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ABSTRACT
US-American philosopher Norman O. Brown (1913–2002) was one of the very few twentieth-century intellectuals to situate hermaphroditism at the core of their work. Although Brown’s publications became cult books of the then emerging protest subcultures and were eventually regarded as milestones in the history of Freudian revisionism, the reception of his views on hermaphroditism has been insubstantial. The present contribution focuses at first on Brown’s attempt to supersede binary sexuality and its same-sex/other-sex combinatories by positing an ambit of hermaphroditic reconciliation that emerges from the depths of the unconscious, but is effectual only as an eschatological ideal. Against this backdrop, Brown’s consequential neglect of Charles Darwin’s universalization of corporeal hermaphroditism and of Magnus Hirschfeld’s conception of human sexual intermediariness are analyzed and assessed.
Disclosure statement
No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.
Notes
1. Despite its systematic relevance in the context of Brown’s post-Christian reconfiguration of Heilsgeschichte, the eschatological figure of the Hermaphrodite is for the most part not even mentioned, let alone parsed or interpreted in Brownian scholarship. Signally, the issue shines by its absence in David Greenham’s The Resurrection of the Body (Citation2006), the only book-length presentation of Brown’s oeuvre. Similarly, there is no reference to Brown’s take on the conciliatory Hermaphrodite in Eli Zaretsky’s Secrets of the Soul, a history of psychoanalysis in which the issue could have been conveniently dealt with on several occasions (see, for instance, Zaretsky, Citation2005, pp. 48, 352n23). For no apparent reason, some of the most often referenced research essays on Brown thematize his recurrent recourse to Dionysian tropes and topoi (see, for instance, Bellah, Citation1971; Bortolini, Citation2020; Carlevale, Citation2005; Hamilton, Citation1968), but avoid dealing, even tangentially, with his elaborations on the post-historical Hermaphrodite or the problem of hermaphroditism. In two strongly adversarial articles seeking to dismantle Brown’s Gnostic abolition of history and culture, Richard W. Noland unexplainably sidesteps the Brownian encodement of the end of all ends in the outrageous personage of the apocalyptical Hermaphrodite, which is designed to replace the Christ of the Second Coming (Noland, Citation1968–1969, Winter; Noland, Citation1969, Summer). In slight contrast to these multiform strategies of avoidance, E. F. Dyck has hinted to the presence of the androgyny motif in the historico-philosophical reflections of Brown’s Closing Time (Dyck, Citation1989, p. 40).
2. It is worth noting in this connection that the oxymoronic character of expressions like “vaginal father” has been seriously called into question by biotechnological developments of the last decades, which anticipate that biological womanhood will soon not be a necessary condition for humans to give birth. Significantly, in his 1999 book titled The IVF Revolution, renowned British gynecologist Robert Winston not only argued that male pregnancies constitute a realistic possibility in the foreseeable future, but detailed the technical means needed to achieve that end. After pointing out that “effectively, our man could suffer all the risks of an advanced and most dangerous form of ectopic pregnancy,” Winston went on to assert in all desirable clarity: “There is no doubt that men could get pregnant” (Winston, Citation1999, p. 207).
3. Shortly prior to this remark, Darwin noted: “Every animal surely is hermaphrodite” (Darwin, Citation1987, p. 380 [Notebook D (1838), no. 154]).
4. Notwithstanding the significant omissions in his appropriation of Darwinian evolution, Brown appears to concur with the basic views advanced by John Dewey (1859–1952) in The Influence of Darwinism on Philosophy (1910) (Dewey, Citation1997). Accordantly, Brown reserved a place of honor for Darwin in the history of critical thought on account of his path-breaking and sobering contentions regarding humanity’s animal origination (see, for instance, Brown, Citation1985, pp. 13, 185). Brown scholarship, however, has been generally reticent to acknowledge and scrutinize the impact of evolution on Brown’s revision of psychoanalysis, as is suggested by the complete absence of Darwin from the otherwise well researched volume by David Greenham (Citation2006). In this connection it should also be noted that psychoanalysis historian Eli Zaretsky passes over in silence Brown’s failing account of Darwinian hermaphroditism, while referring in his discussion of the sexological concept of androgyny to Darwin’s postulation of a “remote progenitor of the whole vertebrate kingdom [that] appears to have been hermaphrodite or androgynous” (Zaretsky, Citation2005, p. 352; see Darwin, Citation1981, Part I, p. 207).
5. To underpin his views regarding Taoism, Brown adduces in Life After Death the authority of British sinologist and scientist Joseph Needham (1900–1995), who had asserted that “Taoist mysticism seeks to recover the androgynous self” (Brown, Citation1985, p. 134). Brown then refers to a passage from the Tao Te Ching as quoted by Needham: “He who knows the male, yet cleaves to what is female/Becomes like a ravine, receiving all things under heaven/(Thence) the eternal virtue never leaks away,/This is returning to the state of infancy” (Needham, Citation1956, p. 589). In the last chapter of Life Against Death, Brown comes back to the issue, specifying: “Taoist mysticism invokes feminine passivity to counteract masculine aggressivity” (Brown, Citation1985, p. 313). As Brown was well aware of, creative processes were associated in the Tao Te Ching and in earlier Chinese classics with the union of male and female. Importantly, sinologist D. C. Lau has pointed in this connection to the fact that “the yin and the yang appear once and only once in the whole of the Lao Tzu” (Lau, Citation2001, p. xxxvii). The passage referred to is particularly relevant to Brown’s line of argument, for it implies that (female) yin and (male) yang are principles that inhere in the “myriad creatures” of the cosmos, including all human individuals. In the Wang Pi text of the Tao Te Ching, the passage in question reads:
“The way begets one; one begets two; two begets three; three begets the myriad creatures./The myriad creatures carry on their backs the yin and embrace in their arms the yang and are the blending of the generative forces of the two” (Tao Te Ching, Citation2001, p. 63 [XLII, 93–94]).
The Ma Wang Tui manuscripts, which were discovered only in 1973, bring an interesting specification in the second part of the passage: “The myriad creatures carry on their backs the yin and hold in their arms the yang, taking the ch’i in between as harmony” (Tao Te Ching, Citation2001, p. 197 [XLII]; see Lao Tzu’s Tao Te Ching, Citation2000, pp. 122–125). On these assumptions, it becomes apparent that the notions of yin and yang constitute the cornerstone of a non-dualistic ontology that is also valid in the material world and therefore contravenes Brown’s core assumption of a this-worldly hiatus between man and woman.
6. For Brown, “the hermaphroditic ideal is central […] in the message of Rilke.” Arguing that in Letters to a Young Poet the writer had envisaged a future in which the sexes “will seek each other not as opposites, but as brother and sister, […] and will come together as human beings, “ Brown highlights that, according to his friend Lou Andreas-Salomé, Rilke considered that “both sexes unite into an entity” (Brown, Citation1985, p. 134; italics in the original). Accordingly, as an artist, Rilke “calls on God to make him a hermaphrodite” (Brown, Citation1985, p. 134). The reference to the passage from Letters is: Rilke, Citation1934, p. 38; for comparison, the original German version of the passage can be consulted in: Rilke, Citation2009, p. 29. The verses in which Rilke addresses God are quoted from Das Stunden-Buch: Rilke, Citation1976, p. 349. For the whole paragraph, Brown remits to: Simenauer, Citation1954, pp. 240–242). The pregnant phrase from Lou Andreas-Salomé's Rainer Maria Rilke that Brown quotes in English translation (but without referencing) is embedded in a complex sentence, which hints at the male element in female creativity (see Andreas-Salomé, Citation2016, p. 31–32). In the sentence immediately preceding the passage that Brown quotes from Letters, Rilke refers to the specific capacity of motherhood inherent in the male (Rilke, Citation2009, p. 29). Despite mentioning that the motherhood of man includes a “corporeal” (leibliche) aspect, Rilke makes clear that what is at stake is only something like giving birth (eine Art Gebären). Remaining throughout within the preserve of metaphorization, Rilke propounds a transformative rapprochement between man and woman that by no means implies the factual dissolution of the binomial understanding of sexuality. Rilke’s advocacy of “the reunification of the sexes in the self” reflects his desire to have a “nice womb, and its pudenda like a gateway […] in a blond forest of young hairs” (Rilke, Citation1976, p. 349). But his “poetical quest […] for an hermaphroditic body” (Brown, Citation1985, p. 313) has lastly no bearing on the poet’s grasp of the masculinity that marks his corporeal sexuality. Thus, on these assumptions, Rilke could not have assumed the scope of Darwin’s universalized hermaphroditism nor the insights suggested in chapter XLII of the Tao Te Ching (Tao Te Ching, Citation2001, p. 197).
7. “les chevilles et emboîtements dans une charpente.”
8. “[L]e neutre est ce qui prend place entre la marque et la non-marque, cette sorte de tampon […] dont le rôle est d’étouffer, d’adoucir, de fluidifier le tic-tac sémantique, ce bruit métronomique qui signe obsessionnellement l’alternance paradigmatique: oui/non, oui/non, oui/non, etc.”
9. “[…] la sensitive, le coing, la chauve-souris, le poisson-volant, les amphibies, les zoophites et tant d’autres espèces qui forment dans chaque règne les liens des différentes séries […].”
10. “[…] ces caractères de transition, ces ambigus ou mixtes si dédaignés aujourd’hui, deviendront, en Association, des liens éminemment favorables à l’essor des vertus sociales.”
11. Early in his career as a classical philologist, though, Brown readily confronted questions akin to those that had led Darwin to historicize Nature and to regard the human world as the result of Nature’s becoming. In the introduction to his 1953 translation of Hesiod’s Theogony, Brown pointed out: “The key to the speculative structure of the Theogony is the idea of history; in Hesiod’s view, the present order of the universe can only be understood as the outcome of a process of growth and change” (Brown, Citation1953, p. 15).
12. Despite its erudite quality, David Greenham’s The Resurrection of the Body epitomizes the extent to which scholarship has disregarded the presence of Charles Darwin and the eschatological Hermaphrodite in the Brownian corpus. Greenham’s book is primarily concerned with presenting Brown’s post-Christianity as “a secular apotheosis of the resurrected human body” (Greenham, Citation2006, p. 74). Given the unjustified absence of the Hermaphrodite from the book’s arguments, one can only speculate whether the exclusion was motivated by his/her being the encodement of an ersatz Christology, whose original Brown, the secularist post-Christian, had already done away with. Furthermore, the circumvention of the results of Darwin’s prosaic research logic as a defining influence on Brown’s thought is not really surprising, if one considers Greenham’s absorption with the issue of symbolism and the creative imagination. It seems safe to assume that Greenham opted for neglecting Darwin, the theoretician of hermaphroditism, as well as the preternatural Hermaphrodite, the nullifier of the man/woman chasm, given the book’s design to depict a sexual thinker, who lastly conformed to the symbolic order of binary sexuality anticipated in the Pythagorean table of opposites transmitted by Aristotle (Aristotle, Citation1968, p. 34 [986 a 22–30] [= Metaphysics I, 5, 6]). Greenham, relying on Kantian transcendental arguments and Cornelius Castoriadis’ philosophy of the imagination, goes at length to show that Brown’s philosophical symbolism preserved an unknowable, “noumenal” mystery, whose epistemic non-assimilability spurs man’s imagination to the creation—or, in Brown’s parlance: “ab-nihilation”—of a world that allows to recognize “the ‘next world’ in the present” (Greenham, Citation2006, p. 133). As though the attribution to Brown of a Bultmanian-like “präsentische Eschatologie” would resolve the fundamental paradoxes posed by his ontology of history, Greenham ignores the limits imposed on any poetic world poiesis by the finitizing logic of scientific research and its falsification procedures. Within this ambit, indeterminate becoming morphs into a form of potentially endless progress that preserves from the hybris of definitive finalities. By neglecting Darwin’s science-based postulation of hermaphroditism and the sexual anthropology ensuing therefrom, Greenham relinquishes an epistemic stance that would have allowed him to dismantle Brown’s unwarranted maintenance of sexual binarity in the natural world, and render pointless the figurative hypostasis of an in-coelo fusion of Nature’s allegedly fissioned sexes. Since Greenham omits thematizing the ciscendent sexual binarism and transcendent ambisexuality advanced by Brown, he leaves no room in his book-length empathetic paraphrasis for deploying a fundamental critique of Brown’s most cherished theo-philosophical assumptions.
13. At this juncture it is apposite to remind that Brown did not relate his own postulation of the eschatological Hermaphrodite to Darwin’s universalization of hermaphroditism. Neither did he recurred to Darwin’s concept of sexual “intermediate gradations” (see, for instance, Darwin, Citation1985, p. 103) in his discussion of ciscendent sexuality. Both issues, however, became essential components in the configuration of Hirschfeld’s “doctrine of sexual intermediary degrees.” Since most sexology scholars and historians have unfortunately ignored Hirschfeld’s reconceptualization of sexual difference, they had no science-based arguments at their disposal for rejecting Brown’s sanction of the this-worldly validity assigned to sexual binarity, which the supernal Hermaphrodite was deemed to supplant in post-history. Furthermore, since misrepresentations of Hirschfeld’s sexology have been widespread in psychoanalytical circles since the times of Sigmund Freud (see Bauer, Citation2015a, Citation2015b), sexual historiography has often overlooked that, from a Hirschfeldian perspective, Karl Heinrich Ulrichs’ suppletory hypostatization of a “third sex” is epistemically baseless. Interestingly enough, the distortion of Hirschfeld’s sexological premises at times goes as far as to attribute to him a conception of homosexuality as a “third or intermediate sex” (Zaretsky, Citation2005, p. 49).
14. “Jeder Mann behält seine verkümmerte Gebärmutter, den Uterus masculinus, die überflüssigen Brustwarzen, jede Frau ihre zwecklosen Nebenhoden und Samenstränge bis zum Tode.”
15. “Wir dürfen aber mit aller Bestimmtheit annehmen, daß auch hier Residuen des zum Untergang bestimmten Triebes zurückbleiben […].”
16. “In der Uranlage sind alle Menschen körperlich und seelisch Zwitter.”
17. “Sehr streng wissenschaftlich genommen, dürfte man […] gar nicht von Mann und Weib sprechen, sondern nur von Menschen, die größtenteils männlich oder größtenteils weiblich sind.”
18. “Hinsichtlich der Sexualkonstitution […] jeder Mensch seine Natur und sein Gesetz hat […].”
19. “Die homosexuellen Männer, die in unseren Tagen eine energische Aktion gegen die gesetzliche Einschränkung ihrer Sexualbetätigung unternommen haben, lieben es, sich durch ihre theoretischen Wortführer als eine von Anfang an gesonderte geschlechtliche Abart, als sexuelle Zwischenstufen, als ein ‘drittes Geschlecht’ hinstellen zu lassen.”
20. “etwas Vollständiges oder auch nur nahezu Abgeschlossenes.”
21. “allzu oberflächliche Einteilungsschema der Sexualkonstitutionen in Mann und Weib.”
22. “eine der gewaltigsten Umwälzungen.”