In Defense of Norman O. Brown

Lionel Abel’s “Important Nonsense: Norman 0. Brown” (DISSENT, March-April 1968) proves only that Abel calls “nonsense” anything that won’t squeeze into his preconceptions. Brown’s work just doesn’t fit the squeeze, and so it cannot be fairly described—much less criticized—in Abel’s terms. Abel has to distort and mangle in order to get the appearance of a fit at all. His idea that Love’s Body might somehow “destroy” statements once made by Aristotle is typical of the desperation with which he tries to demolish that book. Discussion would be pointless. But what he does with Life Against Death reveals crippling implications in his own approach which must accompany any acceptance of his conclusions.

The big squeeze is evident in Abel’s facile equation of a concept of human nature once discussed by Max Scheler with that in Brown’s Life Against Death. Brown’s theory, we are advised, is “a merely rhetorical revision.” For Brown’s addition of the concepts of sublimation and repression to that theory is only “some slight difference in rhetoric.” But in Abel’s paraphrase of Life Against Death, Brown is saying that “man is a `disease,’ that he has always been ill, and that what we call history is nothing other than the sequence of events motivated by, or symptomatic of, man’s illness.” Now this amounts to a tolerable jacket b...