An Antidote to Allan Bloom

A recent essay republished at VoegelinView provided an informative critique of Allan Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind.[1] I read Bloom’s book twenty years ago. It was an enjoyable read. I worked then, as now, in a publicly funded Catholic School Board, and Closing of the American Mind had the effect of inflaming my sense of disdain for modern education and the culture in which it finds itself. In the spirit of Bloom, there is no shortage of complaints to make when working in public education, and Bloom’s book made me feel very righteous indeed! This sense of righteousness, or perhaps superiority is a better word, is one reason Closing of the American Mind was an enjoyable read for me.

In the end, however, I cannot blame Bloom for my sin of self-righteous pride. I have studied a few books, but I have not mastered history, philosophy and literature. I am susceptible to the ideas of others. Still, when I contrast my reading of Allan Bloom with my experience of reading Eric Voegelin, I remember Voegelin inspiring a hunger in my soul to read more, and to learn more. Bloom did not leave me with this hunger. Bloom made me feel quite complete as I was.

A year after reading Bloom, I had the good fortune of reading James M. Rhodes’ Eros, Wisdom, and Silence: Plato’s Erotic Dialogues. As it turns out, Rhodes cured me of a great deal, and helped me temper my self-righteousness, inspiring me anew to do what brings life to my soul, and by happy circumstance, brings me a paycheque at the same time. Rhodes reminded me that I am called to work with students, and to hopefully participate with them in responding to the mysteries of the Divine, the Person, and Creation. One reason Rhodes is an effective antidote to Bloom’s assertion of the truth is Rhodes’ pursuit to understand healthy and unhealthy loves. In this pursuit, he brings Bloom’s critique of the American student into the discussion. This inclusion of Bloom helps the reader appreciate how the Socratic teacher is called to engage with a person whose soul is suffering poor health.

With some detail, Rhodes lists Bloom’s concerns over the dominant place relativism has in his student’s lives, their disinterest in reading, and their “spiritually dreary” families. Rhodes also includes Bloom’s report on student’s addiction to rock music, music that is rooted in a crass form of sexuality, and the dominant place that casual sex has in student’s lives. Casual sex, Bloom asserts, renders the contemporary student incapable of having a passionate relationship with any subject in liberal education. “Sexual passion no longer includes the illusion of eternity,” Bloom is quoted as writing, the students suffering from a “crippled eros that can no longer take wing.” These sad facts are made worse by wide-spread divorce rates that further harm students. Ultimately, American students have become “flat souled.”[2]

Rhodes counters Bloom’s litany of problems in modern America one problem at a time. Rhodes admits that Bloom has indeed diagnosed genuine dangers among the youth of our day, but by Rhodes’ experience, the students are not as far gone as Bloom thinks. The student’s relativism is received, not “systematically deduced.” The Socratic teacher can concede “the legitimacy of relativism provisionally,” and then begin “the philosophic enterprise of careful, open-minded inquiry from scratch with every student who responds.” Although this philosophic enterprise requires self-discipline and “endless hard work,” the benefit for the instructor is that it puts them into the philosophic life, “so it is a happy labor.”[3] College teachers forget the frivolousness of their own youth. “Stimulating wonder is our job,” Rhodes says to those teachers, “we ought not to complain because no one has done this work for us.”[4]

Bloom’s critique of the family as relativistic and vulgar is similarly countered by Rhodes. The families Rhodes meets are “generally thoughtful, interesting, committed to the ethical good … and dedicated to the welfare of their children.”[5] While divorce, like casual sex, can often bring harm to the students, Rhodes has seen soulful injuries compel students toward the philosophic life. Rock music can play a similar role, for while much of it is “sheer alienation and unbridled aggression,” there is also rock music that “expresses sheer joy of living,” and social commentary, however naïve, that has the potential to “propel our youths toward meditation on the eternal realities.”[6]

In the end, Rhodes expresses concern over Bloom’s blanket condemnation of his day. Each case and each person is unique, and “outcomes for our students are not predetermined.”[7] Bloom is mistaken “if he supposes that the eros of damaged souls can never take wing. Sometimes, it is disaster that opens unhappy souls to philosophy.” Regarding the self-centered attitude of most students, Rhodes shares the experience of reading the tale of Glaucon’s ring with his students, asking them if they would abuse the power of the ring as Glaucon did. Rhodes reports that the majority of his students admit they would abuse the power of the ring, while the minority who claim they would resist the ring are accused of lying to themselves. Again, Rhodes is insistent that the Socratic teacher should work patiently with the students, seeking to turn at least some of them toward an open existence. “The students are not bad at heart,” Rhodes writes. “All of us begin life self-centered; all need to learn to recognize a higher good. That is the point of education.”[8]

The Socratic philosopher ministers to a sick eros. Rhodes reminds us that “Socrates holds that a recovery from erotic diseases requires the quest for wisdom.” In the face of Bloom’s critique of the young, Rhodes admits to feeling anxious, unsure of Bloom’s “fidelity to Socratic philosophy.” The “aggressive confidence” that Bloom displays in his “jeremiads” seems to suggest he “already knows the non-relativistic truth of natural right.”[9] Rhodes understands that it is wrong to simply assert the truth onto students. Turning to healthy erotes requires an evocation rooted in the spirit of the good, the true and the beautiful. Does Bloom honor this quest, or is he simply asserting the truth?

Of the many questions Rhodes asks of Bloom, his questions about love are most insightful. Does Bloom’s language about love “involve an artful hedonism or an elevated sexuality? Is it compatible with what we uncomprehendingly regard as Platonic love?”[10] Bloom was critical of young people whose sexual passion did not include “the illusion of eternity,” so Rhodes presses Bloom further. What is the completion of human nature supposed to be, Rhodes asks. “Is it the antithesis of sexual passion that no longer includes the illusion of eternity? Thus, is it a passion that does embrace the illusion of eternity? Are we to understand that the terminus of the philosophic quest is indulgence in a mere illusion?”[11]

Rhodes suspects Bloom of being a nihilist.[12] In order to investigate this concern more deeply, Rhodes also includes Bloom’s teacher Leo Strauss in the Socratic conversation. The view held by Bloom and Strauss is that philosophers, like scientists, are a minority because they threaten the “uninformed opinion” by which society operates. Philosophers have to live their life pretending to be devout to the opinions of the day, politely respecting opinions while rejecting them privately.[13] The philosopher, in other words, wears a mask in his daily life and communicates in the same manner, hiding his true intentions from the dull-witted plebes who may pick up his writing or listen in on his conversations.

Plato’s Symposium is the foundation on which Rhodes has built his study. As Rhodes reads the Symposium, he understands it to be a dialogue filled with humour and heartbreak at the same time [14] because “different forms of tyranny keep appearing.”[15] The men whom Socrates is engaged with, Phaedrus, Pausanias, and Eryximachus, have an erotic desire for honor, for divine roles in creating other souls, and for a technical mastery of being. These “three sophists are laughing as they speak … because they are hunters of young men, and are showing off their techniques for trapping prey. Their motivations are tyrannical oppression of the young than to the common good. Socrates loves the young for their own sakes and is repulsed by the love that guides his companions.”[16] If I can be permitted some leeway for a little ironic humor, I wonder if I was Bloom’s intended prey. In reading Closing of the American Mind, was Bloom inviting me to join him on a power trip where I could feel morally and intellectually superior to the wayward masses being condemned? It certainly does feel good to see oneself as better than others.

Rhodes understands Bloom’s interpretation of the Symposium to rest on the idea that the dialogue’s characters are merely having fun with Eros. As far as Bloom is concerned, there is no tyranny to consider in the Symposium. Bloom does not see the three sophists as being erotic despite the erotic desires that inspire their words and actions, revealing Bloom’s error in seeing eros as only to do with sexual appetite.[17] Although Socrates names Aristophanes as his accuser who says “nothing true,”[18] Bloom defends Aristophanes, suggesting the playwright is simply warning Socrates to be more discreet, as a friend would. Bloom presupposes Aristophanes and Socrates to be atheists who promote their own divinity, are devotees to natural science, and aristocrats who uphold the right of better men to exploit worse men. Bloom can therefore interpret the Symposium as Plato’s attempt to use Aristophanes “as a model for improving Socrates.”[19]

Aristophanes’ portrayal of Socrates is hardly endearing. At the root of Socrates’ sins, as charged by his accusers, is his ability to make the weaker speech appear stronger. Socrates, in other words, has the ability to “promote chaos” by denying the gods through his clever arguments where he can turn everything upside down. He is a teacher who shows young men like Pheidippides how to be scoundrels while appearing just. Aristophanes has Strepsiades upbraid Socrates for causing him to abandon the gods, and asks Hermes what to do with the miscreant. Hermes suggests Socrates’ “thinkery” be burned down, and Socrates chased away by the mob, who should also fire darts at him.[20]

Rhodes concludes that Aristophanes is hostile to Socrates.[21] Socrates was not an atheist, Rhodes argues. He carried out the requisite sacrifices and practiced piety. In Plato’s Apology Socrates declares he acknowledges the gods more than his accusers.[22] In the Phaedo, Socrates shares his interest in the idea that nous orders and causes all things with an orientation toward achieving “the best.”[23] Socrates was dissatisfied when others paid no heed to the good that must hold together and contain all things, and on the day of his execution said he would gladly become the student of anyone who could offer him a lesson on a cause of this kind.[24]

Bloom misses the fact that there is eros for objects beyond sexual desire. At the same time, Bloom recognizes “an essential emptiness” that human beings feel, an incompleteness that can be cured with “embraces and orgasms,” which are “ends in themselves.”[25] Bloom understands his erotic attachment to his lover as inspired by this emptiness, and the desire to embrace his lover and “hold on forever” is a type of cure for this emptiness. A person’s lover represents their “lost half” who, when embraced, makes them whole.

Rhodes acknowledges this emptiness we sometimes feel, and acknowledges that our lover, perhaps a man’s wife, can fill up much of that void. Still, Rhodes argues, Bloom sullies this truth and beauty. “Why should the lover construe the beloved as his or her own ‘lost other half?’” This seems narcissistic. “The beloved is precisely not the self of the lover but an other.” Furthermore, Rhodes asks, why should we understand our experience of emptiness to be a proof that being is dysfunctional?[26] Bloom’s thought is that if we were made to suffer emptiness, then the gods who made us are tyrants.[27] By contrast, Rhodes displays an openness to being. He wonders why we cannot understand our emptiness “as a consequence of our ontological place, as a condition of being human that is certainly difficult but also indicative of the path that we should be following … without whining?” Why should “we construe the filling of this emptiness by love as a triumph over an evil reality,” instead of as a “natural fulfillment in a benevolent order of being?”[28]

This brings us full circle back to Rhodes’ original response to Bloom’s Closing of the American Mind, and to Rhodes’ concern over Bloom’s neglect of his responsibility as a Socratic teacher. What type of pleasures, and what forms of power, visit the sophist when they look down at a world they have escaped from, and see chaos, or see their students as hopelessly lost? What advantage can a sophist lever when people follow their diagnosis of the masses’ spiritual and intellectual illness, delivered from a high point of intellectual and moral authority? Does condemnation of our culture comfortably remove us from the hard work and care that comes with a Socratic response to people’s sufferings? Does confidence in one’s own superiority over the life of the masses make the humbleness required for a Socratic seeking after wisdom impossible to realize? Rhodes leads us to a careful consideration of what we love, and without being prescriptive, gently leads us to the path we can follow, guided by the good, the true, and the beautiful. This path, of course, is not one that Rhodes, Socrates, or anyone else has constructed, which is why it is a spiritually safe path to follow. Like many gifted men and women, Rhodes has simply illumined the way.

NOTES:

1. Wilfred McClay, “The Legacy of the Closing of the American Mind,” VoegelinView, 8 March 2022. <https://voegelinview.com/the-legacy-of-the-closing-of-the-american-mind/>

2. Rhodes, James M. Eros, Wisdom, and Silence: Plato’s Erotic Dialogues. University of Missouri Press, Columbia, USA. 2003. Pages 6-7.

3. Ibid., page 8

4. Ibid., page 9

5. Ibid., page 9

6. Ibid., page 10

7. Ibid., page 10

8. Ibid., page 11

9. Ibid., page 12

10. Ibid., page 12

11. Ibid., page 13

12. Ibid., page 31

13. Ibid., page 84

14. Ibid., page 184

15. Ibid., page 240

16. Ibid., page 241

17. Ibid., page 241

18. Ibid., page 242

19. Ibid., page 244

20. Ibid., page 245

21. Ibid., page 247

22. Ibid., page 251

23. Ibid., page 252

24. Ibid., page 253

25. Ibid., page 277

26. Ibid., page 277

27. Ibid., page 277, footnote #111

28. Ibid., page 278

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