NY Times: Norman Brown, Playful Philosopher, 89, Is Dead

[Jim Farmelant <farmelantj@xxxxxxxx>]

Norman Brown, Playful Philosopher, 89, Is Dead

October 4, 2002
By DOUGLAS MARTIN

Norman O. Brown, an erudite and spectacularly playful
philosopher whose attempt to psychoanalyze nothing less
than history itself entranced intellectuals, beguiled New
Age seekers and sold many books, died on Wednesday in Santa
Cruz, Calif. He was 89.

His son Thomas N. Brown said he had Alzheimer's disease and
died at an assisted-living residence.

Dr. Brown was a master of philosophical speculation, mixing
Marx, Freud, Jesus and much else to raise and answer
immense questions. Alan Watts, the popular philosopher,
sang his praises. His works joined David Riesman's ``Lonely
Crowd'' and J.R.R. Tolkien's ``Lord of the Rings'' on the
reading lists of undergraduates aspiring to the
counterculture.

Scruffy pilgrims streamed to commune with him, only to
discover a short-haired man who lived in a split-level
house and avoided drugs. A meticulous student of ancient
Greek who was given to long, meditative walks with his
golden retriever, he was not a little perplexed when
magazine and newspaper articles linked him to the new left,
LSD and the sexual revolution.

``I have absolutely no use for the human-potential
movement,'' he said in an interview with Human Behavior
magazine in 1976.

His books were nonetheless gobbled up by scholars eager to
respond to hip-sounding ideas that combined erudition and a
poetical mysticism.

``Reading Brown was a little like taking drugs, only it was
more likely to lead to tenure,'' the sociologist Alan Wolfe
wrote in The New Republic in 1991.

In his ``Life Against Death: The Psychoanalytical Meaning
of History'' (Wesleyan University Press, 1959), he said
individuals and society were imprisoned by an essentially
Freudian ill: repression. He argued that the only escape
was to face death head-on and affirm life.

Maurice Richardson wrote in The New Statesman: ```Life
Against Death' is a running dive off the Freudian
springboard into history's deep end. It is a fascinating
book, discursive, inconsequent, sometimes preposterous, but
full of interesting ideas, product of a learned man in a
tight place, one of those rare genuine stimulators.''

Dr. Brown's book ``Love's Body'' (Random House, 1966)
discussed the role of erotic love in human history,
describing a struggle between eroticism and civilization.
He voted against civilization, a stance that elicited
praise and criticism.

Among his critics was Brigid Brophy in The New York Times
Book Review, who called Dr. Brown's assertion that
schizophrenics might be saner than those without the
disease ``the most preposterous ever made in serious
print.''

His ``Closing Time'' (Random House, 1973), an interweaving
of quotations from James Joyce's ``Finnegans Wake'' with
excerpts from the works of the 18th-century philosopher
Giambattista Vico, was ``an extraordinary tour de force,''
Library Journal said.

Norman Oliver Brown was born in El Oro, Mexico, on Sept.
25, 1913. His father was an English mining engineer, and he
was mainly reared and educated in England, where his tutor
at Balliol College, at Oxford University, was the eclectic
historian Sir Isaiah Berlin. He earned his doctorate in
classics at the University of Wisconsin.

>From 1943 to 1946 he served in the Office of Strategic
Services, the forerunner of the Central Intelligence
Agency. He became a friend of Herbert Marcuse, another
intelligence analyst and later analyst of society, and
those philosophers later engaged in spirited intellectual
debates for many years.

In 1938 he married Elizabeth Potter, who survives him. In
addition to her and his son Thomas, of Santa Cruz, he
leaves another son Stephen, who lives near Armstrong,
British Columbia; his daughters Rebecca Brown of Monte Rio,
Calif., and Susan Brown of Iowa City; and five
grandchildren.

Dr. Brown was a professor at Wesleyan University, the
University of Rochester and the University of California at
Santa Cruz.

He was a Marxist by sensibility and intellectual
inclination in the 1930's, and worked in the leftist
presidential campaign of the Progressive Party's Henry
Wallace in 1948. By the early 1950's, he decided that
politics did not answer the important questions, and became
enamored with Freud. He even learned to interpret his
dreams, which had the unwanted side effect of ruining his
sleep.

Sir Stuart Hampshire, an English philosopher who had known
Dr. Brown since they were students at Oxford, said
yesterday in a telephone interview that Dr. Brown was ``a
victim of theories,'' whether those of Marx or Freud. He
said Dr. Brown's idea that it was possible to abandon
Freudian morality in choosing an unrepressed life was ``not
really his life or anybody's life.''

But Sir Stuart praised many of Dr. Brown's intellectual
insights, mentioning in particular his recognition of
Jonathan Swift's hatred of the physical functions of the
body.

``Nobody had ever said that before,'' he said. ``It was
very, very intelligent.''

Jay Cantor, who teaches a mix of literature, philosophy and
psychoanalysis at Tufts University, said yesterday by phone
that Dr. Brown was brilliant at connecting seemingly
disparate subjects to form new insights. A typical example:
``If Freud is true it is because of connections with the
Gospel, and if the Gospel is true it is because of
connections with Marx, and if Marx is true it is because of
connections with James Joyce.''

Dr. Brown typically used memorized quotations to make the
connections, Dr. Cantor said. He added that Dr. Brown had a
modern poet's sensibility in his writings, allowing ``the
symbolism and the history of the words he used to lead his
thoughts.''

``Everything is only a metaphor,'' Dr. Brown wrote in
``Love's Body,'' ``there is only poetry.''

His favorite poetic sentiment was about how we all die with
unlived lives in our bodies. Dr. Cantor suggested that this
referred to ``the difficulty of breaking the mental chains
we carry within us.''

http://www.nytimes.com/2002/10/04/obituaries/04BROWN.html?ex=1034737851&e
i=1&en=4a80ae2529f61ab4

Copyright 2002 The New York Times Company



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