The Closing of Allan Bloom's Mind
Kesler, Charles R.
THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR VOL. 20, NO. 8 / AUGUST 1987 Charles R. Kesler THE CLOSING OF ALLAN BLOOM'S MIND An instant classic reconsidered. T ike every serious political movement since the...
...Instead, they become a kind of alternative to Socratic dialectic, a sort of hope or illusion necessary to make life worth living...
...Doubtless their graduates do go on to commit all sorts of mischief...
...and when the discrete phenomena of politics are subsumed under theoretical categories...
...Bloom is at his most devastating in his depiction of the typical university professoriate, most of whom are beset by secret and not so secret self-loathing because, hoodwinked by the fact-value distinction, they are unable to defend the value of their own vocation...
...When it comes to handling serious German philosophy, we are "children playing with adult toys," it is all "too much for us to handle," and so on and so forth...
...It is certainly a melancholy observa- tion that the years of precipitate decline in American education—since the Second World War, but especially since the 1960s, according to Bloom—are also the years of the rise of American conservatism...
...but on the evidence of his own approach in this book, there is little that one can learn about the soul from politics, as opposed to erotics or culture...
...The shameful episodes at Cornell become mere examples of Heideggerianism working itself out...
...whereas in doing the former, one does not deprive the low of the freedom to reveal itself fully as what it is...
...Learning to play fair and honorably, to admire excellence (even in one's opponents), and to emulate those who are the best, is such a basic part of the American character that we are perhaps tempted to discount or overlook it...
...Reading Thucydides," he writes, "shows us that the decline of Greece was purely political, that what we call intellectual history is of little importance for understanding it...
...Of course, this meant that there was not really a Socratic turn in philosophy, that Socratic and (so-called) pre-Socratic thought were not fundamentally different...
...At the same time, it should be noted that Bloom does not regard the radicals' victory at Cornell and elsewhere Somewhat to the embarrassment of Bloom's thesis, which emphasizes the inability of Americans to digest serious thought, his book has become a popular hit...
...but it was necessary for human beings to will or create values, not for the sake of truth but for the sake of life...
...openness has driven out the local deities, leaving only the speechless, meaningless country...
...politics must be moderate, mostly if not entirely to protect philosophers...
...Americans have, Bloom asserts, been affected by each of these strands of modern thought, so that we are schizophrenic as between self-interest and virtue, commerce and citizenship, calcula14 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1987 Lion and reverie...
...and far from being conditional on man's obligations to God (as Madison and Jefferson had argued, for instance), it was meant to attenuate, if not to abolish entirely, man's reliance on anything higher than himself...
...but philosophy and science took over as rulers in modernity, and purely theoretical problems have decisive political effects...
...His book pleads for a return to genuine openness, to the quest for knowledge of ourselves, to the undiminished and exalting eros that culminates in the love of wisdom, or philosophy...
...Bloom objects to American nihilism not because it is immoral, but because it is thoughtless...
...Bloom is not particularly interested, however, in the high-minded point of view of the Founding Fathers, Lincoln, and (in attenuated form) the majority of Americans—not because he dislikes America but because, au fond, he is not interested in politics...
...Americans like their Nietzsche watered down, however, so our relativism is easy-going and democraticnihilism without the abyss," in Bloom's words, and also without the Inferno...
...While here and there a conservative professor and perhaps even department can be found today, conservatism's influence on the academy as a whole is still negligible...
...Given that Bloom correctly, and courageously, compares the New Left to the Fascist movements of the 1930s, one would expect him to have a few words of gratitude for the good sense of the vast majority of American voters who arrested the spread of Radicalism from the campuses to the national government...
...but that it so completes what was left incomplete in the American Founding as to be almost its culmination, rather than its corruption...
...It was not long afterward that at least some of these parents and other members of Nixon's great "Silent Majority" saved the country from George McGovern, the kids' candidate...
...Their home in America was the universities, and the violation of that home was the crime of the sixties...
...On the contrary, he understands it as a further subordination of the university to society, as part of the general relaxation of standards that he believes to be characteristically American...
...loom's impoverished or abstract 1.) conception of political philosophy, which radically separates morality and philosophy, might seem to be balanced by his accounts of the casual amoralism of today's students and the cowardice and phony idealism of Cornell's faculty during the 1969 campus upheavals...
...Yet from its earliest beginnings, American conservatism has presumed that the case for free society rested on the ability of free men and women to make precisely such difficult, and often painful, distinctions between tolerable and intolerable uses of liberty...
...Which is not to deny that the "politic" presentation of philosophy is a vital part of political philosophy's meaning...
...He just cannot take it seriously, except as a threat to philosophy...
...The deeper understanding of the meaning of nobility comes later, but is prepared for by the sensuous experience and is actually contained in it...
...The result is sometimes amusing if not always enlightening...
...and Buckley, with L. Brent Bozell, would soon after write the most intellectually satisfying apology for McCarthy, McCarthy and His Enemies, which had the misfortune to be published just as the Senator was self-destructing in the Army-McCarthy hearings...
...Instead of being the first philosopher to take ethics and politics seriously—to philosophize by questioning men's opinions about "What is justice...
...But Platonic education con-sists of gymnastic as well as music, and on gymnastic Bloom is silent...
...The story of American life—according to Bloom—consists therefore of various attempts, ever more "creative," to fill that empty center...
...Reason showed, on the contrary, that there was a radical separation between facts (the residue of nature) and values (the constituents of human happiness and flourishing...
...of the New York Times non-fiction best-seller list...
...To be sure, the character of athletes is not incorruptible...
...It is not that concentrating on the top thirty or so universities is unreasonable...
...their inevitable exhaustion is what has got us in the present fix...
...To this extent, conservatism has insisted on viewing the low in the light of the high, has adopted the viewpoint of American citizenship at its best, has, sometimes clumsily, striven to call Americans back to their own best selves...
...For as Bloom describes it, the Founding was based on the "rights doctrine," deriving from Hobbes via Locke, which deduced rights from man's passions...
...Although Bloom mentions the "race of heroes" bred out of the Declaration of Independence—men like Washington, Jefferson, and Lincoln—he dismisses them almost in the same breath...
...It should be noted," he writes, "that sex is a theme hardly mentioned in the thought underlying the American Founding...
...Bloom contends, however, that political philosophers never seriously considered themselves as teachers of legislators, because the philosophic study of politics and morality did not amount to very much...
...What he celebrates in ancient Greece he refuses even to admit in the case of America...
...On the evidence brilliantly adduced in this volume, however, it is hard to see anything very good, or true, or beautiful in today's universities...
...True satisfaction of the self's desires was possible only by the difficult peeling-away of the accretions of civilization, in pursuit of the sweet, natural sentiment of existence—a task that was possible only for a few solitary dreamers, not for society as a whole...
...Bloom objects to American nihilism not because it is immoral, but because it is thoughtless...
...What makes the American mind interesting, therefore, is precisely how its original Lockeanism has been deepened and complicated by the contradictory Rousseauean longings for social solidarity and individual happiness...
...Young men and women were attracted by the beauty of heroes whose very bodies expressed their nobility...
...There is no discussion of any politically relevant form of natural right or justice in the book...
...Old regimes had traditional roots...
...Consider his overall view of the present predicament...
...That, at least, is the impression given by the main contours of Bloom's argument...
...There is no real consideration of this, the pre-eminent political dimension of the education of the American mind, in Bloom's book...
...but of the American Founding which depended on Founding Fathers—who were, after all, creating a nation, which would certainly seem to make them procreative...
...Recounting the declining influence on today's undergraduates of family, religion, books, and love, and the increasing sway of feminism, divorce,rock music, and sex, Bloom invites Americans to think about what they and their children are becoming...
...In fact, God was the victim of an elaborate assassination plot and coup—masterminded by Hobbes and Locke but executed over here by their minions (or dupes), the American Founders...
...Thus, far from Nietzscheanism being alien to American political principles,it was the (admittedly) radical conclusion waiting to be drawn from those principles...
...Bright students have plenty of opinions, especially about politics...
...In fairness, the dispute is really over what constitutes "the high" in American life...
...Given philosophy's inability to will such a new Weltanschauung, however, Bloom must settle for "the good old Great Books approach" as a method for restoring awareness of the fundamental opinions...
...Politics is replaced by history, and not even by genuine political history but by the history of modern political philosophy, in Bloom's account of America...
...The logical absurdity of tolerating intolerance, of granting absolute freedom to Communists and others who would destroy freedom, is acknowledged by him...
...Not from the Founding Fathers' principles, which are too low and selfish, too unerotic...
...The result is both to vulgarize Nietzsche and to corrupt democracy, producing the moral virtue of our day, "openness...
...and the pre-eminent duty of our statesmen has been to remind us of and to defend those principles, to help to educate a properly American citizenry...
...but it was only a part, complemented by the serious philosophic study of "the human things," moral and political affairs...
...In any case, the significant question is not whether the moral and intellectual tone of the American people has declined—it has, and Bloom has some harsh truths to tell us on this subject, though the decline has not always been for the reasons he presents, nor is it as bad or as comprehensive as he maintains...
...Yet Great Books are not a religion, certainly not the Old Time Religion...
...But surely no student of Plato, evaluating the effects of education on Americans' souls, ought to overlook the games that we play both as children and adults...
...The Progressive movement quickly established its hold on American higher education, founding new departments and professional associations for the study of "scientific" political science and economics, for example, and educating thousands of young reformers who would go on to staff the agencies and commissions of the New Deal...
...But, to take the latter example, even his marvelously sardonic account of the Cornell uprising studiously avoids proper names...
...For all his talk of facing up to hard choices, Bloom never makes explicit just what is at stake educationally and politically...
...the German philosophical invasion has, like some dread virus, penetrated to the nucleus of American life and begun to take over the whole cell...
...But in Bloom's hands, Socrates becomes Thales with legal problems...
...Although he doubts that politics has anything to teach philosophy, Bloom concedes that political or "politic" philosophy has something to teach politics, namely, moderation...
...16 THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1987 to have resulted in the further alienation of the university from society...
...just ask the Daughters of the American Revolution—it quickly runs into difficulties...
...In keeping with his position on the primacy of the intellectual, Bloom declares that the primary obligation is for society to minister to the universities, and not the other way 'round...
...Washington, Hamilton, Jefferson, and Madison are simply invoked—or rather, invoked simply, as epigones of Hobbes and Locke...
...Like Nietzsche and Heidegger, Bloom emphasizes the need to retighten the bow of life, to restore the tension and striving that are necessary for man to become great again...
...for philosophy to liberate men from prejudice, to vivify their souls, they must first be opinionated...
...Despite his frequent disclaimers of any intention to "moralize," it is these sections, in which he moralizes in spite of himself, that are the highlights of the book...
...This is not the openness of inquiry but of indifference, the ho-hum acceptance of all principles and life-styles, the disposition to be "pro-choice" except when the conditions or consequences of choice are unpleasant—or when the choice is between good and evil...
...there is plenty of comparison, but little argument and definitely no "moralizing...
...Without always being able to articulate the principles of America, the conservative movement has presupposed that they were rationally defensible, that philosophic reason could pronounce in their favor, that politics and morality could pass muster...
...B what is the character of the L. 3 knowledge for which we long or ought to long...
...Everyone had the right to pursue happiness, but the idea of happiness had no objective content...
...God and Man at Yale, though antedating the heyday of McCarthyism, was spiritually part of this vigorous anti-Communism...
...Locke urged us to escape the state of nature...
...This book is all three, and its reviews have been so disarmingly positive that in a matter of weeks it has displaced sex and diet books at the top `Simon and Schuster, $19.95...
...According to Bloom, political philosophy, of which Socrates was traditionally regarded as the founder, means politic philosophy pure and simple...
...In the United States, "the greatest of thoughts," Bloom remarks, "were in our political principles but were never embodied, hence not living, in a class of men...
...But that is because civic education as such is not taken seriously...
...There is little effort to ascend from these notions to something higher...
...it was a matter of opinion (including religious opinion...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1987 15 the pinchbeck Nietzscheanism of the major universities, and of some parts of popular culture, deserves to be called an expression of the un-American mind...
...Bloom observes that "Lessing, speaking of Greek sculpture, said 'beautiful men made beautiful statues, and the city had beautiful statues in part to thank for beautiful citizens.' This formula encapsulates the fundamental principle of the esthetic education of man...
...they restate rather than solve the fundamental problem, which is to will meaning back into the world...
...What about justice and the common good...
...But there was in fact a class of men charged with embodying, with living out America's political ideals: her citizens...
...The Closing of the American Mind .1 scintillates, but it is not particularly conservative either in the popular or the philosophical sense of the term...
...it is a form of public relations, a set of techniques for shielding atheistic and amoral philosophers from persecution by the many, allowing them to live peacefully among their deluded (i.e., moral) neighbors...
...William F Buckley, Jr...
...In doing the latter, one necessarily distorts the high...
...He is also the editor of and a contributor to Saving the Revolution: The Federalist Papers and the American Founding, just published by The Free Press...
...What is courage...
...This, in turn, is Bloom's rather restricted version of Strauss's basic hermeneutical rule, that "it is safer to try to understand the low in the light of the high than the high in light of the low...
...The problem is that from the point of view of the best and, in the highest sense, most characteristic American thought, The Closing of the American Mind scintillates, but it is not particularly conservative either in the popular or the philosophical sense of the term...
...The American mind is divided between two stages of modernity: suspended between Locke and Adam Smith on the one hand, and Rousseau and Nietzsche on the other...
...Strauss's influence is evident throughout, indeed it is massive...
...The Closing of the American Mind offers, in something of the Socratic manner, an unsparing but undogmatic review of the mores prevailing in the American academy...
...It is Nietzsche and Heidegger who really show that philosophy is possible in this century, for it is they—not Strauss—who were "able to face down both natural science and historicism, the two great contemporary opponents of philosophy...
...Bloom is eloquent on the subject of sex and on the philosophic eros but he has very little to say about "sacred honor" except to depreciate it in comparison to the philosopher's quest for the good...
...Between sharp, vivid portraits of today's students and faculty members, The Closing of the American Mind examines the opinions that unite them—what Bloom calls "nihilism, American style...
...But can one imagine a discussion of modern political history—of the university as part of modernity—that is nothing but a discussion of Locke, Rousseau, and Marx...
...I doubt that this peculiar reticence is caused by delicacy...
...Just how much worse is revealed in Allan Bloom's exciting new book, The Closing of the American Mind.' Coming from the renowned translator and exegete of Plato's Republic and Rousseau's Emile—the greatest ancient and modern works on education —a critique of the modern university is bound to be learned, provocative, witty...
...Bloom writes compellingly on Rousseau, Nietzsche, Flaubert, Goethe...
...Prior to what Socrates called his "second sailing," philosophers from Thales to the young Socrates himself had inquired into nature, but had deprecated politics as the realm of convention concerning which genuine knowledge was impossible...
...Bit by bit, Americans have lost what Dante called "the good of the intellect," the ability to distinguish between good and evil and to be guided by the good...
...and so forth, because he saw that man is the microcosm, and that philosophy without political philosophy is largely nugatory—Socrates was a theorist who needed a good lawyer and better P.R., both of which he in effect got in Plato...
...That is why The Closing of the American Mind only resembles a Socratic inquiry...
...It is not really dialectical, but historical...
...Charles R. Kesler is assistant professor of government and associate director of the Henry Salvatori Center at Claremont McKenna College...
...The truly serious question is how one ought to view this decline: in the light of America at its best, or in comparison with America at, if not its worst, then at its typical level of vulgarity...
...Oh, he admits that "politics was a serious study to the extent that one learned about the soul from it...
...It was they who were charged with the duty of being Americans, of living up to' the country's principles...
...It is at least arguable, after all, that nihilism with the abyss is to be preferred to "nihilism without the abyss...
...Somewhat to the embarrassment of Bloom's thesis, which emphasizes the inability of Americans to digest serious thought, his book has become a popular hit...
...By uncovering the philosophical roots of the language of the contemporary academy, which is filtering down into society at large—words like "val- ues," "commitment," "self," "life- style," and "creativity"--he shows how our vocabulary biases our thought, illustrating the gradual "Nietzscheanization" of the American mind...
...That this philosophical abdication is not merely temperamental is shown in Bloom's account of Socrates as, in effect, the inventor of the university or of the problem of the university...
...Their neglect does, however, together with the omissions already noted, indicate the real limitations of his book...
...Great Books are of course less dangerous than Nietzsche's overman as a solution to the problem of the "rights doctrine"' and its embodiment in the modern democrat, the bourgeois, the "last man...
...This question, which dogs Bloom's bravura performance from beginning to end, suggests that the educational challenges facing American conservatism, from within and without, are greater than they have ever been...
...If the proposition were that society ought to be ministerial to the truth, and particularly to the truth(s) that makes it free, then it might be reasonable...
...It was all a venture in "egalitarian self-satisfaction," with students substituting "conspicuous compassion" for their parents' "conspicuous consumption...
...True, there was never a class of priests or aristocratic censors empowered to enforce political orthodoxy in America, and that is all to the good...
...By learning to write carefully—esoterically—and so perplexing their meaning that only a few fit souls would penetrate the orthodox surface of their works to discern the subversive teachings and forbidden pleasures underneath, philosophers could avoid Socrates' fate without abandoning his pursuits...
...Sports have a powerful effect on the character of those who play and those who admire them...
...To put it differently, the center of the American Founding was blank...
...and he does so without giving any account of whether a thoughtful morality exists or in what it might consist...
...Political philosophy was simply the public or pious presentation of impious, hence politically danger-ous, truths, chief among them being that "Zeus is not," i.e., that the gods of the city, the guarantors of justice, do not exist...
...Magic Johnson, for example, has said that if he could be one person in the world he would want to be the rock star, Michael Jackson...
...Where in American life are these opinions or prejudices to come from...
...As radicalized by Nietzsche, these desires are the cause of our contemporary illness...
...In nearly four hundred pages, Bloom does not mention even once the most famous of all attempts to educate the American mind—Jefferson's intricate blending of civic and philosophic education in his plan for the University of Virginia...
...Clearly Bloom's view of the American people is that they are even lower and less solid than they used to be...
...That cause was more precious than mere life...
...What is unreasonable is to label the vivid description of their intellectual decomposition as an account of "the American mind...
...one, for example, would go on to write God and Man at Yale...
...Those "barbarians" were the nascent American conservative movement, and foremost among them was, of course, the young William F. Buckley, Jr...
...There it is all preservation, not procreation, because fear is more powerful than love, and men prefer their lives to their pleasures...
...Nietzsche, who became notorious for his declaration "God is dead," only reported His demise...
...but his name is mentioned only once, as an authority on the "low but solid" foundations of modernity...
...Rousseau was repelled by the self-interestedness of the Lockean scheme, which he thought destructive both of citizenship and of the genuine interests of the self, which were pre-social, pre-rational, and obscured by the "progress" Locke had unleashed...
...Allan Bloom questions the rational grounds of American moral and political principles, incisively and seductively...
...Of course these trends did not much affect life in the major universities, which is the focus of Bloom's inquiry...
...As a description of Hobbes and Locke, this is unexceptionable...
...This requires re-creating "prejudices, strong prejudices," on the reasonable grounds that the completely unprejudiced mind is empty...
...Yet for a book on the American mind, there is very little discussion of the works of that mind at its best and most authoritative...
...Thus there was no way of life that could reasonably be said to fulfill man's nature or to be in accord with the divine or natural order...
...It traces the philosophical etymology of the words used by today's undergraduates–I'values," "commitment," and the like—but it does not reproduce much of the conversations in which these words occur...
...Like most of the superficial scholarship that he criticizes so eloquently, Bloom reduces the Founders to children of their age, of the Enlightenment...
...Rather it is the way that politics looks when moral indignation, which likes to single out the innocent, the guilty, and the heroic, is proscribed as unphilosophic...
...diagnosed the problem thirty-five years ago in God and Man at Yale, and since then, in most respects, the situation has only grown worse...
...It does no good to point out that the Germans seem to have had rather more deadly trouble with these toys than we, because at least they took their philosophy seriously, which from the strictly intellectual point of view is the thing that counts...
...It was as students of such affairs that political philosophers like Plato, Aristotle, and Cicero prudently offered advice to present and future legislators...
...Besides, the Founding involved precisely the revolutionaries risking their lives, as the concluding words of the Declaration of Independence proclaim: their lives, fortunes, and "sacred honor" were all pledged to the cause of freedom...
...Political philosophizing along these lines is always possible, and though powerfully assisted by the Great Books approach, is not dependent upon it to reconstitute a "world" of opinions...
...In connection with America, the idea of honor figures hardly at all...
...This counterrevolution, along with other developments with important consequences for education and politics—e.g., the revival of Protestant evangelicism and the new prominence of country music—he passes over without comment...
...Hence his revealing treatment of McCarthyism in the 1950s: "McCarthy, those like him, and those who followed them, were clearly nonacademic and anti-academic, the barbarians at the gates...
...They are passe, simply no longer believable...
...Concerning the students he writes poetically and movingly, limning the flatness, the "niceness" that he finds in them to the exclusion of any dominating passion or conviction...
...The critique of modern education is, however, generated more out of Nietzsche and Heidegger than out of Strauss...
...From Locke derives the American devotion to the rights of man—life, liberty, property—and hence to the material prosperity that secures them, largely as a result of Smith's political economy...
...Perhaps this is why we seldom see in Bloom's book the elementary responses to students' opinions, concerning, for example, the relativity of "values"—the follow-ups that question, cajole, charm them into sense...
...That is one reason I cheer for Larry Bird...
...The same students who are listening routinely to rock music—and by the way, Bloom is a little old-fogeyish on this question, reducing all of rock to "the beat of sexual intercourse...
...FDR's triumph, in turn, confirmed and extended liberalism's hegemony over America's universities, which shows no imminent signs of abating...
...One cannot imaginemodern political history without a discussion of Locke, Rousseau and Marx...
...In more than twenty pages devoted to the collapse of the Cornell administration and faculty before the strident demands of the New Left, not a single participant (other than Father Daniel Berrigan) is named...
...but could this really be said, for example, of the Beatles, Bob Dylan, The Four Tops?—these same devotees of rock are also playing softball and rooting for the local sports teams...
...Yet Bloom's position is that the university's independence from and indeed superiority to liberal society ought not to be compromised one inch...
...This is shown clearly by his treatment of the character of today's youth, whom he presents, in Platonic terms, as shaped overwhelmingly by the music they love...
...But when one looks closer, one discovers that Nietzscheanism is not simply an adventitious infection, exploiting a weakness (there are bound to be some) in American intellectual life...
...Is it really necessary to discuss civic education in a book on American higher education...
...but it does not affect his philosophical politics, which distrusts all popular movements as potential threats to philosophy...
...Measured against the sweeping academic victories of twentieth-century liberalism, it has far to go...
...T ike every serious political movement since the thirteenth century, American conservatism has sought to reform the universities...
...Democracy has fallen victim to "alien views and alien tastes...
...THE AMERICAN SPECTATOR AUGUST 1987 17...
...and this is related to the strange, looming absence of Leo Strauss, who was Bloom's teacher...
...The world could, as Bloom puts it, be made safe for philosophy...
...Rousseau, in his individualist mode, to rediscover and return to it...
...Perhaps it is our first task," Bloom declares, "to resuscitate these phenomena [opinions or prejudices] so that we may again have a world to which we can put our questions and be able to philosophize...
...But in divorcing the American mind from moral and political questions as they actually present themselves to American citizens, he forces us to wonder how philosophy, and the academy, and ultimately the Republic, can be kept from becoming either frivolous or fanatical...
...but his references to the Founding Fathers are schematic at best...
...This seems to me to be our educational challenge...
...All values were relative, which meant that it was impossible to choose rationally between, for example, Locke and Rousseau...
...In adopting this point of view, however, he violates his own maxim, that "awareness of the highest is whatpoints the lower upwards...
...The connection between "beautiful men" and "beautiful citizens," between the spiritedness and nobility of athletics and politics, is almost completely lost on Bloom...
...In essence, a new religion or world-view is needed...
...That depends on what one believes college students, and colleges more generally, might owe to their country...
...That a popular reaction (even with some excesses) to the horrors of Stalinism might have been healthy, and in principle even reasonable, Bloom apparently denies...
...Nietzsche took Rousseau's critique of Locke to its extreme conclusion: that man was not naturally rational (in the beginning he was pre-rational, remember) meant that nature could not provide even minimal guidance to human reason and happiness...
Vol. 20 • August 1987 • No. 8
