Irving Massey Books

A groundbreaking investigation into what neuroscience can and cannot tell us about the creation and appreciation of visual art, literature, and music.

Exploring the concept of nonsense, the book delves into its significant role in shaping our language and thought processes. Irving Massey draws on nearly forty years of expertise to examine its historical, grammatical, and philosophical dimensions. Through a unique writing style that incorporates overlap and contradiction, he invites readers to embrace nonsense as an essential aspect of human cognition, ultimately revealing its potential to enrich our understanding of the world.

The work begins with an attempt to understand the philosophy of Nazism and its attendant anti-Semitism, as a necessary prelude to the study of philo-Semitism, which also displays a continuous tradition to the present day. Most of the non-Jewish authors in Germany in the nineteenth century expressed both anti-Semitic and philo-Semitic views (as did most of the German-Jewish authors of that same time); the following work deals with philo-Semitic texts by the non-Jewish authors of the period. The writer who provides the largest body of relevant material is Leopold von Sacher-Masoch, but works by Gutzkow, Bettine von Arnim, Annette von Droste-Hülshoff, Hebbel, Freytag, Raabe, Fontane, Grillparzer, Ebner-Eschenbach, Anzengruber, and Ferdinand von Saar are also examined, as are several tales by the Alsatian authors Erckmann and Chatrian. There is a short chapter on women and philo-Semitism. The conclusion draws attention to the feelings of guilt that are revealed in a number of the texts.