Allan Bloom

Source: Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia.
This article is about the American philosopher. For the British horticulturalist, see Alan Bloom.
Not to be confused with Harold Bloom.
Allan Bloom
Born
Allan David Bloom

(1930-09-14)September 14, 1930
Shakespeare
Notable ideas
The "openness" of relativism leads paradoxically to the great "closing"[1]

Allan David Bloom (September 14, 1930 – October 7, 1992) was an American philosopher,

classicist, and academician. He studied under David Grene, Leo Strauss, Richard McKeon, and Alexandre Kojève. He subsequently taught at Cornell University, the University of Toronto, Tel Aviv University, Yale University, the École normale supérieure, and the University of Chicago
.

Bloom championed the idea of

conservative in the popular media,[3] Bloom denied the label, asserting that what he sought to defend was the "theoretical life".[4] Saul Bellow wrote Ravelstein, a roman à clef
based on Bloom, his friend and colleague at the University of Chicago.

Early life and education

Bloom was born in Indianapolis, Indiana, to second-generation Jewish parents who were both social workers. The couple had a daughter, Lucille, two years earlier. As a thirteen-year-old, Bloom read a Reader's Digest article about the University of Chicago and told his parents he wanted to attend; his parents thought it was unreasonable and did not encourage his hopes.[5] Yet, when his family moved to Chicago in 1944, his parents met a psychiatrist and family friend whose son was enrolled in the University of Chicago's humanities program for gifted students. In 1946, Bloom was accepted to the same program, starting his degree at the age of fifteen, and spending the next decade of his life enrolled at the university in Chicago's Hyde Park neighborhood.[5] This began his lifelong passion for the 'idea' of the university.[6]

In the preface to Giants and Dwarfs: Essays, 1960–1990, he stated that his education "began with

Freud and ended with Plato". The theme of this education was self-knowledge, or self-discovery—an idea that Bloom would later write, seemed impossible to conceive of for a Midwestern American boy. He credits Leo Strauss as the teacher who made this endeavor possible for him.[7]

Bloom graduated from the University of Chicago with a

Hegelian philosopher Alexandre Kojève in Paris, whose lectures Bloom would later introduce to the English-speaking world. While teaching philosophy at the École normale supérieure in Paris, he befriended Raymond Aron, amongst many other philosophers. Among the American expatriate community in Paris, his friends included writer Susan Sontag.[10][11][12]

Career and death

Bloom studied and taught in Paris (1953–55) at the École normale supérieure,[13] and Germany (1957). Upon returning to the United States in 1955, he taught adult education students at the University of Chicago with his friend Werner J. Dannhauser, author of Nietzsche's View of Socrates. Bloom went on to teach at Yale from 1960 to 1963, at Cornell until 1970, and at the University of Toronto until 1979, when he returned to the University of Chicago. Among Bloom's former students are prominent journalists, government officials and political scientists such as Francis Fukuyama, Robert Kraynak, Pierre Hassner, Clifford Orwin, Janet Ajzenstat, John Ibbitson, James Ceaser, and Thomas Pangle.

In 1963, as a professor at Cornell, Allan Bloom served as a faculty member of the

Emile. Among other publications during his years of teaching was a reading of Swift's Gulliver's Travels, titled "Giants and Dwarfs"; it became the title for a collection of essays on, among others, Raymond Aron, Alexandre Kojève, Leo Strauss, and liberal philosopher John Rawls. Bloom was an editor for the scholarly journal Political Theory as well as a contributor to History of Political Philosophy (edited by Joseph Cropsey
and Leo Strauss).

After returning to Chicago, he befriended and taught courses with Saul Bellow. In 1987 Bellow wrote the preface to The Closing of the American Mind.

Bloom's last book, which he dictated while in the hospital dying, and which was published posthumously, was Love and Friendship, an offering of interpretations on the meaning of love. There is an ongoing controversy over Bloom's semi-closeted homosexuality, possibly culminating, as in Saul Bellow's thinly fictionalized account in Ravelstein, in his death in 1992 from AIDS.[17][18] Bloom's friends do not deny his homosexuality, but whether he actually died of AIDS remains disputed.[19][20]

Philosophy

Bloom attempted to preserve a philosophical way of life for future generations through both scholarly and popular writing. His writings may be placed into two categories:

scholarly (e.g., Plato's Republic) and popular political commentary (e.g., The Closing of the American Mind).[citation needed
]

The Republic of Plato

Bloom's translation and essay on the Republic is radically different in many important aspects from the previous translations and interpretations of the Republic. Most notable is Bloom's discussion of

soul; rather, it is a city presented ironically, an example of the distance between philosophy and every potential philosopher. Bloom follows Strauss in suggesting that the "Just City in Speech" is not natural
; it is man-made.

Critical reception

Some reviewers, such as Norman Gulley, criticized the quality of both the translation and the essay itself.[22]

The Closing of the American Mind

Main article:
The New York Times Bestseller List for nonfiction for four months.[25]

The book is a critique of the contemporary university and how Bloom sees it as failing its students. In it, Bloom criticizes the modern movements in philosophy and the humanities. Philosophy professors involved in

Western thought have been devalued as a source of wisdom. Bloom's critique extends beyond the university to speak to the general crisis in American society. The Closing of the American Mind draws analogies between the United States and the Weimar Republic. The modern liberal philosophy, he says, enshrined in the Enlightenment thought of John Locke
—that a just society could be based upon self-interest alone, coupled by the emergence of relativism in American thought—had led to this crisis.

For Bloom, this created a void in the souls of Americans, into which demagogic radicals as exemplified by 1960s student leaders could leap. (In the same fashion, Bloom suggests, the Nazi brownshirts once filled the gap created in German society by the Weimar Republic.) In the second instance, he argued, the higher calling of philosophy and reason understood as freedom of thought, had been eclipsed by a pseudo-philosophy, or an ideology of thought. Relativism was one feature of modern liberal philosophy that had subverted the Platonic–Socratic teaching.

Bloom's critique of contemporary

social movements at play in universities or society at large is derived from his classical and philosophical orientation. For Bloom, the failure of contemporary liberal education
leads to the sterile social and sexual habits of modern students, and to their inability to fashion a life for themselves beyond the mundane offerings touted as success. Bloom argues that commercial pursuits had become more highly valued than love, the philosophic quest for truth, or the civilized pursuits of honor and glory.

In one chapter, in a style of analysis which resembles the work of the

freedom. Some critics, including the popular musician Frank Zappa, argued that Bloom's view of pop music was based on the same ideas that critics of pop "in 1950s held, ideas about the preservation of 'traditional' white American society".[28]

Bloom, informed by

Rousseau, and Nietzsche, explores music's power over the human soul. He cites the soldier who throws himself into battle at the urging of the drum corps, the pious believer who prays under the spell of a religious hymn, the lover seduced by the romantic guitar, and points towards the tradition of philosophy that treated musical education as paramount. He names the pop-star Mick Jagger as a cardinal representative of the hypocrisy and erotic sterility of pop-rock music. Pop music employs sexual images and language to enthrall the young and to persuade them that their petty rebelliousness is authentic politics, when, in fact, they are being controlled by the money-managers whom successful performers like Jagger quietly serve. Bloom claims that Jagger is a hero to many university students who envy his fame and wealth but are really just bored by the lack of options before them.[29]

Along with the absence of literature in the lives of the young and their sexual but often unerotic relationships, the first part of The Closing tries to explain the current state of education in a fashion beyond the purview of an economist or psychiatrist—contemporary culture's leading umpires.

Critical reception

The book met with early critical acclaim including positive reviews in The New York Times,

Chronicle of Higher Education, and The Washington Post. A second round of reviews was generally more critical.[30]

political philosopher and classicist, and Harry V. Jaffa, a conservative, both argued that Bloom was deeply influenced by 19th-century European philosophers, especially Friedrich Nietzsche. Nussbaum wrote that, for Bloom, Nietzsche had been disastrously influential in modern American thought.[31]

In a passage of her review, Nussbaum wrote: "How good a philosopher, then, is Allan Bloom? The answer is, we cannot say, and we are given no reason to think him one at all."

American Historical Review with the statement that Bloom's "probes into popular culture" were "both amusing and perceptive" and that the work was "a rich, often brilliant, and disturbing book".[33]

Some critics embraced Bloom's argument. Norman Podhoretz noted that the closed-mindedness in the title refers to the paradoxical consequence of the academic "open mind" found in liberal political thought—namely "the narrow and intolerant dogmatism" that dismisses any attempt, by Plato or the Hebrew Bible for example, to provide a rational basis for moral judgments. Podhoretz continued, "Bloom goes on to charge liberalism with vulgarizing the noble ideals of freedom and equality, and he offers brilliantly acerbic descriptions of the sexual revolution and the feminist movement, which he sees as products of this process of vulgarization."[34]

In a 1989 article, Ann Clark Fehn discusses the critical reception of the book, noting that it had eclipsed other titles that year dealing with higher education—

Ernest Boyer's College and E. D. Hirsch's Cultural Literacy—and quoting Publishers Weekly which had described Bloom's book as a "best-seller made by reviews."[35]

Camille Paglia, a decade after the book's release, called it "the first shot in the culture wars".[36] An early New York Times review by Roger Kimball called the book "an unparalleled reflection on the whole question of what it means to be a student in today's intellectual and moral climate."[37]

In an article on Bloom for The New Republic in 2000, conservative commentator Andrew Sullivan wrote that "reading [Bloom] ... one feels he has not merely understood Nietzsche; he has imbibed him. But this awareness of the abyss moved Bloom, unlike Nietzsche, toward love and political conservatism. Love, whether for the truth or for another, because it can raise us out of the abyss. Political conservatism because it best restrains the chaos that modernity threatens".[38] More recently, Bloom's book also received a more positive re-assessment from Jim Sleeper in The New York Times.[3]

Keith Botsford would later argue:

Bloom was writing vigorous polemic at a time when America sought to ensure that the intellect could not (and would not be allowed to) rise above gender and race; the mind was to be defined by its melanin and genetic content, and by what lay between our legs; or, in the academe, the canon was to be re-read and re-defined so that it fitted the latest theorem of gender or race. Bloom would have none of it. He loved people who were first-rate with real love ... Many profited. Others, mainly dwellers in the bas fonds of 'social studies', or those who seek to politicise culture, resented and envied.[8]

Love and Friendship

Bloom's last book, which he dictated while partially paralyzed and in the hospital, and which was published posthumously, was Love and Friendship. The book offered interpretations on the meaning of love, through a reading of novels by

Romantic movement; plays by William Shakespeare; Montaigne's Essays; and Plato's Symposium
.

Describing its creation, Bellow wrote:

Allan was an academic, but he was a literary man too — he had too much intelligence and versatility, too much humanity, to be confined to a single category ... He didn't like these helpful-to-the-sick cliches or conventional get-well encouragements ... [S]till partially paralyzed and unable even to sign his name, he dictated a book ... I mention this because it was a remarkable thing for a sick man and a convalescent to do and because it was equally remarkable that a political philosopher should choose at such a moment in his life to write about literature ... I like to think that his free and powerful intelligence, responding to great inner impulses under the stimulus of life-threatening sickness, turned to the nineteenth-century novel, to Shakespeare's love plays, and to the Platonic Eros, summoning us to the great poetry of affects and asking us to see what has happened to our own deepest feelings in this age of artificial euphorias.[39]

Of the work, Andrew Sullivan wrote "you cannot read [Bloom] on

La nouvelle Heloise without wanting to go back and read it—more closely—again ... Bloom had a gift for reading reality—the impulse to put your loving face to it and press your hands against it".[38] Recollecting his friend in an interview, Bellow said "Allan inhaled books and ideas the way the rest of us breathe air ... People only want the factual truth. Well, the truth is that Allan was a very superior person, great-souled. When critics proclaim the death of the novel, I sometimes think they are really saying that there are no significant people to write about. [But] Allan was certainly one."[40]

Personal life

Bloom was

AIDS is a subject of controversy.[41]

Selected works

See also

References

  1. ^ Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind, Simon and Schuster, 1987, p. 42.
  2. ^ Hitchens, Christopher (2002). Unacknowledged Legislation: Writers in the Public Sphere. Verso. p. 226.
  3. ^ a b Sleeper, Jim (September 4, 2005). "Allan Bloom and the Conservative Mind". The New York Times. Retrieved April 23, 2010.
  4. ^ Bloom, Allan. Giants and Dwarfs: Essays 1960–1990, Simon & Schuster, 1990 pp. 17–18
  5. ^ a b c d e f Atlas, James. "Chicago's Grumpy Guru: Best-Selling Professor Allan Bloom and the Chicago Intellectuals." New York Times Magazine. January 3, 1988. 12.
  6. ^ Bloom, Allan (1987). The Closing of the American Mind, p. 243. New York: Simon & Schuster
  7. ^ Bloom, Allan. 1991. Giants and Dwarfs: Essays, 1960–1990, p. 11. New York: Touchstone Books
  8. ^ a b Botsworth, Keith. 'Obituary: Professor Allan Bloom', The Independent, October 12, 1992 Archived August 25, 2017, at the Wayback Machine.
  9. ^ "Biography". Archived from the original on 2015-10-07. Retrieved 2015-10-05.
  10. ^ E. Field, The Man Who Would Marry Susan Sontag, Wisconsin, 2005, pp. 158–70.
  11. ^ C. Rollyson and L. Paddock, Susan Sontag: The Making of an Icon, W. W. Norton, 2000, pp. 45–50.
  12. ^ Reborn: Journals and Notebooks 1947–1963, ed. D. Rieff, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2008, pp. 188–89.
  13. ^ Strauss had sent Bloom to Paris without sufficient funding, and when Bloom was broke he sold his books to Ernest Fortin, a young Catholic priest doing graduate studies there. Father Fortin reported that this forced-purchase of Strauss' works was his introduction to Strauss. J. Brian Benestad, ed., Human Rights, Virtue, and the Common Good: Untimely Meditations on Religion and Politics, at 317 (Rowman & Littlefield 1996).
  14. ISBN 978-0-385-51365-4
    .
  15. ^ Bloom, Allan. 1968 (2nd ed 1991). The Republic of Plato. (translated, with notes and an interpretive essay, by Bloom). New York: Basic Books.
  16. ^ Bloom, Allan. 1991. Giants and Dwarfs: Essays, 1960–1990. New York: Touchstone Books
  17. ^ Jim Sleeper (September 4, 2005). "Allan Bloom and the Conservative Mind". The New York Times. Archived from the original on June 20, 2015. Retrieved June 19, 2015. Far from being a conservative ideologue, Bloom, a University of Chicago professor of political philosophy who died in 1992, was an eccentric interpreter of Enlightenment thought who led an Epicurean, quietly gay life.
  18. ^ Donald Lazare (September 18, 2007). "'The Closing of the American Mind,' 20 Years Later". Inside Higher Ed. Archived from the original on June 19, 2015. Retrieved June 19, 2015. [Paul Wolfowitz said] in Bloom's Chicago circle when he was alive, 'It was sort of, Don't ask, don't tell.' But whether Bloom had AIDS is disputed.
  19. ^ D.T. Max. "With Friends Like Saul Bellow". The New York Times Magazine. Archived from the original on March 7, 2014. Retrieved June 19, 2015.
  20. ISBN 978-0-618-72194-8
    . No one ever said it aloud, but it was important to Bloom's friends, none of whom denied his homosexuality, that he died of an auto-immune disease rather than one associated with sexual promiscuity.
  21. ^ Bloom, Allan. 1968. The Republic of Plato, "Interpretative Essay," p. 387. New York: Basic Books
  22. JSTOR 2218401
    .
  23. ^ Bloom, Allan (September 25, 2006). "Our Listless Universities". National Review. Archived from the original on September 1, 2021. Retrieved September 1, 2021.
  24. ^ Will, George F. (July 30, 1987). "A How-To Book for the Independent". The Washington Post. Archived from the original on May 2, 2020. Retrieved August 8, 2020.
  25. ^ Goldstein, William. "The Story behind the Best Seller: Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind." Publishers Weekly. July 3, 1987.
  26. ^ Bloom, Allan. 1987. The Closing of the American Mind, p. 278. New York: Simon & Schuster.
  27. ^ Bloom, Allan. 1987. The Closing of the American Mind, p. 279. New York: Simon & Schuster
  28. ^ Zappa, Frank (1987), "On Junk Food for the Soul", New Perspective's Quarterly, archived from the original on 2006-12-08
  29. ^ Bloom, Allan. "Music" pp. 68–81. The Closing of the American Mind. New York: Simon & Schuster.
  30. ^ Ferguson, Andrew (April 9, 2012), "The Book That Drove Them Crazy", The Weekly Standard, archived from the original on August 20, 2013, retrieved May 19, 2013
  31. ^ a b Nussbaum, Martha. "Undemocratic Vistas," New York Review of Books 34, no. 17 (November 5, 1987).
  32. ^ a b Atlas, James (1988-01-03). "Chicago's grumpy guru". The New York Times. Archived from the original on 2018-07-27. Retrieved 2008-05-08.
  33. JSTOR 2163758
  34. ^ Podhoretz, Norman. "Conservative Book Becomes a Best-Seller." Human Events July 11, 1987: 5–6.
  35. ^ Fehn, Ann Clark (Summer 1989), "Focus: Literature since 1945", The German Quarterly, 62 (3)
  36. ^ Paglia, Camille (July 1997). "Ask Camille". Salon.com. Archived from the original on 11 April 2008. Retrieved 2008-05-09.
  37. ^ Kimball, Roger (April 5, 1987), "The Groves of Ignorance", The New York Times, archived from the original on November 13, 2013, retrieved May 19, 2013
  38. ^ a b Longing: Remembering Allan Bloom, The New Republic, April 17, 2000.
  39. ^ Saul Bellow, It All Adds Up (Penguin, 2007), pp. 277–279.
  40. ^ Wood, James (April 14, 2000), "The wordly mystic's late bloom", The Guardian, UK, archived from the original on December 17, 2017, retrieved May 19, 2013
  41. ^ "The University of Chicago Magazine: June 2000, Campus News". Archived from the original on 2023-03-15. Retrieved 2022-04-23.

Further reading

  • Atlas, James. "Chicago's Grumpy Guru: Best-Selling Professor Allan Bloom and the Chicago Intellectuals". The New York Times Magazine. January 3, 1988.
  • "The Constitution in Full Bloom". 1990. Harvard Law Review 104, no. 2 (December 1990): 645.
  • Bayles, Martha (1998). "Body and soul: the musical miseducation of youth". Public Interest, no. 131, Spring 98: 36.
  • Beckerman, Michael (2000). "Ravelstein Knows Everything, Almost". The New York Times (May 28, 2000).
  • Bellow, Adam (12/19/2005). "Opening the American Mind". National Review 57, no. 23: 102.
  • Bellow, Saul (2000). Ravelstein. New York: Penguin.
  • Butterworth, Charles E. "On Misunderstanding Allan Bloom: The Response to The Closing of the American Mind". Academic Questions 2, no. 4: 56.
  • Edington, Robert V. (1990). "Allan Bloom's message to the state universities". Perspectives on Political Science; 19, no. 3
  • Fulford, Robert. "Saul Bellow, Allan Bloom, and Abe Ravelstein." Globe and Mail, November 2, 1999.
  • Goldstein, William. "The Story behind the Best Seller: Allan Bloom's Closing of the American Mind." Publishers Weekly. July 3, 1987.
  • Hook, Sidney. 1989. "Closing of the American Mind: An Intellectual Best Seller Revisited". American Scholar 58, no. Winter: 123.
  • Iannone, Carol. 2003. "What's Happened to Liberal Education?". Academic Questions 17, no. 1, 54.
  • Jaffa, Harry V. "Humanizing Certitudes and Impoverishing Doubts: A Critique of Closing of the American Mind." Interpretation. 16 Fall 1988.
  • Kahan, Jeffrey. 2002. "Shakespeare on Love and Friendship." Women's Studies 31, no. 4, 529.
  • Kinzel, Till. 2002. Platonische Kulturkritik in Amerika. Studien zu Allan Blooms The Closing of the American Mind. Berlin: Duncker & Humblot.
  • Matthews, Fred. "The Attack on 'Historicism': Allan Bloom's Indictment of Contemporary American Historical Scholarship." American Historical Review 95, no. 2, 429.
  • Mulcahy, Kevin V. 1989. "Civic Illiteracy and the American Cultural Heritage." Journal of Politics 51, no. 1, 177.
  • Nussbaum, Martha. "Undemocratic Vistas," New York Review of Books 34, no.17 (November 5, 1987)
  • Orwin, Clifford. "Remembering Allan Bloom." American Scholar 62, no. 3, 423.
  • Palmer, Michael, and Thomas Pangle ed. 1995. Political Philosophy and the Human Soul: Essays in Memory of Allan Bloom. Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield Pub.
  • Rosenberg, Aubrey. 1981. "Translating Rousseau." University of Toronto Quarterly 50, no. 3, 339.
  • Schaub, Diana. 1994. "Erotic adventures of the mind." Public Interest, no. 114, 104.
  • Slater, Robert O (2005), "Allan Bloom", in Shook, John (ed.), The Dictionary of Modern American Philosophers (PDF), vol. 1, Bristol, England: Thoemmes Press, archived from the original (PDF) on 2007-07-10.
  • Sleeper, Jim. 2005. "Allan Bloom and the Conservative Mind". New York Times Book Review (September 4, 2005): 27.
  • Wrightson, Katherine M. 1998. "The Professor as Teacher: Allan Bloom, Wayne Booth, and the Tradition of Teaching at the University of Chicago." Innovative Higher Education 23, no. 2, 103.

External links

Wikiquote has quotations related to Allan Bloom.
Retrieved from "https://en.wikipedia.org/w/index.php?title=Allan_Bloom&oldid=1218975471"