The closing of the american mind by allan bloom pdf

The mind that has no prejudices at the outset is empty…. Perhaps it is our first task to resuscitate those phenomena so that we may again have a world to which we can put our questions and be able to philosophize. This seems to me to be our educational challenge.

What poor substitutes for real diversity are the wild rainbows of dyed hair and other external differences that tell the observer nothing about what is inside. But whether or not it is seen as desirable, students invariably seek role models. And without literature, they only have those around them and in the media to emulate. But deprived of literary guidance, they no longer have any image of a perfect soul, and hence do not long to have one. They do not even imagine that there is such a thing.

It slowly turned from being the object of genuine appreciation to a tool for demonstrating sophistication before it was emphatically displaced by rock music. So it may well be that through the thicket or our greatest corruption runs the path to awareness of the oldest truths. To Plato and Nietzsche, the history of music is a series of attempts to give form and beauty to the dark, chaotic, premonitory forces in the soul.

And they know this. It gives them that which their parents insist they have to wait until they are older to have. In short, life is made into a nonstop, commercially prepackaged masturbational fantasy. This description may seem exaggerated, but only because some would prefer to regard it as such.

Mick Jagger tarting it up on stage is all that we brought back from the voyage to the underworld. The first sensuous experiences are decisive in determining the taste for the whole of life….

Rock music encourages passions and provides models that have no relation to any life that young people who go to universities can possibly lead…. Self-Centeredness Students today are largely apathetic about any concerns outside of themselves. Why are we surprised that such unfurnished persons should be preoccupied principally with themselves?

Equality Students today, whatever their politics, believe in equality. Yet they remain silent, because they are at a loss about how to handle the situation. White students have silently and unconsciously adjusted to a group presence of blacks, and they must readjust for a black who does not define himself by the group.

Sex Unlike any other, America is a country founded on and formed by philosophical principles, and we have now allowed them inform our private lives—including our sex lives. These principles, freedom and equality, have arrived in two waves: the sexual revolution freedom and feminism equality —ideals that are to an extent inherently at odds with each other.

Just as Plato advocated in The Republic , feminism calls for a large degree of social intervention birth control, abortion rights, day-care centers, etc. But now it is present not in rhetoric but in reality. The Ancients thought otherwise on both counts.

And in the freest and most independent situations men long for unconditional attachments. The tension between freedom and attachment, and attempts to achieve the impossible union of the two, are the permanent condition of man.

But in modern political regimes, where rights precede duties, freedom definitely has primacy over community, family and even nature…. The spirit of this choice must inevitably penetrate into all the details of life. Yet the family represented the single strongest mechanism for curtailing selfishness, an intermediary between the individual and the state. Parents—particularly fathers—no longer have a motivation to provide for their children.

The enticement of their wives was the old motivation, but given our modern ideals of equality between the sexes, modern women understandably no longer want to play that role, and the family has crumbled.

But this concept is incredibly foreign to modern students. They see chivalry and courtly love as absurd. We are social solitaries. Love Young people are excessively sensible about love. Given the changes in medicine and technology, the feminists had a strong argument in advocating for women to be admitted into the workplace. But in the absence of social norms regarding gender, young people are left trying to understand what they want from the opposite sex as opposed to figuring out how to get it.

The old moral order, however imperfect it may have been, at least moved towards the virtues by way of the passions. If men were self-concerned, that order tried to expand the scope of self-concern to include others [i. I am only insisting that we not cloud our vision to such an extent that we believe that there are viable substitutes for them just because we want or need them. They spin idly, side by side, unable to set the social machine in motion.

Are we lovers anymore? This is my way of putting the educational question of our times. The greatest parts of their lives lie ahead of them. They are complacent. And the universities do not see themselves as providing for such a longing. Yet it fell short, because it explained the latter purely in terms of the former. Something more is needed. Two Revolutions and Two States of Nature Continental thought has always looked down on America as base and superficial, too tied to the material world and not sufficiently introspective or concerned with the finer tastes in life.

Reason was thought to enable the common man to see the benefit gained by working with others to achieve the mutual satisfaction of their desires by the control of the natural world. Hobbes and Locke built their theories on the idea that man was purely selfish but that the private interests of individuals could be pitted against each other to produce public good.

This led to the crucial idea of rights. But for the poor, the weak, the oppressed—the overwhelming majority of mankind—it is the promise of salvation. For Rousseau nature is distant and attractive, and the movement was hard and divided man. But the restoration takes place on very different grounds, as can be seen in the fact that in the past men traced the tension to the irreconcilable demands of body on the soul, not of nature and society.

What is interesting is that they exist side by side in many aspects of American life, despite being incompatible in principle. But this changed after Machiavelli and Hobbes after him suggested that instead we ignore virtue and follow our desires, which find their root in the state of nature. Man tumbled down into what I have called the basement [where Rousseau] discovered all the complexity in man that, in the days before Machiavelli, was up on high….

Modern psychology has this in common with what was always a popular opinion, fathered by Machiavelli—that selfishness is somehow good. Man is self, and the self must be selfish. What is new is that we are told to look more deeply into the self, that we assumed too easily that we know it and have access to it.

And God was dignified in his freedom, his ability to create. If man was to be elevated, he, too, must be free; he, too, must be able to create.

They admire it without seeing that it is the result of Romantic thought absorbed into democratic public opinion. And it has influenced the whole political spectrum, from Left to Right. Now that they belong to everyone, they can be said to mean nothing…. Culture Culture is everything that enables man to live in society in spite of his desires, which pull him in uncivil directions. Yet politics has been subsumed by culture. The founder of a regime must first make a people to which the regime will belong.

They are often in conflict. We are children playing with adult toys. It is the very peak of Christian virtue that demands the sacrifice of Christianity.

To adapt a formula of Plato about the gods, we do not love a thing because it is good, it is good because we love it. It [became] our decision to esteem that makes something estimable.

Nihilism is a dangerous but a necessary and a possibly salutary stage in human history…. It can break him [Man], reduce him to despair and spiritual or bodily suicide. But it can hearten him to a reconstruction of a world of meaning. Only the most basic values, such as fear of a painful death, are actually shared and a potential basis for a common human experience.

Beyond these, every value must be created, and there is no standard against which to judge those created values other than their ability to preserve or enhance life. This meant he anticipated war, because wars are inevitable when values are imposed and unrooted in truth or anything objective. He tried solving this problem by positing the will to power as a replacement for the will to truth.

He respected only Dostoyevsky. The unconscious replaces all the irrational things—above all divine madness and eros—which were part of the old soul and had lost significance in modernity…. In this respect he is further from Plato than Locke or Descartes. But people had ceased to study the good arguments for liberalism because, being the dominant ideology, it needed no defense.

So a religious justification easily supplanted them. Marxism is [construed as] secularized Christianity; so is democracy; so is utopianism; so are human rights…. Dogmatic atheism culminates in the paradoxical conclusion that religion is the only thing that counts.

It must at least be supplanted by charismatic leadership in order to be pointed in the right, or any, direction. The book was published in multiple languages including English, consists of pages and is available in Paperback format. The main characters of this philosophy, non fiction story are ,. The book has been awarded with , and many others. Please note that the tricks or techniques listed in this pdf are either fictional or claimed to work by its creator.

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Need an account? Click here to sign up. Download Free PDF. Andrew Fuyarchuk. A short summary of this paper. Download Download PDF. Translate PDF. In a bid to rescue democracy from losing its bearings and falling into an ethos of openness, Bloom aimed to inculcate in the youth knowledge of universal and unchanging foundations; foundations transcendent to race, religion, national origin and class.

For her, principles are not ideas known to the mind of a few alone, but rather are enacted in our relations with others in the concrete here and now. The dichotomy between Bloom and Ratner- Rosenhagen could not be wider. For Bloom, the fate of democracy depends upon the formal education of the ruling elite; for Ratner-Rosenhagen, upon a flourishing democratic culture, shared language and community. He tends to appeal to the conservative right in the United States, she to the social democrats.

The opposition Bloom and Ratner-Rosenhagen represent between foundations housed in either the intellect of philosophers or the creative will of the people might, however, be false.

According to W. That is to say, their juxtaposition is made possible by, and therefore presupposes, they have something in common which is irreducible to either side. It remains to be seen in what their common ground consists and how it might function in completing their incomplete thoughts about foundations. Allan Bloom is a Platonic political philosopher committed to resisting the forces of historicism originating in modern German philosophy.

More than any other philosopher he exhibits the moral ramifications of equating that which is transcendent to history with the subjective, and therefore arbitrary human will. Accordingly, there is nothing intrinsically true and good about the so called natural right to equality and freedom. The goals of the academy were being compromised by the only bases for thought Nietzsche could recommend—interest group politics, e.

If those interests could be construed as being of the dominant class of white middle class men and therefore chauvinists, so much the better. The only viable way in which to negotiate the clash of ideas was to embrace them all.

Openness became the hallmark of the democratic ethos. Rather than plunge into the abyss when foundations disappeared, they immersed themselves in the diversions offered by popular culture. Cultivating the citadel within, as Pierre Hadot says of the Roman Stoics, would ensure his graduates would become guardians of natural rights and as capable of defending them as was Socrates of virtue in Athens 5th century agora. Bloom places his hopes for democracy in the educational system just as did Plato when he founded the Academy; namely, in order to train the aristocratic youth to become statesmen.

But of course, they themselves do not want the work. They would prefer to have ample amounts of leisure time for study. He explains that philosophers can only be made to accept offices under compulsion from the hoi poloi.