educators attempt to avoid
in their process of bringing out of the child what he
could be. What is becomes shrouded in the forms and

structures of institutional delights in the symbolic

artists' conception of the world.

 

14Senior, p. 196.

5Norman 0. Brown, "Psychoanalysis and the
Classics," The Classical Journal, LII (March, 1957), 241.

16

 

Senior, p. 198.

Brown's call for the youth to be visionaries, to
accept birth and death as a process, places him directly
in what John Senior depicts as the Symbolist camp. His
work is a call to mystery, and as it has developed, it
has become much more mysterious. He purposefully has
made himself untrustworthy to a following,17 and is often
quite enigmatic on the most historically and philosophi-
cally important points. Zen Buddhism, as a reflection of
what Aldous Huxley calls the Perennial Philosophy, pro-
vides a reader with a non-literary style that aims at
much of what Brown attempts. His work is too literary to
be prOperly designated Zen--yet there is a feeling of the
importance of spontaneity and direct action in both Brown
and Zen. Brown nowhere claims to have known a Zen exper-
ience, yet his work does apply psychoanalysis to the
Perennial PhilOSOphy Aldous Huxley describes in his book

by that title.18

The hypothesis has been suggested to me
that Brown's work fits well into the field of Zen
Buddhism-~and while a detailed study of his footnotes,
bibliographies, and various references may indicate a
knowledge of this now pOpular form of occultism, it is

still important to remember that Brown's road to this form

of occultism is through psychoanalysis and books, rather

 

17"Norman Brown's Body," Psychology Today, p. 45.

 

18Aldous Huxley, The Perennial PhilOSOphy (New
York: Harper and Row, Harper Colophon Books, 1945).

 

than a master. It is that Brown has seen the same world
found in Zen's enlightenment--that world which John
Senior sees as the occult.

In this paper, I am not able to affirm or negate
the world of Brown. It is precisely that I write from an
unenlightened source that I cannot divine the sources of
Brown's vision. Yet as a phiIOSOphical tract, this paper
does feel the rhythm of Brown's work, and does discuss
the merit of his being labeled an artist rather than a
philOSOpher. Categorization such as this is within the
sc0pe of a philoSOpher. That Brown displays a vision in
his writing is apprOpriately discussed in a dissertation;
that Brown's vision is acute and sensitive is not appli-
cable discussion. Therefore judgment of the world beyond
culture which Brown perceives is impossible in this paper;
but I hope that I will have shown that Brown does per-
ceive this world and that he finds it already exists.

To again use John Senior's presentation of an
occult maxim as a stepping off point of a discussion on

Brown, "The use of traditional forms without the content

 

is mere decadence."19 In "From Politics to Metapolitics"
Brown states that "The real action in Love's Body_. . . is
to find an alternative to systematic form,"20 but that

 

19Senior, p. 203.

20Brown, "From Politics to Metapolitics," in A
Caterpillar Anthology, ed. by Clayton Eshleman (Garden
City, N. Y.: Doubleday and Company, Anchor Books, 1971),
p. 17.

 

10

"all these systems have immortal longings on them/that is
why they are dead/born dead/representing from the hour of
their birth the dead hand of the past."21 This gives us

a hint at the nature of the world of Brown's vision if
only in a negative way. Yet Brown himself does not design
the world--he leaves this to others. (John Cage and
Buckminster Fuller get prominence in the immediately afore-

mentioned poem.22

) Yet we can perceive that this world
will be void of the funeral home, especially with a

series of Greek columns to remind all of the Victorian

age when everything was so settled, so permanent, so
immortal. This world seemingly will be void of the parti-
tioned home which blocks members into their separate
worlds. The hint is that the occult maxim is heeded.
Brown envisions a world in which tradition demands con-
tent, in which an environment exists because it is alive
rather than because it heralds back to an older form of
life style. Hospitals which restrain the "mentally ill"
would be found nowhere, especially not with the now preva—
lent Gothic architecture which reminds all of the perma—
nence of the condition of those within--gnarled and cold
and dank. No form would be eliminated--but all forms
would be contentually acceptable. (I am here reminded of

some of Lewis Mumford's work. The United Nations build-

ing would have to be justified on its unifying capacities,

 

2lIbid. 221bid., p. 13.

 

11

rather than on economic feasibility.) Lightness would
prevail, Space would be needed so one could literally run
wild in his environment--monumentality would be requisite
to emit man's monumental spiritual/energetic releases.
Fuller's idea is to cover vast areas with one geodesic
dome and thereby reduce the need of any other architec-
tural structures. Paolo Soleri designs all industry
underground--automated and out of sight. Soleri's energy
development is produced by easily-built sites, away from
pOpulation, which use natural sources without disrupting
the natural rhythm. In the following paper there will not
be a development of this world. It is much too dangerous
to suggest that Brown's work leads to a favoring of Paolo
Soleri over Ian McHarg who suggests that man learn to
live at one with the environment, and that he has a place
in this nature.23 Soleri homes man away from nature so
he will have a nature to run free in. These are much too
dangerous grounds to tread upon in a work of this design.
As Brown's work approaches poetry, these points become
even less clear. That Apollo holds his love and his
laurels at once is intriguing24 but one is justified in
asking "What then shall we, as men and not gods, do to

reclaim our natural lands?" Brown would point to the

 

23Ian McHarg, "Man and Environment,’ in The Urban
Conditiog: People and Policy in the Metrgpolis, ed. by
Leonard J. Duhl (New York: Basic Books, 1963).

24Andre Gide, The Counterfeiters, trans. by D.
Bussy (New York, 1961), pp. 83-84, quoted in Brown,
"Daphne," p. 107.

 

 

 

12

fact that we are gods, and when we realize this there is
no longer any problem. This still leaves many quite
empty. Apropos to this situation is a poem. Yet that
reduces no problems--un1ess. But so far very few Sym—
bolist poets have been successful. And their success is

limited. (Jerzy Kosinski, author of Steps and The Painted

 

Bird, all quite Symbolist in approach, taught a class at
the University of Michigan. He quit, saying that the stu-
dents didn't know enough to even ask the right questions.)
The metapolitics of Jerry Rubin aim at effecting a feeling
on the part of the American public, rather than drawing
out a vote or support. But he seems to follow what hap-
pens rather than create it. It is indeed difficult to
discover that "little mosquito biting a big public be-

hind"25

into action and difficult indeed to find a mos-
quito which doesn't die after its first bite. And it is
even more difficult to find someone who uses the medium
of language to effect a feeling in people.

The artist who is continuous, in other words, the
artistic life, is indeed difficult to discover. Perhaps
compromises with the bureaucratically dominated society
expend enough energy and time for the artist in man to

die. Milton Mayer, in On Liberty: Man v. the State,26

 

 

25Joyce Cary, The Horse's Mouth (New York: Harper
and Row, Perennial Library, 1944), p. 247.

26Milton Mayer, On Liberty: Man v. the State,
Center Occasional Papers (Santa Barbara, Calif.: The
Center for the Study of Democratic Institutions, December,
1969).

 

 

13

makes a convincing argument that one simply can't make do
without the structure of the state. The compromises that
are necessary may well be enough to destroy the possi-
bility of an artistic life. Brown, indeed, suggests in
all of his work that we must be constantly "Overcoming
this world, abolishing it,"27 which is total rather than
partial: "The true sacrifice is total, a making holy of
the whole; the false sacrifice sacrifices a part. . . ."28
The work of Brown therefore leads us to believe that the
necessary compromises we daily face are not so necessary
at all. The description of compromise as necessity is
inadequate if we consider Brown's work. This indicates
an inability of any paper, including this one, which is
a compromise of the body to necessity to correctly epito-
mize Brown's work. More importantly, if the sacrifice
must be total, then any dissertation will not be able to
be poetical (in Brown's sense); but, being necessarily a
compromise, cannot possible give the reader the feeling
of totality which Brown claims.

Brown considers repression as psychological rather
than political or economic. It is a personal problem in

the sense of the very meaning of person, and it seems as

insoluble without a total involvement of what we know as

 

27Norman 0. Brown, Love's Body (New York: Random
House, Vintage Books, 1966), p. 233.

28

 

Ibid., p. 174.

14

the person. This is spontaneous, therefore unpredictable.
The Utopian vision of Brown is necessarily incomplete,

and his work is still a search for that vision. The in-
depth study of Freud drew him to conclude "The 'magical'
body which the poet seeks is the 'subtle' or 'spiritual'

or 'translucent' body of occidental mysticism, and the
'diamond' body of oriental mysticism, and in psycho-
analysis, the polymorphously perverse body of childhood."29
The equation of the body of Christianity, mythology, and

oriental religion with the body of psychoanalysis led

Brown to a study leading to Love's Body, searching for the

 

total revolution of mankind into a world without repres-
sion of the body. This necessitated a new form of com-
munication, body to body rather than person to person.

Love's Body is aphorism, yet is not yet revolution because

 

Brown still aligns to the person of past authorities to
make his point. Yet there is a magic to the work, a
poetry, which captures the intellectual as well as the
physical man. In this sense his work is totally involv-
ing. After this, his work becomes more and more pure
poetry—-and the intensity of his search for a poem seems

to increase and magnify.

 

. 29gggg, Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical
Meanin of Histor (Middletown, Conn.: Wesleyan Univer-
31ty Press, , p. 313.

 

CHAPTER II

ANALITY

The Imposition of Civilization on Life:
An Introduction

 

 

When reading Brown it is important to bear in
mind he believes, and supports his belief,1 men have
somehow denied their unity with the cosmos and that this
denial has caused neoteric man to be insufficient to his
possibilities. Brown conceives of the healthy individual
as a harmonious unity with the whole of existence, yet
finds individuality presently expressed in "the struggle
of the mind to overcome the split and conflict within
itself."2 Therefore, the struggle within the mind is
felt to have cosmic implications, and therapy of the
individual "fulfills itself only when it becomes histori-

3 To Brown the individual is

cal and cultural analysis."
ultimately significant only as he gains an open acceptance

of the world, of nature. In Brown, education is integral

 

1Brown, Life, "The Disease Called Man," pp. 3—10;
and Brown, Love's Body, pp. 184-90.

2

 

Brown, Life, p. 321.

3Ibid., pp. 170-71.

15

16

not only to the development of the separate homonoidal
organisms, but as the very definition of its significance.
The openness to the world is what makes the existence of
mankind itself significant, as well as each man. Brown
warns that this openness is not furthered by the develop-
ment of reasonable, or clearly explicable, differentiating
categories imposed upon the world, but is the acceptance
of things as they really are. It is here, in Brown's
conception of reality, that an investigator of Brown's
theory of education is imperated to clarification. Brown
feels that, since man himself is the conceptualizer, the
whole of man can never be discerned through the conceptual
processes. The very search for salvation, or wholeness
with the cosmos, is felt to be the salvation, or therapy,
of each man. Brown accepts the apparent contradiction of
individuality in unity and in doing so posits a paradigm
for the education of all mankind.

Reason, Brown explicates in his works, cannot
suffice to fully describe the human animal nor can it
save the animal from the ravages of civilization. Fur—
thermore, reason needs be suspended in order to describe,
and thus set to utilization, the great human potentiali-
ties which for a myriad of excuses have been bound. Salva-
tion is shown to be in erotic, playful, behavior which

appears to the civilized world as a Dionysian fury or a

17

schiZOphrenic madness.4 Brown's works can be read as at-
tempts to allow us to realize that it is reason which is
merely a tool and that the venture into the unconscious
(intuition) is the rebirth of man--the fulfillment of his
previously bypassed possibilities.

Brown views human education as a search for some-
thing 1ost, rather than a groping for the unknown. Dis-
covery becomes rediscovery. Therefore, the methods of
the search must be those of the goal for the search is
the goal which is the making conscious of our repressed
selves (salvation). Brown's later works reflect this
symbolist/surrealist presumption. Through Brown we can
envision all human life as a return to childhood rather
than a development to civilization which he feels imposed
itself upon the human animal.5 In saying "The rents, the
tears, the splits and divisions are mindmade, they are
not based on the truth but on what the Buddhists call
illusion . . ."6 Brown shows his belief that civilization
diverges while nature, or truth, has a therapeutic value.

Brown enjoins that the repletion of the rents

caused by the "illusions," "maya," is to be found in love

 

4John Bleibtreau, The Parable of the Beast (New
York: MacMillan Company, Coilier Books, 1968), p. 63.

5Jose Ortega y Gasset Speaks of culture Opposed
to life in a manner similar to Brown, Jose Ortega y
Gasset, The Modern Theme, trans. by James Cleugh (New
York: Harper and Row, Harper Torchbooks, 1931).

6

 

 

Brown, Love's Body, p. 81.

 

18

which is bodily rather than genital. Therapy is salvation
to Brown for the human is seen as "knowing" his own salva-
tion through his body. Brown quotes Freud in pointing out
that "'The ego is first and foremost a body-ego,‘ 'the
mental projection of the surface of the body'"7 . .
"loving the function of mediating between the body and

other bodies in the environment."8

Therefore, the ego
which we consider to be hidden deep within ourselves is
really at the border of, is really our unity with, the
cosmos. Brown feels that the ego properly understood and
felt will provide man with the Opportunity to live rather
than merely understand and appreciate life. Through an
understanding of Freud, Brown posits that in childhood
the human, protected by a prolonged infancy, knew love and
was at oneness with nature. Thusly seen, the human con-
dition is a steady decomposition of energies battling a
steady, continuous attempt of repressed love to return.
Using Freudian terminology, Brown finds the infant "poly-
morphously perverse."9 In other words, he finds the in-
fant is participant in an environmentally dynamic eco—

system10 in that his erotism is natural and accepted. It

 

7Sigmund Freud, The Ego and The Id, p. 31, as
quoted in Brown, Life, p. 159.

8

 

Brown, Life, p. 159.

91bid., p. 27.

10Rene Dubos, "Man Overadapting," Psychology
Today, IV (February, 1971) , 50-53.

 

19

is therefore from the outside impositions of society that
the decomposition of erotism is perpetrated. Brown's poem
is not that of a dying world living out a pattern of effec-
tual doom, but is the expression Of a dynamic that must be
lived. We can thus better comprehend the sense of urgency

we feel in reading Love's Body since its author is found

 

to feel that this dynamic is even life.

Brown recognizes that Freud inevitably concluded
that therapy will be unsuccessful since Freud had a "meta-
physical vision Of all life sick with the struggle between
Life and Death."11 But Brown states that, more appro-
priately, only at the human level do these polarities be-
come differentiated into conflict, "But if man has revolted
from nature, it is possible for him to return to nature and

heal himself."12

Throughout his writing Brown emphasizes
that the adult human condition has been brought on by the
steady divergence of the human with his natural body--by
interference, noise. Brown states that "childhood is the

state of nature"13

and that man, even if not prodded on by
books and formal educative apparati is committed "to the
unconscious project of overcoming the instinctual ambiva-
lence which is his actual condition and of restoring the

unity of Opposites that existed in childhood and exists in

 

animals."14 It is Brown's feeling that, in infancy,
llBrown, Life, p. 32. 121bid., p. 83.
13 14

Ibid., p. 84. Ibid., p. 85.

20

libidinal stimuli are not displaced from the erogenous zones
of their occurrence.15 Infancy is found to be a "pre—
ambivalent" stage of human existence-—occurrences are all

erotic and non-sublimated.16

Society is thought the de—
eroticization of the body, and technology considered the
successful sublimations which rationality perpetuates. The
search for salvation, which we have shown to be considered
the process of education, is thus the search for the resur-
rection of the body.17 Brown feels we must come as children
before God to be saved and comprehends man as in search for
the "Human Form Divine."

Brown senses a happiness and joy divine in the child
which distinguishes its condition from that of the adult.
Life Against Death (1959) is a reasonable explanation of

the causes of this distinction, inspired by the works of

Freud. Love's Body' (1966), however, is the adult Brown

 

becoming as a child. (That Brown is, as Theodore Roszak
claims, "Dionysus with footnotes"18 is an absolutely appro-
priate description of Brown the adult, who knows something,

searching to become as a child--not become a child. The

 

15 16

Ibid., p. 26. Ibid., p. 85.

 

17Ibid., p. 313.

18Theodore Roszak, The Making of a Counterculture:
Reflections on the Technocratic Society and Its YouthfuI
O osition (New Yofk: DoubIEday and Company, Anchor
BOOKS, I969), p. 115.

 

21

search is not for a primitive, childish religion based on
superstition, but for a poem.19)

The world, since dominated by adults, has become
prosaic to Brown.20 It is not perceived by him as the
joyous exuberant expression of unification of the wholeness
with the world, with all that is or could be. Brown delves
into the search for his poem in Love's Body. It is a book,
published, which should not have been published in the sense
that we then assume Brown's experience has been frozen and
can be explained. It is an example of what Brown desires
to avoid--the freezing of men's actions, the transference
of action to causality through the effects of civilization--
in this case print technology. Yet Brown is therein per-
ceptive about these very faults. He warns that the human
being should not be transformed into a utile item rather
than being an expression of all past and future in the
present moment. As he says, "The boundary line between
self and external world bears no relation to reality."21
Brown finds that under the influence of civilization the

individual becomes a person--"persona, a mask." The Person

is not part of reality, rather only a part of reality acting

 

19Brown, Love's Body, p. 254.

 

20Anais Nin emphasizes that only prose which is
poetic will cause people to be what they should be, thus
causing change. Anais Nin, The Novel of the Future (New
York: MacMillan Company, CoIIier BOOks, 196877 pp. 165-201.

21

 

Brown, Love's Body, p. 143.

 

22

as all reality. Brown conceives of a person as a cause,
as historical fact, rather than an expression of all
facts-~which is Brown's conception of the true individual.
Aphorized by Brown, "Personality is not innate but

acquired."22

Man cannot live up to his possibilities as
long as he hides behind the mask of personality which
keeps him diverged from his natural "pre-ambivalent" unity
with the cosmos. Brown's educational theory would be
senseless to one not comprehending, at least on a prehen-
sile level, this trend in Brown.

The Effects of Personality
(The Human as CauseII

 

 

Brown's position is that personality acquisition
is the placement of an illusory world upon the child, re-
pressing his erotism. Self-identity (as the search for
education) is found to be the denial of the individual's
dynamic relation to the cosmos. It is seen as an attempt
to fixate the individual as a distinct set of stimuli and
responses within the environment. The educational philo-
sophy of Existentialists (such as VanCleve Morris) depends
heavily upon the Existential moment of awakening.23 But

Brown makes us aware that this occurs only when the in-

dividual is deprived of his erotic body, and Morris's

 

221bid., p. 94.

23VanCleve Morris, Existentialism in Education:
What It Means (New York: Harper and Row, 1966), p. 135.

 

 

23

"responsibility" is nothing more than regaining the lost
body, brought on by guilt for having lost what one loved.
Reading Brown one concludes that the inculcation of values
through didatic rhetoric, be it fiery or benevolent (re—
ligious or scholarly), is less Opprobrious since more ap-
parent (transparent) than the attempt of others more radi—
cally tendered to bring out the personality of the learner
as a distinct and self—identified quantity.
Brown:

If the mechanism of sublimation is the dream, the
instinctual economy which sustains it is a primacy

of death over life in the ego. The path which leads
from infantile dreaming to sublimation originates in
the ego's incapacity to accept the death of separa-
tion, and its inauguration of those morbid forms of
dying--negation, repression, and narcissistic in-
volution. The end result is to substitute for the
reality of living—and-dying the desexualized or
deadened life. This conclusion, so shattering to the
hOpe of finding in sublimation a "way out" and there-
fore omitted in the encyclOpedias of psychoanalytical
orthodoxy--is squarely faced and stated by Freud in
The Ego and the Id: "By thus obtaining possession

of the libido from the object-cathexes, setting
itself up as the love-object, and desexualizing or
sublimating the libido of the id, the ego is working
in Opposition to the purpose of Eros and placing
itself at the service of the opposing instinctual
trends."2

 

The crisis of self-identity is therefore found to
be inherent in the search for the distinct self. It is
only in a confluence with the environment, the cosmos, that
Brown understands the individual to be real. An equation

is implicit in Brown. Therapy is transference is the

 

24Brown, Life, p. 173.

24

search for the androgynous existence is the polymorphously
perverse body is endless. Interference exists as that
which reasonably destroys or blocks awareness of this re-
lationship. But Brown sees that the acceptance of this

equation through faith in nature is therapy itself.

The World as Excrement

 

The world Brown sees about him is anal erotism
displaced. "Swift does not hate the bowels," he points

25 If Brown's

out, "but only the human use of the bowels."
stance is taken, the child must be viewed as accepting

his anal erotism, but as frozen in his anal explorations
by the subtle displacement of the anal functions away from
the body and into the external world, forming culture--
away from his initiation and discovery. Furthermore, the
symbolic acts of anality will be viewed as interfered with
and displaced into cultural products showing play, gift,
26

property, weapon, reason as all anal. Civilization is

to Brown the excrement of men. It is found the non-fertile
atmOSphere of a "second-best substitute for the original."27
Civilization is envisioned the symbol of the symbol and man
caught in civilization is seen as removed from his body.

(The resurrection and not the erection of the body is called

forth.) The method of this separation of the body from the

 

25 26

Ibid., p. 190. Ibid., p. 191.

27Ibid.

25

man is explained as the overemphasis of a part of the whole,
a part heading the body--the part heading the body--the
(corporate) body headed.

In a bold proclamation, eSpecially considering
Brown's avowed faith in psychoanalysis, he states, "Psycho-
analysis stands or falls on the expansion of the idea of
sexuality to comprehend the entire life of the human body."28
Furthermore, "Monarchy is the constituent form of all cor-
porate bodies, including the body physical."29

The instituted corporations of civilization are
necessarily hierarchical in Brown's thesis for they are the
body repressed--the human body denied action. This is
nothing less than action taken from the whole body and
placed into a part. Therefore, Brown's implications here
are consistent with those of Marshall McLuhan. Technolog-
ical developments are shown as extensions of a part of the

30

body ruling the body, and (here he goes beyond McLuhan)

 

28Brown, Love's Body, p. 126.

 

291bid., p. 127.

30Marshall McLuhan posits the hypothesis that
electric media are the nervous system of the body ex-
tended. Marshall McLuhan, Understanding Media (2nd ed.;
New York: New American Library, Signet Books, 1964).
This is to say that what Freud referred to as the "body—
ego" (supra, p. 18) is considered to be extended in
electric technology. Brown's position, though he does not
state it, would be that the context of the development of
electric media is a denial of its very possibilities, and

 

26

are hierarchical by concept. Brown perceives that this
allows the head to rule the body and reduces the range of
the environment so that the body is consequently reduced.
Transaction of the body and environment is denied by the,
consequently, logical extensions of the part of the body.
All corporate bodies are monarchies; Brown shows that

hierarchy and not democracy31

is the necessary style of
institutions. Perfected civilization is the head erected-—
reason supreme. (Brown feels no qualms in speaking of the
head Of the body as the head of an institution; after all,
"psychoanalysis must regard language as a repository of the

PSYChiC history of mankind."32

) The process of civilizatknm
rolls on to its frightening end, Brown warns, "and since

the dialectic of sublimation in civilization is cumulative,
cumulatively abstract and cumulatively deadening, Freud's
intuition that civilization moves toward the primacy of

33 The

intellect and the atrOphy of sexuality is correct."
head will rule all. Politics reach perfection only when
the head is all and the polymorphously perverse body is

negated.

 

that it will never be appropriately developed until man

is at one with his body. Brown's position tenders that we
humans could hardly understand what is an extension of

our bodies if we don't understand or feel our own bodies.

31Brown, Love's Body, p. 26.

 

32Brown, Life, p. 197.

33Ibid., p. 173.

27

His critique of civilization thus has a strong
pungency of anarchism, or at least of a hatred of political
activity. It would not be as strong an odor if Brown were
at all unrelenting in his initial belief that "It is the
distinctive achievement of man to break apart the undiffer-
entiated or dialectrical unity of the instincts at the

animal level."34

The goal for Brown, we must remember,
is salvation and not amelioration and that he feels man is
distinctively in need of salvation. It is more in the
tradition of Kropotkin who found anarchism as the only mode
for the beautiful expression of human grace that Brown's
anarchism can be posited than in the work of Proudhon and
Bakunin who find revulsion at present forms of government
as the mandate to anarchism. Brown finds that man is
uniquely saved; that it is within himself and not legis—
lated from without that salvation occurs. At this point
one could digress to an interesting essay on Brown's re-
lation to Marxist philoSOphy, but it would be counterpro-
ductive to an effort to describe Brown's discovery of the
anal presuppositions controlling modern theories of edu-
cation.

He continues his damnation of civilization by
pointing out that the denial of the polymorphously perverse
body occurs when man is merely his extension in the part

substituting for reality, and that reason is the

 

34Ibid., p. 84.

28

deve10pment Of technological procedures to replace man's
relationship with the environment. Reason is excrement.
It is at this point that Brown (Romulus) and his
Remus (Herbert Marcuse) differ most sharply. To Marcuse
technology provides a means of freedom for man--beyond the

35

state Of necessity into the state of freedom. (Brown

would contend here that Marcuse's goal is a state, not
poetry which is stateless.36) Marcuse believes that tech-
nology can be used to supply the needs of mankind, not in

a modest way, but in a way which captures the genius

37

imagination of mankind. Therefore, man must submit to

the repressive technology long enough to provide the pro-

ducts of needs satisfaction in order to then and (Marcuse

38

adds) only then be free. Norman Brown rebuts that "the

issue here is the same question of alienated (compulsive)

"39

labor. Brown's position here is clarified if one

considers that life is (as John Bleibtreau states in a

 

3SHerbert Marcuse, Bros and Civilization: A

Philosgphical Inguiryiinto Freud (New York: Random House,
Vintage Books, 1955), pp. 180-202.

36

 

 

Brown, Love's Body, p. 16.

 

37Herbert Marcuse chastises Paul Goodman for being
too modest in his demands upon technology and the "system."
Herbert Marcuse, "Liberation from the Affluent Society,"
in Dialectics of Liberation, ed. by David Cooper (New York:
MacMillan Company, Collier Books, 1968), p. 176.

38

 

Marcuse, Eros, p. 142.

39Norman 0. Brown, "A Reply to Herbert Marcuse,"
Commentary, XLIII (March, 1967), 83.

 

29

biological tract very similar to Brown's poem)40 a rhythm

of accented and unaccented moment signs, and that technology
always interferes with this rhythm, as it always tends to
unaccent every moment. If technology is to be used, Brown
is there to warn that it is always the monarchy of the

head over the body and is repressive. In Life Against Death

 

Brown discusses the possibility of work to redeem; that is,
that "the abandonment of the illusion that work redeems
signifies a disillusionment with the dreams of infantile
narcissism, a strengthened capacity to endure harsh truth

. . ."41 Brown discovers that work in a non-narcisSitic
environment is excrement, the self-punishment of man in a
secularized environment. Furthermore, the secular environ-
ment which man, according to Marcuse, must tolerate and
perpetuate to its end, is shown by Brown to be "demOnolatryJ'
Marcuse points toward archaic communities as examples of
non-repressive societies, but Brown feels that even at this
stage man was already "Instinctively committed to create an
economic surplus"42 and "instinctively committed to non-

43

enjoyment, self-repression, and compulsive work." This

is brought upon man not by his alienation from his work,

but by his guilt for having committed the primal crime (of

44

destruction of his father.) This results, Brown shows,

 

40John Bleibtreau, pp. 3-83.

41 42

Brown, Life, p. 272. Ibid., p. 261.

43 44

Ibid. Ibid., p. 271.

30

in the "archaic consciousness" which is that of sociability
through an attempt to pay off the debt to the father.

Brown states that "Archaic gift-giving (the famous pot-
latch is only an extreme example) is one vast refutation

of the notion that the psychological motive of economic

life is utilitarian egoism."45

Therefore, even an economy
which is based upon repressive labor that would not be con—
sidered by Marcuse to be superfluous is driven by guilt.

It would not appear feasible to Brown that a compromise is
possible at this point, a compromise Marcuse makes in ac-
cepting a certain amount of repression as necessary.46
Labor, though, is integrally connected with time. As

Brown states, "Time is a schema necessary for the expiation

Of guilt"47

and the time domination of technology, since
imposed from the head, is that guilt reified. It becomes
Obvious that Brown is looking for a way out of the trauma
Of guilt, a trauma which Marcuse tacitly accepts. His "way
out" is found in the postulation of non-repressive work--
work which is bodily necessary. Labor becomes that which
the whole man does, since the whole man only acts out his
necessities. Marcuse's call to a society progressing

towards an eroticization is replaced by Brown with an

Apocalyptic vision of man becoming whole. Marcuse desires

 

451bid., p. 263.

46Marcuse, Eros, p. 40.

47Brown, Life, p. 277.

31

the rational progression to the libidinalization of man,
while Brown feels that the whole man, the eroticized body,
alone can perceive what the goal is. It is impossible,
Brown's philoSOphy here tenders, to aim towards the goal
without first being healthy. A homeopathy is required.
It is only through being healthy that one becomes healthy
according to Brown's view. Marcuse therefore attacks Brown
for being too "symbolic" in his interpretation of reality,
while Brown cajoles Marcuse to see that "the real meaning
of technology is its hidden relation to the human body, a
symbolical or mystical relation."48 Romulus and Remus have
departed, not to reach different goals, but to reach the
same goal by different paths. Brown's way is the goal,
while Marcuse feels that we can take progressive steps
towards that goal.49
Brown's work stands as a warning that technology

cannot be used to effectively bring to man his needs for

it is in the technology of denial that man has lost the

 

48Brown, "Reply to Marcuse," Commentary, p. 83.

 

49Marcuse does attempt to face the problem of
creating a new consciousness in a people who do not yet
possess this consciousness. He frankly admits this is
a dilemma. Herbert Marcuse, Five Lectures: Psychoanalysis,
Politics and Utopia, trans. by Jeremy J. Shapiro and ShirIey
M. Weber (Boston: Beacon Press, 1970): p. 99. The position
taken in this paper is that Brown feels the unconsciouss in
all men is basically free and that the "way down" into the
caverns of each man's mind will provide the "way out."
That therapy becomes the end of psychoanalysis in Brown's
work is herein tendered.

 

 

32

body he so desperately needs. The rhythm of the machine
is not the rhythm of man, but Brown, seeing this, would
not deny that work itself need always be repressive. In

Life Against Death Brown searches for a new type of science

 

which will fully eXpress the needs of the body of men. In
order to meet truly human needs we cannot stipulate a

rational progression while we ourselves are alienated.

Carnal Knowledge

 

Brown exhorts, "The human mind was born free, or
at any rate born to be free, but everywhere it is in
chains . . ."50 The chains Brown sees are rationality and
they bold man back from his own knowledge. When the mys-
teries of the universe are placed at the diSposal of
rational discourse they are to be evaluated and judged,
which Brown finds as a sickening process of demystification.
Knowledge is carnal; it is pure communication between human
bodies; and, Brown further points out, it is inexplicable
in language. Western man51 has grOped for the security
that definite statements allow and in this process has

developed a logic which imposes an order upon nature.

Brown calls this the logic of contradictions, and his work

 

50Brown, Love's Body, p. 13.

 

51 . . . .
Eastern man is here1n opposed. For a discu531on
of this type of opposition see Thomas Merton, Zen and the
Birds of Appetite (New York: New Directions Publishing
Corporation, 1968), pp. 99-138.

 

 

33

can be apprOpriately read as an attempted reformulation of

Western logic. (In an article "Animadiversions upon

Professor Brown's Apocalypse,' J. E. Grant damns Brown

 

because he calls for a mystification of man in nature rather

52

than for a four-fold vision of Divine Humanity. I feel

that Brown implies in Love's Body that man has created a

 

one-dimensionality of thought by denying his body and that
he must see the world in himself, see that he is the world,
in order to become Divinely Human. He also implies that
the order man imposed upon the universe in the name of
rationality is itself inadequate and must be attended to
allow man the freedom of his godliness. That Brown is not
a visionary himself cannot be a condemnation of his call
to vision. After all, as Meier points out, "the god (of

healing) who is himself sick or wounded"53

is an important

motif of life, and Brown does see civilization as sick and

himself as part of civilization, even though he is attempt-

. 54

ing to part ways.
Brown places great importance on the idea that the

body denied, sublimated to the head (of the penis) creates

 

 

 

 

52J. E. Grant, "Animadversions Upon Professor
Brown's 'Apocalypse,'" The Noble Savage, V (1962), 12-18.

53C. A. Meier, Ancient Incubation and Modern
Psychotherapy, trans. by Monica Curtis (Chicago: North-
western University Press, 1967), p. 131. (Parenthetical
phrase mine.)

54

This is not to say that Brown's call is not for
individuals with vision, but that he himself is not a
visionary.

34

the eternal struggle of Life Against Death. Rationality

is sensed as uncreative, and perhaps as beyond the sickness
of imperfection, therefore is not sensed as curative. As
Meier points out, "What works in medicine is irrational

"55

Brown realizes that the "Disease Called Man" is
never to be cured through rational procedures. Rational
thought is conceived as eliciting nothing new or miraculous,
and cures, like education, are always miracles. Further-
more, rationality in its fixation on the intelligible and
repetitive is felt to be the very negation of miracles,
and to be the excrement of the creative powers. Brown is
interested in showing that the residual of creativity is
what becomes habituated while the creative remains con-
stantly inexplicable and humanly expressed in irrationality.
Simply, Brown feels that mystery discovered is no longer
mystery.S6

In this view civilization is what is residual since
it can be learned and studied and dissected and analyzed
(it is analytical-anal residual of the creative body.)
Knowledge is carnal in Brown's vision and becomes trivi—

alized as it becomes analyzed. That rational knowledge

can be Obtained by experts is felt to be part of its

 

55Meier, Ancient Incubation, p. 28.

 

56

Brown, "Apocalypse,'

Harper's, p. 48.

35

excremental nature, and Brown espouses the fact that ex-
perts "possess" this knowledge as proof of its wastefulness.
It is within the realm of intellectual expertise that Brown
sees the head coming to completely dominate the body, and
he fears the justification of this process through the
reasonable explication that the head can rationally know
more than the body and its responses are therefore more
valid than the body's reSponses.57 Brown believes that
knowledge as rational is trivial, desexualized knowledge.
It is nothing more than rational, sane, cold conceptions
of the environment being Spliced up and dominated by men.
It is, Brown continues, the anal/penile sublimations of
the human ego acting as the entire body. The non-bodily
ego, Brown insists, is the tool of excrement especially as
it is expressed rationally.

The knowledge received of the rational ego is al—
ways false to Brown, and "The mystery of meaning remains

"58

forever inviolate; there is not literal truth. Brown

states that the trivial "event remains trivial for those

who do not have eyes to see"59

meaning that an irrational
vision is needed to see the truth. Truth is therefore
conceived as trivialized by rationality's expanded sense

of importance. Thereby, he feels, truth is made as foolish.

 

57Brown, Love's Body, p. 199.

59

 

58

Ibid., p. 238. Ibid.

 

36

Brown says that "the original sense is nonsense; and common

"60

sense is a cover-up job, repression and also says "Truth

riding a donkey; as foolishness."61
It is not rational to think of "infinity in a grain
of sand" yet this is precisely the truth which Brown knows
to be in creation. He sees that rational knowledge is a
lie, the biggest lie. He sees it is the lie that one man
has more knowledge, and access to knowledge, than another.

This lie implies that mystery is inferior to, or different

than, reality. Love's Body is, if nothing else, the dis-

 

cussion of mystery as real, imagination as the only true
thought,62 and that only through imagination can man be
resurrected. Brown does not leave the reader empty-handed,
but points to the hands (the body) as holding whatever
truth there is. He sees rationality is the head erected-

63

idolatry. Culture, he reminds mankind, is gained from

the active attempt of the human consciousness to alter

64 and "has the

reality so as to "regain the lost objects"
essential quality of being a 'substitute gratification'; a

pale imitation of past pleasure substituting for present

 

 

pleasure, and thus essentially desexualized."6S Remembering
601bid., p. 245. 6lIbid., p. 245.
621bid., p. 226.
63Idem, Life, p. 277.
64Ibid., p. 163. 6SIbid.

 

37

that Brown believes fantasy is "a hallucination which

"66 one knows that it

cathects the memory of gratification
cannot be used by Brown to satisfy the bodily union with
the world. Rational culture thus is seen to be a fantasy
world of second best substitutes for reality. In denying
rational culture Brown feels that he has not robbed man of
anything significant.

Brown's denial of epistemology as an intellectual
process is not complete until he shows that the body sexual
is denied, or destroyed, by culture. Thereto we find
throughout his writing arguments such as what follows:

"Fantasy is also the mechanism whereby the ego con-
structs the pregenital and genital organizations . . .
fantasy has the power to alter the body."67 Culture
is the sublimation not of the reality of the poly-

morphously perverse body but of infantile sexuality
"organized by fantasies into sexual organizations."

68
It is apparent from lines of argument such as these that
Brown regards rational knowledge as fantasy, as being a
reflection of a world which is the sublimation of a sub-
limation, as being a reflection of an organized and certain
world which is Obviously not a human and polymorphously

69

perversed world. True knowledge (as Opposed to ration—

ality) is found to be symbolism and not syllogism.

 

66 67

Ibid.,

 

Ibid., p. 164.

681bid., p. 165.

69Meier's study of incubation shows this to be an
important aspect of the mythology of medicine. Meier.

38

"Culture," Brown states, "the products of subli-
mation is, in Plato's words, 'the imitation of an imita-

70 Brown feels that he has not invented true know-

tion.'"
ledge as a construct of his own personal vision but that
it has been known by the child. It was the child's entire
life and was his primary relation to the environment. In
fact, the child was his own environment. This life, which
has been known by the child, is seen to be destroyed by
fantasied sexual organizations imposed through the fear of
separation into an individuated being in an environment
which once was the expression of its entire body. Brown
argues that this is a false fear, but it is reified and
reinforced by the cultural rationality. It is, after all,
reasonable to assume that the body is a separate entity in

71 It is reasonable for the body of men

the environment.
to lay themselves before the heads of men. It is reason-
able to strive for the particular skills which will allow
one to qualify as a legitimate member of the culture. All

of this Brown sees as a reasonable, but unreal, life that

men lead under the reign of authority. He blames Freud

 

7oBrown, Life, p. 165.

71Petr Kropotkin discusses the impossibility of
distinguishing unique cultural artifacts, especially the
ownership of these physical items. Petr KrOpotkin, The
Conquest of Bread (New York: Vanguard Press, 1926),—ET 7.
Brown does not seem to be familiar with KrOpotkin, but
that this view here discussed can be extended to the realm
Of all relationships, including economic ones, is important

for the present consideration.

 

39

for being equivocal on this point, and does not desire to

. 72
equivocate.

Obscene Violence is Authoritarian

 

Brown finds all authority as repressive, and, con-
versely, all repression as authoritarian. This begins, he
says, with "The primal crime" which "is an infantile
fantasy created out of nothing by the infantile ego in
order to sequester by repression its own unmanageable

"73

vitality (id). Therefore, "The ultimate problem is not

"74 Rationalism is in—

guilt, but the incapacity to live.
adequate to the solution of problems, and it is in "blessed
madness" that Brown finds the body alive. Education which
does not lead to this madness is unreal to life (a point

I shall discuss in Chapter III). Rationality is seen to
tell the body that it is unmanageable, and must be seques-
tered. It is seen to tell the body technologies must exist
to complement the body so as to fulfill the capacities the
body of men cannot exercise. Brown implies this is a lie,
a fantasy world made up of make-believe rulers and denied
vitality in the mass of men. It is a violent and deadly
world of waste. Here Brown is seen to show violence is

excrement. It is seen as the result of the body's most

wasteful projects. Therefore violence is also the freedom

 

728rown, Life, p. 165.

73Ibid., p. 270. 74Ibid.

40

of "blessed madness." It is the quintessence of the dialec-
tic of Life Against Death which is the opposites united in
One.

Brown declares that the body must declare war on
violence, must declare the peaceful war. Truth, which must
inevitably control violence, is found by Brown to be elu-
sive since "The true psychic reality, which is the un-
conscious, cannot ever be translated into words.".75
Rationalism, since it is the attempt to explain existence,
is felt to be the power Of words over reality, over truth.
TO Brown truth, we remember, is always carnal. Therefore
authority is always the negatiOn of the body towards the
head (what Brown describes as the anal/penile displacement
upwards to the mouth) and is the desire to put into words
what is known only in silence. The battle which Brown
sees is the endless struggle of the head to destroy the
body by desexualizing the involvement of the body with the
cosmos. This is to submit the body of men to the desires
of the few. In outlining the development of Homo sapiens

Brown attempts to display we are always and everywhere

developing the tyrant and Homo economicus is the form of

 

acquiescence. This is seen as the Western dream played out
through the bodies of all men. But it is an unreality

(what Roszak calls the "Myth of Objective Consciousness")

 

7SIdem, Love's Body, p. 257.

 

 

41

posing as taa reality. It is felt as violence to the body,
and Brown furthermore feels that only through the fire of
the return of the body can this be avoided. In political
terms, which Brown astutely avoids, this is an anarchy of
the mass of men. In educational terms, which Brown always
avoids, this is an anti-intellectualism. In military terms
this is the war which Eros itself wages.

In Life Against Death Brown seems to suggest that

 

the forms of acquiescence are part of reality posing as

76

the substance of reality, but in his later book, Love's

Body, he senses that it is an unreality substituting for

the reality.77

Yet he suggests it is always and everywhere
violence: the vitality of life sequestered and the insti-
tutions which are the excrement of society demanding the

creativity of the peOple of that society.78

At this point
Brown seems closest to becoming a visionary. Culture is
envisioned a fantasy and what we come to see as reality,
our everyday existences, is sleep. The body is still re—

pressed, but not destroyed, and is always tending to become

polymorphously perverse. So Brown, believing this,

 

761dem, Life, p. 322.

 

77Idem, Love's Body, p. 266.

 

78Many of Brown's critics feel that he is implying
all institutions are excremental, and this is often their
point of contention. Richard Noland, "The Apocalypse of
Norman 0. Brown," American Scholar, XXXVIII (Winter, 1968),
pp. 59-68. Sidney Morgenbesser, "The Vision of Norman 0.
Brown," review of Life Against Death, by Norman 0. Brown,
Harper's Magazine, November, 1966, pp. 138-40.

 

 

42

perceives Nirvana is not ecostatic but is constant erotic
play sought by the body.79
An adjunct to this position, which is significant
to those who educate in an institutional setting, seems to
be that Brown finds institutions as negating the body's
attempts to pleasure. Politically speaking, Brown has
accepted Marx's vision that men are everywhere denied
common union. It is, accepting Brown's view, unfeasible
for an institution to exist which does not do violence to
the body's freedom. The institution, still carrying out
Brown's implications, is the infantile fantasy dominating
the ever-surging adult reality, which we earlier saw Brown
felt to be an unconscious strive to polymorphous perversity.
That institutions must work to exist does not justify their
existence is a conclusion which can be reached if we, as
does Brown, feel that they are based upon a fantasied need.
Rather, all institutions have become examplars of a fetish.

In Brown's words a fetish is "a non-existent penis."80

BY
producing a commodity, the institution has rationalized
its existence, no matter whether that commodity is meant
to become obsolescent (as is the case with manufacturers)

or meant to suppress vitality (as is the case with schools.)

Brown's quote, "Work is . . . a punishment for the Fall,

 

79Brown, Life, p. 104.

80Idem, Love's Body, p. 78.

 

43

which is falling asleep,"81 must be seen as referring to
all work sensed as work. (In our discussion of Brown's
relation to Marcuse, Brown was shown to feel that work need
not be repressive, but this is true only if the working
individual is so integrated with his activity that he does
not label it. Just as a child who would label his activity
"play" would not be engaged in that spontaneous activity we
call play, so an adult who would label his activity "work"
would not be engaged in that spontaneous fulfillment of
human needs which we call work.) Institutions, which Brown
considers necessarily hierarchical, are shown as the neg-
ation of the erotic impulse to play which is to integrate

the activity of the organism and its environment.

Violence is Excrement

 

Brown feels communication is itself educative
for he feels that in the true union of man with the
universe, and other men, the excrement is burned through
and passed away. Brown shows knowledge to be transparent;
excrement is inevitably dirty and Opaque. Brown implies
that truth cannot be institutional, for institutions, which
are cultural manifestations, are themselves the very neg-
ation of the human body. Warfare is the result of excre-
ment dominating the body which is equated with the strive

Of the body to create a head. As Brown says, "Violence

 

8lipid.

 

44

82 He feels it is the rational solution to

vindicates."
the struggle to separate out what was previously united.
In other words, to Brown it is the ultimate fantasy.
Brown's vision is again muffled at this point. He feels
that warfare is fought according to rules when fought be-
tween parts of the whole body, for the body itself is
otherwise destroyed. Yet Brown does call for another war,
a war with violence of peace. He tells us, "The new war-
fare is total: it seeks an end to war, an end to brother-

hood."83

It seems that what Brown calls forth is either
atomic war, which fulfills the criterion of totality, or
absolutely peaceful existence. The dualism is sharp, but
Brown does not recognize it in his own writings. Simply,
the first alternative is not considered. It seems an
ultimate contradiction that apocalypse could be the moment
of absolute repression, of the head completely dissolving
the body and all its possibilities to communicate with the
cosmos. (It is interesting to note here that we put faith
in leaders as we feel they would carefully reason before
"utilizing" an atomic warhead, while of what use it could
be evades me.) Brown apparently has not recognized his
own pun in the "end to war." The "end to war" is the

destruction of all or is it the pacific reconstruction of

All in One?

 

82 83

Ibid., p. 18. Ibid., p. 19.

 

45

To Brown the pure excrement is violence. Brown
calls for the purity of violence in a new peaceful war,
which is the "end to war." The anality of war does not
seem to be fantasy, yet Brown insists that all sublimation
is fantasy. In Brown the body sexualized would be the end
to history which he sees is "Time and Space integrated

into that point like unity."84

Integration is the culmi-
nation of an infinite amount of bodiless points (moments)
into a body (time). Thus reality can be created from the
unreal, which is equivalent to "infinity in a grain of
sand" (Brown). His scatology of violence is not formally
developed, but his analysis reveals that violence is not
real, being the fantasy of the child destroying what is
not perceived to be his self to once again regain the uni-
fication of the subject and object, to make All in One.
Yet we have seen Brown considers all division unreal
fantasy, which is not knowing how to live. In other words,
Brown believes the body cannot be destroyed but can only
be repressed.

How, then, can we qualify the apparent dualism in
Brown, violence as constructive, yet everywhere destructive?
The process of regaining the body, he reminds us, is neces-
sarily violent in that the parts which dominate the whole

will exert their influence tremendously when upheaval

 

84Ibid., p. 262.

46

85

begins. To him, "Both science and poetry ought to be

e o o o 6
in some condition of permanent revolution."8

He feels
that the imagination cannot conquer the sublimations of
the body without somehow destroying these sublimations.
In Brown's writing, violence is, precisely, the tool of
the body, rather than the enervating forces of the bureau-
cratic institutional superstructures which keep men from
their violent poems. The body is seen as constantly
struggling to be one with itself. Therefore, violence is
found to be the excrement of the purely functioning body.
It is necessary to have violence. (Thus Brown's call for
a "permanent revolution" and not a revolution leading to
some absolutely perfect moment.)

Brown's position is clarified if we remember that
he feels the body does know how to live, but that civili-
zation thwarts its liveliness at all exits. Violence
therefore must occur, but the body should be unified. In
other words, he believes there would be no political
struggles if the world were sane (unified) and not com-

87 Brown reminds his readers that what

pletely neurotic.
is normal is not what is naturally human, but is the body
being denied to the head. Brown describes this as author~

ity dominating the masses, the genital organization erected

 

85"Norman Brown's Body," Psychologijoday, p. 47.

 

861bid., p. 47.

87Brown, Life, pp. 3-10.

47

plunging into the depths of excrement, necrophilia without
love. (Perhaps a metaphor here would c1arify--The body
erected is rigor mortis, death over life.)

Brown does call for the peaceful war, and he sees
the end to violence as the end of the body struggling.
Therefore, the search is for the androgynous body which is
found in perfection in excrement. Brown insists that the
contradiction must be accepted, the very posing of the
situation as dualistic must be denied, "poetry and dia-
lectical thought . . . unite the opposites and transform

88 Brown warns us that the

this world in a deeper sense."
logic that tells us the apocalypse could be holocaustic
is itself desirous of the holocaust 89 and that the human
body is violent from the necessity to resurrect, and that
human energy unified with nature must be creative.

The "end to violence" is not a pun in Brown's
writing. It is not part of his poem but should be con-
sidered his poem completely. Brown's view is that the
"end to violence" is revolution is an ongoing process of
the entire organism and its environment which will lead

toward man's unification with God. Education can be per-

ceived as pacific education. In an interview, Brown points

 

88

"Norman Brown's Body,‘ Paychology Today, p. 47.

 

89Robert Brustein suggests that when we ask, "What
is it?" we have committed ourselves in favor of whatever
"it" is. Robert Brustein, Revolution as Theater (New
York: Liveright Books, 1971), p. 105.

 

48

out his frequent usage of "This is the end."90

He is very
conscious of the possibilities of "end" as a tool of
poetry, and yet he leaves himself Open to the charge (which
we made) that he is not aware of his own pun. It is rather
that he feels the pun has ended and feels the paranomasiac
wonderland of imagination is not alive in the pure excre-
ment of violence. There is not a develOped eschatology of
violence in Brown's work, unless one considers that vio-
lence is the excrement of the real body and is discarded

as quickly as the body has become erotically alive again91
(in Bleibtreau's terminology, as soon as the moment sign
is again accented.)

Beypnd the Warp and Woof
of’History

 

 

The body alive and functioning is envisioned by
Brown as beyond the trials and errors of history. Brown
longs for a "post-historical community" which is beyond
(or without observance of) the illusion which he feels
dominates the present. An importance of this being that
it is the visionary spirit of the body gaining its oneness
with the cosmos. History is seen as the head exalted over
the body, the integrative process disrupted, and the Whole

giving up its powers to the part thereby causing the body

 

90

"Norman Brown's Body,‘ Psychology Today, p. 47.

 

91Brown, "Psychoanalysis and the Classics,"
Classical Journal, p. 242.

 

49

to lose grace. (The first effect of civilized man can be
seen to be his awkwardness and clumsiness.) History is
found to be the excrement of creativity. It is Euclidean
space attempting to dominate time. Brown feels that his-
tory is the story of events, but never the truth of events.
Brown does not bother to point to the impossibility of
describing an event as separate from anything else that
was, is, or could be. Instead, as he aphorizes, we find
"infinity in a grain of sand." History is exposed as the
rational explication of the necessity of rationality. To
Brown it is a nightmare of fantasies about fantasies. In
other words, he finds that history is the body forgetting
how to live and trying to remember through vicarious ex-
perience. C. Wright Mills describes the role of celebri-
ties in modern society as individuals who are to keep the
body of men from contacting their own sexuality through
the provision of a vicarious life, thereby reducing the
possibilities of revolution.92 In such a way Brown repre-
sents historical characters those individuals who keep the
body of men from contacting their own present sexuality
through provision of a vicarious, therefore fetishistic,
life with which the body of men can feel a oneness. The

possibility of revolution is reduced accordingly.

 

92C. Wright Mills, The Power Elite (New York:
Oxford University Press, 19567, pp. 71-93.

 

50

Brown's Call for History's End: A Post
Historical--Post Cultural Community

 

 

To Brown history is the numerical serialization of
events, a giving of individual identity to experience.
This process is therefore the very denial of the process
of experiencing. Events are perceived as historical as
they are separated from their own milieu and are develOped
as phenomena of the rational, intellectual, world. In a
paper presented in 1956 Brown expostulates, "that the es-
sence of our time is the superannuation of political and
economic problems as such and their transformation into

PSYChological problems.u93

Brown feels that history is
ended as man concerns himself with unification, rather than
with the world of politics and economics. Brown's post-
historical community is beyond rational culture, for the
reality is lived rather than sublimated. Brown is certain
that as man concerns himself with psychological problems,
the political-economic element which forms culture will
fade into the background and eventually become non-existent,
for it is a fantasy anyway. Correlatively, Brown sees that
imagination will be vitiated only as bodily experiences are
realized in themselves rather than as they are analyzed and

drawn from the environment in which they occur. It is

reasonable to want experience definitive and usable for

 

93Brown, "Psychoanalysis and the Classics,"
Classical Journal, p. 242.

 

51

the prediction of the future, but, Brown points to the
words of Mommsen, "you cannot learn to realize the life

of the past except by the experience of the present . . ."94
Brown's vision finds that reason is repressive as it de-
mands experience be confined, and that, therefore, history
exist. Furthermore, he perceives that history is serious
while humanity is playful. The pun and the metaphor
destroys history, and poetry sings of the death of history,
and the world is anti-historical as it is alive.

Brown says, "I don't want to be a leader."95 He
sees history as the erection of the head over the body,
and culture as being nothing without history. In this
vein, Brown proposes, “The original sin is not sex but
progenation."96 He does not descry sexuality as progen-
ation, or fecundity, but as the development of the ero—
genous primacy over the domineering head of the body. As

Marcuse calls for a "genitofugal sexuality"97 (and Brown

98) Brown desires to show that

admits his debt to Marcuse
the flight must be into the entire body. He relegates
history to the excrement of the body, which is violence.

(It is not a counter example of Brown's position then,

that a great share of historical literature is concerned

 

94Ibid., p. 241.

95

Norman Brown's Body, Psycholognyoday, p. 45.

 

96Brown, Life, p. 36.

98
97Marcuse, Eros, p. 190. Morgan, P- 105-

52

with wars and conquests. That history is economic and
political in the main seems to vindicate Brown's discussion
of the excremental dominance of history, re, "Filthy

Luchre," Life Against Death.)

 

In order to comprehend the plausibility of Brown's
post-historical community, we must consider the role of
vision in Brown, for it is the visionary experience which
he feels is repressed by history and, we must assume, will
be loosed in the post-historical community. As he feels
time does have a flow, a rhythm, Brown feels "the dynamic

"99 This

of history is the slow return of the repressed.
is itself made possible by an "irruption of fresh material
from deeper strata of the unconscious made possible by a
large scale transformation in the structure of the pro-

"100 What is sublimated is found

jective system (culture).
by Brown to be history as economic and political and it

is a dominance of the rational over the body and is itself
violence. The transformation in structure will be, there-
fore, to create a culture which is irrational, which is

an anti-culture. For this to be true the anal sublimations
must themselves be "thassal" or else the cultural world
need not be transformed in order to be made free. Brown

does not miss this point. In discussing Protestantism

Brown states:

 

99Brown, Life, p. 230.

100Ibid.

53

The inquiry confirms the theoretical postulate of a
close connection between anal fantasies on the one
hand and the death instinct on the other. While
orthodox psychoanalysis is accustomed to the notion
that the anal organization is also the sadistic
organization, its notion that the anal organization
is essentially a sexual organization, and the impli-
cation that in it Eros somehow takes sadistic forms
underestimates the role of the death instinct in the
anal organization and in the formation of the sexual
organizations altogether. To put it another way,
the whole theory of sexual organizations . . . should
be revised in terms of the death instinct."101
Brown feels that rational culture is death to the
body. Furthermore, he feels the human drama is that
excrement is non-creative and that it is destructive. He
feels, and his writing is very sensuous at times concern-
ing this subject, that the body constantly fights death
and is continuously attempting to revolt against the
reality of the projective system (a fantasy) which is
culture. Herein, history is sensed asifluaperpetuation of
culture and is the attempt to reify experience apart from
the experience itself in order to make it a part of the
hierarchy of rational knowledge. Brown knows reification
becomes the experience and the true relationship of the
body and the environment which was the experience is lost
as trivia. The head once more dominates the body. But
in repression, Brown reminds us, the repressed is not
lost forever but is recurringly attempting liberation.

This is explained by Brown in what he calls the "psycho-

analytic" fact that man has known his own body and he

 

101Ibid., p. 231.

54

seeks it again. Brown sees rational repression as murder~—
actual carnal murder. As Theodore Roszak says "And if we
cannot bring ourselves to murder, then we shall not be

"102

able to dissect. Brown sees that visionary experience

is lacking in the world and calls forth visions. As he
says, "I am trying to make history poetic again."103
Brown feels that his attempt depends on the bodily
meaning of poetry. He believes that the return of the
body is a poetic or visionary experience. "The original
meaning of poetry . . . is actual making or doing, a
bodily gesture"104 (Brown). Brown not only feels that
this is possible, but that it is imminent. His Optimism
on this subject is glaringly exciting. He states that
"Surely the Second Coming is at hand, when your young men

shall see visions."105

Reading Brown, one feels the human
drama is nearing its abolition; that the fire is presently
burning through and Eros is about to be released and the
body will survive. Brown sees that the expiation of

quilt is the present human drama (we attempt to make our
excrement creative) and this cannot suffice to bring forth

the body. Brown discovers the real drama in the fact that

men do not know how to live, proven by their attempts to

102Roszak, p. 254.

103"Norman Brown's Body," Psychology Today, p. 47.

Ibid., p. 46. lOSIbid.

 

104

 

55

make excrement creative. Brown's work presents the primal
crime as culture (the leaving behind of wastes) and as

history (the study and glorification of these wastes).

Summary Without Synopsis

 

In Education and Existentialism Van Cleve Morris

 

suggests that a person has an existential awakening to
his personal responsibility for action. Not regarding
the difficulties Brown would find with the term "person,"
Brown would suggest that at this stage the body no longer
sees play as an end which gives life intrinsic value but,
using his words, "it represents a definitive victory for

"106 The

the aggressive component over the love component.
body, Brown points out, is caught in its own ambivalence
between play and control which is induced and heightened
by the specter of separation so that, as Brown relates,
"the sexual organizations appear to be constructed by
anxiety, by the flight from death and the wish to die; the
distribution of libido in a life not at war with death is

polymorphous perversity."107

The polymorphously perverse
body is ingenuous and furthermore is the reduction of cul-
tural anxiety. If Brown is taken seriously the human

drama is ended by the body no longer struggling with the

 

106Brown, Life, p. 121.

107Ibid., p. 116.

56

head which occurs when the psyche is distributed to the
entire body rather than the cultured genital/anal sexual
organizations. Therefore the post-cultural body is that
of play and liveliness. Brown quotes Brinton with ap-
proval "'Boehme answers by calling the perfect state

"play." In "play" life expresses itself in its fulness
“9108

As the body regresses to anality, play becomes
control and reason comes to dominate sexuality. The true
human drama, as presented by Brown, is irrational, poetic,
and not the present ratiocinations of guilt expressed in
social welfare programs and benign institutionalization
of needs (distributions) which we presently find. It is
in search of a physically apparent reification of some
form of prOgress that Brown sees the guilty head pere-
grinating. And this is also seen as precisely the cause
of our inability to live. Brown understands that we have
sought too much to deny the life within us and attempt
too much to make all life dead. Present day man, Mr.
Antrobus, to be sure, searches for a "solution" which
indicates some sort of dissection of the whole has been
perpetrated. Brown witnesses man's deve10pment of fan-
tastic and complex structures to handle what are the most

human situations. Brown points to the irrational as the

 

1°81b16., p. 33.

57

perspective which is the most human, and rational culture
as death itself. Brown will not accept education as the
drive for enculturation, for culture is seen to be the
death of any lively world whatsoever. The "end to vio-
lence" is no pun to Brown, but is the apocalypse of all
men which is their divinity. Brown finds the search for
God, the strive for grace, is the human story and as such

is post-historical.

 

whi

sir

ed:
Whi
Bro-

fai

ati:

CHAPTER III

EROS AS EDUCATION

Introduction

 

Since Brown considers the unified body, the body
which is one with the cosmos, as the healthy body, and
since Brown's conception of disease as cultural has been
considered, the theorization of unification by Brown is
significant for present consideration. The pathology has
been presented, and the rectification of the diagnosed
disease is imminent. The uniqueness of the cure is that
it is the education of the diseased element. Brown's
description of the anal characteristics of present civili-
zation, "'The Disease Called Man,'" leads one to recognize
that the cure for the disease is considered in itself
educative. It is the formation of a new man, a renaissance
which goes beyond mere rational knowledge to action. If
Brown is correct assuming man is a disease of his own

failure to live, then education must be vivifying, erotic.

John Dewey conceived of education as an encultur-

ation, as the growth of immature beings into the knowledge

58

59

and customs of society.1 But Brown proposes that Dewey's
view is merely an enhancement of man's sickness, that it
is in the "immature" and undiseased that we can and must
learn to find life. Dewey called for a "progressive"
form of education and, in this chapter, I hOpe to show
that Brown's position calls for education to be an erotic
recorporealization of the body in a dialectic process
which will lead to a community beyond culture.

"The learning is to be unlearned; the simplicity
to be acquired"2 Brown aphorizes. He feels we are con—
stantly losing something, we are constantly failing to
live, as we are enculturated, instrumentalized. Brown
does not discuss education as such in his writing, but
it is my thesis that in Brown education is erotic rather
than definitional or taboo functioning. If we talk about
education being expansive, then we must, Brown enjoins us,
be prepared to carry this out to the limits. We must, his
hypothetical enjoinder continues, be prepared to under-
stand education as therapeutic to the "'Disease Called
Man.'" "As long as man is caught within boundaries he
will never be free, or truly educated" seems to be the

maxim derived from Brown's position.

 

1John Dewey, Democracy and Education: An Intro-
duction to the Philgsophy of Education (New York:
MacMillan Company, The Free Press, 19I6), p. 3.

2

 

 

Brown, Love's Body, p. 236.

 

60

The scope of the following survey is Brown's
writing which conveys the meaning behind the phrase (that
I have coined) "Education as Eros." Nowhere in his
writings has Brown specifically delineated the parameters
of the term "education" and I hOpe to show this is
direCtly related to the fact that in Brown's writing
"education" has no boundaries. In other words, I hOpe to
show that to Brown it is precisely the conceptualization
of "education" as a term that destroys the possibility

of education.

Art and Psyahoanalysis

 

Brown finds all men Adams in Paradise. The Garden
is Delightful and man is a lover, a furious tempestuous
lover wanting nothing (for he is all) feeling pain in his
pleasure and his pleasure's pain.3 The body of men is
negated in history (Brown's position as earlier discussed)
since history is the manifestation of our decorporealized
bodies. Education thus must be considered re-education.
Love is a return to love. (It is not merely a memory of
love which is the putrification of the aspects of love
without the attendant furies of love.) And dialectic is
a unifying of opposites. The matter of machines is in-
strumentality and Brown points out that "Personality is

not innate, but acquired. Like a mask it is a thing, a

 

3

Idem, "Homage, Caterpillar, p. 101.

61

4 Brown's

fetish, a fetishistic object or commodity."
stand is that revitalization cannot be found in the de-
ve10pment of an individual personality which fits into
the cultural structure for that is "a mask," a mechanical
acting out of a role which is not one's own. "Dehuman-
ization" is the term Brown finds useful. Brown is point-
ing to man qua more than man. The assumption is that man
is a phenomenon unique and at one with the rhythm of
life. at is felt that life has a current which is erotic
and lived in infancy and, therefore, all events are re-
currences.) As Brown says, "Real history is the history
of renewals."5

"Heroic individualism" becomes in Brown's work the
identification with the past as a "life destiny." Brown
states that "The historical personage offers a continuous
performance and achieves a continuous existence . . ."6
rather than being a part of the rhythmical cycle. Brown
asserts that personality is a technological repression
and is a placement of a part of life as the whole of

life.7

 

4Idem, Love's Body, p. 94.

51bid., p. 203.

61bid., p. 100.

7Brown talks of the plays of the Greeks as child-
ish if compared to the nature and "political" actions of
the Romans. The Romans are seen as making the tragedy
a "life destiny" rather than the "cyclical recurrence
of a temporary role." Love's Body, p. 100.

 

62

Brown's conception of life is that life is no
concept at all; rather that humans are to develop from
the personal to the supra-personal. (Using Brown, we
must consider man is not in search of self-definition as
most group therapists Claim.) Believing that in the

cycles of natural recurrence ("periodicity") we find

life, Brown states that we will find:
the whole story from Genesis to Apocalypse in any
event; in any metamorphosis. Therefore it is
important to keep changing the subject. . . . It
is important to keep changing our mind.
Brown is seen to accept as fact that we are preceded by
our own essence. This forces us to avoid, if at all
possible (which it always is» the acquisition of per-
sonality. Brown's description of person is the Person
as Instrument, the Person as dehumanized man. (What
Paul Goodman is wont to call personnel.)

Yet, if we follow Brown, if this constant re-
organization of mind and avoidance of history (which is
the constant change of subject) is to occur consciously,
it will apparently be fruitless for it is man's conscious-
ness that will be directing him and Brown has been shown
to feel that this is a diseased "second best substitute"

for the real man. The "ingenuous" existence of which

Brown speaks must be presumptionless, or, using a

 

81bid., p. 94.

63

Phenomenologist's term, "presuppositionless." Brown
calls for men to realize their oneness with the universe
in their essential energy, which is, as he says,
a mode of consciousness that can be called, although
the term causes fresh difficulties, the dialectical
imagination. By "dialectical" I mean an activity of
consciousness struggling to circumvent the limi-
tations imposed by the formal-logical law of contra-
diction.
This is the erotic sensibility which Brown is convinced
all men possess already for "if beyond labor at the end
of history there is love, love must have always been there
from the beginning of history and it must have been the
hidden force supplying the energy devoted to labor and

to making history."10

Brown drives to find All in One in that all men
"arrive at the idea that life and death are in some sort
of unity at the organic level, that at the human level

11 It is

they are separated into conflicting opposites."
on the organic level that Brown discovers man unrepressed,
and it is this repressed animal which has lost its or—
ganismic unity with the world which develOps the "formal-
logical law of contradictions" and denies the love which
is the source of his power and unity with the cosmos. To

Brown, we live a second-best substitute for our own poten-

tialities. Brown quotes Blake, "'Energy is the only

 

9Brown, Life, pp. 318-19.

loIbid., p. 17. llIbid., p. 101.

64

life . . .'"12 We are beyond the materialistic confines

of reasonable assumptions at this stage of Brown, and
into the mystical world of a new mode of consciousness,
new to the body of men. (Brown does write about men who
have gained this naive mode of consciousness throughout

his work, especially in Life Against Death.)13

 

The convergence of all men in Energy is an im-
portant theme in Brown. ("Exuberance is Beauty" is
another Blake phrase Brown uses fondly.) He poeticizes:

My utOpia is

an environment that works so well

that we can run wild in it 14

anarchy in an env1ronment that works
This erotic sensibility is not effected subconsciously
for he feels "psychoanalysis tries to reach the uncon—
scious by extending the conscious, art represents an
irruption from the unconscious into the conscious."15
He finds that under present conditions men are not exu-
berant for "Our normal orderly responsible selves, domi-
nated by the reality-principle, are sustained by a con-
stant expenditure in psychic energy devoted to the
maintenance of the repression of our fundamental de-

16

sires." Since consciousness is dominated by repressive

 

12 13

Ibid., p. 312. Ibid., p. 32.

l4£dam, "Politics," Caterpillar Anthology, p. 13.

 

15Brown, Life, p. 62.

lGIbid., p. 63.

65

energy, the psychoanalytical vision of man is to be con-
sidered, in Brown's terms, as the method to tap the un—
conscious to allow an artistic "irruption" to occur thereby
changing that very consciousness. His terminology in this
realm is confusing, but only because he is not speaking
from the "normal orderly responsible" point of View. In

Love's Body he finds that "The true psychic reality, which

 

is the unconscious, cannot ever be put into words . . .
therein, precisely, lies the distinction between uncon-
scious and pre-conscious."17

The physical manipulation of material to provide
the fulfillment of certain basic needs will fail, Brown

warns, as long as man negates his very needs in a mode of

consciousness which denies the energy loosed by the artis-

tic expression. He feels:

Art as pleasure, art as play, art as the recovery
of childhood, art as making conscious the uncon-

scious, art as a mode of instinctual liberation,
art as the fellowship of men struggling for in-
st1nctual liberation. These ideas plainly fit into
the system of psychoanalysis.
The call is plainly for man to go beyond his present
diseased self into a transcendent self, one which is

gained through an acceptance of the loss of reality.

Since Brown feels "Imagination is a better artist than

 

l7Idem, Love's Body, p. 257.

 

18Idem, Life, pp. 65-66.

66

imitation . . ."19 we can readily observe that the

energy drawing the unconscious into consciousness is
imagination.

At the organic level, Brown discovers an ineffable
unity and the "dialectical" of which he Speaks "would be
the struggle of the mind to circumvent repression and

"20 Therefore, imagination

make the unconscious conscious.
itself is placed upon an organic level and is the very
essence of the resolution of any antinomy between psycho-
analysis and art. That education, if it is at all criti-
cal, is therapeutic in Brown's thought will be clear if
we consider that he feels psychoanalytic thinking

has a double relation to the dialectical imagination.

It is, on the one hand (actually or potentially) a

mode of dialectical consciousness; on the other hand,

it contains, or ought to contain, a theory about

the nature of the dialectical imagination.2
(We have just discussed what parameters Brown feels this
theory takes.) In other words, education is bimodal, a
process/product which is life/death rather than the
oppositions of life and death. It is an effort to con-
sciously create a being which is constantly Becoming.

Which is, in other words, consciously escaping conscious-

ness.

 

19Idem, Love's Body, p. 262.

20Idem, Life, p. 321.

 

211bid., p. 319.

67

Obliteration of Ideology

 

Brown's educational theory is implicit in his
"mystic" dialectic conception of consciousness. Education
is seen to be the deve10pment of a new sensibility which
is a higher form of consciousness which is, precisely,
consciousness turned in on itself. Brown's search for the
erotic polymorphous perversity of the body is brought
through reality only by an artistic irruption of uncon-
scious into consciousness. The educative process is
therefore the avoidance of the strangling effects of en-
culturation (which bring out the "'Disease Called Man'").
Education is most apprOpriately the process which has its
end in its own abolition for it is a turning of the con-
sciousness towards the truth which is nothing more than
that consciousness pure and simple. Brown finds that at
this point man has discovered his own divinity which is
the Sharing of this mode of consciousness with all man-
kind.22 Brown poeticizes this point:

"The real thing is perishing
long drawn-out dying"
"Must culture be corrupt?

Must civilization be vulgarity7.
Not so in ancient time .

23

It is that we have known man before as incorrupt, and

erotic, and we again can and must know him so. Brown's

 

22Idem, Love's Body, pp. 230-31.

 

23Idem, "Homage," Caterpillar, p. 97.

 

241616., p. 95.

68

poem is that the world is not excrement, but that the
cultural configurations are. Man can be purified by
turning his awareness in on himself to discover his es-
sential Oneness with the cosmos, with all that exists or
could exist.

Brown emphasizes that by educating a man to
understand nothing he will discover everything. We all
have within us the experience of our own bodies and the
matter/process of again finding this is the conception of
education in Brown. Thwarting the "polymorphous per-
versity" of playful youth towards more "constructive" or
useful goals has no place in Brown's educational fund.

Ideology is insanity in Brown's mysticism for
ideology is seen as the imposition of part of reality (at
best) as the whole of reality upon a body which is happy
and playful. Ideology which is the perpetuation of neg—
ation, Brown says, is "the basic mechanism for producing
this desexualization of life, this holding of life at a
distance . . ."25 Our vulgar behavior is chastised by
Brown. He sees that when we perpetuate a certain ideol-
ogy what we are in effect doing is negating the very pos-
sibilities which life could find in playful activity.
Play is shown as the very denial of the failures which
are our lives, and the training in ideology is shown as

destructive to the player himself.

 

25Idem, Life, p. 172.

 

69

In a conversation with Warren Bennis in Psychology

 

Today Brown uses himself to example his belief that the
tendency of ideology is to ruin the need for truth (which

is polymorphous). Life Against Death is a book written

 

of personality, published by an expert in history des-
cribing the effects of reason upon history, but always
in a reasonable self-reliant manner. Brown collected a
following and, as he relates to Bennis, he felt:
. . . in writing Love's Body some kind of obligation
to undo what I had done’in Life Against Death. I
wanted to release any followers I had acquired or

at least to confuse them. . . . I don't want to
be a leader.26

 

 

The ideology of Life Against Death had to be "torpedoed"

 

by Brown, for he felt that he had imposed his own section
of reality upon those who became his followers and that
they Should become confused so each might again play with
himself in order to find his poem, rather than accepting

,the role of follower.

Education as Therapy

 

Brown's thought becomes flesh as it progresses
towards a definitive statement of the role of education
in the life of technologically dominated societies. Al-
ready it has been seen that the strive is towards a higher
form of consciousness or towards a state of perfection,
yet the way there is down through one's own mode of con-

sciousness into the true essence of one's own being. It

 

26"Norman Brown's Body," Psycholognyoday, p. 45.

 

70

was then I hypothesized that this produces a theory of
education as a form Of therapy with its own abolition as
its end. The drama is, therefore, educational and we are
faced at this stage of the paper with the fact that men
simply do not live their own drama, but rather satisfy
themselves vicariously and, even more often, not at all.
Brown's approach to this problem has been to consistently
reproach the role of reason as a guide to action within
(what I term) the human drama. Life becomes a theater
and all action is unreal as we place it in the realm of
the social masses, into the hands of sociologists, neo-
revisionist psychiatrists, public servants, or any other
conceivable authority. Brown reminds the readers that
"Revolution is Recurrent"27 and that it is constantly
within the reality of each man.

Brown Sincerely feels that when we place the human
at the hand of reason, which Brown believes can only be
accomplished through authoritarian and not truly voluntary
arrangements, we have interfered with the human's potential
to act. Brown finds that men become dissociated from
their bodies as they are forced to conceive Of ideas as
somehow distinct from corporealization. In Brown the body
is the center of all action, and the poem is that which
makes the word and deed one. Therefore, Brown's thought

relevant to education comes to be flesh, because Brown is

 

27Brown, "Reply to Marcuse," Commentary, p. 83.

 

71

constantly attempting to live the poem he calls forth.
(In his interview with Bennis, Brown becomes very defen—
sive when Bennis suggests Brown might be a hypocrite in

his life style.28

) Education is aphorism in Brown, it
is word and deed as one.

Contending as he does that the life of the human
is a rhythmic extension of the cosmos, Brown presents an
unreasonable tenet as education. "In psychotherapy,"

Brown says, "nothing happens but an exchange of words."29

But earlier he had emphasized,
Get the nothingness back into words. The aim is
words with nothing to them; words that point beyond
themselves rasher than to themselves; tranSparencies,
empty words.
We are to think that psychotherapy (which is a term, along
with art, connoting "education") is nothing. Therefore,
it is not the relationship of a master and pupil but a
stream of consciousness among men aiming to "a play of

"31

light, an irridescence, in the empty air. Education

is playful, irrational,behavior within Brown's contexts.

Reading Brown we must assume alienation is bodily.
That is, alienation is conceived as the separation of the
mind of man from his body, and is man's lack of con-

sciousness of that body. Brown's writing on this subject

 

28"Norman Brown's Body," Psyghology Today, p. 46.

 

29Brown, Love's Body, p. 263.

31

 

30

Ibid., p. 259. Ibid.

 

72

is, as one would expect, irrational (he is coming to be
what he says):

Empty words; dissolve the solid meanings . . . con-

sciousness penetrates the darkness; consciousness

is an opening or void. . . . Admit the void; accept

loss forever. . . . To see three truths with the

same mind: things are real, unreal, and neither

real nor unreal. 2
Psychotherapy (education) is the emptying of words, but
also the search for the empty words. This is distinguished
from schizophrenia only by the fact that one can accept the
loss of the objectification of words.33 To Brown, edu-
cation is the meaning when we do not expect to find meaning
and before we attempt to explain the meaning.34 Education
must become spontaneous for it is only in spontaneity that
nothing is meant. Brown states " . . . there is no literal

truth"35

and assumes that when words have become empty we
have attained a "primordial language" which is the accept-
ance of our own bodies as complete.

Consequently, Brown's theory of psychotherapy (edu-
cation) can be seen as the process of killing what we

commonly know as man and the resurrection of what he once

was. This is the search for that pearl inside each man

 

3ZIbid., pp. 260-61. 33

Ibid., p. 260.

34John Senior Speaks of "moments" of occultism
which are mysterious, but Similar in all occultists'
experiences. Senior, p. xiii.

35Brown, Love's Body, p. 238.

 

73

which is his connection with all men. Educational theory
which purports in any way to support the dominance of one
man over another leads away from what Brown conceiVes
psychotherapeutic. Brown's educational theory becomes the
"negation of negation." In other words, Brown has denied
the true usefulness of reason to unveil the mysteries. It
is within these occultisms themselves that education must

occur. Education is mysterious and Brown accepts that it

can only be so:
The Western consciousness has always asked for

freedom; the human mind was born to be free, but
everywhere it is in chains, and now at the end

of its tether. It will take a miracle to free
the human mind; because the chains are magical
in the first place. We are %n bondage to author-
ity outside ourselves .3
It is clear now that Brown conceives all authority
as mysterious, resting upon the bondage of the body of men.
Envisioning that the body of man is kept away from the
spirit of man by the bondage of Western consciousness
(rationality) Brown knows it is only a mysterious process
which will free men of these magical bonds.
Education transmogrifies unto freedom, and this is
spontaneous interaction of man and his cosmic environment.

Even books themselves Brown discerns as capable

of engendering the bondage of man to reason, compelling

 

36Idem, "Apocalypse," Harper's, p. 49.

 

74

"us to see with the eyes of the dead, with dead eyes."37

Alienation is not a matter of sociological displacement of
guilt, but is a failure to live, a bondage. Education is
seen by Brown, as I postulated earlier, as the negative
process of unencumbering man of his cultural configurations

which block him from his own true reality.38

Brown's Theory of Dream

 

Brown's body mysticism is opposed to "Apollonian
or sublimation mysticism" and his educational applicability
will at once be conceived "impractical" or "utOpian." Yet
precisely in his consideration of irrational dialectics as
educative lays the force of Brown's position. He is accused
by many critics for denying reality and inserting nothing,

39

for being a nihilist. Yet it is precisely this type of

thinking on the critics' parts which Brown sees as the

40

sickness of our society. He finds that we too often

place "fantasies" in place of reality, which is

 

37Ibid.

 

38A Zen poem, with drawing, is brought to mind here-

"Cucumber
Unaccountably
Cucumbering"
Paul Reps, "Cucumber," in The World of Zen, ed. by Nancy
Wilson Ross (New York: Random House, Vintage Books, 1960),
p. 261.

 

39Noland, pp. 59-68. Also, Herbert Marcuse, "Love
Mystified: A Critique of Norman 0. Brown," review of
Love's Body, by Norman 0. Brown, Commentapy, XLIII
‘Trebruary, 1967), 71-75.

 

 

40"Norman Brown's Body,‘ Psycholognyoday, p. 46.

 

75

imaginative, creative. He delegates reality to the human
Spirit precisely in its creative capacity, which is its
capacity to overcome boundaries. In fact, we have now to
consider the position Brown takes concerning the substi-
tution of "fantasies" for realities of the imagination in
order to fully appreciate the dialectic process of educa-
tion he promotes.

As he says, "The primary issue is in the imagina-
tion. Polymorphous perversity turns out to be a poetical

"41

rather than a literal thing. It is not in the physi-

cal, literal, world Brown finds reality. As Richard
Noland, a critic, points out, Brown is attacking literal-

isms of all kinds.42

We are in a society, Brown warns,

in which tendencies for "abstraction from the reality of
the whole body and substitution for the whole reality are
inherent . . ."43 Brown does see reality as bodily and
culture as decorporealization. It is only by going beyond
culture, Brown declares, that we can hope to discover the
fact that, as Alan Watts says, "the world outside your

skin is as much yourself as the world inside."44 We are

 

411616.

42Richard Noland, "Norman 0. Brown and the Future
of Man," Massachusetts Review, ){ (Summer, 1969), 541.

43

 

Brown, Life, p. 236.

44Alan Watts, The Book on the Taboo Against Knowing
Who You Are (New York: MacMillan Company, Collier BoOks,
1966), p. 124.

 

 

76

not, then, speaking from the midst of a real world when
we attack him on the grounds of impracticability. He
draws out the distinction more clearly,

A social order based on the reality-principle, a

social order which draws a distinction between

wish and deed, between criminal and righteous,

is still a kingdom of darkness. It is only as

long as a distinction is made between the real

and imaginary that real murders are worth com-
mitting.

Brown's reply to the critics conjecturally would
be that they have attacked him from within "the kingdom
of darkness" and are tightly bound there. This is a mas-
sive dose to take, but we must realize that Brown perceives
the only "Reality is not things (dead matter or heavy stuff)
in simple location. Reality is energy, or instinct; Eros
and Thanatos . . ."46 There is then, in Brown, a radical
split with his major critics, and there is seen a sickness
as involved in the considerations of fantasies as reality.
"The hidden psychic reality contained in the un-
conscious," Brown points out, "does not consist of fanta-
sies, but of action at a distance, psychic streams, pro-

jects, in a direction: germs of movement, seeds of living

thought."47 Imagination is action itself, and, Brown

 

45Brown, Love's Body, p. 152.

 

46"Simple location" is a phrase taken from the
work Of A. N. Whitehead. N. 0. Brown, Love's Body, p. 155.

47

 

Ibid., p. 157.

77

continues, "In the deepest level of the unconscious we find
not fantasies . . ."48 Brown envisions that the dream is
based on "fission, duplication" and is not an acceptable

base of that poetry which is word and deed as one.

Symbol as Reality

 

(Brown's Presentation of Language as
Analysis versus Language as Freedom)

Since Brown believes "the reality disclosed by the
imagination is not the literal but the symbolical or mysti-
cal body"49 a discussion of Brown's usage of symbols is
imperative. The most Obvious importance of the symbol is
its relationship to language, and Brown is not remiss in
presenting a theory of symbolical language.

That we recognize "that everything is symbolic"50
is essential to our development towards that new sensi-
bility for which Brown searches. That education is, under
Brown's handling of symbolism, the envelopment of the
mind/body of man in mystery, rather than intellectual
clarification, is important to comprehend. The connection
of Brown's elucidation of this point and the meaning of
education become integrally wrapped up in the theory of
symbols which he presents. It is through a discussion of

symbolism in Brown that I hope to clarify his truly radical

break with even the rational definition of education.

 

481bid., p. 158. 491bid., p. 226.

SOIbid., p. 191.

78

The Pun

The pun is language producing flesh. Brown feels
that we must construct a Dionysian ego which is distin-

guished as freed of "the boundary of repression separating

"51

the dream from instinctual reality which is the Apol-

lonian displacement of a part to control the whole, or
abstraction.52 The pun makes havoc with formal lOgic for
the pun has meaning in duplication and cannot be accurately
defined. Brown projects, "Wisdom is wit; in play, not in
work; in freedom not in necessity. A vast pun, as in
dreams . . ."53 Brown continues his argument that litera-
ture is the real lie, "To teach is not to tell, is not-to-

"54 "55

tell. Puns play and the "meaning is in the play so

that:

meaning is a continuous creation, out of nothing
and returning to nothingness. If it is not
evanescent it is not alive. Everything is sym-
bolic, is transitory; is unstable.56
The pun is seminal to symbolism. It is the union of
meanings which is the conception of no meaning. Through
this position Brown has shown the pun to be revolution-

ary, to be that which is the creation of a new sensi-

bility and Simultaneously that sensibility in action.

 

51Idem, Life, p. 174.

 

SZIbid.

53Idem, Love's Body, p. 245.

55

 

 

54

Ibid. Ibid., p. 246.

 

561bid., p. 247.

79

Brown's work itself is riddled with puns (Love's Body)

 

especially the work after Life Against Death, though his

 

study of Hermes the Thief can be perceived as an attempt

 

to explain the puns of meanings attributed to Hermes, and
especially of the fantastic pun of Hermes as Apollo.57 Yet
this discussion has shown that the pun is only a conception

of symbolism.

Metaphor

 

Brown feels that "The thing to be abolished is
literalism . . . Truth is always in poetic form; not

literal but symbolic hiding, or veiled . . ."58 In poetry

the "antinomy of economics and love, work and play,"59
which Brown suggests as the present human situation, is
overcome.

The poet is he who finds the "worlds of beauty"
and is not confined to the dualisms of love and hate, male

and female, or even life and death. In this sense metaphor

is metamorphosis. Brown states that:

The newness is the metaphor, or nonsense, saying
one thing and meaning another. It is the legal
fiction, which liberates the letter of the law
and the tyranny of literal meaning.60

 

57£dag, Hermes the Thief (New York: Random
House, Vintage Books, I947).

58

 

Idem, "Reply to Marcuse," Commentary, p. 83.

 

59Idem, Life, p. 57.

60

 

Idem, Love's Body, p. 248.

80

To Brown the poet is more than a mere writer, for it is he
who has through metaphor made knowledge carnal by "a copu-

lation of subject and Object, making these two one."61

Symbolism

 

In order to comprehend the power Brown posits which
makes language carnal we need from Brown an explanation of
the goal of language itself. Symbols, as puns and metav
phors, are expressed poetically only in the exaggerations

of aphorisms. Yet Brown sees this as also the very life of

poetry:
A subterranean passage between mind and body underlies
all analogy; no word is metaphysical without first
being physical; and the body that is the measure of
all things is sexual. All metaphors are sexual; a

penis in evegy convex object and a vagina in every
concave one.

(Sexual here is erotic and not genital.) Symbolism is
shown to be Eros itself, and speech is polymorphous sexual-
ity. Brown allows that the meaning is that "In puns, two
words get on top of each other and become sexual; in meta-

phors two become one."63

Words themselves, thoughts, Brown
believes, are carnal. Language has as its goal, therefore,
love which is dialectics. Brown postulates that to teach,

to educate, becomes the power to make conscious our un-

conscious knowledge, to bring manifest the erotic sense of

 

61 62

Ibid., p. 249. Ibid., p. 250.

63Ibid., p. 252.

81

reality.64 Life itself is considered symbolic, and Brown
believes that "the sexual organizations (all of them) are
metaphors; a play or interplay of organs (Ferenczi's
amphimixis) a play upon meaning; a play upon words."65
But we are warned by Brown, "The meaning is not in the
words but between the words, in the silence; forever be-
yond the reach, the rape, of literal-minded explication;
forever inviolate, forever new . . ."66 If the meaning
of symbolism is not logical, or literal, then poetry must
have its meaning in Silence. Symbolism must be silence
and also sexual, to which Brown agrees: "To recover the
world of sentence, of symbolism, is to recover the human

67

body." But in order to recover the human body Brown

feels we must be made:

conscious of our unconscious participation in the
creation of the phenomenal world. . . . To become
conscious of our participation in the creation of
the phenomenal world is to pass from passive exper-
ience, perception as impressions on a passive mind,
to conscious creation, and creative freedom.

Brown's theory of symbolism leads directly to his postu-

lation of the divinity of humanity. If the word is sexual,

 

64In another light, Brown states, "No place needs
the transforming spirit of play more than the Univer-
II

sity . . . Brown, "Politics," Caterpillar Anthology,
p. 20.

 

65Idem, Love's Body, p. 265.

 

 

66Ibid., p. 264.

67Ibid., p. 265. 681bid., p. 255.

82

and all men share the word, then all men are engaged in
intercourse and the phenomenal world that results is the
creation of all men.

Man as God and yet not conscious of his own
divinity seems to be presented by Brown. But Brown finds
this occurs because man is himself a contradiction, an
animal which is unique because it is repressed. The prob-
lem of mankind is not the inability to conquer the
political-economic bounds of reality, but to discover
and exist in reality itself. Brown finds mankind entrapped
in a "kingdom of darkness" which is the excremental waste
of true reality which all men know at all times. Creativ-
ity is impossible in an atmosphere of excremental waste.
The contradiction must be accepted that education is un-
learning, or as Brown says "Things hidden from the wise
and revealed to the babes. The learning to be unlearned;

the simplicity to be acquired."69

In Brown the reality
principle must be abolished. According to Brown we must
"Overthrow the importance principle; turn it upside down.
Put down the mighty from their seats, and exalt them of
low degree, and every throne a toilet seat and ever toilet
seat a throne. Psychoanalysis, the visionary sansculottism.
The distinction between the sublime and the vulgar is

abolished; sublimation is swallowed up in symbolism. AS

above, so below; go high-low every time. The way up is

 

691bid., p. 236.

83

the way down; the penis a symbolic head, and vice versa."70

Each man must unlearn the wisdom of his body. As Brown
continues, "Truth comes empty-handed; in its poverty is its

"71 Education in Brown becomes reversal. It is

strength.
the renunciation of the power principle of reality in
favor of polymorphous perversity ("Symbolism is poly-

morphous perversity," Love's Body, page 250.)

 

The serious business of education becomes play.
Brown wants to throw everything "Upside down." We are all
divine,72 Brown tells us, and our play is itself truth.
What we must do is accept the contradiction that we are in
"The permanent revolution, the perpetual reformation."73
We must no longer be fooled by appearances, but realize
that "All power is an imposter, a paper tiger, or idol; it

"74 We must

is burnt up the moment men cease to behold it.
become as dead men to the world to become alive to our-
selves. In Brown's accounting all men are contradictions

and are therefore unpredictable, and their play is their

very reality as humans. The child knows more of reality,

 

Ibid., p. 236-37. 7lIbid., p. 237.

70

72This position taken by Brown is occultist
according to John Senior. Senior states occultists tend
to believe that "Since man is the prototype, man is
capable of realizing in himself all things. He is capable
of becoming God because he is God without 'realizing' it."
Senior, p. 36.

73Brown, Love's Body, p. 235.

 

741616.

 

84

according to Brown, than does the adult, for the child
plays with his world.

We are irrational man. Irrationality does not
serve a function in Brown for it is the very denial of
functionality.75 Brown envisions education as an ephe—
meral, playful activity which is not bound by the logic
of words and the boundaries of the physical world. Brown
believes man creates that world and must become conscious
of his creative, divine, powers. Brown says, "Truth will
not stand or stay or keep; it is nothing to be had or
hoarded or passed from hand to hand; it is no commodity
or store of past labor; it is either new or not at all."76

It is obvious that education, as conceived in the
past, is completely reversed if Brown's tenets are accepted.
Instead of the transference of the wisdom of the ages to
the young, education becomes the transference of the wisdom
(vision) of the young to the aged. Instead of somehow
being a stabilizing influence on the culture, education
becomes, in Brown's hands, the "permanent revolution."
Instead of connotative/denotative form of words being the
medium of education, aphorism becomes the form. "Words

used not to interpret the world but to change it; not to

 

75Ibid., p. 234. 76Ibid.

 

85

advertise this world but to find another."77 Furthermore,

Brown:
Aphorism is instant dialectic
The instantaneous flip instead of the elaborate
system
only so do we have a form of intellect that is as
easy

that any child could do it
or, only a child can do it

78
Brown believes:

the point (of education) is first of all to find again

the mysteries. By which I do not mean simply the

sense of wonder, the sense of wonder which is indeed

the source of all true philosophy, by mystery I mean

secret and occult; therefore unpublishable.7
(Parenthetical phrase mine.) The form of education is
thus spontaneity, and the present style of education we
know in the world is repressive, even if based upon volun-
tarism.80 Students must be seen as those who are Sick and
need help, the diseased who have caught the neurosis of
all mankind. Brown's goal of education is therapy and not
knowledge transfer of any sort. Schools become places of
spontaneous interaction. Knowledge not put into words,
which Brown's fiats, makes teaching become nothing. Brown

cannot be applied adequately on a practical level because

practical talk is prosaic and he speaks in aphorisms.

 

77Ibid.

78$§Efl1 "Politics," Caterpillar Anthology, p. 18.

 

79Idem, "Apocalypse,
thetical phrase mine.)

80

Harper's, pp. 47-48. (Paren-

Idem, "Politics," Caterpillar Anthology, p. 20.

86

Education is dialectics, reversal, love to Brown
and not anything less than a loving, erotic, atmOSphere
will serve for education (therapy) to occur. When it does
happen, it will be unpublishable; we will not be able to
test it in any manner; we will not be able to obtain any
knowledgeable results. Truth is always new, Brown prOphe-
sizes, and it cannot be judged by old standards. Myster-
ious knowledge, and here Brown is referring to occultism,
must be revered for what it is if man is to come to a

communion with the world in which he lives.

Education as an End to History

 

Brown, in Love's Body, is fond of equations. Edu-

 

cation is Eros is Life is Becoming children is appropriate
to both his style and his philOSOphy. If this is so, then

Brown's position leads us to perceive education as the

abolition of history.

Children are also unable to make the distinction
fundamental for culture, the reality principle, and
the serious business of life, between higher and
lower functions and parts of the body. . . . Neu-
rotic symptoms, with their fixation on perversions
and Obscenities demonstrate the refusal of the
unconscious essence of our being to acquiesce in 81
the dualism of flesh and Spirit, higher and lower.

Brown continues, "It is the same thing if we say that play .

is the erotic mode of activity . . . the ultimate essence

 

81Idem, Life, pp. 31-32.

 

87

of our being is erotic and demands activity according to

the pleasure principle."82

Brown knows playful activity is, as Huizinga points

In83

out, "'purposeless yet in some sense meaningful. It

is a "realistic necessity" to reorganize and transform
"human society and human nature in the spirit of play."84
Education is the denial of history and culture for Brown,
Since culture is that which represses play.

Brown points out, in delineating play as an edu-
cative process of infantile sexuality, that "play is that
activity which, in the delight of life, unites man with
the objects of his love . . ."85 He feels possibilities
of man are fully explored only in playful activity, and
we must remember that Brown discovers man is a constantly
creative animal which is presently defined only by its
repressions. Education is therefore recognition of the
body as the human being, and is not what Brown coins that
"insane delusion" begun by Plato and Descartes, followed
by secular humanists, "that the true essence of man lies

86 u

in disembodied mental activity." What is needed is a

 

82Ibid., p. 33.

83Guardini as quoted in J. Huizinga, Homo Ludens:
A Study of the Play Element in Culture (New York: Roy,
1950). p. 19 as quotedfin Brown, Life, p. 32.

84 85

 

Ibid., p. 34. Ibid., p. 33.

86Ibid., p. 34.

88

solution to the problem of repression . . . to change the
human body so it can become for the first time an organism,
the resurrection of the body."87 Furthermore, Brown be-
lieves that "The resurrection of the body is a social
project facing mankind as a whole . . ."88 It is important
to Brown that we emphasize the bodily sexuality of our
existence, and come to the "dialectical" (or visionary)
experience that there is no dualism between the mind and
body. To Brown we must live this life. Brown berates the
secular humanists for not really believing in the search
for the end to this dualism because they lived practically
committed to the life of the mind.89
Brown insists that truth is unpublishable and that

all men must live truth, must embody truth, for it to be
meaningful. Men must play, must engage in spontaneous,
bodily satisfying activity in order to become full as men.
But this is purposeless activity in which culture is
abolished to the tune of the constantly new song. It is
Love's Body made manifest that is the goal of this social
project. Brown states,

Repression and the repetition-compulsion generate

historical time. . . . And conversely life not

repressed, life below man and human life if re-

pression were overcome, is not in historical time.90

 

87 88

Ibid., p. 317. Ibid.

 

89 90

Ibid., p. 34. Ibid., p. 93.

89

The following discussion will center on the role
of violence in the life of man, Since it should be obvious
that Brown sees man as a violated creature and consequently
that some violation of present existence is needed to pro-
vide that world of visionaries Brown envisions.91 Brown
feels that humanity is:

committed to treating as excrement not only its own
body but the surrounding world of objects, reducing
all to dead matter and inorganic magnitudes. Our
much prized "objectivity" toward our own bodies,
other persons, and the universe, all our calculating
"rationality" is, from the psychoanalytic point of
View, an ambivalent mixture of love and hate, an
attitude appropriate only toward excrement only in
an animal that has lost its own body and life. 2

Violence is thus that which is ambivalent and
therefore deadening; it is the mistake of making aliment
what is excretory. Violence, therefore, is that not neces-
sarily inappropriate behavior for the human to engage in
except as it is calculating "rationality." We do violence
when we are engaged in spontaneous behavior, and Brown
allows this form of violence.

It is when violence becomes ambivalent that it
deadens life and is inhumane. In fact, Brown accepts that
"Love is violence. The kingdom of heaven suffereth vio-

"93

lence, from hot love and living hope. ("Religion hid

 

91Brown states "Surely the second coming is at

hand, when your young men shall see visions." "Norman
Brown's Body," Psychology Today, p. 46.

92Brown, Life, p. 295.

 

93Idem, Love's Body, p. 180.

 

90

in War"94) Brown discovers life only at that moment of
violence, pure true violence. Birth and not Death. He

"95 the fire which

says we must "Learn to love the fire,
is the violent eruption of man from nothing. It is com-
pletely irrational and mad and therefore pure.

As shown, Brown feels that it is "calculating

' which causes death in life, and it is in

'rationality"
embodiment that violence is complete. "Total incorpor-
ation, or fusion, is combustion in fire."96 True edu-
cation becomes violent, becomes a war with the world. It
is that we must, according to Brown, "Find the true fire.
. . . The true teachers of peace are those who have the
highest power, who can work miracles, who are masters of
fire."97 To Brown violence is anal if its way is not
playful, and if it is playful it leads to the "total
incorporation" of man which is his true humanity or peace.
At this point education which is therapy must be:

To find the true war, the true sacrament. . . . To

find the true fire. . . . Save us from the literal

fire. . . . The real fire, the chariot of fire, the

Fiery Chariot of his Contemplative Thought. The

real fight, the mental fight; poetry, a sword of

lightning, ever unsheathed, hat consumes the scab-
bard that would contain it.

 

94Idem, "Homage," Caterpillar, p. 13.

 

95Idem, Love's Body, p. 178.

 

 

961bid., p. 176.

97 98

Ibid., p. 181. Ibid., p. 183.

 

91

Brown believes that "Truth is error burned up."99 Vio-

lence is always, and is what forms the body of mankind.
We have perverted violence to make war, and the
war in which we fight and die is not a true war. Brown's
discovery is that the true teachers will lead us away
from the ambivalence of love and hate caused by ration-
ality to the madness and purity of violent consumption in
conflagrated ecstasy. Yet this demands all men be their
own teacher since what Brown is calling forth is the "True
Individual." It is here and now that incorporation is
total, at the point when the individual discovers that he
is part of the universe, that the universe is man, and
that he creates that universe that the greatest violence

is done to the person.

 

991bid.

 

CHAPTER IV

THE CHRISTIC-DIONYSIAN VISION

Introduction: The Vision

 

Brown's "Christie-Dionysian vision" is replete
with political innuendoes. Nothing could be much more
ludicrous than a world which actually subscribes to the
separation of Church and State--for Brown Shows that the
primal religious act is political. He feels that we must
again have "mystical participation, but now for the first
time freely; instead of religion, poetry."l Brown calls
for man to become again free for he sees that today "Mr.
and Mrs. Antrobus are getting nowhere."2 He perceives
our dance of life is getting us nowhere, and our "metro-

3

polis is necropolis" and that we have created an arti-

ficial environment which has as its prototype the tomb.
We are, according to Brown, effectually dead. AS he says,
"Every house is a house of Hades. And every city a city

4

Of Dis. . . . We are dead." The resurrection is

 

1Brown, Love's Body, p. 254.

 

21bid., p. 39.

3 4

Ibid., p. 41. Ibid., p. 42.

92

93

necessary if we are to avoid the tomb and begin to get
somewhere. What is needed is a real birth--a birth from
the dream world we presently inhabit. Brown reminds us
birth will be violent—-will be fiery but not a hair will
be singed.S Brown feels that "Birth is bursting, the
Shell burst."6 This occurs in mad, spontaneous behavior
which is guided by the god Dionysus. Brown feels Christ,
the reborn body, has Dionysus, the twice-born spirit,
as its god. Brown defines Christ as the body which is
yet to be born--which arises when man awakens from the
hypnotic trance (the dance of death) in which he is
presently swathed. Dionysus is the spirit of that re-
awakening. Brown sees it is in a form of madness indeed
that men can come to find their body--but this is a body
Of a man. So when men become spontaneously mad, Brown
feels they are coming towards the discovery of their
unity.
Brown is aware that the Christ of whom he speaks

is not the historical figure living approximately two mil-
lenia in the past. Rather,

the Jesus of historical commemoration can only be

the ghost of Jesus . . . history reaches not Christ's

flesh and blood. The Jesus of commemorative
ceremony and historical reconstruction is the

 

6

Ibid., p. 183. Ibid., p. 180.

94

passive, not the active, Jesus. The active Jesus
can only be actively recreated. The historical
reconstruction is a spectral image in a passive
viewer.
Brown's religion is suddenly political. It is a call to
man to behave so as to extract in himself the divinity
that is his. Men must be as Christ. This is the purpose
of distinguishing religion and poetry. Religion, Brown
feels, is based upon faith and "Christ the fulfillment,
is not an abstract idea but a human body. All fulfill-
ment is carnal."8 Fulfillment is here and now. Brown
views the Church as a decayed institution perpetuating
the sobriety of death, rather than allowing man to
release himself in the playfulness of life.9 It is
Brown's belief that the stately king is at once a reli—
gious idol demanding man's obedience through a process
of faith. History is then discovered to be a serializa-
tion of the truly periodic essence of human life. Brown
finds that man is trapped by a fearfully woven lie,
It is the star—inwrought veil of the heavens, God's
garment, reproduced in the roles of God's repre-
sentatives on earth, the priest and the king. The
Spinning sisters, at the humming looms of time,

weave a mantle of pestilence and war, concealing
the divine humanity.

 

Ibid., p. 200. 8Ibid., p. 222.

Ibid., p. 229. loIbid., p. 79.

95

The lie Brown finds is the lie Rosa Millard most fears

11

in The Unvanquished, which is the unSpoken lie which

 

weaves intricacies and traps even the liar himself.
Brown knows man is the God whose representatives are the
king and the priest, and yet feels man does not realize
this. About the Big Lie, Brown agrees with Blake: "'It
is Burnt up the moment men cease to behold it.'"12
Brown feels that a religious revival is necessary, but
that it is done in the fire of Spontaneous, playful,
activity. As man is in search of his own body,

The true body is the body burnt up, the Spiritual

body. The unity is not organic--natural unity, but

the unity of fire. . . . In the baptism of water

we are buried with Christ; in the baptism of fire

we are conformed to the body of his glory.
It is therefore seen that Brown does not espouse the
coming together of men in a place of worship, but that all
men are divine and, so being, are one. The fire is the
process of burning away the veil of the world. This veil
Brown finds as a love of the letter and not the spirit.

It is in the process of the sexualization of Speech that

men come to realize their unity. However, Brown views

 

11William Faulkner, The Unvapguished (New York:
Random House, Vintage Books, 1938).

12William Blake, "The Marriage of Heaven and Hell,‘
The Complete Writinga, ed. by G. Keynes (New York, 1957),
p. 14 as quoted in Brown, Love's Body, p. 183.

13

Brown, Love's Body, p. 183.

 

96

this process as continual and eternal. It is found to

be the poetic process of creation.

stantly
divine.
hero is

literal

Books of Death

 

Brown's Christian vision perceives man as a con-
elusive Spirit which can create and is therefore
But the human Situation is found to be tragic-—a
coming undone. Brown most certainly blames the

interpretations of the Bible as an element in this
14

downfall. But in this style, which shows the most secu-

lar is the most sacred, Brown also sees the world of

scholarship as an equal participant in the invidious

process

of the hypnosis of mankind. As he says "Literal-

ism is idolatry; taking shadows for reality; taking ab-

stractions, human inventions, unconscious projections of

the human Spirit, as autonomous powers; letting the meta-

phors go dead, and, then, when dead, bowing down before

them, taking them literally."

15 The purpose of Brown is

definitely a form of anti—intellectualism-—a search for a
"Higher Logos." As he says,

To pass from shadows to reality is to pass from the
external and material temple to the new temple, the
true temple, which is the human body. . . . Liter-
alism makes the world of abstract materialism; of
dead matter; of the human body as dead matter.

Literalism kills everything, including the human body.

 

14Ibid., p. 229.

15 .
Ibid., p. 222. 16Ibid., pp. 222—23.

16

97

The real body, Brown continues, . . . is the poetic body;
the made body; Man makes Himself, his own body, in the
symbolic freedom of the imagination."17 We must recoqnize
that Brown feels that literalism is a very Protestant
development,
The modern historical consciousness is Protestant
literalism. The aim of modern historical science
is to establish for historical events a single
simple, sg§id, and constant, meaning--what really
happened.
Furthermore, "There is in both Protestant religion and mod—
ern scholarship a double standard (not the same thing as
a two-fold vision): they combine self-effacing objectivity
with self—asserting subjectivity, a principle of subjective

intuition (Dilthey's verstehen)."19

 

Scholarship is not only inane, but dangerous. It
is seen by Brown as a self—perpetuating blight on the human
body's spirit, and as a negation of Love's Body. The
principle of education, which is appropriately here drawn
out, is that we can never hope to educate if we desire
discovery to be a process of illumination of the meaning
of an event, or series of events. Education is a
"possession by the dead" if it is an attempt to delineate
definitions or impose limits upon the human animal. The

modern dilemma is that man is hypnotized because his body

 

17 18

Ibid., p. 226. Ibid., p. 198.

19Ibid., p. 199.

98

is ripped from the symbol of its own activity. Brown
feels that "Meaning is made in a meeting between the holy
spirit buried in the Christian and the holy spirit buried
in the letter of scripture; a breakthrough, from the ap-
graad, from the unconscious of the reader past the con-
scious intention of the author to the unconscious meaning;
breaking the barrier of the ego and the barrier of the

"20

book. "Every sentence is bilingual, or allegorical:

saying one thing and meaning another. . . . Saying makes
it so. Poetry, the archetypal fiat; or creative act."21
Brown is firmly convinced that man is constantly
"Promising immortality or awaiting resurrection."22 Brown
sees that one of the primary obligations of the scholars
(or professors) is to fail to respect the tradition of
literalism--to inculcate Spontaneity and free association--
to develop a new elliptical language. (Brown's latest
works certainly aim at this.) He believes that "Literature
is as collective as the unconscious; private authorship or

"23

ownership is not to be respected. The scholar must

give up his search for particular meanings of events. He

feels ". . . the message is: Let's Play. Or, let's prac-

"24

tice metamorphosis. Or, let's change the subject. The

 

20Ibid., p. 196.

21Idem, "Daphne, or Metamorphosis," in Myths,
Dreams, and Reli ion, ed. by Joseph Campbell (New York:
E0 Po DUtton, 19 O) I p0 93.

22

 

23 24

Ibid., p. 109. Ibid.

Ibid., p. 101.

 

99

professor has the playful imperative from Brown. He feels
the professor must not abide in the world of trivial know-
ledge, for that perpetuates the negation of Christ in the
body of men. Brown believes the knowledge which claims to
be private is unreal, and

Wisdom is in wit, in fooling,most excellent fooling;

in play, and not in heavy puritanical seriousness.

In levity, not gravity. The real deceivers are the

literalists, who say I cannot tell a lie, or, hypo-
theses non fingo.

 

The educator is thus impelled by Brown "To seduce

the world to madness,"26

"27

for "Wisdom is wit; in play, not

in work; in freedom. He does not feel that an educator

can give out the meaning of truth as an Opposition to un-

28

truth, but that "We stumble on the truth." He believes

"The doctrine of the unconscious, prOperly understood is
a doctrine of the falseness of all words, taken literally,
at their face value, at the level of consciousness."29
Christ, our divinity which is locked "within the wall of

paradise, which is the wall of the law of contradiction"30

cannot be released except by a playful interaction with

the environment until we have "The body that is identical
32

 

 

 

with environment." The educator who locks himself in a
25 .
Idem, Love S Body, p. 245.
261bid., p. 242. 27Ibid., p. 245.
281bid., p. 243. 291bid., p. 257.
30 31

Ibid., p. 242. Ibid., p. 253.

321bid., p. 227.

100

serious world of "realism" and doesn't play with his body
and his world is seen by Brown as lacking the ability to
ever gain knowledge, since Brown feels all knowledge is

carnal.33

In reference to education on a collegiate level,
Brown states that the necessity for poetry, which he con-
nects with freedom, is most readily apparent, therefore
most possible, in the most "serious" minded areas: "The
most meaningful poetry can be made in those areas of thought

34 This

at the university that are so aridly prosaic."
would indicate that poetry is difficult in areas that are
liberalizing, and that the implication for schools is that
the experiments in liberality that aim at control rather
than Spontaneous freedom may well be the most difficult to
poeticize. The work of Brown emphasizes "Meaning is new,
or not at all; a new creation, or not at all; poetry or not

at all."35

In "aridly prosaic" realms anything is new,
therefore poetry is always possible. In less arid realms
newness is much more difficult--demands on the creator
more--and Brown's concept of poetry would normally be
missing. According to Brown we must be constantly on "the

road of excess which leads to the palace of wisdom."36

 

33Ibid., p. 249.

34"Norman Brown's Body," Psychology Today, p. 47.

 

35Brown, Love's Body, p. 248.
36

 

Ibid., p. 187.

101

The concept Brown presents in "Only the exaggerations are

true"37

is more easily understood if it is considered that
in a world which is not completely totalitarian one must
go to extremes to find newness. Therefore, the professor,
or teacher, who nears aphorism, the bodily language, has
found what Brown refers to as "the form of the mad truth,

"38 Brown's anti-intellectualism is

the Dionysian form.
more a form of the end of the intellect. He feels the
poet is the wise man who has found "the mad form of the
truth" and that "Intellect is sacrifice of intellect, or

"39 In the mad

fire; which burns up as it gives light.
playfulness of the poet-professor Brown posits a true

form of wisdom. This is the release of Christ in each man
which Brown sees as the "supreme task of higher logic."40
He insists the expert must throw down his crown. The
political battle is, after all, seen as the battle for the

unification of the body. This is the religious battle,

and it is won only in the playground of poetry.

West and East

 

Brown's approach has been called "an emerging

Christic-Dionysiac vision. . . ."41 So far, this thesis

has presented the positions Brown takes regarding the

 

37 38

Ibid. Ibid.

 

39 40

Ibid., p. 188. Ibid., p. 242.

41Book review. Choice, Peter M. Darian, ed.
(Chicago: Chicago Assoc1ation of College & Research
Libraries, January, 1967), p. 1007.

102

excremental nature of culture and the fiery rebirth of life
in this culture--both important aspects of this vision. It
is here placed, as in Chapter I, that his vision is not yet
replete with those microcosmic interactions of potential
and actualized awareness which formulate a definitive body
of knowledge nor yet a finitely applicable coterie of
mystical considerations. Even so, the relevance of Brown
to Western thought is precisely in the totality of his
criticism on that thought. He is fond of handling, in his
works, the remote implications of technological and cul-
tural deve10pment with an aplomb normally relegated to
those who genuinely seek the private spheres of non-
publication.

One who has reacted to Brown in public and who has
presented the vision of the East in terms which the West
can understand and assimilate is Alan Watts. Shortly after

publication of Life Against Death Watts wrote Psyghotherapy
42

 

 

East and West. One could read this book as an inter-

 

pretation and synopsis of Brown's arguments, even though
Watts does not specifically state this is so. Watts' book
serves as a simplification of the, indeed, esoteric and
complex volume Brown created after his "meeting" with
Freud. Yet there is more than simplification involved for

Watts is attempting to somehow synthesize the approaches

 

42Alan Watts, Psychotherapy East and West (New
York: Ballantine Books, 1961).

 

103

of the two hemispheres--and forms of culture that today
exist. Brown, on the other hand, does not seem at all

~ interested in perpetuating the culture. In Life Against

 

Death he had not dealt with this fact clearly and indeed
could not foresee its consequences clearly. Since the

public assessment of Life Against Death Brown has been a

 

more avaricious precursor of all who would relegate the
culture, no matter what form, to a subsidiary and, accord—
ing to Brown, appropriately ineffectual role. Watts could
not hOpe to develop a strong thesis of cultural synthesis

from a consideration of Life Against Death. It is just

 

because Brown has denied the Situation of deve10pment
through political and economic realms and emphasized
psychological progress that his work mirrors Eastern
mysticism. It is in the recognition that the purpose of
those who are of the Oriental "Ways" is not the reinforce-
ment of culture, but is the destruction of its influence
over men, that Brown can be considered Eastern in his
thought. Yet Brown, unlike Watts, perceives Eastern
mysticism as not possessing a unique power over the realm
of the knowledge of the true body. Brown understands much
of the Western tradition as replete with the vision into
man's true nature. His later work could easily be inter-

preted as the description of "Eastern" mysticism inherent

104

43 I C I
Brown env151ons an occ1dental

in the Western world.
mysticism, the Christic-Dionysiac vision, which expresses
the "dialectical imagination."44 From this realization
Brown describes some "schools" of thought which have as
their direct goal the "'conjunction of contrarieties.'"
He even includes poetry in this listing and also states
that psychoanalysis is not only "a mode of dialectical
consciousness,"45 but also that it "contains, or ought to
contain, a theory about the nature of the dialectical

46 It is against the Western cultural tradi-

imagination."
tion of "formal-logical law of contradiction" that Brown

works, and yet, even in Life Against Death, he finds

 

aspects of that tradition which have repelled repression.
It is therefore appropriate that Brown be read not as a
synthesizer of East and West, but as a propagator of that
tradition of the West which underlies and undermines all

Of the repression which culture can exert and educational
institutions can perpetuate. It is towards the unconscious
unity of each man in the West to which Brown speaks. Brown
is attempting to cajole the Westerner out of what he senses

is a hypnotic state of subservience to the cultural
I

 

3Roszak claims Brown has taken an "occult turn."
Roszak, p. 116. Noland calls Love's Body a "symbolist
poem" meaning that it reaches into the mystical tradition
of Western literature. Noland, "Brown and Future,"
Massachusetts Review, p. 541.

44
45

 

 

Brown, Life, p. 318.

 

46

Ibid., p. 319. Ibid.

 

 

105

repression which Western man has formed. Yet Brown does
not go directly to the Eastern schools to find examples of
a new mode of consciousness for occidental man to immerse
himself. Rather, Brown remains within the framework of
Western culture and searches out for presentation what is
truly erotic in its development, so as to Show each man

he can bring himself up through the repressive personality
he has develOped. By remaining within the tradition of

the West, Brown's arguments seem more esoteric than a syn-
thesizer (such as I have labeled Alan Watts). But, in-
evitably, his arguments are more relevant and more sub-
stantial to we who are presently entrenched in, and identi—
fied with, the Western culture. If we are to break loose
into a new mode of consciousness, it seems more likely we
will do so in Western terms within a Western tradition of
the mystical (or occult) than through a study of a cultural
heritage with which the body of Western men do not empa-

thize.

Christ, Freud, Bacchus

 

Brown finds this new mode of consciousness which
he calls "symbolic consciousness," in three Western tradi-
tions: "Christian, or psychoanalytical, or Dionysian."47

He finds these three schools of thought to be as one in

that they are found to be grounded upon the dialectical

 

47Idem, Love's Body, pp. 222-23.

 

106

imagination. Brown is a classical scholar and realizes
the importance Of Greek mythological thought to the pre-
sent style of existence. Therefore, he understands that
if Greek thought, which many believe is the initiator of
much contemporary thinking, is not based on the dialectical
imagination it would be difficult to convince an occidental
that Western thought is so based. His searches reveal the
Bacchic revelry, the joy of the body released in agonistic
play. "Dionysus is the god." (As John Senior points out,
the Greeks felt all men have Dionysus within themselves,48
a fact of which a classical scholar, as Brown, would not
be unaware.) Secondly, Brown's work shows he realizes he
must convince Westerners that Christianity has a basis in
"dialectical imagination" to make his thesis effable.
Brown's aim, as a critic put it, "is nothing less
than the overthrow of the whole Hebrew-Greek (i.e.,

49 Indeed, he calls man to the

Christian) enterprise."
erotic element in Christ's thought. Thus, Brown attempts
to expose Christ's body of thought as expressing the need
for a new mode of consciousness, a dialectical mode at

that. The third “school" of dialectical imagination re—

ferred to by Brown is psychoanalysis--the teachings of

 

48Senior, p. 18.

49 . n
John Dixon, Prolegomena to Christian Erotics,"

review of Love's Body by Norman 0. Brown, Christian
Scholar, 1. (Spring, 1967), 59.

 

107

Freud. But this Brown sees as standing in a unique re-
lation to Western man in that, according to him, it
began as a further advance of civilized (scientific)
objectivity; to expose the remnants of primitive
participation, to eliminate them. . . . But the
outcome of psychoanalysis is the discovery that magic
and madness are everywhere. . . . There is a marriage
(in heaven) between psychoanalysis and the mystical
tradition.50
Its purpose has become its method, and is Brown's method.
That Freudian thought is as significant as Christianity
or Athenian perspicuity is not at once obvious. Yet if
we View Freud through Brown's eyes, we can see that Freud-
ian thought is a direct outgrowth of the Protestant world,
developed upon terms of Greek rationality. It is not so
much that Freud has more followers than other psycholo-
gists, but that his thought is somehow to be seen as an
evolutionary development and explication of the Western
mind. And Brown sees it is linked with the mystical
tradition. It is the approach Brown uses towards every-
thing—~but psychoanalysis is weighed from its lowest depth.
Freud is found, by Brown, to base his thought upon the
mystical "dialectical imagination" even though (and this
may be significant) Freud himself often did not comprehend
51

this. Psychoanalysis is the posture from which Brown

exposes the mystical tradition of Western culture, which

 

50Brown, Love's Body, pp. 254-55.

51Morgan, p. 104.

 

108

is Christian and Greek in essence. Yet, I feel the inevi-
table impact of Brown is that he does not pretend to desire
to immediately amalgamate the East and West, but rather to.
lead the West to fuller expression of the true bases, which,
if accomplished, will make a synthesis with Eastern thought
imminent and effortless-~since they are one in the body of
love. Brown does call for a mode of consciousness which

is beyond the battle of life against death. But he does

so within the thrust and tradition of Western thought, al-
though Zen and Tao have been considered and some of their
terminology incorporated. Brown feels that it is not to
another culture we must seek, but beyond all cultures

where men are unified with the body of men. Brown feels
his search is a criminal act, for, as he says, "It is
criminal to violate the civilized taboos which have kept

the seamy side concealed."52

The search for Christ's body,
which is only recreated (resurrected) actively--not
historically or by passive faith-~is seen by Brown to be
the uncovering of the dead elements of culture and the

53

concomitant revival of the life instincts. Importantly,

Brown feels the erotic element of man is within all men,

 

52Brown, Life, p. ix.

53Richard Noland presents the thesis that Brown
is mistaken in what he uncovers, but that what I have
described is Brown's procedural method. Noland, "Apoca-
lypse," American Scholar.

109

since it is instinctual, and as a consequence is the one-
ness of all men. Brown describes this unity of men as
being the "body" of men--since it is what is most central
and essential to the human situation. Since it is felt

by Brown that this is an erotic, or lively, instinct ex-
pressed most succinctly in the most irrational, unreason-
able, acts of men, and especially in the most unreasonable
of all acts, the love act, he terms this essence of man
"Love's Body." But it is significant here to comprehend
this essence as something unstable, something which is
constantly recurring and constantly new. The essence of
man is found to be a completely playful body which is a
body coming into complete oneness with the environment.
Therefore Brown feels the essence of man is reached, is
developed, so man becomes more and more involved and trans—
acted with his environment. But this environment cannot

be perceived as merely the physical habitat of the organism,
but is all that impinges upon the development of love's
body. In investigating what this could be, one is forced,
Brown espouses, to discover that all possibilities of al—
ternatives, and all events that have actualized these pos-
sibilities or could have done so or will do so, are properhz
discussed as the environment of love's body. (Brown there-
fore reaches the conclusion that the measure of man is in
"billions of light years.") We are led by Brown to con-

ceive of man's environment as what the Taoists call the

110

"Whole." Brown conceives of man as unifying the opposites--
as being the Unity of all Diversity in the Whole. It is
seen that precisely in Christ's body man lives this unity
with the whole. Man's essence is seen to be his oneness
with everything, which is his immediate erotic polymorphous
perversity. Brown understands Christ as a Christ of all
mankind, and the true body as the constantly changing,
playful, transaction of the organism and environment. AS
he says, "to become conscious of ourselves as body is to

. . 54
become consc1ous of mankind as one."

Apocalypse, in
Brown, is the sudden recognition by a human that he is
all-at-one with the universe and is therefore unique. This
is a "mystical participation" in the universe and Brown

feels that this is a fiery consummation of our bodies into

Love's Body.

The Peaceful War

 

Brown finds the unification of man is a very

Christian effort: "That they may be one--ut unum sint.

 

This is Christ's last prayer before the crucifixion.
. . ."55 He finds the body of Christ is love's body, the
unified body. It presently exists, Brown feels, but is

covered up by the "ego illusion" in the Western culture.

The problem Brown discovers is how to develop salvation,

 

54Brown, Love's Body, p. 82.

 

551bid., p. 81.

111

how "to make in ourselves a new consciousness, an erotic
sense of reality . . ."56 And this "is to become conscious
of symbolism. Symbolism is mind making connections (cor-
respondences) rather than distinctions (separations)."57
Brown finds that a war must be waged, yet it is a peaceful
war. The war is "a mental fight, a struggle in and about
men's minds."58 The battle is "the erotic sense of real-
ity" attempting to present itself in the life of man, and
Brown feels it is won as men realize that all divisions,
as he says, "are not based on the truth but on what the
Buddhists call illusion, what Freud calls unconscious

59

fantasies." This occurs, Brown proposes, as we "recon-

nect consciousness with the unconscious, to make conscious-
ness symbolical . . ."60 This is found to be an endless
process, and the war must be waged peacefully or the death
instinct will win.61 Erotic battle is fought with instru-
ments of the miraculous. It is in levity that Brown finds

man in union with the erotic reality. Brown feels that

presently Eros is in bondage. As he says, "We are in

 

56 57

Ibid. Ibid.
59

 

58

Ibid. Ibid.

 

601bid., p. 258.

61Jules Henry describes a "death culture" and a
"life culture" and warns that men must be aware of the
potential of the "death culture" to dominate the world.
Jules Henry, Culture Against Man (New York: Random
House, Vintage Books, 1963), pp. 475-77.

 

5‘”

.-__-' \

-;.-

112

bondage to authority outside ourselves . . ."62 The battle

fought is for freedom from authority. Brown says, "There
is only one political problem in our world today: the
unification of mankind."63 Brown feels that spontaneous
action is the Sign of Eros winning the"peaceful war."
Freedom is license to Brown, and he understands we must be
free. Brown feels that scholars come to an "erotic sense
of reality" as they recognize the choice is "Either miracle
or Scripture"64 and that intellectuals are presently in a
"bondage to books" which "compels us not to see with our
own eyes; compels us to see with the eyes of the dead,
with dead eyes."65 Much of his writing is made to con-
vince those who presently are in the fields of scholarship
to become poets and escape what he calls "the age of

"66

reasoning from already received Scripture. As scholars,

and teachers, avoid bondage to books and attempt to come to

the spirit of their human divinity, Brown perceives that

. . . the authority of the past is swallowed up in new

67

creation; the word is made flesh." Love's Body is gained

by scholars, and teachers, as they come to experience

 

62

Brown, "Apocalypse,"

Harper's, p. 49.

63Idem, Love's Body, p. 81.

 

 

 

 

64Idem, "Apocalypse," Harper's, p. 49.
551616. 66Ibid.
67

Ibid.

 

I XT‘ADAu'u'
'0.
~_ ,oj. 0"

It_-' 9'“

113

experiencing, rather than to experience through the vicar-
ious means of books and cultural traditions.

Brown prOposes that Christianity is psychoanalysis
when it is significant to the battle of Life against Death:

For two thousand years Christianity has kept alive the
mystical hope of an ultimate victory of Life over
Death, during a phase of history when Life was at war
with Death and hOpe could only be mystical. . . .
Certain it is that if Christianity wishes to help
mankind toward that erasure of the traces of original
sin which Baudelaire said was the true definition of
progress, there are priceless insights in its
tradition, insights which have to be transformed

into a system of practical therapy, something like
psychoanalysis, before they are useful or even
meaningful.

Psychoanalysis becomes, in Brown's hands, the
Christ-revealing process. Men's minds are made whole, the
diseased ones are eased, as they become themselves Christ.69
This process, though, comes through a mystical oneness with
nature. This is a "Dionysian or body mysticism" and is
felt to be the Western tradition.70 Brown finds in the
poet, in the novelist, and in the artist the ability to
heal. He feels that "the times call for . . . the begin—
ning of COOperation between the two (art and psychoanalysis)
in the work of therapy and in the task of making the un-

«71

conscious conscious. Furthermore, "Modern poetry, like

 

68Brown, Life, p. 309.

69 70

Ibid., p. 311. Ibid., p. 310.

71$§£§¢7 p. 312. (Parenthetical phrase mine.)

114

psychoanalysis and Protestant theology, faces the problem

"72 Brown calls for what

of the resurrection of the body.
Whitehead calls the "Romantic Reaction." This could be
seen as the attempt of the artist at therapy, to render
whole what is rent asunder. Brown finds this poetry as
subverting the "'reasonableness' of language."73

Christ is found to be revealed to men only as

they are consciously active in the peaceful war, which is

waged against the use of words. Brown feels that men will 9

 

1 Bin-f“? .

never be free of the "bondage of authority outside" until
they have died through recognition they are presently
existing deadly. When man is conscious that he is dead
he is immediately consumed by his own fire of the desire
to live, according to the work of Brown. When man recog-
nizes the excremental tendencies of his own existence,
Brown feels he has found the light which will, through
radiant energy, destroy the excrement. As he paraphrases,
"Truth is error burned up; a light shining in darkness;
darkness overcome. The everlasting bonfire. The truth
and the life and the joy is in the overcoming."74 Brown

feels man will then be nothing, "Or no one; I'm a noun."75

Yet out of this nothing Brown feels we have the true shape

 

721bid. 731bid., p. 319.

75

 

74

Idem, Love's Body, p. 233. Ibid., p. 262.

 

115

of a human being. "Creation is out of nothing: the unreal

"76

awakens us out of the sleep of reality. Brown believes

that as we die we become divine and that when we accept
what he calls "Object-loss, world loss"77 we realize that
we have created the phenomenal world we perceive, and there-
fore recognize our own divinity. In other words, Brown
believes that man will come to feel his own divinity as he
destroys the world he perceives and recognizes that he is
divine because it was he who perceived that world. At
exactly that same moment man is lost in an "oceanic con-
sciousness" for he exists as an ego no longer--that too
was a creation of his.

Psychotherapy becomes the Christ revealing process.
Brown states, "Psychotherapy is rebirth; and to be reborn,
we have to pass through the grave."78 But he has earlier
reminded us that birth is violence, and it is a creative
violence. Psychotherapy is also Dionysian. It is seen as
the deve10pment of the body of mankind in the Spirit of
the Erotic. It is felt to be the negation of the excre-
mental body which we presently call our own, and the
sudden, apocalyptic, miraculous recognition that we are

everything.

 

76Ibid. 77Ibid.

 

 

78Ibid., p. 263.

116

Play is the Way

 

Play is a foolish enterprise. It is ludicrous
that men (grown, mature, civilized men) should disregard
all that they have grown to depend upon and jump around
like a group of silly youngsters-~having a transactional
ecstasy with everything. It is foolish that men can
learn from children. Brown feels that this is true, very
true: "Truth comes empty-handed; in its poverty is its

"79 80

strength. "Truth riding a donkey; as foolishness."

Brown feels that "The sublimation is at the same

"81 He

time a fall, into a lower order of creation.
furthermore feels that abstraction can be equated with

sublimation. Children are said to act naturally because
they are playful. They see the entire world as alive, as
being of the same essence as men. Brown points out that
this is also the case with schiZOphrenics and primitives.
They are at one with the world and know that it is alive
as they. Brown points out that "The final metamorphosis

"82 This is an alchemical

is the humanization of nature.
process; it is not accomplished by modern, rational sci-
ence. The scientist can tell that a stone is not alive

or that a tree is not something human. The scientist is

more mature than to feel this. Yet Brown calls for man

 

79 80

Ibid., p. 237. Ibid., p. 238.

81Idem, "Daphne," p. 99.

821bid., p. 103.

117

to be aware of the symbolic. Man must see a "penis in
every convex object, a vagina in every concave one."83
The world is alive and "symbolic consciousness" Shows
this. Yet this is silly. It is a playful world that
Brown describes. The world constantly must be played
with, says Brown, or it becomes dead. Brown feels that
each man literally forms his own world, so that Brown can

say "ontogeny recapitulates orogeny."84 Furthermore,

"The final metamorphosis is the humanization of nature
85
ll

Since Brown feels "The spirit, the human essence,

hides, buried in the natural object . . ."86 the return

to man's very human origin is in what he calls "The re-

conciliation of spirit and nature."87

This is a symbolic
process and is accomplished by man developing a symbolic
consciousness that has awakened "the Spirit from its

Sleep."88

This occurs in a sudden, abrupt, apocalyptic
matter. It is sheer madness, but is "supernatural" or
divine.

We are enjoined to believe that we deny the govern-

ment of the world, for we are to "see politics as

 

83Idem, Love's Body, p. 250.

 

 

84Ibid., p. 212.

85Idem, "Daphne," p. 103.

86 87

Ibid., p. 100. Ibid., p. 106.

881bid., p. 101.

118

madness"89 but a madness that is so bound to the reality-

principle that it can never "liberate instead of re-

press."90

The trip back down, through our cultural
selves into our human essence is a mysterious trip and
ends in mystery. It is always, according to Brown,
"Poetry, the creative act, the act of life . . ."91 But
this is an act of transformation, which is an art of pure
sexuality. To Brown the beginning is a whore, a myster-
ious beginning, which is always a rebeginning--a
revolution. But he says that "the revolution is a vision-
ary break-through/or poetry/or madness."92 When we come
to union, unification, Brown feels man has become Diony-
sian and has come through madness to solve the problem of
madness. This is beyond the literal sense, for he feels

"93 we

we "begin by being conquered/cave-man conquered.
must leave the political solution behind, which is to con-
quer and to become divided, more split, if we are to come
to the Dionysian communion. This is, according to Brown,

"a metapolitical solution to the problem of madness."94

 

89Idem, "Politics," Caterpillar Anthology, p. 12.

 

 

90Ibid.

91Idem, "Daphne," p. 93.

gzldgm, "Politics," Caterpillar Anthology, p. 11.

 

93Idem, "Homage," Caterpillar, p. 93.

 

94IQEE, "Politics," Caterpillar Anthology, p. 12.

 

119

Politics is to Brown, "a cycle of explosion and re-
pression."95 This is madness to become divine, or origi-
nal, rather than madness to reinstitute the old forms of
repression in new manners. The call to a "Higher Logos"
of play which Brown makes is therefore less elusive. It
is a "logos of union" which is founded through "intellect
seeking union with energy."96 It is grown men playing
that Brown envisions; grown men who are using their
imaginations. Play is seen as aggressive behavior pre-
cisely in its attempts to transfigure man as the divine
creator. Imagination is more real to Brown than physical
objects for it alone can lead us back to our origins--our
essence. This is an eschatological philOSOphy only as it
is etiological--for man is seen as a recurrent phenomenon
developed through a "permanent revolution" of constant
creation which is a constant rebirth of the man. Brown
feels that only in the abolition of literal unilinear time
do we gain a communion with the "Species essence" of which
Brown comments Marx spoke. It is thus that imagination
destroys. In unilinear time, conceptions and events are
routines and have Specific causes. Brown believes that
the origin of civilization is therefore not lived out
through each man and life becomes a sober process of

flight and ennui from the terrors of death. Poetry is,

 

951bid-. p. 12. 96Ibid., p. 15.

120

instead, found to be "The rule of die-in-order-to-live

. . ."97 which is the very rule that destroys lineality.
Poetic imagination is not to be routinized, for it is our
graSp of our collective oneness with the universe.98

Since Brown understands that the development of the formal

law of contradiction, which is lineality, negates recur-

'F

\
‘I 1y.»
.- .

rence in mankind, he posits that the perception of the

4‘

origin of civilization is thereby repressed in mankind.

But he believes that in a "Higher Logos" we can escape

lwu.» ‘pllS-r 44*: 5?n_£¢¢%-‘Wa‘

#1. .*_~-... -

from ennui and fear perpetuated by the fact we feel
alienated from the world about us. Our formal logic is,
Brown feels, specific to a particular mode of conscious—
ness which is an historical contingency. Our civilization
is seen as merely a representative product of this mode
of consciousness and is therefore also a contingency.
Humans are not felt to be contingencies, but are espied
as significantly divine: "The Spirit is human; the in-
visible reality is human."99 Man discovers this divine
spirit within himself and the world as he becomes con-
Scious of his role in the mysterious process of the de-
velopment of everything he perceives—-"cultural" or

"natural."

 

97 98

Ibid., p. 17. Ibid., p. 18.

99Idem, "Daphne," p. 103.

121

The "Higher Logos" of which Brown speaks must be
beyond contingencies, but always mysterious. It is the
"mystical tradition" that is felt to have kept this Logos
alive, and man is shown to be able to participate in this
Higher Logos only as he becomes conscious of the veil the
"formal law of contradiction" has Spread over him. Here
Brown speaks of the burning away of error, or the under-
standing of the unnecessity of the reality principle. The
discovery, though, cannot be made through the rise of the
particular mode of consciousness which has produced the
particular culture to which a man is wedded and embedded.
Rather, Brown shows, it is gained only as the imagination
Operates freely. This is found to be the real behavior
of man, and to be the uniting factor between him and his
Supreme Divinity which is the Creator of Civilization.

If we take Brown seriously we see man is trapped by a
reality-principle or culture which is of his own making.
At the point of sheer divinity man is nothing in particu-
lar, yet is everything. (It cannot properly be expressed
in words for it is what creates language.) Therefore,
Brown posits that for man to gain unity with his divinity
he must be able "to redeem words, out of the market
place, out of the barking, into the silence; instead of

"100

commodities, symbols. This is to Brown the search

 

100Idem, Love's Body, p. 258.

 

 

122

for truth: "The true meanings of words are bodily mean-
ings, carnal knowledge; and the bodily meanings are the
unSpoken meanings. What is always speaking is the
body."101 Thus Brown says, "To rise from history to
mystery is to experience resurrection of the body here
now, as an eternal reality; to experience the prouisa,

the presence in the present, which is the spirit."102

‘41! i.”
... ,
“ 1“"

(Dionysus and Christ reborn in the death of the world
which has rent our bodies asunder. Dionysian Christianity

is ours.) Brown feels that "To let the silence in is
103

H‘W"?‘“F '~ ‘ . .- ‘ 7’. 3A—

symbolism." But is also perceived as a new mode of

consciousness by Brown, "If consciousness is all words
. . . . "104
and no Silence, the unconSCious remains unconscious.
A bodily, playful consciousness is created as man goes
down into the depths and discovers his union. The trip

105 and we will find this

down is not easy, Brown attests,
is always a question of a tempestuous furor of a religious
conversion. It is, as he says, "Religion hid in War," but
the war is the anachronistic reality-principle attempting
to destroy, crucify, the mad god within us, warns Brown.

Brown does not present a philosophy that is difficult for

an educator to follow. He says, "It is a question of

 

love . . ."106
1°11bid., p. 265. lozIbid., p. 214.
103 104

Ibid., p. 190. Ibid., p. 258.

105"Norman Brown's Body," P§X¢h0109Y TOdaY: P- 45-

 

106Brown, "Daphne," p. 103.

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