The Closing of the American Mind

Introduction: Our Virtue

Bloom argues that the single unifying belief of contemporary American students is relativism, which they hold not as a philosophical conclusion but as a moral postulate, and that the educational system’s decades-long commitment to ‘openness’ has paradoxically closed off the genuine quest for truth and the good life.

• Contemporary American students universally believe truth is relative, treating this not as a philosophical insight but as a moral postulate necessary for a free society — the modern replacement for natural rights as the foundation of democratic life.
  • When challenged on relativism, students respond with indignation rather than argument, equating questioning relativism with witch-hunting or monarchism, because the danger they have been taught to fear is not error but intolerance.
  • Students cannot defend their relativism intellectually; when asked whether they would have allowed widow-burning in India if they were British administrators, they either go silent or say the British should never have been there.
• Every educational system has a moral goal and produces a certain kind of human being; American democratic education has shifted from producing the rational, rights-conscious citizen to producing the democratically ‘open’ personality, abandoning the founding emphasis on natural rights.
  • The old model required immigrants to subordinate their old-world attachments to new rational principles of natural rights, creating a homogenizing universalism; the new model of openness rejects this in favor of celebrating diverse cultural identities without demanding fundamental agreement.
  • The recent education of openness pays no attention to natural rights or the historical origins of the regime, treating the founding as essentially flawed, and has no enemy other than the person who is not open to everything.
• The drift from natural rights to openness was enabled by legal and intellectual moves — such as Oliver Wendell Holmes’s ‘clear and present danger’ standard — that replaced principled limits on freedom with mere public order, optimistically assuming truth always wins in the marketplace of ideas.
  • The Founders, unlike Holmes, believed democratic principles must be returned to and consulted even when harsh, and that there should be no tolerance for the intolerant; Lincoln’s insistence that equality was not subject to popular sovereignty illustrates this.
  • The Founding approach differed from later liberalism by insisting the sphere of rights be the arena of moral passion, not a domain of weak, attenuated conviction.
• Openness—and the relativism that makes it the only plausible stance in the face of various claims to truth and various ways of life and kinds of human beings—is the great insight of our times.
• The historical and anthropological approach to culture, which teaches students not to be ’ethnocentric,’ actually rests on a self-contradictory premise: it uses Western scientific rationalism to assert the equality of all cultures while denying the validity of that same rationalism.
  • Every non-Western culture examined is itself deeply ethnocentric — Herodotus describes how the Persians ranked peoples by proximity to Persia — so the lesson drawn from studying other cultures (that we should not think our way best) is precisely the opposite of what those cultures themselves teach.
  • Only in Western nations influenced by Greek philosophy is there willingness to doubt that the good is identical with one’s own way; the scientific study of other cultures is almost exclusively a Western phenomenon, making anti-ethnocentrism itself a form of Western cultural imperialism.
• True openness, in the classical sense, was the accompaniment of the desire to know and the awareness of ignorance; contemporary openness, by contrast, means accepting everything and denying reason’s power, which paradoxically results in a great closing — conformism to the present and indifference to the past.
  • Plato’s image of the cave shows that culture is a cave from which philosophy attempts to free us; the solution is not to visit other caves (other cultures) but to seek nature as the standard — which is why philosophy, not history or anthropology, is the most important human science.
  • Cultural relativism destroys the West’s universal claims and leaves it as just another culture, but the West is defined by its need for justification, its need for philosophy and science — deprived of that, it will collapse.
• The lesson students draw from their education — that history and cultural diversity prove values are relative — is factually false; diversity of opinions raises the question of which is true rather than proving none is, and only an unhistorical assumption that opinions are held for no reason prevents pursuing that inquiry.
  • Herodotus, equally aware of cultural diversity, took it as an invitation to investigate what was good and bad about each culture; modern relativists take the same observation as proof that investigation is impossible and all cultures must be respected equally.
  • Historicism and cultural relativism are actually a means to avoid testing our own prejudices — asking, for example, whether men are really equal or whether that is merely a democratic prejudice — rather than a courageous confrontation with the question.
• There are two fundamentally different kinds of openness: one that is indifferent and serves as a cover for surrender to whatever is most powerful or fashionable, and another that is the genuine accompaniment of the desire to know — and contemporary education systematically promotes the former while suppressing the latter.
  • Openness as currently conceived is historicism’s ruse to remove all resistance to history, which in our day means public opinion; abandoning requirements to learn languages, philosophy, or science is praised as progress of openness when it is actually accommodation to student preference.
  • The professor who told Bloom his function was to ‘get rid of prejudices’ in students — knocking them down like tenpins — illustrated the problem: he had no clear idea what he was replacing them with, and risked rendering students passive and subject to the authority of current thought.

Part I: Students

The Clean Slate

Bloom examines how American students, once charming in their natural curiosity and freedom from cultural baggage, have progressively lost even the minimal intellectual and spiritual equipment — Biblical literacy, knowledge of the founding, family tradition — that once gave their quest for education some purchase, leaving them increasingly flat-souled and cut off from the tradition.

• Earlier American students arrived at university as ’natural savages’ compared to their culturally formed European counterparts, but this very blankness was a source of genuine openness to great texts — they encountered old works freshly, without the stale familiarity that made them routine for Europeans.
  • European students in the post-war era knew Rousseau and Kant thoroughly but as childhood baggage, making them susceptible to novelty; American students could approach the same works as genuine discoveries, with the potential for man as man to participate in what is highest regardless of time or place.
  • In 1965, Bloom observed that the post-Sputnik generation of students had an aristocratic quality — unattached to comfort, willing to give it up for grand ideals, open and generous — creating an electric intellectual atmosphere.
• The post-Sputnik intellectual revival of the late 1950s and early 1960s was a genuine but wasted opportunity: students with real intellectual longing found no liberal education waiting for them, and the energy was dissipated in the political upheavals of the mid-1960s rather than channeled into genuine learning.
  • Science had been oversold as the answer; when students discovered there was something beyond science, the universities offered them every concession except education, and the experiment in excellence was washed away, leaving ’the students’ souls exhausted and flaccid, capable of calculating, but not of passionate insight.’
  • Bloom now fears that Nietzsche’s warning about the permanent unbending of the spirit’s bow may be correct — that the decay of culture means not only the decay of man in this culture but the decay of man simply, as the soil grows ever thinner.
• The founding heritage — the Declaration of Independence, the Constitution, the founding heroes — once provided American students with a unique civic scripture, a clear and universally accessible national story that gave moral significance to ordinary lives; this has been largely destroyed by academic debunking.
  • Unlike French, German, or English national traditions that remain ineffable, Americanness could always be articulated: freedom and equality as rational principles, embodied in the Declaration and the Constitution, generated a race of heroes all pointing in the same direction.
  • The founding heritage was attacked from multiple directions — Beard’s Marxist debunking of the Founders’ motives, Becker’s historicism casting doubt on natural rights, Southern historians rehabilitating the Confederacy, and civil rights radicals branding the founding as racist — until it disappeared from daily life and textbooks.
• The disappearance of Biblical literacy from American homes and education represents the loss of the only truly common culture that once united simple and sophisticated Americans alike and provided the key to Western art, the possibility of world-explanation, and a vision of the moral cosmos.
  • The family, not the schools, was the primary transmitter of religious tradition, but families have become spiritually empty — people sup, play, and travel together but do not think together, and hardly any homes have any intellectual life connecting vital interests to serious texts.
  • Bloom’s grandparents, though formally uneducated, lived in a spiritually rich home because all activities found their origin and explanation in Biblical commandments and stories, linking them to great scholars; his educated cousins — M.D.s and Ph.D.s — by contrast, have only clichés when speaking about the human condition.
• Moral education cannot succeed through abstract ‘values clarification’ because values are insubstantial without the imaginative framework — narrative, protagonist and antagonist, cosmic stakes, rewards and punishments — that the Bible and great literature once provided; today’s moral education produces only pallid, will-o’-the-wisp opinions that change with public opinion.
  • Courses in ‘value clarification’ in schools have children discuss abortion, sexism, or the arms race — issues they cannot possibly understand — producing opinions without ground in experience or passion, which are the bases of moral reasoning.
  • The result is university students who can say nothing more about the ground of their moral action than ‘If I did that to him, he could do it to me’ — an explanation that does not even satisfy those who utter it.

Books

Bloom argues that students have lost the practice of and taste for reading serious books, with consequences ranging from psychological obtuseness to an inability to conceive of ideals, and that feminism has become the latest force — after the leveling of the sixties — to actively turn students against the classic literary tradition.

• Contemporary students have no books that genuinely count for them as companions or sources of counsel; when asked, most are puzzled by the question, occasionally naming Ayn Rand’s The Fountainhead or The Catcher in the Rye — responses that reveal felt need for self-interpretation but an uneducated approach to satisfying it.
  • Students who visit the Louvre or Uffizi without knowledge of Biblical or classical stories see only colors and forms — modern abstraction — because the paintings assumed immediate recognition of their subjects and the powerful meaning those subjects held for viewers; without that meaning the works lose their essence.
  • The lack of Dickens-style literature means students have no shared vocabulary of human types — no Scrooges, Pecksniffs, or Micawbers — resulting in psychological obtuseness, since pop psychology offers only a narrow range of motives.
• Without literary education, students cannot distinguish between the sublime and trash, making them prey to politicized films and sentimental entertainment; the failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens the fatal tendency to believe the here and now is all there is.
  • Films like Gandhi or Kramer vs. Kramer serve passing political movements or flatter vices; a viewer without Anna Karenina or The Red and the Black as viewing equipment cannot sense what is lacking or distinguish honest presentation from consciousness-raising sentimentality.
  • Cinema now only knows the present, providing no distance from the contemporary — exactly the distance students most need in order not to indulge petty desires and to discover what is most serious about themselves.
• Students have been taught to have no heroes, on the ideological grounds that forming oneself on models is inauthentic; but without heroic models they have no resource against conformity to current role models, unconsciously imitating the doctors, lawyers, and TV personalities around them.
  • The contempt for the heroic is an extension of democratic relativism that denies greatness and wants everyone comfortable without suffering unpleasant comparisons; students artificially restrained from enthusiasm for great virtue are left with no genuine inner resources for guidance.
  • Tolstoy’s Prince Andrei, educated in Plutarch and inspired by admiration for Napoleon, is a genuinely noble man whose heroic longings give him a splendor of soul that dwarfs the petty, self-regarding bourgeoisie around him — illustrating what is lost when the capacity for hero-worship is suppressed.
• Feminism has become the most direct contemporary assault on the content of classic literature, directing activism against books themselves rather than merely the structure of education, on the grounds that all literature up to the present is sexist — thereby eliminating the love interest that remained after politics was purged from literary study.
  • The Muses never sang to poets about liberated women; from the Bible and Homer through Joyce and Proust it is ’the same old chanson,’ and this is particularly grave because the love interest was most of what remained in the classics after politics was purged and was also what drew students to reading them.
  • Students have been taught that old literature cannot teach them anything about the relations they want to have or will be permitted to have, so they are simply indifferent — rendering the feminist effort to expunge offensive authors or add corrective feminist readings largely unnecessary.

Music

Bloom argues that rock music has colonized the inner lives of young Americans with an appeal exclusively to sexual desire in its most undeveloped form, ruining the imagination for the kind of sublimated, aspirational eros that liberal education requires, and that this represents a historically unprecedented capture of youth culture by a commercial industry with no counterweight.

• Contemporary students are addicted to music in a way that has no modern parallel except Wagner’s Germany, but unlike that elite enthusiasm, rock music is universal, available nonstop, and has effectively replaced all other sources of inner meaning — school, family, and church have nothing to do with students’ musical world.
  • Classical music is now a special taste like Greek language or pre-Columbian archaeology, involving at most 5 to 10 percent of students; thirty years ago most middle-class families made European music part of the home, creating a recognizable class distinction between educated and uneducated that no longer exists.
  • Students today know exactly why Plato takes music so seriously in the Republic — they know it affects life profoundly — whereas an earlier generation found Plato’s discussion of rhythm and melody puzzling, because music then was merely entertainment.
• Plato and Nietzsche both understood music as the barbarous expression of the soul’s most primitive passions — pre-rational and hostile to reason — and that civilization consists in taming and forming these passions through art, creating a harmony between the passionate and rational parts of the soul that education requires.
  • Music provides an unquestionable justification and fulfilling pleasure for the activities it accompanies: the soldier is enthralled by the march, the religious man exalted by the organ, the lover carried away by the guitar — armed with music, man can damn rational doubt.
  • Bach’s religious and Beethoven’s revolutionary intentions are examples of music that cultivates the soul by using the passions while sublimating them toward a higher purpose; a man whose noblest activities are accompanied by music expressing them is whole, with no tension between the pleasant and the good.
• Rock music has a single appeal — to sexual desire in its most undeveloped, untutored form — and by delivering premature ecstasy without effort, talent, or virtue, it is like a drug that drains the soul’s energy and makes it difficult to have enthusiasms or great expectations for the higher achievements liberal education promises.
  • Rock’s lyrics celebrate puppy love and polymorphous attractions, describe bodily acts of sexual satisfaction, and treat them as the only natural culmination for children who have no imagination yet of love, marriage, or family — having a more powerful effect than pornography because it encourages active rather than vicarious engagement.
  • Students who have had a serious fling with drugs and gotten over it find it difficult to have enthusiasms or great expectations, as though the color has been drained from their lives; Bloom suspects rock addiction has a similar effect — when students shed their Walkman and their Michael Jackson costume, they find a Brooks Brothers suit beneath but a life as empty as the one they left.
• The rock music industry represents a perfect capitalism that discovered children as a consumer group with disposable income, exploiting and creating demand with the moral dignity of drug trafficking — and its commercial success has given it a respectability that prevents effective criticism or control.
  • The result is parents’ loss of control over their children’s moral education at a time when no one else is seriously concerned with it; parents cannot forbid their children to listen because it is everywhere, all children listen, and forbidding it would only cause them to lose their children’s affection.
  • The Left has given rock music a free ride, treating it as a people’s art coming from beneath bourgeois cultural repression; its antinomianism and longing for a world without constraint serve both the sexual revolution and Marcuse’s promise that overcoming capitalism would result in polymorphous sexual satisfaction.
• Rock music ruins the imagination for liberal education by cutting the golden thread linking eros to the quest for knowledge: the first sensuous experiences are decisive in determining taste for life, and when they are colonized by music that has no relation to any ideal, the soul cannot be moved by what education has to offer.
  • The period of nascent sensuality has always been used for sublimation — attaching youthful inclinations to music, pictures, and stories that provide the transition to fulfilling human duties and pleasures; education is not sermonizing against instincts but providing natural continuity between what the senses feel and what reason sees as good.
  • As long as students have the Walkman on, they cannot hear what the great tradition has to say; and after prolonged use, when they take it off, they find they are deaf.

Relationships

Bloom diagnoses a broad spiritual crisis in contemporary students’ inner lives, tracing through their egalitarianism, the racial failure of university integration, the sexual revolution and feminism, and the collapse of family bonds, to show that students now inhabit a ‘psychology of separateness’ that makes genuine friendship, love, and commitment nearly impossible.

• Contemporary students are genuinely egalitarian in ways previous generations were not — race, religion, national origin, and class have ceased to function as real social dividers among whites — but this homogenization reflects the eradication of meaningful differences rather than a triumph of universal humanity.
  • Harvard, Yale, and Princeton are no longer preserves of aristocratic sentiment; the old wounds of the clubbable versus the unclubbable have healed because the clubs no longer matter, and academic merit replaced legacy preference after World War II and the GI Bill.
  • The egalitarianism is pure feeling, not principle — students do not experience considerations of sex, color, religion, family, or money as relevant, not because they have reasoned through to equality but because these distinctions have simply ceased to have living meaning in their experience.
• The racial integration of universities has been a conspicuous failure: black and white students do not form real friendships, black students largely self-segregate, and the university’s acquiescence in this separatism — through affirmative action, black studies programs, and separate social spaces — has institutionalized rather than solved the problem.
  • Affirmative action has produced a situation where the average black student’s achievements do not equal those of the average white student at good universities, and everyone knows it — creating among black students a disposition of equal parts shame and resentment, and among white students a silent turning toward non-black company.
  • At Cornell, black militants demanded and received the dismissal of a tough-minded integrationist black dean; what followed was a system of permanent quotas, racially motivated faculty hiring, difficulty in giving blacks failing marks, and organized grievance — ’everywhere hypocrisy, contempt-producing lies about what is going on.’
• The sexual revolution liberated desire from old constraints but revealed those passions as smaller than imagined — ’the lion behind the door turned out to be a little, domesticated cat’ — while feminism then imposed new and more comprehensive moral regulation aimed not at restraining desire but at eliminating the differentiated sexual roles that constituted the old human connections.
  • Feminism is founded not on nature but on the premise that biology should not be destiny; its project requires the suppression of modesty — which extended sexual differentiation from the sexual act to the whole of life and was the structural condition for the old forms of relatedness between men and women.
  • Plato’s Republic, which feminists praise as prescient, shows with full clarity what equal treatment of women requires: the abolition of the private family, common raising of children, suppression of particular attachments between man, woman, and child — making explicit that equal treatment of women necessitates the removal of meaning from old sexual relations and hence the loss of human connections resulting from them.
• The possibility of separation is already the fact of separation, inasmuch as people today must plan to be whole and self-sufficient, and cannot risk interdependence.
• The decay of the natural ground for the family — rooted in the modern political principle that consent and individual rights precede all social duties — was anticipated by Rousseau, who saw that liberal individualism was dissolving the male-female bond and dedicated much of his work to reconstructing it on grounds of passionate romantic love.
  • Locke transformed paternal authority into parental authority for the sake of children’s future freedom, making children grateful but providing no compelling motive for parents to sacrifice for them; the one exception is the mother’s instinctive attachment to children, which Locke recognized as a natural social bond not reducible to self-interest.
  • Rousseau’s effort to persuade women freely to embrace the differentiated sexual role, and Tocqueville’s description of the absolute differentiation of husband’s and wife’s functions in American democracy as the key to its success, have both failed; romantic love is now as alien as knight-errantry.
• Divorce is America’s most urgent social problem and has a specific distorting effect on university students: children of divorce develop rigid defensive frameworks, a fear of both isolation and attachment, extinguished intellectual daring, and a sub-basement worldview installed by therapeutic ideology that prevents them from reaching the cave of common sense from which genuine philosophy begins.
  • Children do not believe it when told their parents have a right to their own lives; they think they have a right to total attention, and voluntary separation seems to them worse than death precisely because it is voluntary — teaching them that the fundamental human bond is conditional and breakable.
  • The psychologists paid by divorcing parents to make everything work out as painlessly as possible are sworn enemies of guilt who provide children with an artificial language for artificial feelings; children so treated arrive at the university deafened by self-serving lies expressed in pseudoscientific jargon, living in a sub-basement far below the world of common sense.
• The most characteristic feature of contemporary student love life is the replacement of love — with its commitment, self-forgetting, and intimation of eternity — with the gray, amorphous concept of ‘relationships’ and ‘commitment,’ words that signal the absence of the real passionate motives they are meant to substitute for.
  • Students usually do not say ‘I love you’ and never ‘I’ll always love you’; one student told Bloom that of course he says ‘I love you’ to girlfriends — ‘when we are breaking up.’ The clean and easy break, no damage, no fault, is understood to be morality, respect for other persons’ freedom.
  • Dating has disappeared; students live in herds with no more sexual differentiation than herds have when not in heat, with none of the conventions civilization invented to take the place of heat, guide mating, and give the act significance that separates the couple from the flock.
• The eroticism of contemporary students is lame — not the divine madness Socrates praised that links the lowest bodily and highest spiritual, proving man’s relatedness to others and to the whole of nature — because premature sexual experience and popularized Freud have snipped the golden thread linking eros to education and the quest for self-knowledge.
  • In all species other than man, puberty is the completion of development; only in man does puberty begin the greater and more interesting part of moral and intellectual learning, which in civilized man is incorporated into erotic desire — easy, clinical sex in adolescence destroys this by delivering premature ecstasy without the longing that education requires.
  • Rousseau said the Symposium is always the book of lovers; the question of whether we are lovers anymore is Bloom’s way of putting the educational question of our times, because only from the heights of Platonic eros can our educational crisis be seen in proper perspective.

Part II: Nihilism, American Style

The German Connection

Bloom traces the origins of contemporary American moral language — values, commitment, life-style, identity, charisma — to Nietzsche and his heirs, arguing that Americans have unconsciously absorbed a German philosophical tradition fundamentally hostile to Enlightenment democracy, trivialized it into a comfortable nihilism, and are now living out its consequences without understanding their source.

• There is now an entirely new language of good and evil in America — the language of value relativism — that prevents serious moral discourse; when Reagan called the Soviet Union an ’evil empire’ he was condemned, but when he said the two superpowers ‘have different values’ the same critics approved, though he meant the same thing.
  • Value relativism serves two opposite purposes simultaneously: it releases people from the perpetual tyranny of good and evil and the guilt they carry, enabling easygoing self-preservation; and it enables intense ideological commitment, since values chosen freely by autonomous creators are more admirable than values received from tradition.
  • These two uses — surrender to the line of least resistance, and adoption of fanatic resolutions — are merely different deductions from the same premise: values are not discovered by reason, the quest for the good has ended, and Nietzsche’s announcement that God is dead has been democratized.
• Nietzsche diagnosed modernity as nihilism — the collapse of all belief in an objective good and evil — and called it an unparalleled catastrophe that meant the decomposition of culture; he saw liberal democracy’s rationalism and egalitarianism as the ‘civilized reanimalization of man’ and issued a call to revolt more radical than Marx’s.
  • For Nietzsche, the Left and socialism are not opposites of capitalism but its fulfillment — both move toward equality, whereas his call is from a new Right transcending both, toward the extraordinary individual capable of value creation.
  • The value-creating man has become a democratic substitute for the good man: ’life-style’ replaces the good life, and the man who has one is in competition with no one, commanding his own and others’ esteem without reference to any standard of the genuinely good.
• The German philosophical heritage entered American life primarily through Freud and Weber, who divided Nietzsche’s concerns between them — Freud the psychological and Weber the sociological — and whose ideas were absorbed by post-war American social scientists who embraced the technical language while ignoring its tragic implications.
  • Weber lived in an atmosphere of permanent tragedy: his science was a doubtful dare against chaos, values lay beyond reason’s limits, and he saw calculating reason ending in heartless bureaucracy while value commitment led to fanaticism — none of which prevented American social scientists from cheerfully adopting his fact-value distinction and going ahead with optimism.
  • Comparing Talcott Parsons with Max Weber gives the measure of the distance between the Continent and the United States; in Parsons one sees the routinization of Weber’s tragic vision into an academic methodology.
• The popularization of German philosophical nihilism in America is visible in how terms like ‘charisma,’ ’life-style,’ ‘commitment,’ and ‘identity’ — all traceable to Nietzsche — have become everyday American slang, while the depth and darkness of their original meaning has been dissolved into a comfortable ’nihilism with a happy ending.’
  • Woody Allen’s comedy is nothing but variations on the theme of the man without a real ‘self’ or ‘identity,’ borrowed from Heidegger via Fromm via Riesman — but where Allen fails is in his presentation of the healthy inner-directed man, who is simply empty or nonexistent, showing the shallowness of the American appropriation.
  • Louis Armstrong singing ‘Mack the Knife’ — a translation from Brecht and Weill’s Threepenny Opera, itself rooted in Nietzsche’s ‘On the Pale Criminal’ — illustrates how Weimar’s dangerous irrationalism becomes mass-marketed American entertainment, with all historical awareness and distance dissolved.
• The German philosophical influence on America is uniquely problematic because, unlike the universal Greek and French philosophical traditions, German thought after Hegel was explicitly anti-universalist: for Nietzsche and Heidegger, values are products of folk minds, language cannot truly be translated, and the very idea of cosmopolitan universalism is a symptom of decline.
  • We chose a system of thought that, like some wines, does not travel — one that had as its starting point dislike of us and our goals, holding the United States to be a non-culture, a collection of castoffs from real cultures, seeking only comfortable self-preservation.
  • Whether value relativism is harmonious with democracy is a question dealt with by never being raised; the Weimar Republic contained intelligent persons attracted to fascism for reasons very like those motivating the left ideologues, and once one plunges into the abyss there is no assurance that equality or democracy will be found on the other side.

Part II: Nihilism American Style

Two Revolutions and Two States of Nature

The American and French Revolutions, scripted by Locke and Rousseau respectively, produced two incompatible understandings of liberal democracy: where Americans saw a solution in Lockean self-interest and rights, Continental thinkers saw the French Revolution’s bourgeois outcome as a catastrophic failure of human possibility, generating two centuries of philosophical and political reaction.

• The Continental European intellectual tradition has been obsessed for two centuries with the ‘bourgeois’ as the worst failure of modernity, while Americans — who do not apply the term to themselves — broadly believe their democratic project is being successfully fulfilled.
  • The term ‘bourgeois,’ originating as a label for a diminished, materialistic being without grandeur, has been used by Continental thinkers from the Right and Left alike as a term of contempt, with the last great bourgeois-haters — Sartre, De Gaulle, and Heidegger — dying around the same time.
  • Americans call themselves ‘middle class’ without any negative spiritual content, while for Continentals ‘bourgeois’ has opposites like aristocrat, saint, hero, and artist that reveal a fundamentally different moral vocabulary.
• Locke and Rousseau, both beginning from the state of nature teaching that men are free and equal by nature, diverged sharply in their conclusions: Locke’s framework produced the successful Anglo-American liberal order, while Rousseau’s critique of it generated all subsequent Continental attempts to escape or correct that order.
  • Locke was the great practical success — English and American regimes founded themselves according to his instructions — while Rousseau, probably the greatest literary success of all time, inspired all later attempts in thought and deed to alter, correct, or escape from the fatality of Locke’s complete victory.
  • Rousseau invented the term ‘bourgeois’ in its modern sense and with it the great source of modern intellectual life; so persuasive was he that he destroyed the self-confidence of the Enlightenment at the very moment of its triumph.
• The Enlightenment project, epitomized by Locke, sought to extend rational self-governance to all men by grounding political life in natural rights derived from self-preservation, replacing virtue ethics with enlightened self-interest as the basis of social order.
  • Government exists to protect the product of men’s labor — their property, life, and liberty — and the notion of inalienable natural rights belonging to individuals prior to civil society is an invention of modern philosophy, not part of classical political philosophy.
  • The Lockean formula replaced the old demand for virtue with rational industriousness: what is needed is not men who practice Christian or Aristotelian virtues but rational and industrious men, whose opposite numbers are the quarrelsome and the idle.
• Americans are Lockeans: recognizing that work is necessary (no longing for a nonexistent Eden), and will produce well-being; following their natural inclinations moderately, not because they possess the virtue of moderation but because their passions are balanced and they recognize the reasonableness of that.
• Rousseau argued that Locke’s derivation of civil society from self-interest fatally produced the bourgeois — a being who is neither natural man nor true citizen, who corrupts morality by treating honesty as mere policy, and who cannot experience the ‘sweet sentiment of existence’ that is the deepest natural good.
  • “Rousseau diagnosed the bourgeois as one who ‘always in contradiction with himself, always floating between his inclinations and his duties, will never be either man or citizen… he will be nothing.’” —Jean-Jacques Rousseau
  • Fear of death, on which Hobbes and Locke built their systems, presupposes an even more fundamental experience — that life is good — and the busy bourgeois, absorbed with existing, has lost all sense of why he exists.
• The nature-society tension Rousseau introduced became the founding opposition of modern thought and pervades contemporary life in the conflict between Lockean institutions (represented by the economist) and Rousseauan depth psychology (represented by the psychoanalyst), a division that defines American intellectual culture.
  • Locke’s state-of-nature teaching is responsible for American institutions, justifying absorption with private property and the free market, while Rousseau’s lies behind the most prevalent modern views of what life is about and how to seek healing for human wounds.
  • The crisp, efficient economist is the Lockean; the deep, brooding psychoanalyst is the Rousseauan — in principle their positions are incompatible, but easygoing America provides them a modus vivendi: economists tell us how to make money, psychiatrists give us a place to spend it.
• Nietzsche’s proclamation that the French Revolution’s ultimate product — the ’last man’ satisfied with bourgeois comfort — represented the worst and most nauseating failure of modernity became, through Max Weber, the common starting point for all serious twentieth-century political thought, including that imported into America.
  • Weber declared in 1919 that Nietzsche’s annihilating critique of ’the last men who have discovered happiness’ had settled the matter for all serious thinkers, meaning that almost all Americans — particularly those who said ‘We hold these truths to be self-evident’ — were still ‘big babies’ by Continental standards.
  • The misunderstanding between America and the Continent is that where Americans saw a solution, Continentals saw a problem: the French Revolution’s failure lay not in its inability to establish liberal democracy but in its success in producing the liberal democratic type of man.

The Self

The modern concept of ’the self’ — invented as a substitute for the soul after Machiavelli and Hobbes abandoned soul-talk — represents a progressive emptying of interiority, from Hobbes’s self-preserving individual through Rousseau’s sentiment of existence to Nietzsche’s bottomless, incommunicable id, leaving contemporary Americans with a psychology without a psyche.

• The modern ‘self’ is the philosophical substitute for the soul, invented after Machiavelli encouraged men to forget about eternal salvation and Hobbes reinterpreted self-knowledge as feeling rather than rational contemplation, producing a psychology without a psyche.
  • Machiavelli dared men to forget about their souls and the possibility of eternal damnation, and Hobbes followed by reinterpreting the Delphic ‘Know thyself’ not as an exhortation to philosophize but as an invitation to consult one’s most powerful passions, especially terror in the face of death.
  • The self is more feeling than reason and defined primarily as the contrary of other — ‘Be yourself’ — making Hobbes, astonishingly, the first propagandist for bohemia and preacher of sincerity or authenticity.
• Locke and Hobbes assumed that stripping away virtue-demands and grounding man in self-preservative desire would produce a natural consensus and simple solution to politics, but Rousseau demonstrated that this Lockean rational-and-industrious man was itself a construction that suppressed most of what is actually in man.
  • Locke illegitimately selected those parts of man he needed for his social contract and suppressed all the rest — the bourgeois is the measure of the price paid, most unable to afford to look at the thinly boarded-over basement within himself.
  • Rousseau exploded the simplistic harmony between nature and society that seems to be the American premise, finding in the depths all the complexity that pre-Machiavellian thought had located on high, in the soul.
• Modern psychology’s central distinction between healthy self-care and unhealthy other-directedness — most revealingly expressed as ‘inner-directed vs. other-directed’ — inverts the classical understanding, in which goodness meant caring for others rather than knowing how to care for oneself.
  • The great change is that a good man used to be one who cares for others as opposed to himself; now the good man is one who knows how to care for himself as opposed to one who does not — this is most obvious in politics, where for Aristotle good regimes have rulers dedicated to the common good, but for Locke and Montesquieu all rulers are presumed selfish and only institutional structures differ.
  • The most revealing distinction — ‘inner-directed vs. other-directed,’ with the former taken as unqualifiedly good — carries the unconscious wickedness Rousseau understood when he distinguished amour de soi from amour-propre, untranslatable into English because we must use ‘self-love’ for both.
• The bottomless Nietzschean self — the id — marks the final stage of the self’s evolution: unlike earlier versions that pointed to shared human experiences (fear of death, the sweet sentiment of existence), it is strictly individual, incommunicable, and isolates each person from all others rather than uniting them.
  • Each stop on the descent into the self was more inaccessible than the last: fear of violent death was immediately accessible to all; the sweet sentiment of existence required effort to recover; but at the Nietzschean bottom one finds only one’s own fatum — a stubborn, strong reality that has nothing to say for itself other than that it is.
  • Nietzsche restored something like the soul to the understanding of man by providing a supplement to the flat screen of consciousness, but the difference between the self and the soul remains great because of the changed status of reason — the reconstitution of man in Nietzsche required the sacrifice of reason that Enlightenment, whatever its failings, kept at the center.

Creativity

The concept of ‘creativity’ — originally a near-blasphemous attribution to man of God’s power to make something from nothing — has been democratized and trivialized in America until it means nothing, while simultaneously undermining the scientific rationalism on which liberal democracy was founded.

• Calling man ‘creative’ was originally a near-blasphemy, since only God had been called a creator; its application to human artists represented a radical claim that man, not as rational animal but as artist, is the highest being, whose greatest work of art is himself.
  • The greatest men are now understood to be not the knowers but the artists — Homer, Dante, Raphael, Beethoven — and art is not imitation of nature but liberation from nature; a man who can generate visions of a cosmos and ideals by which to live is a genius, a mysterious, demonic being.
  • This language — self, culture, creativity — expresses the dissatisfaction with the scientific and political solutions of the Enlightenment and turns around the understanding of what nature is, with the ‘creative’ response conquering the Continent and coming from Germany to England through Coleridge and Carlyle.
• The democratic tendency to deny no one access to good things has trivialized ‘creativity’ and ‘personality’ from terms of distinction meant to describe Beethoven and Goethe into empty words applied to every schoolchild, producing a self-satisfaction that replaces the genuine virtues of industry and rationality.
  • These words are the bourgeois’ way of not being bourgeois — hence they are sources of snobbishness and pretentiousness alien to our real virtues; we have a lot of good engineers but very few good artists, yet all honor goes to the latter, or rather to those who stand in for the latter in the eyes of the many.
  • Creativity and personality take the place of older words like virtue, industry, rationality, and character — they affect our judgments and provide educational goals while meaning nothing specific, being a kind of opiate of the masses.
• Scientists who describe themselves as ‘creative’ unwittingly undermine the scientific enterprise, since nothing is more contrary to the spirit of science than the opinion that scientists fabricate rather than discover their results — revealing how the Romantic Zeitgeist has incorporated science rather than science liberating men from it.
  • Scientists are universally against creationism, recognizing rightly that if there is anything to it their science is wrong; but they fail to see that creativity has exactly the same consequences — either nature has a lawful order or it does not, either there can be miracles or there cannot.
  • Books like Thomas Kuhn’s The Structure of Scientific Revolutions are popular symptoms of a decay in science’s good conscience, suggesting that science is only a product of our culture, which we know is no better than any other.

Culture

The concept of ‘culture’ — invented by Kant to describe the synthesis of nature and society that overcomes the bourgeois dividedness — has split into two contradictory uses (culture as people/nation and culture as art) that are ultimately incompatible with the universal human rights on which liberal democracy rests.

• Kant invented ‘culture’ in its modern sense as a philosophical solution to the Rousseauan problem of the bourgeois: by showing how natural desires — illustrated through sexual love — can be progressively informed by civility until inclination and duty practically coincide, producing a fully human being whose social life genuinely fulfills rather than represses his nature.
  • The education of sexual desire is Kant’s paradigm: natural promiscuous desire, if sublimated through romantic love into faithful marriage and parental care, culminates in art (poetry, music) and connects the isolated individual through family and its legal protection all the way to politics — all without repression.
  • Culture is the unity of man’s brutish nature and all the arts and sciences acquired in his movement from the state of nature to civil society — it restores the lost wholeness of first man on a higher level where his faculties can be fully developed without contradiction.
• The disappearance of politics from the concept of culture — replaced by either economics (the subpolitical) or culture (the suprapolitical) — is one of the most salient aspects of modern thought, stripping away the architectonic art of the statesman’s prudence that once held these extremes together.
  • For the ancients, the soul of the city was the regime — arrangements of offices, deliberation about the just and the common good, choices about war and peace — but nothing of the kind is found in ‘culture,’ and today we are interested in Greek culture rather than Athenian politics.
  • The contemporary reading of Pericles’ Funeral Oration as a celebration of Athenian love of beauty and wisdom is a misreading dependent on German interpretations: Pericles actually praises Athens’ regime and finds beauty in its political achievement, especially its empire, with arts as imitations of that heroism.
• Rousseau’s chapter on the Legislator in The Social Contract — which argues that founding a people requires transforming human nature, weakening natural forces to strengthen acquired ones — is the true philosophical origin of the idea of culture, but his political frankness was replaced by the softer notion of organic cultural growth that denies there is a human nature to be transformed.
  • “Rousseau argued the legislator must ‘change human nature, transform each individual, who by himself is a perfect and solitary whole, into a part of a greater whole from which that individual as it were gets his life and his being.’” —Jean-Jacques Rousseau
  • His successors denied there is a human nature rather than acknowledge the brutality required to form a people, and so culture became understood as an organic growth — binding the idea to history, understood not as the investigation into man’s deeds but as a dimension of reality constitutive of man’s being.
• The tension between universal human rights and particular cultural identity is irresolvable because the idea of culture was adopted precisely as an alternative to the shallow universality of rights based on animal nature — the folk mind replacing reason — yet those who invoke culture to criticize America often also invoke human rights against regimes like Khomeini’s, wanting both simultaneously.
  • A culture itself generates its own way of life and highest principles with no authority above it — if there were such an authority, the unique way of life born of its principle would be undermined; so respect for cultures is fundamentally incompatible with human rights.
  • The ’new ethnicity’ or ‘roots’ movement is superficial because real differences among men are based on real differences in fundamental beliefs about good and evil and about God; ethnic festivals displaying clothes, dances, and foods are decaying reminiscences of old differences that once caused ancestors to kill one another.

Values

The word ‘values’ — introduced by Nietzsche to diagnose modern man’s loss of the capacity for genuine commitment and to shock him into creative self-overcoming — was democratized and softened in America into a language of relativistic tolerance that achieves precisely the nihilistic complacency Nietzsche sought to destroy.

• Max Weber’s declaration in 1919 that Nietzsche had decisively refuted Enlightenment rationalism — showing that reason cannot establish values and that all thinking Americans were still ‘big babies’ who had not confronted this — marks the moment when Continental nihilism was formally imported as the starting point for serious thought.
  • Weber said that anyone who still believed science was the path to happiness had not absorbed Nietzsche’s annihilating critique of ’the last men who have discovered happiness’ — implying that the entire American rational-democratic tradition from the Founders through John Dewey was naive.
  • Weber pointed toward Nietzsche as the common source for serious twentieth-century thinkers and identified the single fundamental issue as the relation between reason or science and the human good.
• Nietzsche’s proclamation that ‘God is dead’ was not a triumphant atheism but an anguished recognition that man, who loved and needed God, had lost his Father without possibility of resurrection — requiring a new description of good and evil founded on man’s own value-creating will rather than discovery of an objective good.
  • Enlightenment killed God, but like Macbeth the men of the Enlightenment did not know the cosmos would rebel at the deed and the world become ‘a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing’ — Nietzsche replaced easygoing atheism with agonized atheism that suffers its human consequences.
  • To adapt Plato’s formula about the gods: we do not love a thing because it is good — it is good because we love it. It is our decision to esteem that makes something estimable; man is the esteeming being, ’the beast with red cheeks.’
• Nietzsche used the vocabulary of ‘values’ to diagnose modern man’s loss of the capacity for genuine commitment and to shock him toward creative self-overcoming — but when this vocabulary was democratized in America it achieved exactly the opposite of Nietzsche’s intention, becoming a language of comfortable relativism.
  • Nietzsche’s works were intended to fill the few genuine creators with awe and awareness that everything depends on them, treating nihilism as a dangerous but possibly salutary stage that can either break man or hearten him to reconstruct a world of meaning — not as a permission for comfortable self-satisfaction.
  • Nietzsche sought to restore the harsh conflicts for which men were willing to die; that value philosophy was used in America for exactly the opposite purpose — to promote conflict-resolution, bargaining, and harmony, on the premise that if it is only a difference of values, conciliation is possible.
• Nihilism is a dangerous but a necessary and a possibly salutary stage in human history. In it man faces his true situation.
• Moses and other founding figures represent for Nietzsche the genuine creators of values — men who imposed life-preserving and life-enhancing tables of the good on chaos through acts of will — and authentic values require such creative imposition rather than rational persuasion, making struggle and cultural war the fundamental political phenomenon.
  • Moses, overpowered by obscure drives within him, went to the peak of Sinai and brought back tables of values with a necessity and substantiality more compelling than health or wealth — these values had no rational ground, yet constituted a people and gave it a life-style, a unity of inner experience and outer expression.
  • Since values cannot be rationally justified, commitment rather than truth becomes the moral virtue — commitment is the equivalent of faith when the living God has been supplanted by self-provided values, making decisions rather than deliberations the movers of deeds.
• Max Weber’s concept of ‘charisma’ — God-given grace secularized into the self’s value-positing capacity — was introduced to provide a corrective to the rationalist-bureaucratic politics that produces ’the last man,’ but its indeterminacy and extremism made it available for demagogues and ultimately provided intellectual legitimation for fascist leadership.
  • Weber’s analysis of the state as domination of man by man founded on legitimate violence — accepted by the dominated through traditional, rational, or charismatic beliefs — elevated charisma as the most important form, since all traditions had a charismatic founder and rational bureaucracy cannot establish ends.
  • Just over the horizon when Weber wrote lay Hitler — a leader who was certainly neither traditional nor rational-bureaucratic, the mad horrible parody of the charismatic leader hoped for by Weber — yet his example did not cause a rethinking of politics; the thought that preceded him in Europe conquered America while we were fighting him.
• Weber’s ‘Protestant Ethic’ thesis — that Calvinist charisma, not rational self-interest, was the decisive cause of capitalism — effectively destroyed the Lockean and Marxist accounts of history in favor of a Nietzschean one, yet proponents of the free market adopted his language without recognizing they were admitting their system needs an irrational moral supplement.
  • If Weber is right that Calvin’s charisma was decisive for capitalism, then Marx — his economics, his revolution, his entire system — was finished, since the purported material necessity turns out to be dependent on a ‘worldview’ or spiritual ‘value’ that has no rational ground.
  • Those who use the language of ‘work ethic’ without recognizing its Weberian genealogy are admitting that their rational system needs a moral supplement that is not itself rational — if the work ethic is just one choice among equally valid choices, then the free-market system is also just one choice, and its claims to universal rationality collapse.

The Nietzscheanization of the Left or Vice Versa

As Marx became intellectually untenable — his absolute historical science relativized into just another ideology — the European and American Left absorbed Nietzschean and Weberian categories to fill the gap, producing a cultural criticism of bourgeois life that has nothing authentically Marxist in it but disguises this by keeping Marx’s name and his anti-bourgeois stance.

• Marxism became intellectually untenable once its own historical method was turned against it: when Lenin called Marxism an ‘ideology,’ he relativized Marx’s claimed absolute scientific truth into just another perspective, beginning the inner rot that has made serious Marxism unbelievable to anyone who thinks.
  • In Marx, ideology meant the false system of thought by which ruling classes justify their rule, sharply distinguished from Marx’s own science — the truth based on disinterested awareness of historical necessity; but if this method applies to all thinkers, it applies to Marx himself, making his system self-refuting.
  • By 1905 Lenin was speaking of Marxism as an ideology, meaning it too can make no claim to truth — in less than half a century Marx’s absolute had been relativized, and the implausibility of any standpoint outside history, on which Nietzsche had insisted, had become commonly acknowledged.
• Sophisticated Marxists rescued themselves from Marx’s intellectual collapse by absorbing Nietzsche: they identified Nietzsche’s ’last man’ with Marx’s bourgeois, his ‘superman’ with the victorious proletarian, and took over his rich cultural criticism while asserting without evidence that capitalism causes what Nietzsche described and that socialism would cure it.
  • Nietzsche’s colossal political irony is that the Right, his only hope for proper effect, has utterly disappeared and been tainted in its ugly last gasp, while today virtually every Nietzschean and Heideggerian is a leftist — a total inversion of his actual politics.
  • Georg Lukacs, the most prominent Marxist intellectual of the twentieth century, set the ball rolling by frequenting the circle of Stefan George and Max Weber, absorbing the power of what was being discussed about history and culture, and then looking back toward the richer Hegel to supplement the mature Marx’s silence on art, music, literature, and education.
• The attempt to synthesize Freud and Marx — enrolling Freud’s account of erotic repression in the cause of socialist liberation — added the charm of eros to economics in Marcuse and others, but the synthesis is philosophically incoherent, resting on the unsubstantiated assertion that capitalism, not human nature, causes neurotic repression.
  • What Freud said were permanent contradictions between human nature and society could be set in motion dialectically so that in a socialist society there would be no need for the repression that causes neuroses — thereby solving the problem of what men would do after the revolution that Marx left entirely unsolved.
  • The working-class Marxists still thought about surplus value and authentic Marxist concerns; the intellectuals were obsessed by culture, and as Leszek Kolakowski aptly observed, found themselves without a proletariat — which is why the students of the sixties were so welcome to many of them.
• The transformation of revolutionary violence from a regrettable means to a quasi-end in itself — from Sorel through Sartre to the student movements of the 1960s — reflects the Nietzschean insight that commitment and creative self-assertion matter more than the rational program being advanced.
  • The new revolutionaries should be unprogrammatic, made by intellectually honest, committed, strong-willed, creative men — Nietzsche said ‘A good war makes sacred every cause,’ meaning the causes have no status as values and it is the positing that is essential.
  • The radical students of the sixties called themselves ’the movement,’ unaware this was also the language used by young Nazis in the thirties and the name of a Nazi journal, Die Bewegung — movement replacing progress, which has a definite good direction, with pure motion having no content or goal not imposed by man’s will.
• Nietzsche’s arrival in America — via Weber, the émigré scholars, and most recently French deconstructionists — was accepted as a conversion to the Left because Americans cannot believe any intelligent and good person does not share democratic egalitarianism, and the goods got damaged in transit from serious cultural criticism to cultural studies populism.
  • Marcuse began in Germany in the twenties as something of a serious Hegel scholar and ended up in America writing trashy culture criticism with a heavy sex interest in One Dimensional Man — in the Soviet Union philosopher-kings became ideologist tyrants; in the United States the culture critic became the voice of Woodstock.
  • A language developed to explain to knowers how bad we are was adopted by us to declare to the world how interesting we are — the goods were damaged in transit, with academic psychology, sociology, comparative literature, and anthropology dominated by Nietzschean categories for a long time before their passage from academy to marketplace completed the trivializing transformation.

Our Ignorance

The specialized philosophical vocabulary Americans have half-absorbed — values, life-style, charisma, creativity, the sacred — originated as attempts to force serious confrontation with nihilism but has been domesticated into a language of comfortable self-justification, covering a void where genuine thought about good and evil should be and leaving Americans unable to ask the questions on which a serious life depends.

• The great Continental philosophical vocabulary that Americans have absorbed — values, life-style, the sacred, charisma, creativity — was designed to force confrontation with permanent human questions about good and evil, but has been adopted as answers rather than as invitations to thought, producing a dogmatic relativism more closed than the certainties it replaced.
  • What was intended as an elevation of taste and morality has become grist for the American mill while sapping the mill’s foundation — the old tragic conflicts that required men to accept real suffering and disapproval have been repackaged as assurances: ‘I’m OK, you’re OK.’
  • If a law were made forbidding use of the words on the list — values, life-style, charisma, commitment, creativity, the sacred — a large part of the population would be silenced, for these words are there where thoughts should be, and their disappearance would reveal the void.
• The American language of ‘choice’ and ’life-style’ has stripped choice of the real consequences — suffering, disapproval, ostracism, guilt — that gave it significance, producing a no-fault moral universe that is the exact inversion of what the tragic literary tradition understood as the ennobling weight of genuine decision.
  • The nobility of Antigone derives from accepting terrible consequences for affirming what really counts; Hester Prynne and Anna Karenina are now reinterpreted not as ennobling exemplars of the intractability of human problems but as victims whose sufferings are unnecessary in our enlightened age — America has no-fault automobile accidents, no-fault divorces, and is moving toward no-fault choices.
  • Kant argued men are equal in dignity because of their capacity for moral choice; with the intermediary of value relativism this has been simplified to ‘Men are equal in dignity’ with the business being distribution of esteem equally — making Rawls’s A Theory of Justice the instruction manual, doing for Fear of Flying what Kant’s theory did for Anna Karenina.
• Modern American culture is systematically eliminating the three great sources of human non-domestication — God, love, and death — through the mechanisms of therapeutic secularism, sexual liberation, and thanatology, with the aim of achieving a perfectly comfortable existence that is the precise fulfillment of Nietzsche’s nightmare of ’the last man.’
  • God was slowly executed in America over two hundred years and His place taken by ’the sacred’; love was put to death by psychologists and replaced by sex and meaningful relationships; and thanatology or ‘death with dignity’ is on the way to putting death to death — what will take death’s place is not yet clear.
  • On Sunday mornings educated men used to be harangued about death and eternity, made to give them a bit of attention; this is not a danger to be run doing battle with the Sunday New York Times — forgetting, in a variety of subtle forms, is one of our primary modes of problem-solving.
• Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice — which American readers understood as an early manifesto for sexual liberation rather than as a diagnosis of cultural collapse — illustrates how Continental warnings about the failure of sublimation get inverted in America into permissions for the very decadence they diagnose.
  • Mann analyzed the failure of sublimation and the shakiness of cultural superstructure with what Bloom takes to be a heavy Freudian hand — depicting Aschenbach’s discovery that his life work rested on self-ignorance, and that touching the roots revealed only ungovernable desire with no noble expression possible.
  • Americans titillated by the story took it as evidence that even the most distinguished talents suffer from repressed longings, that ‘people should learn to accept themselves’ — in short that Aschenbach is a man aching to come out of the closet, entirely missing Mann’s depiction of the crisis of a civilization.
• The Continental philosophical tradition — Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Nietzsche — represents thought of the very highest order that Americans have absorbed only through damaged, popularized fragments; the corrective requires not rejection of this tradition but serious engagement with it, including the thinkers it was responding to, above all Plato.
  • We need history not to tell us what happened or to explain the past, but to make the past alive so that it can explain us and make a future possible — what is needed is a careful excavation of the beautiful structures of which the fragments popping up to the surface were once a part.
  • Souls artificially constituted by a new kind of education, believing all values are relative and determined by private economic or sexual drives, cannot learn from Plato — how a youngster who sees sublimation where Plato saw divination could think Plato speaks to him is the central educational question.

Part III: The University

From Socrates’ Apology to Heidegger’s Rektoratsrede

The university’s essential purpose — protecting and cultivating reason in a democracy hostile to the theoretical life — is traced from Socrates through the Enlightenment to Nietzsche and Heidegger, whose critique of rationalism culminated in the philosophical abandonment of the university’s founding principle.

• Tocqueville identified the greatest intellectual danger of democracy as enslavement to public opinion: by removing traditional authorities (church, aristocracy, family), democracy leaves individuals formally free but practically dependent on majority consensus, which becomes tyrannical not through force but by breaking the inner will to resist.
  • Because few people school themselves in reason beyond calculating self-interest, and because all issues are thrown open to fresh judgment, the common beliefs of the majority fill the vacuum left by vanished traditions.
  • The only quarrel in American history that involved truly fundamental differences of principle was over slavery — otherwise, the range of permissible disagreement is very narrow compared to other regimes, starving the theoretical imagination.
• The university must compensate for democracy’s structural tendency to suppress the theoretical life by preserving alternative thoughts, maintaining high standards, and resisting absorption into the useful and the current — because freedom of mind requires not just absence of legal constraints but presence of genuine intellectual alternatives.
  • Democracy’s concentration on the useful makes theoretical distance seem immoral in the face of poverty, disease, and war — the ‘for-its-own-sake’ is alien to the democratic spirit, and intellectuals face a recurring crisis of conscience about whether to remain contemplative.
  • The university risks less by opposing the ephemeral and maintaining intransigently high standards than by trying to be inclusive and relevant, because society is already wide open to the new while insufficiently respecting the old.
• The Enlightenment was fundamentally a political project, not merely a scientific one: thinkers from Machiavelli through Locke sought to restructure society so that reason would be publicly respected and supported, replacing priests and nobles as the authoritative voices by demonstrating that science produces freedom from fear and material well-being.
  • The harmony proposed between scientific progress and political progress — that the advancement of knowledge benefits all citizens — was the essential argument that won rulers’ toleration and eventually support for free inquiry.
  • Hobbes proposed that a political order founded on fear of violent death, enforced by a new kind of policeman empowered by science, could supplant the priest’s hold on men by addressing the same fear more effectively and rationally.
• Socrates represents the original and permanent tension between philosophy and civil society: philosophy, by questioning the gods that legitimate the city’s laws, necessarily appeared impious and subversive, and Socrates’ execution established that the philosopher’s primary political problem is always religion and the sacred foundations of community.
  • Socrates’ defense in the Apology is deliberately evasive rather than ‘intellectually honest’ — he never asserts the right of academic freedom but rather tries to appear as a sign sent by the gods, because he fully accepts the city’s right to demand belief while understanding that the truth about philosophy is incomprehensible to his audience.
  • The three groups present at Socrates’ trial — the hostile majority, the sympathetic but uncomprehending middle group of gentlemen, and the tiny group who truly understand — established the political sociology of philosophy’s survival: everything depends on cultivating the gentlemen’s goodwill.
• The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities, that makes it seem inconceivable that other ways are viable, that removes the sense that there is an outside.
• Plato’s philosophical strategy — and that of all classical philosophers through Maimonides — was to ally with the educated class of gentlemen, reforming their moral passions just enough to make them tolerant of philosophy without ever fully revealing its subversive implications, using rhetoric and poetry rather than direct argument.
  • Aristotle’s Ethics and Poetics exemplify this strategy: he speaks to gentlemen about virtue and tragedy in their own terms, but quietly removes piety from the list of virtues and redefines tragedy’s purpose as purging the very passions of pity and fear that make men religiously fanatical.
  • Plato secured philosophy’s long-term survival not by reproducing Socrates’ arguments but by representing his action dramatically — making Socrates a civilization-constituting figure like Moses or Achilles who touches every kind of soul and makes the need for him felt.
• The Enlightenment’s decisive innovation was to switch philosophy’s political alliance from aristocracy to the people, promising that science would conquer fortune and serve everyone’s self-preservation — but this required substituting one misunderstanding for another, with the democratic masses mistaking philosophical equanimity for their own fear-driven rationality.
  • Machiavelli, the inspirer of modern philosophy, claimed the ancients built ‘imaginary principalities’ by addressing how men ought to live rather than how they actually do live — the modern project was to harness the dominant passion of fear of death rather than exhort men to virtues they rarely practice.
  • The doctrine of natural rights is nothing other than the fundamental passions — self-preservation, liberty, property — recast as rational entitlements, providing a foundation for consent-based government that required no virtue and was proof against clerical manipulation.
• Jonathan Swift’s Gulliver’s Travels provided an early prophetic critique of the Enlightenment university: the Flying Island of Laputa, a parody of the Royal Society, showed that science generates political power while losing the human perspective, enabling a new form of tyranny grounded not on ignorance but on scientific expertise indifferent to human ends.
  • The Laputian scientists have eyes turned inward and toward the zenith — pure Cartesians contemplating self and cosmos — but cannot understand poetry, which means they cannot comprehend man, making their claim to rule politically illegitimate despite their technical power.
  • Swift’s prediction was borne out by the Soviet Union, where natural scientists alone could force the state to leave them alone, while historians and political scientists had to become party hacks — proving that natural science became entirely neutral with respect to political regimes once theological supervision was defeated.
• Nietzsche and Heidegger represent the philosophical culmination of the university’s crisis: Nietzsche’s attack on Socratic rationalism — arguing that reason destroys the noble instinct underlying culture — led directly to Heidegger’s endorsement of National Socialism in his 1933 Rectoral Address, making the crisis of the German university the crisis of the university everywhere.
  • The history of Western thought can be encapsulated in the fate of Socrates: Plato defending him, the Enlightenment institutionalizing him, and Nietzsche executing him philosophically — with Heidegger then putting philosophy at the service of a mass movement as the logical corollary of rejecting rationalism.
  • The trajectory from Socrates’ refusal to obey Athens’ command to cease philosophizing to Heidegger urging commitment to the German people’s ‘irreversible decision’ shows that when reason loses its claim to special authority, the university becomes prey to whatever intense passion moves the masses.

The Sixties

The campus upheavals of the 1960s repeated the pattern of the German university’s collapse under National Socialism — faculty who had abandoned belief in reason’s special authority capitulated to student ideological pressure, destroying curricular standards and the university’s insulation from democratic public opinion.

• The Cornell crisis of 1969 — in which the faculty capitulated to armed black students after having voted days earlier to reject their demands — exposed that professors who had made careers defending academic freedom did not actually believe in it, and could be manipulated into submission because they lacked conviction in the university’s purpose.
  • The university administration’s response combined cowardice with moralism: officials believed they were righting historic injustice toward blacks while also being more frightened of and admiring toward the violent extremists than toward the integrationist black students they abandoned.
  • After the capitulation, leading administrators and faculty rushed to congratulate the gathered students and seek their approval — revealing that the professoriate’s rhetoric about academic freedom had always been performative rather than principled.
• The American campus upheavals structurally replicated the German university’s collapse under National Socialism: in both cases, faculties who no longer believed in the theoretical life gave way to ideologized student movements claiming a moral truth superior to any the university could provide, with the content of the ideology — value commitment over reason — being identical.
  • A distinguished political science professor demonstrated this continuity by reading students speeches they enthusiastically applauded until he revealed they were by Mussolini — the New Left was a Nietzscheanized-Heideggerianized Left sharing the same ‘unthinking hatred of bourgeois society.’
  • Heidegger’s formula from his 1933 Rectoral Address — ‘The time for decision is past. The decision has already been made by the youngest part of the German nation’ — was with only slight alteration the slogan of American professors who collaborated with student movements in the 1960s.
• The student moralism of the sixties was a species of Tartuffe — a histrionic performance of moral heroism involving little genuine sacrifice — uniquely combining revolutionary fervor with hedonism, transferring the word ‘obscene’ from sex to politics while legitimizing previously suppressed bodily desires under the banner of liberation from ‘repression.’
  • The students’ actual sacrifices consisted of: freedom from in loco parentis restrictions, drug use without university interference, elimination of sexual restrictions, relaxed academic requirements with grade inflation, and avoidance of military service — all disguised under labels like ‘individual responsibility’ and ’liberation.’
  • Richard Nixon, recognizing that the student movement was driven more by draft avoidance than genuine antiwar conviction, ended the draft — and miraculously the student movement came to an end, although the war continued for almost three years thereafter.
• The American university in the sixties was experiencing the same dismantling of the structure of rational inquiry as had the German university in the thirties. No longer believing in their higher vocation, both gave way to a highly ideologized student populace. And the content of the ideology was the same — value commitment.
• The student movements harbored a covert elitism: unable to achieve political distinction through legitimate democratic channels in a mass society, talented students used elite universities as stages to seize instant notoriety, adopting revolutionary models like Mao and Che Guevara while practicing ‘conspicuous compassion’ as the democratic substitute for their parents’ conspicuous consumption.
  • Modern democratic philosophy, from Hobbes through Rousseau and Freud, had systematically delegitimized the proud soul’s desire for political glory — but the spirited instinct for rule lives on underground, occasionally bursting forth in monstrous disguises like ‘compassion for the oppressed’ or the vanguard’s claim to know what everyone will soon know.
  • The universities provided a kind of affirmative-action elitism — giving students the distinction they craved without their having earned it — while the students remained unaware they were living off the stored intellectual capital of the very institutions they were destroying.
• The sixties were intellectually a period of dogmatic conformism rather than genuine questioning: not a single book of lasting importance was produced in or around the movement, while the real intellectual vitality of the period had come from European refugee scholars who had arrived after 1933 and were absorbed into American universities by the 1950s.
  • The postwar American university had reached a peak by 1955 — the refugee scholars from Germany brought the living tradition of Kant and Goethe’s humane educational vision, making American universities for the first time genuinely independent of and competitive with their European counterparts.
  • McCarthyism paradoxically represented the last moment when academic freedom had real content — the shared sense of a common enemy made the university community aware of its special status, whereas in the sixties, when the movement’s opinions became fashionable, the protection of unpopular ideas was abandoned.
• The educational reforms of the sixties — abolishing core curriculum requirements, dropping language study, relaxing standards — were not liberating but destructive, severing American students from the European intellectual tradition that was their only link to serious alternatives to democratic conformism, with consequences now visible in the collapse of basic educational standards.
  • The reforms were made for the ‘inner-directed’ person, but in America ‘doing your own thing’ meant the vulgarities of the surrounding society overwhelmed the delicate intellectual plants cultivated in the university greenhouse — the window to Europe was slammed shut just as Europeans were helping to close it.
  • The students’ claimed achievement of advancing racial equality actually rested on the very intellectual capital they were destroying — the Enlightenment teaching of the rights of man, the Founding documents, constitutional law — and by trashing that tradition they made future moral progress less likely, not more.
• Bloom’s students who had spent the year reading Plato’s Republic remained contemptuous of the campus revolution and distributed passages from it to crowds in the agora — demonstrating that genuine education in the great texts provides a real counter-charm to ideological passion by giving students a vantage point outside the present moment.
  • The passage they distributed described how a young man’s private education is swept away when he sits among thousands in assemblies, courts, and theaters shouting blame and praise — the Republic had diagnosed exactly what was happening around them and gave them real distance on it.
  • This episode illustrates the university’s proper function: providing experiences unavailable in democratic society, specifically the encounter with texts that make the present visible as particular and limited rather than universal and inevitable.

Liberal Education

American universities have failed to provide genuine liberal education because they have abandoned any coherent vision of what an educated human being is, replacing it with a democracy of disciplines that is really an anarchy, leaving students to drift toward careerism while the great questions of human existence go unaddressed.

• Universities have abandoned the question of what an educated human being is, producing an intellectual anarchy in which no discipline has legitimacy over any other and students receive no guidance about what is worth studying.
  • The refusal to impose a point of view on students sounds like freedom but actually ensures that all the vulgarities of the outside world flourish within the university, while students face the harsh necessity of the specialized disciplines unfiltered by unifying thought.
  • Without a recognized vision of the educated person, students find it impossible to make a reasonable choice and default to career preparation, where at least there is a prescribed curriculum.
• The two typical administrative responses to the crisis in liberal education—breadth requirements spread across departments, and composite interdisciplinary courses—both fail to constitute genuine liberal education because they lack a unifying vision of truth.
  • Breadth requirements built from existing introductory courses teach students only that there is no high-level generalism, confirming that what they are doing is preliminary childhood to be gotten over.
  • Composite courses like ‘Man in Nature’ or ‘War and Moral Responsibility’ tend toward trendiness and popularization, cut off from the top of the university’s intellectual life, and provide no independent means for students to pursue permanent questions on their own.
• The Great Books approach, despite legitimate objections about amateurism and lack of rigor, is the only method that consistently excites students and gives them access to the permanent questions of human existence.
  • Wherever Great Books form a central part of the curriculum, students feel they are getting something from the university they cannot get elsewhere—awareness of the classic, acquaintance with big questions when there were still big questions, and a fund of shared experience on which to ground friendships.
  • “Alexandre Koyré reported that when teaching at the University of Chicago in 1940, a student wrote about ‘Mr. Aristotle’ unaware he was not a contemporary—Koyré said only an American could have the naive profundity to take Aristotle as living thought.” —Alexandre Koyré
• The university now offers no distinctive visage to the young person. He finds a democracy of the disciplines—which are there either because they are autochthonous or because they wandered in recently to perform some job that was demanded of the university.
• Natural scientists, social scientists, and humanists are each hostile to or indifferent toward the Great Books for characteristic reasons that reflect the fragmentation of knowledge in the modern university.
  • Natural scientists regard classic texts as mere historical curiosity—Aristotle’s teleology is ‘an absurdity beneath consideration’—because scientific progress no longer appears to depend on philosophical reflection.
  • Social scientists are hostile because classic texts deal with the same human phenomena they claim as their scientific domain, and they feel threatened that students might be seduced back into pre-scientific ways of thinking.
  • Humanists are divided, with many either defending recent scholarly interpretations rather than vital understanding of the texts, or eagerly seeking to join real sciences by transcending their roots in what they regard as an overcome mythic past.
• The crisis of liberal education is ultimately a crisis at the peaks of learning—an incoherence among first principles that constitutes the crisis of Western civilization—and liberal education decayed precisely when what lay beyond it were only specialties leading to no unified vision.
  • Liberal education flourished when it prepared the way for discussion of a unified view of nature and man’s place in it, debated at the highest level; it decayed when beyond it lay only specialties whose premises lead to no such vision.
  • Cornell’s six-year Ph.D. program, funded by the Ford Foundation and aimed at students who had already made ‘a firm career choice,’ exemplified the university’s preferred mode of suppressing students’ longing for liberal education by encouraging professionalism and avarice.
• American colleges cannot generate a coherent program of general education despite their enormous capacity for specialized research, because the knowledge explosion and increasing specialization have not filled the college years but emptied them.
  • Outside the hardest natural sciences, almost no specialty requires more than two years of preparatory training before graduate studies—the rest is wasted time, or mere ripening, as students poke around without plan or question.
  • Programs like Black Studies, Women’s Studies, and computer literacy represent attempts to fill the vacuum painlessly with fancy packaging of what is already there, designed to show the university is ‘with it’ rather than to address fundamental questions.

The Decomposition of the University

The campus crisis at Cornell in the late 1960s revealed how the university had no real community of scholars willing to defend academic freedom, with natural scientists remaining indifferent, humanists enthusiastically joining the revolution to their own destruction, and only some social scientists mounting any resistance in defense of objective inquiry.

• The Cornell crisis of 1969, when armed students forced faculty capitulation, revealed that the university had no genuine scholarly community and no solidarity in defense of the pursuit of truth, with each division responding in characteristic ways that exposed their real interests.
  • Professional schools simply closed the shutters, not feeling it was their fight; natural scientists remained above the battle as an island unto themselves; and the challenge had to be faced by arts and sciences alone.
  • Walking to the faculty capitulation meeting, Bloom’s colleague who had received death threats heard a biology professor loudly asking ‘Do these social scientists really believe there is any danger?’—prompting the colleague to say, ‘With colleagues like that, you don’t need enemies.’
• Natural scientists’ indifference to the assault on academic freedom reflected a deeper reality: they have no genuine intellectual connection with the rest of the university, and their work’s absolute independence made the crisis feel irrelevant to them.
  • Since Kant, the last philosopher who was also a significant natural scientist, and Goethe, the last literary figure who believed his scientific contributions might exceed his literary ones, natural science has become the Switzerland of learning—safely neutral to battles on the darkling plain.
  • Natural scientists cooperated with the new radical agenda by adopting anti-elitist rhetoric while quietly resisting change in their own domain, effectively passing the burden to humanists and social scientists who proved more accommodating.
• Humanists were the most enthusiastic supporters of the campus revolution, but their capitulation destroyed precisely the institutions and disciplines they inhabited, leaving the humanities permanently weakened.
  • Cornell had for years been a laundering operation for radical French ideas in comparative literature—from Sartre through Goldmann to Foucault and Derrida—which gave humanists an active, progressive role as revolutionaries rather than mere antiquarians guarding aging courtesans.
  • Lucien Goldmann told Bloom that he was privileged to have lived to see his nine-year-old son throw a rock through a store window in Paris in 1968, saying his studies of Racine and Pascal had culminated in this moment.
• The social sciences became both the primary target of radical pressure and the only place where any serious resistance was mounted, because they had a scientific conscience about facts and a direct engagement with political phenomena.
  • A group of black activists disrupted an economics class, then held a chairman and his secretary hostage for thirteen hours, accusing the teacher of racism for using Western standards to evaluate African economic performance—the teacher subsequently disappeared from campus.
  • Some social scientists of left, right, and center joined together to protest the outrage against academic freedom, united by mutual respect for colleagues’ motives and attachment to the institutions protecting their research—a band of scholars willing to sacrifice for love of truth.

The Disciplines

The three great divisions of the modern university—natural science, social science, and humanities—exist in a state of fundamental incoherence, with no genuine intellectual unity among them, each failing in characteristic ways to address the central question of what man is and how he should live.

• Natural science is flourishing and self-sufficient but ends at man—the one being outside its purview—leaving the fundamental questions of human existence unaddressed and unaddressable by its methods.
  • Natural scientists know they cannot speak as scientists about the political, artistic, or prophetic dimensions of human life, yet they effectively believe that only scientific knowledge is real knowledge, making the entire humanistic enterprise seem like mere recreation.
  • Doubts about nuclear weapons and the need for ’ethicists’ in biology signal the limits of science’s self-sufficiency, but scientists know there are no such knowers as ethicists—a contradiction they prefer not to examine.
• The division of the humanities from the social sciences reflects not a natural articulation of subject matter but an unresolved nineteenth-century dispute about whether man can be studied scientifically, with each side caricaturing the other.
  • Social science, following Locke, tries to assimilate man to the new natural sciences and treats him essentially as another brute without genuine spirituality; the humanities, following Rousseau and Kant, occupy the territory of freedom but act as though man has no body.
  • The two roads end in very different places: Walden II (known as Brave New World by the other side) versus The Blessed Isles (known as The Kingdom of Darkness by its opponents)—man the producer of consumption goods versus man the producer of culture.
• The social sciences lack any agreed-upon organizing principle, with economics and cultural anthropology representing antipodal worldviews rooted in Locke and Rousseau respectively, while political science and sociology are strung tensely and incoherently between them.
  • Economics teaches that the market is the fundamental social phenomenon culminating in money; anthropology teaches that culture is fundamental and culminates in the sacred—and these two disciplines have almost nothing to say to each other.
  • Each social science—psychology, economics, sociology, anthropology, political science—can claim to be the starting point from which the others are understood, making the field a series of competing and incompatible perspectives rather than a unified science of man.
• Political science occupies a uniquely hybrid position in the university because it deals with phenomena—war, justice, the good regime—that resist reduction to the subpolitical causes favored by modern social science, and it alone among social sciences retains a philosophic branch.
  • “Churchill’s response to Coolidge’s statement that the British ‘hired the money’—‘This is true, but not exhaustive’—illustrates why political science must be comprehensive: it must contemplate war with its altogether different risks and gravity, which economics cannot handle.” —Winston Churchill
  • Political philosophy, scheduled for termination in the forties and fifties as unscientific, survived through serious scholarship and the energy of rebellious students in the sixties, and has proven continuously the most attractive subject in the field for both graduate and undergraduate students.
• Philosophy once proudly proclaimed that it was the best way of life, and it dared to survey the whole, to seek the first causes of all things, and not only dictated its rules to the special sciences but constituted and ordered them. But this was all impossible, hybris, say their impoverished heirs.
• The humanities are in the worst condition of all university divisions because they cannot assert they are pursuing important truth, yet they exclusively possess the books that ask the questions about the whole that the rest of the university excludes.
  • If Galileo, Kepler, and Newton exist anywhere in the university now, it is in the humanities as historical figures—effectively mummified, saved only on the condition of being treated as historical artifacts rather than seekers of truth about nature.
  • Professors of humanities do not believe in themselves or what they do: they are partisans of the leisured and beautiful in a setting that demands only the here and now and the active, and their democratic guilt pushes them to abandon their proper domain.
• Philosophy, once the architectonic science that founded and ordered the university, has succumbed and nearly disappeared from American universities, replaced by technical specialties like logic and positivist methods that repel students with humanizing questions.
  • Ordinary language analysis and positivism dominated American philosophy departments for decades, but professors in these schools simply would not and could not talk about anything important, and they themselves did not represent a philosophic life for students.
  • In America, everyone has a philosophy—Tocqueville noted that every American is a Cartesian although no one has read Descartes—yet philosophy as a discipline has no particular claim on the cultural language it produced, leaving its American inheritance rootless and philosophical talk as mere jargon.
• Deconstruction, which has come to dominate comparative literature, represents the last predictable stage in the suppression of reason and denial of truth—making the interpreter’s creative activity more important than the text and dissolving the very tradition that might liberate students from their narrow horizon.
  • The school of Derrida, Foucault, and Barthes asserts there is both no text and no reality to which texts refer, leaving what is most necessary—knowledge of what great texts tell us—in the hands of subjective interpreters who deny any objective content exists.
  • This fad will pass, as it already has in Paris, but it appeals to worst instincts and shows where temptations lie—it is the literary complement to the ’life-styles’ science of the self, and fancy German philosophic talk takes the place of really serious things.
• The MBA has become the moral equivalent of the MD or law degree, corralling a large portion of undergraduates into economics as a pre-business major and making careerism the organizing principle of undergraduate life at the expense of any genuine liberal education.
  • Something like 20 percent of undergraduates at serious universities are now economics majors, skewing students’ perception of all the social sciences and persuading them that economics can handle everything belonging to sociology, anthropology, or political science.
  • True liberal education requires that the student’s whole life be radically changed by it, that no previous attachment be immune to examination—but premed, prelaw, and prebusiness students are distinctively tourists in the liberal arts, their minds tethered by obsessive concern with getting into elite professional schools.

Conclusion

Despite the university’s evident failure to achieve intellectual wholeness, the permanent questions remain present in the institution for those who seek them, and the real community of those who love truth—exemplified by Plato and Aristotle disagreeing about the good while remaining true friends—offers the best hope for liberal education to survive.

• The university’s lack of wholeness in an enterprise that demands it is itself a philosophical provocation—the questions are all present and only need to be addressed continuously and seriously for liberal learning to exist, since it consists not so much in answers as in permanent dialogue.
  • The matter of liberal education is still present in the university; it is the form that has vanished—and one cannot and should not hope for a general reform, only that the embers do not die out.
  • The Symposium was written in the midst of a terrible war that Athens was destined to lose, yet Aristophanes and Socrates were not given to cultural despair—their abandon to the joy of nature proved the viability of what is best in man, independent of circumstances.
• The real community of man is the community of those who seek truth—exemplified by Plato and Aristotle, who were absolutely one soul as they looked at the problem of the good even while disagreeing about it—and this is the only genuine friendship and common good.
  • The other kinds of relatedness are only imperfect reflections of this philosophical friendship, gaining their only justification from their ultimate relation to it—which is the meaning of the riddle of the improbable philosopher-kings, whose true community is exemplary for all other communities.
  • This is a radical teaching appropriate to a radical time in which proximate attachments have become questionable and the love of wisdom must survive, as it did after Socrates was put to death, partly because of his individual example.
• America stands at a moment of civilizational judgment in which the fate of philosophy in the world has devolved upon its universities, just as the fate of political freedom has devolved upon its regime, and the two responsibilities are more closely related than ever before.
  • Socrates was not a professor, he was put to death, and the love of wisdom survived—this is what really counts, and we must remember it in order to know how to defend the university against those who would reduce it to professional training.
  • The books in their objective beauty are still there, and what is needed is to help protect and cultivate the delicate tendrils reaching out toward them through the unfriendly soil of students’ souls.