Aside from The Outsider and Tropic of Cancer, the other life-changing book I read this year (yes, it’s been a big year of reading discoveries) was Life Against Death by Norman O. Brown. I actually heard about it last fall, when I bought a large book on Stanley Kubrick as a Christmas present for my brother. The author of the Kubrick book was semi-obsessed with Brown’s work, and he would reference it when writing about 2001: A Space Odyssey and A Clockwork Orange. Given my semi-obsession with those films, I had no choice but to get Life.
Reading the book, I had the sense that Brown was speaking directly to me. It seemed to connect many different ideas, concepts, and experiences in my mind in ways I was unprepared or incapable of doing myself. It was a breath of fresh intellectual air, but it hit me like a tornado–and right from the start, too. The book is the result of Brown’s exhaustive studies of Freud’s psychoanalysis. However, it’s not a biography; it’s a highly interpretive work that connects psychology, philosophy (especially Hegel and Spinoza), history, and literature. Brown hopes to explain and eventually absolve mankind’s “restlessness and discontent.” One of my favorite paragraphs came on page 16:
“Mankind today is still making history without having any conscious idea of what it really wants or under what conditions it would stop being unhappy; in fact what it seems to be doing is making itself more unhappy and calling that unhappiness progress.”
“Freud’s real critique of religion…is the contention…that true humility lies in science. True humility, he says, requires that we learn from Copernicus that the human world is not the purpose or center of the universe; that we learn from Darwin that man is a member of the animal kingdom; and that we learn from Freud that the human ego is not even master in its own house.”
“History is shaped, beyond our conscious wills, not by the cunning of Reason but by the cunning of Desire.”
This page alone lessened the awkwardness I have felt for being a science nerd first and a reader/writer second. It suddenly made sense: why I was obsessed with astronomy in high school; why I took a history of Darwin class in college; why (also in college) I took a Freud/psychoanalysis class; why I couldn’t shake the knowledge I had accumulated through all three endeavors.
As with most theoretical nonfiction studies, things get extremely messy and somewhat less interesting towards the end. It’s a lot easier to construct the big ideas on page 16 than it is to divide them up into dozens of sub-ideas. Anyways, I highly recommend the book. (Does it seem weird to anyone else that most of the stuff I’ve been writing about is from the late 1950s?)
Similar Posts:
- The Human Mystique (March 10, 2010)
- Mere Indoctrination (December 9, 2008)
- The Emergency of Life in a Modern World (January 20, 2009)
- An Enlightenment Steak, With A Side Of Karma (November 6, 2008)
- An Orange in the Rookers of Bog (December 23, 2008)
