| Western Philosophy 20th-century philosophy |
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| Full name | Allan Bloom |
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| Birth | 14 September 1930 Indianapolis, Indiana, United States |
| Death | 7 October 1992 Chicago, Illinois, United States |
| School/tradition | Continental Philosophy, Platonism, Conservatism |
| Main interests | Greek philosophy, History of philosophy, Political philosophy, Nihilism, Continental philosophy, Politics |
| Notable ideas | Great Books, Socratic Irony |
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Allan David Bloom (14 September 1930 in Indianapolis, Indiana – 7 October 1992 in Chicago, Illinois) was an American philosopher, essayist and academic. Bloom championed the idea of 'Great Books' education, as did his mentor Leo Strauss. Bloom became famous for his criticism of contemporary American higher education, with his views being expressed in his bestselling 1987 book, The Closing of the American Mind.[1]
In 2000, years after Bloom's death, Saul Bellow, Bloom's friend and teaching partner at the University of Chicago, wrote a novel based on his colleague titled Ravelstein.
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Allan Bloom was born in Indianapolis to social worker parents. He had one older sister named Lucille (b. 1928). As a thirteen year old, he read a Readers Digest article about the University of Chicago and told his parents he wanted to attend; his parents thought it was unreasonable and did not encourage his hopes.[2] Yet later, when his family moved to Chicago in 1944, his parents met a psychiatrist and family friend whose son was enrolled in the University of Chicago’s humanities program for gifted students. In 1946 Bloom was accepted to the same program, at the age of fifteen, and spent the next decade of his life enrolled at the university in Chicago’s Hyde Park neighborhood.[2] This began his life-long passion for the 'idea' of the university.[3]
In the preface to Giants and Dwarfs: Essays, 1960-1990, he stated that his education "began with Freud and ended with Plato." The theme of this education was self-knowledge, or self-discovery -- an idea that Bloom would later write seemed impossible to conceive of for a Midwestern American boy. He credits Leo Strauss as the teacher who made this endeavor possible for him.[4]
After earning his bachelor’s degree he enrolled in the Committee on Social Thought, where he was assigned Classicist David Grene as tutor. Grene recalled Bloom as an energetic and humorous student completely dedicated to reading the classics, but with no definite career ambitions.[2] The Committee was a unique interdisciplinary program that attracted a small number of students due to its rigorous academic requirements and lack of clear employment opportunities after graduation.[2] Bloom earned his Ph.D. from the Committee on Social Thought in 1955. He subsequently studied under Alexandre Kojève in Paris.
Bloom studied and taught abroad in Paris (1953-55)[5] and Germany (1957). Upon returning to the United States he taught adult education students at the University of Chicago with his friend Werner J. Dannhauser, author of Nietzsche's View of Socrates. Bloom later taught at Yale, Cornell, Tel Aviv University and the University of Toronto, before returning to the University of Chicago.
In 1963, as a Professor at Cornell, Allan Bloom served as a faculty member of the Telluride Association. The organization aims to foster an everyday synthesis of self-governance and intellectual inquiry that enables students to develop their potential for leadership and public service. The students receive free room and board in the Telluride House on the Cornell University campus and run the house themselves, hiring staff, supervising maintenance and organizing seminars. Bloom had a major influence on several residents of Telluride House, including Paul Wolfowitz, one of the founding members of both the Project for the New American Century and the New Citizenship Project.
Bloom's first book was a collection of three essays on Shakespeare's plays, Shakespeare's Politics; it included an essay from Harry V. Jaffa. He translated and commented upon Rousseau's "Letter to D'Alembert On the Theater," bringing it into dialogue with Plato's Republic. In 1968, he published his most significant work of philosophical translation and interpretation, a translation of Plato's Republic. Bloom strove to achieve "the first translation of Plato's Republic that attempts to be strictly literal.[6]" Although the translation is not universally accepted, Bloom said he always conceptualized the translator's role as a matchmaker between readers and the texts he translated.[7] He repeated this effort while a Professor at the University of Toronto in 1978, translating Jean-Jacques Rousseau's Emile. Among other publications during his years of teaching was a reading of Swift's Gulliver's Travels, entitled "Giants and Dwarfs"; it became the title for a collection of essays on, among others, Raymond Aron, Alexandre Kojeve, Leo Strauss, and John Rawls. Bloom was an editor for the scholarly journal Political Theory as well as a contributor to History of Political Philosophy (edited by Joseph Cropsey and Leo Strauss).
After returning to Chicago, he befriended and taught courses with Saul Bellow. Bellow wrote the Preface to The Closing of the American Mind in 1987, the book that made Bloom famous and wealthy. Bellow later immortalized his dead friend in the novel Ravelstein. Bloom's last book, published posthumously, was Love and Friendship, where he offered interpretations of novels by Stendhal, Jane Austen, Flaubert, and Tolstoy in light of Rousseau's influence on the Romantic movement, of plays by William Shakespeare, of Montaigne's Essays, and finally of Plato's Symposium.
Bloom's work is not easily defined, yet there is a thread that links all of his published material. Allan Bloom was a philosopher and he was primarily concerned with preserving the philosophical way of life for the future generation. He strove to do this through both scholarly and popular writing. Accordingly, his writings fall into two basic categories: scholarly (e.g. Plato's Republic) and popular political comment (e.g. Closing of the American Mind). On the surface, this is a valid distinction, yet closer examinations of Bloom’s works reveal a direct connection between the two types of expression, which reflect his view of philosophy and the role of the philosopher in political life.
Bloom’s translation and interpretive essay on Plato’s Republic was published in 1968. For Bloom, previous translations were lacking. In particuliar, Bloom was eager to sweep away the Christian Platonist layers that had coated the translations and scholarly analysis. In 1971, he wrote, "With the Republic, for example, a long tradition of philosophy tells us what the issues are. [...] This sense of familiarity may be spurious; we may be reading the text as seen by the tradition rather than raising Plato's own questions.[8]
Up until the late 20th century, most English language Platonists were following a tradition that blended Christian theology with Plato. This view, named Christian Platonism, interprets Plato as prophet of the coming Christian age, a monotheist in a polytheist world. In this school, Socrates is considered a pre-Christian saint; the tradition emphasizes Socrates' 'goodness' and other-worldly attributes, such as accepting his death like a martyr. In the words of George Grant, "Straussians say that Christianity led to overextension of soul."[9]
Yet there developed a different type of Platonism, Pagan Platonism, a type of which Bloom became aware and most certainly adopted from his teacher Leo Strauss (1899-1973), the most important representative of this thought in the past century.[10] Adherents have a significantly different view of Plato’s Republic.
Strauss developed this point of view by studying ancient Islamic and Jewish theorists, such as Al-Farabi (870-950) and Moses Maimonides (1135-1204). Each philosopher was faithful to his religion but sought to integrate classical political philosophy into Islam and Judaism. Islam has a prophet-legislator Muhammad and similarly, Jewish law is a function of its theology. Thus these philosophers had to write with great skill, incorporating the ideas of Plato and Aristotle, many of which contradicted or contravened Islamic or Jewish thought and practice, without being seen to challenge the theology. According to Strauss, Al-Farabi and Moses Maimonides were really writing for potential philosophers within the pious faithful. Strauss calls this the discovery of esoteric writing, and he first presents it as a possibility in Persecution and the Art of Writing (1952). Christianity differed from these faiths in that philosophy was always free to establish a foothold in Christendom, without necessarily being seen as heretical. All one has to do is think of Saint Augustine (354-430) and his City of God and On Free Will.
Strauss took this insight and applied it eventually to Plato’s writings themselves. Bloom's translation and essay of the Republic takes this stance; therefore, it is radically different in many important aspects from the previous translations and interpretations of the Republic. Most notable is Bloom's discussion of Socratic irony. In fact, irony is the key to Bloom’s take on the Republic. (See his discussion of Books II-VI of the Republic.) Allan Bloom says a philosopher is immune to irony because he can see the tragic as comic and comic as tragic. Bloom refers to Socrates, the philosopher par excellence, in his Interpretative Essay stating, "Socrates can go naked where others go clothed; he is not afraid of ridicule. He can also contemplate sexual intercourse where others are stricken with terror; he is not afraid of moral indignation. In other words he treats the comic seriously and the tragic lightly.[11] Thus irony in the Republic refers to the 'Just City in Speech' Bloom looks at it not as a model for future society, nor as a template for the human soul; rather, it is an ironic city, an example of the distance between philosophy and every potential philosopher. Bloom follows Strauss in suggesting that the 'Just City in Speech' is not natural; it is man-made, and thus ironic.
Closing of the American Mind was published in 1987, five years after Bloom published an essay in The National Review about the failure of universities to serve the needs of students. With the encouragement of Saul Bellow, his colleague at the University of Chicago, he expanded his thoughts into a book "about a life, I've led"[2] that critically reflected on the current state of higher education in American universities. His friends and admirers imagined the work would be a modest success, as did Bloom, who recognized his publisher’s modest advance to complete the project as a lack of sales confidence. Yet on the momentum of strong initial reviews, including one by Christopher Lehmann-Haupt in the New York Times and an op-ed piece by syndicated conservative commentator George Will entitled "A How-To Book for the Independent" [12] it became an unexpected best seller, eventually selling close to half a million copies in hardback and remaining at number one on the New York Times Non-fiction Best Seller list for four months.[13]
Bloom's Closing of the American Mind is a critique of the contemporary university and how Bloom sees it as failing its students. In it, Bloom criticizes analytic philosophy as a movement, "Professors of these schools simply would not and could not talk about anything important, and they themselves do not represent a philosophic life for the students." To a great extent, Bloom's criticism revolves around his belief that the Great Books of Western Thought have been devalued as a source of wisdom. Bloom's critique extends beyond the university to speak to the general crisis in American society. "Closing of the American Mind" draws analogies between the United States and the Weimar Republic. The modern liberal philosophy, he says, enshrined in the Enlightenment thought of John Locke - that a just society could be based upon self-interest alone, coupled by the emergence of relativism in American thought - had led to this crisis.
For Bloom, this created a void in the souls of Americans, into which demagogic radicals as exemplified by 60's student leaders could leap. (In the same fashion, Bloom suggests, that the Nazi brownshirts once filled the lacuna created in German society by the Weimar Republic.) In the second instance, the higher calling of philosophy and reason understood as freedom of thought, had been eclipsed by a pseudo-philosophy, or an ideology of thought. Relativism was one feature of modern liberal philosophy that had subverted the Platonic–Socratic teaching. The Great Books of Western Thought simply became the ramblings of dead white men rather than beacons leading to the highest calling.
The power behind Bloom's critique of contemporary social movements at play in universities or society at large is derived from his philosophical orientation. The failure of contemporary liberal education leads to the social and sexual habits of modern students, and their inability to fashion a life for themselves beyond the mundane offerings touted as success. Bloom argues that commercial pursuits had become more highly valued than the philosophic quest for truth or the civilized pursuits of honor and glory.
In particular, he looked seriously at the effects of popular music on the lives of students, placing pop music, or the generic term "rock music" in a historical context from Plato’s Republic to Nietzsche’s Dionysian longings. Treating it with great seriousness, he gave fresh attention to the industry, its target-marketing to children and teenagers, its top performers, and its hypocritical pretensions to liberation and freedom. Some critics, including Frank Zappa, denounced Bloom's view of rock music as being based on the same ideas that critics of rock and roll in the 1950s held, ideas about the preservation of "traditional" white American society. [14] Bloom, informed by Socrates, Aristotle, Rousseau and Nietzsche, explores music’s power over the human soul. He cites the soldier who throws himself into battle at the urging of the drum corps, the pious believer who prays under the spell of a religious hymn, the lover seduced by the romantic guitar, and points towards the tradition of philosophy that treated musical education as paramount. He names Mick Jagger as a cardinal representative of the hypocrisy and intellectual sterility of rock. Pop music employs sexual images and language to enthrall the young, and persuade them that their petty rebelliousness is authentic politics, when in fact they are being controlled by the money-managers whom successful performers like Jagger quietly serve. In fact, Bloom claims, Jagger is a hero to many university students who envy his fame and wealth, but are really just bored by the lack of options before them.[15] Along with the absence of literature in the lives of the young, and their fractured erotic relationships, the first part of Closing tries to explain the current state of education in a fashion beyond the purview of an economist or psychiatrist – contemporary culture's leading umpires.
The success of the work attracted a wide spectrum of critics; some scholars made interesting bedfellows. Martha Nussbaum, a liberal political philosopher and classicist, and Harry V. Jaffa, a conservative, both argued that Bloom was deeply influenced by 19th-century European philosophers, especially Friedrich Nietzsche. Nussbaum wrote that, for Bloom, Nietzsche had been disastrously influential in modern American thought.[16] Jaffa went so far as to point out the lack of attention Bloom paid to the moral role gay rights were playing in the lives of current students.[17] According to Jaffa, while Bloom discusses contemporary social movements, particularly those that gained ascendancy in the 1960s, he is virtually silent on the gay rights movement.[17]
In a famous passage from her "damaging" review, which propelled her into the public eye, Nussbaum wrote: "How good a philosopher, then, is Allan Bloom? The answer is, we cannot say, and we are given no reason to think him one at all."[16] The "assault" on the book was continued by strongly negative reviews by Benjamin Barber in Harper's; by Alexander Nehamas in The London Review of Books; and by David Rieff in The Times Literary Supplement.[18] David Rieff, indeed, called Bloom "an academic version of Oliver North: vengeful, reactionary, antidemocratic." The book, he said, was one that "decent people would be ashamed of having written." The tone of these reviews led James Atlas in the New York Times Magazine to conclude "the responses to Bloom's book have been charged with a hostility that transcends the usual mean-spiritedness of reviewers."[2] One reviewer, the philosopher Robert Paul Wolff writing in the scholarly journal Academe, reviewed the book as a work of fiction: he claimed that Bloom's friend Saul Bellow, who had written the introduction, had written a "coruscatingly funny novel in the form of a pettish, bookish, grumpy, reactionary complaint against the last two decades", using as the narrator a "mid-fiftyish professor at the University of Chicago, to whom Bellow gives the evocative name 'Bloom.'"[18] Yet some reviewers tempered that criticism with an admission of the merits of Bloom's writing: for example, Fred Matthews, a historian from York University, began an otherwise relatively critical review in the American Historical Review with the statement that Bloom's "probes into popular culture" were "both amusing and perceptive" and that the work was "a rich, often brilliant, and disturbing book".[19]
Some critics embraced Bloom's argument. Thus Norman Podhoretz in his review noted that the closed-mindedness in the title refers to the paradoxical consequence of the academic "open mind" found in liberal political thought – namely "the narrow and intolerant dogmatism" that dismisses any attempt, by Plato or the Hebrew Bible for example, to provide a rational basis for moral judgments. Podhoretz continued, "Bloom goes on to charge liberalism with vulgarizing the noble ideals of freedom and equality, and he offers brilliantly acerbic descriptions of the sexual revolution and the feminist movement, which he sees as products of this process of vulgarization."[20]
In a 1989 article (The German Quarterly, Vol. 62, No. 3, Focus: Literature since 1945 (Summer, 1989)), Ann Clark Fehn discusses the critical reception of the book, noting that it had eclipsed other titles that year dealing with higher education (College, by Ernest Boyer, and Cultural Literacy, by E. D. Hirsch), and quoting Publisher's Weekly, which had described Bloom's book as a "best-seller made by reviews."
Camille Paglia, a decade after the book's release, called it "the first shot in the culture wars." [21] MIT Linguist Noam Chomsky referred to 'The Closing of the American Mind' as "mind-bogglingly stupid."[22] Nevertheless, The New York Times review by Roger Kimball - who went on to fame arguing against "cultural amnesia" - called the book "an unparalleled reflection on the whole question of what it means to be a student in today's intellectual and moral climate."[23] Bloom's book has recently been given more positive critical re-assessments, within the New York Times amongst other publications.[24]