Reading Allan Bloom
I have at my leisure been reading Bloom’s The Closing of the American Mind, and find it much to my taste. It’s full of vitriol, but of the most refined sort, and always directed toward what Bloom has no real power to oppose – Rock and Roll, Heideggerian anti-enlightenment (i.e. post-modernism), historicism. It really is, in a sense, Natural Right and History finally set to American language.
What strikes me as almost obscene about the book is its love of the theoretical life and its contempt for the useful. It was a contempt I myself pretended to. But what really ends up striking me is that Bloom loves Achilles more than Odysseus by far. And his reason for loving Achilles more or less amounts to his courage in facing his own death by slaying Hector.
It is little wonder, though, given his disdain for the useful that he would love Achilles more than Odysseus. His love for The Philosopher really adds up to a contempt for the active life, for pleasures on a human scale. And what is lovable about Odysseus than that he renounces Calypso’s immortality for Ithaka and Penelope and Telemachus? And the pear trees his father gave him.
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Personally, Hector is the only “real” man in the Iliad. He’s the one we see constantly failing, constantly trying, constantly worrying. He’s the only man that is vulnerable and yet brave. His bravery outmatches Achilles by far. Oh sure, Achilles loses his life for killing Hector. Hector loses his city for facing Achilles–he knows it and before he goes to face death he hopes for a reasonable solution, a way out with words. Or maybe it’s because I’m dating a Medievalist who studies the Aeneid in Latin…
I think Allan Bloom had a little chinaman tethered to his wrist if I’m not mistaken that is indeed an inhuman pleasure.
What?
“His love for The Philosopher really adds up to a contempt for the active life, for pleasures on a human scale.” read Ravelstein.
No comment ever fits what you’ve written. You don’t write clearly or the people can’t read.
Bloom was no different seeking his venial pleasures. But philosophers are allowed.
What does ‘Chick’ have to do with the pleasures of theory? If anything you’re being cryptic and not me. Or else you’re saying that Bloom never lived up to his own expectations?
And yes, I’ve read Ravelstein. And yes, that’s precisely Bloom’s problem (and the problem of all philosophers, on pain of not being philosophers).
And no, people can’t read. What did Wittgenstein say, “what the reader can do, leave for reader”? (rough approximation). And I count on that fact.
Here’s your fortune cookie: You must become a nihilist before you will ever be a man.