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Follies of the Wise: Dissenting Essays | 
 enlarge | Author: Frederick Crews
Publisher: Shoemaker & Hoard
Category: Book
List Price: $26.00
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Avg. Customer Rating:  8 reviews
Sales Rank: 503386
Media: Hardcover
Edition: 1st Shoemaker & Hoard Ed
Number Of Items: 1
Pages: 396
Shipping Weight (lbs): 1.6
Dimensions (in): 9.1 x 6.1 x 1.7
ISBN: 1593761015
Dewey Decimal Number: 814.54
EAN: 9781593761011
ASIN: 1593761015
Publication Date: March 10, 2006
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Product Description
Best-selling author and Berkeley professor of thirty years Frederick Crews has always considered himself a skeptic. Forty years ago he thought he had found a tradition of thought — Freudian psychoanalytic theory — that had skepticism built into it. He gradually realized, however, that true skepticism is an attitude of continual questioning. The more closely Crews examined the logical structure and institutional history of psychoanalysis, the more clearly he realized that Freud's system of thought lacked empirical rigor. Indeed, he came to see Freudian theory as the very model of a modern pseudoscience.
Follies of the Wise contains Crews's best writing of the past fifteen years, including such controversial and widely quoted pieces as “The Unknown Freud” and “The Revenge of the Repressed,” essays whose effects still reverberate today. In addition, his topics range from “Intelligent Design” creationism to theosophy, from psychological testing to UFO zaniness, from American Buddhism to the current state of literary criticism. A single theme animates his bracing and witty discussions: the temptation to reach for deep wisdom without attending to the little voice that asks, "Could I, by any chance, be deceiving myself here?"
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| Customer Reviews: Read 3 more reviews...
 Against fashionable nonsense May 12, 2008
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Frederick Crews, a well-known American literary critic by trade, but also a popular writer on the 'culture wars' and on academia and academic practice, has collected a series of essays in "Follies of the Wise", most of them from the New York Review of Books.
The greater part of the collection is dedicated to refuting and eviscerating Freud and Freudianism, which is still unrelentingly influential both in the humanities and in pop psychology, if by no means in any scientific approach to psychological issues, where it has been discarded ages ago. Crews shows that Freud, rather than being a pioneer of science and an authoritative doctor surprised by the lurid confessions of his patients, in fact was a domineering and superstitious fraud, who badgered and pressured his patients into 'remembering' the most inane sexualized fantasies, until they either left his practice or gave in out of desperation. Freud and Freudianism have never cured a single person, and Freud himself in his 'secret' papers admits as much.
Moreover, Crews very effectively uses the critique of Freudianism to equally critique the highly damaging and unscientific theory of "repressed memories". Although a review of 60 years of experimental and clinical tests of this theory has revealed that there is not a single true case of "repressed memory", this theory has nonetheless been wedded in the United States to the Puritanism and sexual fright of that country, leading in the 1980s to a spate of "repressed memories" of the most absurd ritual Satanic sexual abuses and various other crimes. Most frighteningly, this was accepted without question by the courts and the general public (in the form of juries), who sentenced many people to long jail terms based on the fake evidence of this modern witch-hunt. Only recently has the damage from this theory fully come to light.
In the later part of the book, Crews takes aim on the one hand at the nonsensical evasions and pseudoscience of "intelligent design" as well as the platitudes and downplaying of scientific evidence by those, such as Ruse, who try to appease it. This topic has been done many times before by everyone from Weinberg to Dawkins to Lewontin, but Crews' essay is as good as any. What is more refreshing is that Crews also attacks the anti-scientific tendencies in the humanities, in particular literary science, that result from the wholesale adoption of the jargon and worldview of postmodernism and post-structuralism. While opposition to the scientific method and its results, not on a specific point but a priori, used to be the domain of precisely the reactionary religious groups in modern society, this has now more and more become the domain of disaffected pseudo- and former radicals. This tendency has proven highly damaging because it has given conservatives the opportunity to paint the entirety of academia and science as hopelessly ideological ivory tower idiots out of touch with normal people, which has greatly benefited their political position in times of contentious cultural shifts, such as in the United States. What is particularly remarkable is that unlike many other critics of this phenomenon, he does not see fit to dismiss or denigrate the entirety of the humanities or even just literature studies on the basis of this particular fad. Perhaps it helps here that Crews' on background is in this area, so that he can use a book on Melville to show that there are many other approaches also and that there is no reason to equate literary sciences with unreadable Lacanian jargon.
Crews does not, unfortunately, discuss the causes for the academic popularity of this ideology very extensively; but one suspects that for whatever reason (would-be) radical intellectuals have lost the prior faith of socialists in science and truth being on the side of the underdog in society. Instead, they now fear science and its results, afraid that it will reveal that leftism and its values was wrong all the time, so they adopt a rhetorical strategy of undermining the whole enterprise: sacrificing the Enlightenment to save the socialist project. If this theory (not one that Crews proposes) is true, it is all the more to be regretted that Crews counts Marxism in the same range as Freudianism and other made-up or unverifiable pseudo-theories. As reviewer Podmore already noted, Marxism is on the contrary an ally of science against all superstition and ideology, and what's more, Marxism also proves that science is on the side of the exploited and oppressed on its own terms, and that science does not need the dubious 'help' of all the revisionist fads from Black Athena to Lacan. It is sad that Crews does not recognize this.
 Brilliant demolition of various idealist nonsenses July 9, 2007
2 out of 3 found this review helpful
Frederick Crews is a retired teacher from the University of California, Berkeley. In this brilliant collection of essays, he passes judgment on `Intelligent Design' creationism, UFO reports, satanic mind control, alien abductions, previous incarnations and telepathy. He demolishes the frauds Freud and Jung, and he exposes the cults of psychoanalysis, theosophy, Zen Buddhism, channelling, rebirthing and past life regression.
As he writes, science is "not a body of correct or incorrect ideas but a collective means of generating and testing hypotheses, and its trials eventually weed out error with unmatched success." He suggests, "If knowledge can be certified only by a social process of peer review, we ought to do what we can to foster communities of uncompromised experts. That means actively resisting guru-ism, intellectual cliquishness, guilt-assuaging double standards, and, needless, to say, disdain for the very concept of objectivity."
He observes, "trust in the supernatural does get shaken by the overall advance of science. This is an effect not of strict logic but of an irreversible shrinkage in mystery's terrain. Ever since Darwin forged an exit from the previously airtight argument from design, the accumulation of corroborated materialist explanations has left the theologian's `God of the gaps' with less and less to do. And an acquaintance with scientific laws and their uniform application is hardly compatible with faith-based tales about walking on water, a casting-out of devils, and resurrection of the dead."
He notes that certain features characterize religious fanaticism - "undue deference to authority, hostility towards dissenters, and, most basically, an assumption that intuitively held certitude is somehow more precious and profound than the hard-won gains of trial and error." He writes, "certain indicators of bad faith ... are unmistakable: persistence in claims that have already been exploded; reliance on ill-designed studies, idolized lawgivers, and self-serving anecdotes; evasion of objections and negative instances; indifference to rival theories and to the need for independent replication; and `movement' belligerence."
Unfortunately, he uses his justified attack on Freud to swipe at Marxism, as if exploitation and class conflict were as unreal as the Oedipus complex. Marxism is an ally of reason and common sense against wishful thinking and superstition. Nonetheless, Crews has produced a valuable book that examines and explodes many absurd claims and theories.
 Inferior to Alternatives April 19, 2007
4 out of 8 found this review helpful
Crews' repentance for being lured into Freudian metaphysics of mind is welcome, but alas a bit late. How many students of literature have been contaminated by another ideology of English literary studies? And, Lacan, of the French post-modernist ilk still psycho-babbles, despite Foucault's indictments of the Cult of Therapy. Sociologist Philip Reiff (deceased) praised the Therapeutic Cult for its shift of focus, only to lament the death-works (Thanatos) of self-absorption posthumously. It's all lamentable, but Crews' late-date conversion and this deserved polemic is still unsatisfying.
For literary theorists who repudiate all this nonsense, I recommend Joseph Carroll's "Literary Darwinism" over Crews' alternative. While I have reservations about "fitting" literary theory into sociobiology's paradigm, Carroll's efforts are far more compelling and persuasive than Crews'. Yes, Darwinism is an empirical fact; so too are works of the creative imagination a fact -- just different types of fact. Trying to "fit" the creative imagination into a scientific paradigm is not without its own set of problems. But at least a theory about life itself, as E. O. Wilson's "Consilience" argues, should be a more viable template than the post-modernist fantasies espoused by Derrida, Lacan, Barthes, and the French pseudo-intellectual class.
As a Darwinian, I still have regard for the hermeneutics of Ricoeur, Gadamer, and Richards; the social constructionism of Searle; the philosophy of language of Austin and Wittgenstein; the criticism of Arnold, Frye, Auerbach, and Boothe; etc. While Darwinism informs us of how life evolved, it does not explain what we mean when we use words, how context changes meaning, how our imaginations concoct stories, narratives, or myths. Literary Darwinism surely surpasses most of the ideologies in today's English departments, but in philosophical parlance, it is necessary, but insufficient. At least, apostates are repenting, and that's a start.
Classic Crews April 6, 2007
1 out of 1 found this review helpful
Trenchant, devastating critiques of pseudoscience and hokum from "intelligent " design, to the psychoanalyst's couch, to the most hallowed halls of academe. Virtuoso displays of good scholarship, good logic, and good humor. A joy to read, and a brave challenge to the empire of superstition and nonsense.
Should be follies of the not very wise March 13, 2007
7 out of 12 found this review helpful
The author Crews is a person who worked as an academic in the field of literature. Years ago he was a follower of the noted quack Freud. He later gained insight into the fact that Freud's work was that of a confidence trickster without the slightest merit and that it was part of branch of human reasoning described by Popper as essentialism. That is a set of ideas which were incapable of empirical testing or evaluation.
Fresh from this conversion Crews has thus devoted a good deal of the latter part of his life in revealing the error of Freud's system to the world. A number of the early essays in this book discuss Freud and aspects of his life and ideas. Crews seems just a little bitter about the issues and shows how Freud was more than a deluded fool. He shows that he never cured anyone and his work is simply a confidence trick.
In reality Freud has probably not been taken seriously as a thinker by anyone who has medical expertise for years. His main followers are people in some sections of academia where the work is to turn out turgid works talking about things already known but trying to put a bit of a spin on them so that one can get a thesis up or an articled published. To read again that his work is simply nonsense is not that interesting all though this book does reveal the fact that he was aware that he never actually cured anyone.
Crews however seemed to develop a passion for debunking stupid idea systems. He is clearly a highly intelligent and educated man and as such was called upon by the New York Review of books to write debunking essays on a number of things. He thus attacks the fashion for recovered memories, UFO abductions, intelligent design and Poststructuralism.
Although the essays on Freud are fighting a battle which has been won the other essays deal with issues that are still being fought out in the public arena and are an excellent starting point to gain knowledge of the issues. The only real criticism of the book was the that the essay on Poststructuralism was a little dull.
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