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In Re Allan Bloom: a Respectful Dissent

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In Re Allan Bloom: a Respectful Dissent CONTENTS VOL. VIII SPRING 2002 No 4 Allan Bloom In re Allan Bloom: A Respectful Dissent by George Anastaplo 2 George Anastaplo is Professor of Law, Loyola University of Chicago, and Lecturer in the Liberal Arts, the University of Chicago. This essay was published in The Great Ideas Today, an Encyclopedia Britannica publication. (1988): 252-273. Reprinted in Essays on The Closing of the American Mind, ed. Robert L. Stone (Chicago Review Press, 1989): 267-284. He was also a dear friend and colleague of Dr. Adler’s for many decades. Aronson sent up a cry of rapture when he won the million dollar prize in a lottery. Levi asked him, “What made you pick a number like 52, anyway?” “It came to me in a dream,” replied Aronson. “I dreamed I was in a theater, and on the stage there were six columns of dancers with eight dancers in each column. So I chose 52.” “But six times eight is 48 not 52!” said Levi. Aronson chortled, “So okay, you be the mathematician!” —Anon. 1 Prologue f it had been at all anticipated that a million copies of Allan IBloom’s The Closing of the American Mind would eventually be sold, many things in it would no doubt have been written much more carefully than they were—but if that had been done, the book would have sold nowhere near as well as it has.2 Professor Bloom’s widely acclaimed book provides shorthand reminders of what is wrong in higher education today. Everywhere one goes this year on campuses, one encounters people interested 3 in the Bloom phenomenon, just as last year one encountered people interested in the Bork phenomenon. Since I am known to have been in school with both Robert Bork and Allan Bloom at the University of Chicago (in the Law School and the Committee on Social Thought, respectively), I have been asked many times about these celebrities who share the not altogether happy capacity of saying plausible, even sensible, things in a highly provocative manner.3 We are all in Mr. Bloom’s debt for the dozens of fine students in political philosophy he has helped train and for several fine things he has published.4 Particularly instructive have been his studies of Shakespeare,5 his translation of Plato’s Republic,6 and his translation of Rousseau’s Emile.7 We would be even further in his debt if he could now transform some of his phenomenal winnings from the best-seller lottery into the leisure needed to prepare for publication his brilliant doctoral dissertation on Isocrates.8 Mr. Bloom is one of many who are privileged to recognize Leo Strauss as a teacher.9 He, however, has had a publishing success inconceivable for his master. In fact, I estimate that more copies of Closing have been sold than of all the books published by Mr. Strauss and his other students combined.10 For better and for worse, the form, tone, and substance of Closing will represent to many, for a long time to come, what the Straussian persuasion means.11 The Closing of the American Mind has become an “event,” making it difficult for us to assess the book in itself. Since there is in its overall argument relatively little that is both new and sound, it would not warrant much attention if it were merely still another academic title. But the astonishing reception of the book places it outside the normal range of scholarly interest. One can be reminded of what the citizens of Thebes faced when they discovered the remarkably unnatural creature they had in Oedipus. We can see great success turn into an appalling curse in Sophocles’ Oedipus Tyrannos. In any event, the unnatural is hard to talk about because the usual points of reference are not available. In Mr. Blooms circum- stances, moreover, a clear grasp of the situation is hard to secure by those who cannot help but be jealous of, as well as appalled by, what has chanced to happen. 4 I. The unnatural was once readily associated with the impious. Something of the impious may be detected in Mr. Bloom’s book, which is rather odd considering that it stands for a return to an older way of education. One form impiety can take is neglect of one’s origins and teachers. Leo Strauss, Allan Bloom’s principal teacher, is ignored, even though there are in his book dozens, if not hundreds, of echoes of that teachers work.12 Nor can one easily gather from this book that most of the things Mr. Bloom has to say about the current failings of higher education in this country are things already long bruited about at the University of Chicago and else- where when he first arrived on the academic scene in the 1940s.13 To be sure, Mr. Bloom is prepared, in private conversations and in public interviews, to acknowledge both Mr. Strauss and the University of Chicago.14 But the stance taken throughout his book is that of the pioneer staking out new ground rather than that of the laborer cultivating soil already cleared by others. This desperate self-assertiveness, which is less generous than Mr. Bloom is naturally inclined to be, is intimately linked, I suspect, to his decision to dramatize the 1960s as somehow the point of departure in the United States for the crisis he is announcing.15 Is it not misleading to permit a grounding in the classics to seem so self-centered that one can neglect what is due to one’s teachers and to one’s community?16 This is the questionable side of what is often condemned as “elitism.” Certainly, it is not healthy to leave the impression that those upon whom one has depended, and from whom one has learned much, have not been duly appreciated. This is an instructive aspect of that extreme form of impiety found in an obvious repudiation of the divine. II. Something of the determination to enlist everything in the service of his thesis may be seen in the way Mr. Bloom deals with the texts of the great writers he draws upon. One can easily get the impression, if this book were all one had to go by, that he never truly studies such books but merely uses them. I am reminded of a comment I once heard from Mr. Strauss about Nietzsche: he always found Nietzsche interesting in his masterful generalizations, 5 but he often found him simply wrong in the details which he could check out for himself.17 One observation after another in Closing is questionable: Socrates is presented more in opposition to Achilles than Plato indicates;18 Aristotle is presented as saying that sexual intercourse, rather than moral virtue, is one of man’s two peaks;19 enterprising moderns such as Hobbes and Locke are presented as if they wanted to uproot ambition;20 Maimonides is presented as if he identified theology with philosophy;21 Goethe is presented in a way that seems to leave a useful discussion dependent upon errors in translation of a key passage in Faust;22 Schiller is presented in a way that makes him seem far less sophisticated than he is about Homer;23 and Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, and Nietzsche are presented as “thinkers of the very highest order,” even though they are fundamentally wrong in critical respects.24 One can easily conclude that there is in the abundance of Closing, which is much more biographical and sociological than philosophical, hardly a statement about any of the great authors or their books that can be confidently relied upon.25 It may even make one wonder what good the kind of education advocated in Closing is if it should exhibit, if not depend upon, such unreliable scholarship. There is a warning here for all of us who have been liberated by Mr. Strauss, who was himself the model of care and restraint in his broad-ranging scholarship, however daring and unconventional he was willing to appear in his conclusions. A proper education should make one cautious in one’s uses of sources, moderate in the tone of one’s political and social advocacy, and anything but overbearing in one’s assessment of the less enlightened, keeping in mind that it is usually easier to attack than to defend. Related to these concerns is the perennial question of how influential the traditional education can be if its advocates display themselves, both in public and in private, as decidedly self- indulgent. Someone may protest that it is not fair to assess Closing as a scholarly work. Still, all reports indicate that it was originally prepared as a book that would appeal only to a limited academic audience. It is common knowledge that the publisher had a lot to say about how the text should be rearranged. What governed the arrangement of the material was not the authors ideas but the publishers commercial instincts, with the “packaging” of the book taking precedence over its substance. Cannot we see reflected in 6 such deference to consumerism one major cause of the deterioration of American education rightly decried by Mr. Bloom? It is difficult to take seriously any book whose author has acquiesced in a comprehensive rearrangement of what he had thought fit to say. Mr. Strauss, on the other hand, was legendary in his insistence upon the integrity of those scholarly texts he had carefully prepared.26 He would have found congenial the injunction issued by another fastidious author27 to his publisher “I write; you print” III. The deficiencies all too evident in Mr.
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