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A masterpiece., 14. Januar 2000
Nearly all of us Americans say that we believe in liberty and equality. But how many of us would be able to defend these beliefs against an attack by a really intelligent anti-egalitarian such as Nietzsche? Our regime was founded on the idea that reason, not religion or brute force, should rule. It was not always obvious that such a regime was either good or possible, and arguments had to be made to convince people to support its creation. The Enlightenment philosophers provided those arguments. As Bloom notes, the Enlightenment brought the philosopher (i.e., reason) and the regime into harmony as they never had been before. (Socrates, the archetypical philosopher, had of course been executed for impiety.) Rousseau, while agreeing with the the fundamental Enlightenment idea of equality, argued forcefully that reason alone could not found and sustain a society, and in the process invented the modern idea of the bourgeois, the product of the reason-based society, hatred of which was an important element of both Marxism and fascism. But it was Nietzsche who provided the really devastating attack, arguing that listening to our heads rather than our hearts had killed what was really worthwhile in us, that we need to stop reasoning and start coming up with new "values."The middle chapters of the book are the best overview of political philosophy that I have come across. Bloom understands Plato, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau and Nietzsche as I believe they would have wanted to be understood. Especially Nietzsche, whose ideas are described with the utmost respect, even though it is implicit that if we are to keep our regime we ultimately must reject those ideas. The sections on "Values" and "Culture," which describe how some German ideas with a great deal of nobility in them mutated when they got to America, are riveting. Bloom can see that our regime, even as it prospers economically, is in crisis. We Americans mouth the words of Jefferson, but really believe Nietzsche. We do not believe in the primacy of reason. Equality and liberty are nothing more than prejudices for most of us. They are merely "values," and if pressed, most of us would not be able to explain why we like those values better than other ones. Regimes decay for a variety of reasons, one of which is internal contradiction, as in the fall of the Soviet Union. The American regime, with its emphasis on human rights, liberty and equality, is based on the primacy of reason. If most Americans do not now believe in the primacy of reason, then our regime has an internal contradiction. I take Bloom to be saying that this contradiction has come about because those in a position to educate the rest of us have failed to do so. That is where the opening and closing sections on young people and university education come in. Those sections are interesting (and obviously near and dear to Bloom's heart) even if not as informative as the middle chapters, and, even if the section on music is flawed as some other readers have pointed out, they provide concrete examples and describe consequences of the intellectual crisis. "The Closing of the American Mind" is at the top of my all-time non-fiction list. To me, Bloom is as interesting to read as the thinkers whose thought he describes so well. I believe that in a few years his masterpiece will be seen as a classic of democratic political thought.
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Bloom stands alone, outside of modern thought, 11. Mai 2000
Allan Bloom's work will most likely evoke feelings of detest and discomfort from the reader, as he, in typical iconoclastic form, unrelentlessly attacks modern america, thought, and metaphysical mindlessness. Bloom stands in the vein of Kierkegaard; his melancholic discussion of the dissipated need for authority and cultural direction places him among the great moral thinkers, who have ardently attempted to place the individual within the context of a community -- while he searches for an eternal teleology and heirarchy. Bloom, unfortunatley, will appear excessively erudite to most of his readers; the reader, trapped within the fetters of modern scepticism and over-analytic thought, will be unable to accurately assess his place WITHIN Bloom's criticism. Is the book void of relevance? Certainly not. Consider this text a barometer of both heart and conviction. There is anything but a paucity of implications, and this book provokes an insurgency of conversation about the permanent possibilities of man and his role within the eternal.
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Not terribly "objective"- but maybe that was the point., 10. März 2000
Alan Bloom articlated masterfully the incohate rumblings of my heart and mind. One reviewer accuses him of using 'weighty words" to elicit emotional responses. Yes, it's true Bloom repeatedly talks of soul, heart and moral without defining them, but it's tragic if one cannot undestand their meaning intuitively, from context. His brave critique of the 'liberal' and pop culture hit home even to someone who'd never set foot on US soil. Then again, maybe it was because I was privvy to two civilizations that I found so much meaning in what his words. Yes, he overgeneralizes, and yes, he fails to see the good that is born even of reactionary pop culture, but the kernel of his thesis is as true and as important as any political philosophy I have read. I found the book particularly helpful, as someone on the border of two civilizations, one blindly accelerating toward the other.
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