I never got past more than a few chapters of this book, but the notes I took on the preface (written by Saul Bellow) and the first three or four chapters are extensive enough that it seems worth sharing them.
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From the Foreword Written by Saul Bellow:
On Academics : “Academics, even those describing themselves as existentialists, very seldom offer themselves publicly and frankly as individuals, as persons.”
On Alan Bloom’s Approach in Closing of the American Mind: “Speaking of the place of the humanities in the universities, he calls them a ‘submerged old Atlantis,’ to which we turn again to try to ‘find ourselves now that everybody else has given up.’”
… “Professor Bloom’s book makes me fear that the book of the world, so richly studied by autodidacts, is being closed by the ‘learned’ who are raising walls of opinions to shut the world out.”
On Being Hard to Write: “I readily concede that here and there I am probably hard to read, and I am likely to become harder as the illiteracy of the public increases.”
On Civilization : “What no one was able to foresee was that all civilized countries were destined to descend to a common cosmopolitanism and that the lamentable weakening of the older branches of civilization would open fresh opportunities and free us from our dependency on history and culture – a concealed benefit of decline. There would be barbarous manifestations certainly, but there would be also the possibility of new kinds of independence.”
On Keeping an Open Channel to the Soul: “In the greatest confusion there is still an open channel to the soul. It may be difficult to find because by midlife it is overgrown, and some of the wildest thickets that surround it grow out of what we describe as our education. But the channel is always there, and it is our business to keep it open, to have access to the deepest part of ourselves – to that part of us which is conscious of a higher consciousness, by means of which we make final judgments and put everything together. The independence of this consciousness, which has the strength to be immune to the noise of history and the distractions of our immediate surroundings, is what the life struggle is all about. The soul has to find and hold its ground against hostile forces, sometimes embodied in ideas which frequently deny its very existence, and which indeed often seem to be trying to annul it altogether.”
On the Mental Measure of Readers: “It is never an easy task to take the mental measure of your readers. There are things that people should know if they are to read books at all, and out of respect for them, or to save appearances, one is apt to assume more familiarity on their part with the history of the twentieth century than is objectively justified. Besides, a certain psychic unity is always taken for granted by writers. ‘Others are in essence like me and I am basically like them, give or take a few minor differences.’”
On the Truest Truths in Writing: “It is risky in a book of ideas to speak in one’s own voice, but it reminds us that the sources of the truest truths are inevitably profoundly personal.”
On Writing as an Offering: “A piece of writing is an offering. You bring it to the altar and hope it will be accepted. You pray at least that rejection will not throw you into a rage and turn you into a Cain. Perhaps naively, you produce your favorite treasures and pile them in an indiscriminate heap. Those who do not recognize their value now may do so later. And you do not always feel that you are writing for any of your contemporaries. It may well be that your true readers are not here as yet and that your books will cause them to materialize.”
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Quotes from Allan Bloom
Alan Bloom on Reading Good Books: “The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency – the belief that the here and now is all there is.”
Alan Bloom on the Humanities in Universities: “They are like a refugee camp where all the geniuses driven out of their jobs and countries by unfriendly regimes are idling… The other two divisions of the university [I assume business and science] have no use for the past…” (This was 1987, mind you.)
Alan Bloom on the Real Community of Man: “The real community of man, in the midst of all the self-contradictory simulacra of community, is the community of those who seek the truth, of the potential knowers…of all men to the extent they desire to know. But in fact, this includes only a few, the true friends, as Plato was to Aristotle at the very moment they were disagreeing about the nature of the good…They were absolutely one soul as they looked at the problem. This, according to Plato, is the only real friendship, the only real common good. It is here that the contact people so desperately seek is to be found…This is the meaning of the riddle of the improbable philosopher-kings. They have a true community that is exemplary for all other communities.”
Allan Bloom on “Culture Peddlers” “Particularly revealing are the various impostors whose business it is to appeal to the young. These culture peddlers have the strongest of motives for finding out the appetites of the young – so they are useful guides into the labyrinths of the spirit of the times.”
Allan Bloom on American intellectualism: “They [their European counterparts] belonged to the whole world using their reason to see the things all men have in common, to solve the problems of survival all the time innocently and unaware trampling on the altars sacred to the diverse peoples and nations of the earth who believe themselves constituted by their particular gods and heroes rather than by the common currency of the body. This American intellectual obtuseness could seem horrifying and barbarous, a stunting of full humanity, an incapacity to experience the beautiful, an utter lack of engagement in the civilization’s ongoing discourse.”
Allan Bloom on American Writers: “One can think of American writers and writings that should be read and frequently are read; but, to the extent that Americans are readers, the whole world is their bookshelf; there has not been the deep necessity to absorb their own country’s writings that citizens of other nations experience.”
Allan Bloom on Being the Heirs of Science: “As the heirs of science, so the argument goes, we know more than did the peoples of other times and places with their unscientific prejudices and illusions, but they were, or are, happier.”
Allan Bloom on Cartesian VS Pascalian in France: “Descartes and Pascal are national authors, and they tell the French people what their alternatives are, and afford a peculiar perspective on life’s perennial problems. They weave the fabric of souls… It is not so much that the French get principles from these sources; rather they produce a cast of mind.”
Allan Bloom on Descartes vs Pascal: “Descartes and Pascal represent a choice between reason and revelation, science and piety, the choice from which everything else follows… These great opponents whom no synthesis can unite – the opposition between bon sens and faith against all odds – set in motion a dualism when we speak of both French clarity and French passion.”
Allan Bloom on Education: “Education in our times must try to find whatever there is in students that might yearn for completion, and to reconstruct the learning that would enable them to autonomously seek that completion.”
Allan Bloom on his “Great Books conviction”: “That conviction was that nature is the only thing that counts in education, that the human desire to know is permanent, that all it really needs is the proper nourishment, and that education is merely putting the feast on the table.”
Allan Bloom on How the Civil Rights Movement Was Supplanted by the Black Power Movement “…the Black Power movement that supplanted the older civil rights movement – leaving aside both its excesses and its very understandable emphasis on self-respect and refusal to beg for acceptance – had at its core the view that the Constitutional tradition was always corrupt and was constructed as a defense of slavery. Its demand was for black identity, not universal rights. Not rights but power counted. It insisted on respect for blacks as blacks, not as human beings simply.”
Allan Bloom on Human Potential: “…their approach to these works bespoke a free choice and the potential for man as man, regardless of time, place, station or wealth, to participate in what is highest. It would be a sad commentary on the human condition if the brotherhood of man is founded on what is lowest in him, while the higher cultivation required unbridgeably separate ‘cultures.’”
Allan Bloom on Lack of Education: “Lack of education simply results in students seeking for enlightenment wherever it is regularly available, without being able to distinguish between the sublime and trash, insight and propaganda.”
Allan Bloom on Liberally Educated People: “The liberally educated person is one who is able to resist the easy and preferred answers, not because he is obstinate but because he knows others worthy of consideration. Although it is foolish to believe that book learning is anything like the whole of education, it is always necessary, particularly in ages when there is a poverty of living examples of the possible high human types.”
Allan Bloom on Our Educational Challenge: “Have we so simplified the soul that it is no longer difficult to explain? To an eye of dogmatic skepticism, nature herself, in all her lush profusion of expressions, might appear to be a prejudice. In her place we put a gray network of critical concepts, which were invented to interpret nature’s phenomena but which strangled them and therewith destroyed their own raison d’etre. [That is, reason for being] Perhaps it is our first task to resuscitate those phenomena so that we may again have a world to which we can put our questions and be able to philosophize. This seems to me to be our educational challenge.”
Allan Bloom on Overcoming Prejudice Through Education: “History and social science are used in a variety of ways to overcome prejudice. We should not be ethnocentric, a term drawn from anthropology, which tells us more about the meaning of openness. We should not think our way is better than others. The intention is not so much to teach the students about other times and places as to make them aware of the fact that their preferences are only that – accidents of their time and place. Their beliefs do not entitle them as individuals, or collectively as a nation, to think they are superior to anyone else.”
Allan Bloom on Pop Psychology: “The psychological obtuseness of our students is appalling, because they have only pop psychology to tell them what people are like, and the range of their motives. As the awareness that we owed almost exclusively to literary genius falters, people become more alike, for want of knowing they can be otherwise.”
Allan Bloom on Prejudices: “Prejudices, strong prejudices, are visions about the way things are. They are divinations of the order of the whole of things, and hence the road to a knowledge of that whole is by way of erroneous opinions about it. Error is indeed our enemy, but it alone points to the truth and therefore deserves our respectful treatment. The mind that has no prejudices at the outset is empty.”
Allan Bloom on Real Teachers: “No real teacher can doubt that his task is to assist his pupil to fulfill human nature against all the deforming forces of convention and prejudice.”
Allan Bloom on Students: “Those students are only potential, but potential points beyond itself; and this is the source of the hope, almost always disappointed but ever renascent, that man is not just a creature of accident, chained to and formed by the particular cave in which he is born.”
Allan Bloom on Teaching: “The teacher…dedicated to liberal education, must constantly try to look toward the goal of human completeness and back at the natures of his students here and now, ever seeking to understand the former and to assess the capacities of the latter to approach it. Attention to the young, knowing what their hungers are and what they can digest, is the essence of the craft.”
Allan Bloom on the best and worst of human nature: “At the very best, it is clear to me now that nature needs the cooperation of convention, just a man’s art is needed to found the political order that is the condition of his natural completeness. At worst, I fear that spiritual entropy or an evaporation of the soul’s boiling blood is taking place, a fear that Nietzsche thought justified and made the center of all his thought.”
Allan Bloom on the Best Role for History and Anthropology: “History and anthropology cannot provide the answers, but they can provide the material on which judgment can work.”
Allan Bloom on the Corruption of Openness: “Openness used to be the virtue that permitted us to seek the good by using reason. It now means accepting everything and denying reason’s power. The unrestrained and thoughtless pursuit of openness, without recognizing the inherent political, social, or cultural problem of openness as the goal of nature, has rendered openness meaningless. Cultural relativism destroys both one’s own and the good. What is most characteristic of the West is science, particularly understood as the quest to know nature and the consequent denigration of convention – i.e., culture or the West understood as a culture – in favor of what is accessible to all men as men through their common and distinctive faculty, reason. Science’s latest attempts to grasp the human situation – cultural relativism, historicism, the fact-value distinction – are the suicide of science. Culture, hence closedness, reigns supreme. Openness to closedness is what we teach.”
Allan Bloom on the Education of Openness “The recent education of openness… pays no attention to natural rights or the historical origins of our regime, which are now thought to have been essentially flawed and regressive. It is progressive and forward-looking. It does not demand fundamental agreement or the abandonment of old or new beliefs in favor of the natural ones. It is open to all kinds of men, all kinds of life-styles, all ideologies. There is no enemy other than the man who is not open to everything. But when there are no shared goals or vision of the public good, is the social contract any longer possible?” (I’d say there does need to be a shared vision, but one that is naturally and necessary to the furtherment of human progress.)
Allan Bloom on the Education of Young Americans: “…little attention has been paid to what is required in order truly to convey the spirit of other places and other times to young people, or for that matter to anyone, partly because the students see no relevance in any of it to the lives they are going to lead or to their prevailing passions.”
Allan Bloom on the Failure to Read Good Books: “…the failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengths our most fatal tendency – the belief that the here and now is all there is.”
Allan Bloom on the Function of Historicism and Cultural Relativism: “Historicism and cultural relativism actually are a means to avoid testing our own prejudices and asking, for example, whether men are really equal or whether that opinion is merely a democratic prejudice.” (Historicism being ‘the view that all thought is essentially related to and cannot transcend its own time’.)
Allan Bloom on the Greatest Talents: “…the greatest talents are the most difficult to perfect, and the more complex the nature, the more susceptible it is to perversion.”
Allan Bloom on the Illusion of Openness: “Actually openness results in American conformism – out there in the rest of the world is a drab diversity that teaches only that values are relative, whereas here we can create all the life-styles we want. Our openness means we do not need others. Thus what is advertised as a great opening is a great closing. No longer is there a hope that there are great wise men in other places and times who can reveal the truth about life – except for the few remaining young people who look for a quick fix from a guru. Gone is the historical sense of Machiavelli who wrested a few hours from each busy day in which ‘to don regal and courtly garments, enter the courts of the ancients and speak with them.’”
Allan Bloom on the Importance of Teaching Non-Western Cultures to Undergraduates: “It points them back to passionate attachment to their own and away from the science which liberates them from it. Science now appears as a threat to culture and a dangerous uprooting charm. In short, they are lost in a no-man’s-land between the goodness of knowing and the goodness of culture, where they have been placed by their teachers who no longer have the resources to guide them. Help must be sought elsewhere.” (Essentially, social science can become its own sort of religion, its own demagogical weapon.)
Allan Bloom on the New Curriculum: “The point is to propagandize acceptance of different ways, and indifference to their real content is as good a means as any. It was not necessarily the best of times in America when Catholics and Protestants were suspicious of and hated one another; but at least they were taking their beliefs seriously, and the more or less satisfactory accommodations they worked out were not simply the result of apathy about the state of their souls.” (It’s about being civil and agreeing to disagree and coexist than blindly just being relativist morons.)
“Practically all that young Americans have today is an insubstantial awareness that there are many cultures, accompanied by a saccharine moral drawn from that awareness: We should all get along.” (And yet, we most certainly don’t, unless we conform to some arbitrary standard set by a seemingly countless number of different niche-based tribes that mostly exist only in the digital realms, something Bloom couldn’t have imagined.)
Allan Bloom on the old writers being new to American students: “But for Americans the works of the great writers could be the bright sunlit uplands where they could find the outside, the authentic liberation for which this essay is a plea. The old was new for these American students, and in that they were right, for every important old insight is perpetually fresh.”
Allan Bloom on the Peace Corps Mentality: “Young Americans have less and less knowledge of and interest in foreign places. In the past there were many students who actually knew something about and loved England, France, Germany, or Italy, for they dreamed of living there or thought their lives would be made more interesting by assimilating their languages and literatures. Such students have almost disappeared, replaced at most by students who are interested in the political problems of Third World countries and in helping them to modernize, with due respect to their old cultures, of course. This is not learning from others but condescension and a disguised form of a new imperialism. It is the Peace Corps mentality, which is not a spur to learning but to a secularized version of doing good works.” (Now it’s all about Instagram.)
Allan Bloom on the Problem with Relativism: “…relativism has extinguished the real motive of education, the search for a good life.”
Allan Bloom on True Openness: “True openness means closedness to all the charms that make us comfortable with the present.”
Allan Bloom on Why Philosophy is the Most Important Science: “Nature should be the standard by which we judge our own lives and the lives of peoples. That is why philosophy, not history or anthropology, is the most important human science. Only dogmatic assurance that thought is culture-bound, that there is no nature, is what makes our educators so certain that the only way to escape the limitations of our time and place is to study other cultures. History and anthropology were understood by the Greeks to be useful only in discovering what the past and other peoples had to contribute to the discovery of nature. Historians and anthropologists were to put peoples and their conventions to the test, as Socrates did individuals, and go beyond them. These scientists were superior to their subjects because they saw a problem where others refused to see one, and they were engaged in the quest to solve it. They wanted to be able to evaluate themselves and others.”