Norman O. Brown
Norman O. Brown
Norman Oliver Brownwas an American scholar, writer, and social philosopher. Beginning as a classical scholar, his later work branched into wide-ranging, erudite, and intellectually sophisticated considerations of history, literature, psychology, culture, and other topics. Brown advanced some novel theses and in his time achieved some general notability...
NationalityAmerican
ProfessionPhilosopher
Date of Birth25 September 1913
CountryUnited States of America
exercise self order
The human body is not a thing or substance, given, but a continuous creation. The human body is an energy system which is never a complete structure; never static; is in perpetual inner self-construction and self-destruction; we destroy in order to make it new.
lead
The view only changes for the lead dog.
truth errors truth-is
Truth is error burned up.
reality self ego
The boundary line between self and external world bears no relation to reality; the distinction between ego and world is made by spitting out part of the inside, and swallowing in part of the outside.
guests world walks
Whoever expects to walk peacefully in the world must be money's guest.
psychology society progress
Psychoanalysis can provide a theory of 'progress,' but only by viewing history as a neurosis.
vulnerable vulnerability
To be is to be vulnerable.
currency neurotic
All currency is neurotic currency.
religious money heirs
The money complex is the demonic, and the demonic is God's ape; the money complex is therefore the heir to and substitute for the religious complex, an attempt to find God in things.
fashion humanity survival
Utopian speculations ... must come back into fashion. They are a way of affirming faith in the possibility of solving problems that seem at the moment insoluble. Today even the survival of humanity is a utopian hope.
mad way resisting
Resisting madness is the maddest way of being mad.
essence common-sense long
In its famous paradox, the equation of money and excrement, psychoanalysis becomes the first science to state what common sense and the poets have long known - that the essence of money is in its absolute worthlessness.
reality insane favors
The insane do not share the normal prejudice in favor of external reality.
history stage commemoration
History is the enactment of ritual on a permanent and universal stage; and its perpetual commemoration.