I. “Speaker Bloom”
When I invited Prof. Allan Bloom to Dartmouth in 1973, I got to see the fire in the smoke. As he spoke, each one of the hundred students felt he was speaking to him, firing his soul to study; and his talk early Saturday morning, on Mme. Bovary, brought the faculty wives out of the sleepy hills; also afire was the cigar he left in my daughter’s frilly bed that nearly burned our home down.
The same fire in the book he published decades later, The Closing of the America Mind, still kindles us to study beautiful lofty things, open our foggy minds to their light, and change our low disordered lives.
All Mr.Bloom’s writings bear the stamp of his ardent way of speaking, of his ebullient conversation, rich in allusion, spicy with anecdotes, salted with insults, ever on the move, expanding to the horizon or zeroing in on details, and with his hawk eyes flashing to see his effect, and at the same time producing it, but in the Closing he is even more alive than elsewhere. Mr. Bloom is not writing to scholars, thus no footnotes; he is speaking as if to his friends, such as Saul Bellow who urged him ‘put it in a book,’ but we lucky citizens, parents, and fellow teachers get to listen.
I can hear him now.
II. “Overview: Part II Crowns the Closing”
Part I of the Closing described the slack-souled students so discerningly that parents bought the book to understand their own children; Part III described what Mr.Bloom saw close-up at Cornell, the threatening students and the cowering faculty. That was then. Are students today at elite colleges as Bloom once found them? Are they the “excellent sheep” William Deresiewicz describes at Yale, filled with ambition and empty of purpose? I would like to hear a teacher with Bloom’s gift of getting students to talk candidly about their lives tell us what they are like at Yale, Dartmouth, or Chicago. And the faculties? Today they do seem weaker than at Cornell, where they first voted to oppose the armed students; now when the kids make outrageous demands, the adults scramble to get out ahead with preemptive surrenders. Even before a single student weeps about an election, there at Yale the teacher announces “skip the test.” Having for years wanted students to share their rages (race, class, and gender[1]), the faculties now suffer them from the students. They have created war zones and call them colleges.
Part II of Bloom’s Closing, entitled “Nihilism American Style,” traces both the dissipation of longing in the students (Part I) and the enfeebling of reason in the faculties (Part III) to the reduction of the deep, daring, and risky thoughts of Nietzsche, by Max Weber and Sigmund Freud, and then their dilution by their epigonic emigres, so that we Americans now enjoy a slack nihilism. Being as true now as then, this Part only asks to be heeded. If you think of yourself as a “self” or “ego” rather than a soul, if you speak of “commitment” rather than choice, and if you speak of “values,” then you need Dr. Bloom’s help. He will lead you in two directions: there is the way of philosophy, joyous but steep and lonely, probably tragic; and there is the civic way to home and country, a long road, at most contented, and probably comic.
III. “Nietzsche Diluted or Traduced?”
Part Two of the Closing is the most difficult section because it is the deepest. While in Parts I and III Bloom is talking of persons we may know, students and professors, in Part II he is talking about persons we better not claim to know, philosophers, the brilliant Nietzsche and the dark Heidegger, who are above us, whom we need to learn from, and not degrade.
Is degradation inevitable or culpable? According to Bloom, if you are a worthy thinker such as Max Weber, and yet lesser than great souled Nietzsche, you will inevitably convey something diluted; the only guard against it is to keep saying to the reader, or your student, and to yourself, as Bloom does, “look higher than me.” Unworthy ambitious ones (Freud) and opportunists like Adorno, Marcuse, and Fromm, don’t care, and simply unknowing ones, plain Americans like Riesman, just don’t know.[2] But according to Bloom we relaxed Americans are also culpable for our own corruption.
There is a mystery here. Leo Strauss, Bloom’s teacher, once wrote a ten-page history of modernity entitled “Three Waves of Modernity” (Machiavelli, Rousseau, and Nietzsche), which proves Nietzsche’s contention that the really big events in human history are thoughts. Bloom’s addition in the Closing, (e.g. p.200) dealing with third-wave Nietzsche, is ambiguous; on the one hand, to Bloom the dilution of Nietzsche’s thought is inevitable and yet on the other, as Bloom’s critical aspersions on us Americans maintain, we are guilty of this dilution, which implies it was not inevitable; we might overcome it and should do so by studying Nietzsche. Though Bloom did study Nietzsche, I believe he seldom taught Nietzsche,[3] and does not ascend to what in Nietzsche is far about all “values,” namely the noble “order of rank” of the virtues, which climbs to Zarathustra, and might then lead, peak-hopping, to Plato, and Aristotle, and Thomas, and to Socrates, as Nietzsche was ever led, all his thinking life.
Readers of Bloom’s account will then want to study Nietzsche, and accordingly then desire to dwell with every thinker and poet Nietzsche lives with, and especially Socrates. No other part of the book requires as much study. After reading Part I you should talk to your own children; after reading Part III, if you are a professor, you should use your tenure to reform the university, but after reading Part II, you should philosophize, or not, or if young, spend college discovering the great spirits to spend your un-”gainfully employed” hours after college with. And if you do that, you will not only come to know yourself better, but contribute to the common good of our Republic.
IV. “The Civic Good of Choosing Your Words”
There are civic ways, as well as the philosophic way, roads to home and to country, requiring quite as much effort and yet promising good results sooner (for philosophy never ends). In Part II, Allan Bloom examines the words that have closed our American minds, hindered us from knowing ourselves, made it hard to deliberate, and thus contributed to our many blunders and even disasters.[4] Mr.Bloom devotes major attention to such words as “self” (not soul), to “creativity” to “culture,” and to the mother of them all, “values.” “These words are there where thoughts should be” (p.238) and Bloom thinks about them, first archeologically tracing them to German thinkers, then critically exposing their deficiencies, and finally suggesting better words.
Along the way he exposes the emptiness of “the sacred,” “secularize,” “charisma,” and all Freud’s at once pretentious and murky psychology. Only the sophisticatedly mad would refers to my “id, ego, and superego.” Mr.Bloom fixes on cloudy phrases, such as “relate” (which avoids specifying related in what way, love, hate, pity?), and “failure to communicate” (rather than failure to understand). And there are all the inferior or downright evasive substitutions, “intellectual honesty” for love of truth, the pairs “authentic-inauthentic, profound-superficial, creative-uncreative” replacing true and false, “commitment” (a thing of the will) which excuses one from practicing the moral virtues (moderation, justice, courage) or the spiritual (faith, hope, love); “identity” and “personality” instead of character; and “positing” instead of claiming, contending, arguing, maintaining, or holding (as in “hold these truths self-evident”) and reasoning together; all these slippery innovations support the shallow preference, “life-style,” instead of the consequential choice of way of life —How Bloom would have laughed to hear that “life-style” is now the name of a condom!
“There is a whole arsenal of terms for talking about nothing—caring, self-fulfillment, expanding consciousness, and so on indefinitely. Nothing determinate, nothing that has a referent.” (p.155) All these evasive substitutions stem from holding that man is the value-creating self and not the good-discovering soul. The revolutionary cry “Values” governs all the others and like Robespierre beheads all the good ancient ones. As C. S. Lewis once observed, persons who worship God seldom speak of religion; they speak of God, more often to God, and gather in His name. “Religion” is a word convenient for those to stand outside all religions. But “values” is more than distant. It sucks the meaning out of everything it embraces. Whatever the Greeks, the Romans, and the Christians founded they did not call a value. Neither the Renaissance nor the Reformation were restoring a value. We read of “values” most often in the plural of vagueness. And when we hear a speaker, with a hand waving indignantly in the air, calling for “values,” just ask “which ones were you thinking of?” And from the sputtering, you will gather how impoverishing the word is, and if the speaker is the most Constitutional president in modern times, how truly parlous our situation. (p.141)
V. “Never Shall I Utter These Words”
Towards the end of Part II, Mr. Bloom asks if we Americans were forbidden to use all these words, whether we would be speechless. If deprived of “life-style” would we say “living exactly as I please,” if stripped of “my ideology,” we say “my prejudices,” and if unable to say “my values” but just “my opinions” would we, now naked and a touch ashamed, try to give reasons for our views and our choices, hence begin to know ourselves, and live seriously (p.238)
A couple of years ago I was very pleased when the whole class studying Part II took the pledge I offered, and solemnly swore (with a smile): “I shall never utter these words, but ever seek better ones, so help me God.”
What words might we seek? While Mr. Bloom’s exposure of the new words often includes better words, Americans can find plenty elsewhere. There is, there remains, the mighty fortress of the King James Bible, not in the luke-warm modern replacements, though with notes explaining things no longer intelligible. And there is the boundless treasury of Shakespeare.
In Shakespeare you won’t find such words as life-style, ideology, or even entertainment in its shallow modern sense; the word “creative” does not appear, only creature, creation, and creator, for creativity was only recognized in “great nature” and nature’s God, and you won’t find “charisma” for there was only one Christ whose “blessed feet, /… fourteen hundred years ago were nailed / For our advantage on the bitter cross “ (1 Henry IV I.1.25-7). The later philosophic sludge, of “concept,” of “objective” and “subjective,” and of “fact/value,” are not there to stymie our search for truth. And instead of “values,” you will find, long before Nietzsche, the exposure of its danger, when the amorous Troilus defends the abduction of Helen: “What’s aught but as ’tis valued? (2.2.52) and is refuted by Hector: “value dwells not in particular will; / It holds his estimate and dignity / As well wherein ’tis precious of itself…. ‘Tis mad idolatry / To make the service greater than the god” (2.2.53-60).
The seven most common adjectives in Shakespeare are: “good,” “great,” “fair,” “sweet,” “true,” “poor,” and “noble.” (“Fair” includes beautiful and just) and the good exceeds (2985) all others. When teaching Shakespeare I challenge students to spend a week using such words, and no words not in Shakespeare, and extra credit if they get some winsome Shakespearean word into local print, like “romage” in the Daily Dartmouth. How many knaves would be recognized, and some restrained, if we used the word “knave”as often as Shakespeare (247). And fools if we used “fool” too.
The glory of our English tongue is not in our mundane philosophers Locke, Mill, Rawls (let alone the tribe of “analytics” addressing small questions in hopes that all the big ones go away), or its turgid social scientists, but in the poets, led by Shakespeare, and also in its Statesmen: why not spend a week, a month, using only the vocabulary of the Founders, or spend a lifetime, like Lincoln who combined them with Shakespeare, and in the end in his two greatest addresses, now on the walls of his Memorial, added the Bible.
While the great are to be emulated, the good should be consulted. So, let me recommend a rare guide to good writing, by a good writer, Jacques Barzun’s Simple and Direct, and for the exact word, there is James Fernald’s Synonyms, Antonyms, and Prepositions. And evil writers must be shunned. Since intellectuals foment new corruption, imitate how Roger Scruton (Fools, Frauds, and Firebrands) scrutinizes passages in which celebrity nihilists, Deleuze, Foucault, and Derrida, drown reason in mystifying jargon. If since about 1970, when Paul DeMan seduced Yale to “theory,” literature professors had continued to love literature, admire Shakespeare, and teach others to, the colleges would not now be so enraged. Even if they had emulated only Mr. Bloom’s attention to words, if they’d taught writing, and written well themselves, all American Academe might still be the peaceful home of the American mind.
Michael Platt, Friends of the Republic
Author: After a long life of teaching, chiefly Shakespeare and Nietzsche, at Dartmouth, the University of Dallas, and in Germany, Dr. Michael Platt continues over the internet, with his Friends of the Republic, and welcomes inquiries: drmichaelplatt1942@gmail.com.
This above is my piece with my chosen words, before the cool Ryan Anderson and the hot
Nathan Schleutter refused to include my most philosophic section (on Bloom’s most
philosophic part), since, they declared, it would be too hard for readers; myself, I think a bit of something hard and elevating, though it be for only a few, is merited anywhere it can be found, and if in the middle of something otherwise appealing is just right; after all, the middle of Bloom’s book comes after the immensiely appealing first part; reading the first part, seeing Bloom understood their own children better than they did, parents forged on. Though Ryan espouses the good, he’s not a writer, never a passage or sentence, to cause a reader to exclaim to a friend, “hey listen to this.” In what’s below, I tried to explain one subtlety, also a courtesy, that preceeeded his time, to no avail.
Here’s what they published: “Allan Bloom on American Nihilism and its Degrading Vocabulary” posted on The Public Concern (4 May 2017) http://www.thepublicdiscourse.com/2017/05/19063/
On Sat, Mar 25, 2017 at 5:00 PM, Michael Platt <drmichaelplatt1942@gmail.com> wrote:
Dear Editor/s,
I see what you have returned to me is not the conventional author’s text with suggested revisions marked, such as you Nathan provided earlier.
In regard to style, let one sentence stand example for others.
Platt’s version:
All Mr. Bloom’s writings bear the stamp of his ardent way of speaking, of his ebullient conversation rich in allusion, spicy with anecdotes, salted with insults, ever on the move, expanding to the horizon or zeroing in on details, and with his hawk eyes flashing to see what effect he is having, and at the same time producing it, but in the Closing this is even more so.
Editor’s version:
Bloom’s writing reflects his ardent way of speaking. His ebullient conversations were always rich in allusion, spicy with anecdotes, and salted with insults. His mind was ever on the move, expanding to the horizon or zeroing in on details, with his hawk eyes watching his interlocutor to monitor the effect of his words.
The substitution of the vague “reflects” for “stamps” loses the bit of solidity in the reminder that writing and printing do make an impression, a stamp, upon a chosen material. The shift from Bloom being the agent of “ever on the move” to his “mind” diminishes his vigorous personal agency. Interjecting “watching the interlocutor” also slows things down, and left out altogether is how those hawking eyes made things happen. I well remember Cary Lord, when he lived on my third floor, describing how he and his fellow students in “Directed Studies” developed a masked look to avoid Bloom’s jabbing: “come on Cary, I saw you thinking, tell us what are you thinking?” In sum, my sentence describing Bloom’s ebullience, being itself somewhat ebullient, is true to him, as well as to me. (And to make it even more so, I would now have the final words be: but in his Closing, Mr. Bloom is even more alive than elsewhere, which also leads better into what you now have immediately following: “I can hear him now.”)
Second, I see only the blunt “Bloom” in place of the distinctions: Bloom, Mr. Bloom, and Dr. Bloom. Let me explain. The substitution of Bloom for Mr. Bloom is not the way he was known, in an earlier more respectful era, when even the President was “Mr. Truman.” I do go back and forth between Mr. Bloom and Bloom (and once Dr. Bloom), all for good reason. Mr. Bloom I recall and hail; but when I differ from him, he’s Bloom; and when readers need to be cured of deseased vocabulary, then he’s Dr. Bloom.
Of course, I recognize what you’ve sent me is a comprehensive rewriting, with much cutting. From that, especially the cutting of the somewhat philosophic section, and some other things, I conclude that in the editor’s judgment, the audience of Public Concern would only be vexed or bored by anything else, and who would know its audience better than its editors.
So, though I’d prefer my sentence on ebullient Mr. Bloom left ebullient (and with the addition I provided above), and he properly respected as Mr. Bloom, go ahead and publish it, for the benefit of Public Concern’s readers, and I’ll share my chosen words with friends. For what you want, perhaps a better, because slimmer title would be: Allan Bloom on American Nihilism and Its Degrading Vocabulary. Or maybe: Allan Bloom Scrutinizes American Words, Words, Words.
Prosper, Dr. Michael Platt
Oh one thing: the little introduction by the editor, should say by the “Editor”.
And here is “about the author”:
After a long life of teaching, chiefly Shakespeare and Nietzsche, at Dartmouth, the University of Dallas, and in Germany, Dr. Michael Platt continues over the internet, with his “Friends of the Republic,” and welcomes inquiries: drmichaelplatt1942@gmail.com
If you’d like any changes to this “about the author” please confer with me.
[1]See Ross Douthat’s Privilege, on his experience of Harvard College.
[2] Ignored by Bloom was the emigre Erikson whose “eight stages of life” introduced the virtues into psychiatry, and also the native behaviourist Skinner whose “teaching machines” recognize no virtues, in courses I took.)
[3]Dennis Teti remembers he taught the Use and Abuse of History in a survey.
[4]See Bloom p.364 for the way Kennedy, Johnson, McNamara, Taylor, and the Bundys conceived of war as economics, talked as if killing were “graduated communication,” 58,307 Americans died in vain, and the country divided, unto this day.
Friends Of The Republic 