PREFACE TO THE THIRD GOLDEN OLDIE

My first Golden Oldie was a jeu d’esprit.  My second one was, as it were, a cri de coeur.  My third and last, which I shall post tomorrow, is something else again. It is perhaps, despite its appearance, the most serious thing I have ever written on higher education in America. Let me prepare for it by giving you the background. The distinguished philosophy department of UNC Chapel Hill has for many years put on an annual conference. A good long time ago, I was invited to give the keynote address, and I accepted. I sent them the following rather stodgy title: Some Thoughts on the Distribution Of Educational Resources in the United States Today.

 

When I showed up and it was my turn to deliver the keynote address, I got up and said something like the following:

“When I received this invitation, I was very honored and immediately thought of putting together some ideas I have had about higher education into a formal address. But alas I am getting old and I longer have the abilities that I seemed to possess when I was young, and I simply could not do it. But I was committed and did not want to be a no-show so it occurred to me that perhaps I could amuse you with an account of a trip I recently took. I hope you will forgive me for my incapacity and perhaps take some enjoyment from this story.”

 

I then launched into my talk, which I called “The Pimple on Adonis’s Nose.” As you will imagine, there was some nervous whispering and shifting about in chairs but they were there and they were stuck so they sat and listened. Somewhere in the middle of the talk it began to dawn on them what I was doing and one young man was so offended that he got up and stalked out – quite the best reaction I have ever had to a talk.

 

After I have posted the talk and you have had a chance to read it, I will write a fairly lengthy post about the discussion that followed and some of the things I said by way of elaboration and defense of my quite radical position.

GOLDEN OLDIE NUMBER TWO

 A word of explanation is called for. Thirty-five years ago I was asked to prepare a paper on Kant's legal philosophy that was originally intended to be published in the Columbia Law Journal as part of the proceedings of a conference, but the students in charge of the journal wisely recognized that what I have written did not really call for such distinguished recognition so instead they asked me to write a report of the conference. This paper is that report. When the students read it, they were obviously appalled and I got a collective phone call from the editors of the Journal in which they delicately suggested some editing changes. I said that as a matter of principle I never allowed anybody to edit what I write but that I would not be at all upset if they chose simply not to publish it. There was an explosive outpouring of breath that had been held tight by students who saw their careers going down the tubes and we parted friends. I put the paper back in my file drawer and, as they say in the soaps, moved on.

WHY INDEED

by

Johannes Climacus

Responsible for publication Robert Paul Wolff

 

The Workshop in Kantian Legal Theory, of which the papers reproduced here are a partial record, was a curious event, withal. Nineteen men and one woman, closeted - and cossetted - for three days in Columbia Univer­sity's Arden House for the avowed purpose of discussing the jurisprudential theories of the greatest philosopher who ever lived, Immanuel Kant. Fifteen hundred dollars plus expenses for the six authors of the papers circulated in advance for discussion, five hundred for those charged with participating in the discussion, the bill to be paid by the right-wing Liberty Fund, whose minatory representative, eerily resembling the Jehovah's Witnesses who every day radiate from their home in Brooklyn Heights to proselytize the faith, attended each session to make sure that the hired hands put in a full day's work.

Five of the nineteen were professional philosophers, four of them Kant scholars who had made their reputations struggling with one or another of Kant's great works. Twelve hours of concentrated discussion on Kant's phil^­osophy was, in Eliza Doolittle's words, mother's milk to them, and Philoso­phy being what it is, the pay wasn't bad either. But the remaining fourteen were professors of law - two from Canada, one from England, a lone represen­tative of the German Federal Republic, and the rest from the United States. What, one could not help but wonder, were they doing there? What could Kant possibly have to say to them that would justify three days of unrelenting Kantshtick?

The cast of characters itself was more than passingly interesting. Leading the group, the organizer of the conference, diminutive, erect, rath­er military in bearing, looking like nothing so much as the Major in BEAT THE DEVIL, was George Fletcher, Professor of Law at Columbia University. Kant clearly had a powerful valence for Fletcher, and one felt that the invocation of his name was code for intensely felt hostility to unspecified, but dangerously lax, tendencies in modern legal thinking. He seemed to draw strength from even garbled allusions to significant texts in Kant's ethical writings.

Most voluble of the nineteen was Fletcher's colleague, Bruce Ackerman, brilliant, precocious, enormously — and on occasion, with some justification — pleased with himself. Antaeus—like, Ackerman would draw renewed strength from the sound of his own voice, so that launched upon a comment of finite scope, he would be refreshed by his words, and extend his remarks to fill all available space and time. Competing with Ackerman for the floor most often was the radical philosopher and sometime Kant scholar Robert Paul Wolff, whose face, contorted by a persistant facial tic, showed excitement, disgust, irritation, and exasperation in quick succession. Ackerman and Wolff, like the two youngest boys at a Seder, frequently competed to see who could ask the most questions from a reclining position, both of them manifestly expecting an indulgent Jewish mother to pat them on the head and offer them another piece of cake.

Intervening with impassioned criticisms that often outran their target somewhat was newly—tenured Andrzej Rapaczynski, also of Columbia Law School. Rapaczynski, quite possibly the philosophically quickest mind at the conference, had many years earlier been a brilliant student in the Columbia philosophy department, and had studied with Wolff. Now that he is safely tenured, it can perhaps be acknowledged that Rapaczynski is really a philosopher, not a Jurisprude, and in his youthful enthusiasm he was frequently less successful than his fellow philosophers in concealing his dismay at the appallingly low level of understanding of Kant manifested around the table. 

Across from Ackerman and Wolff sat tall, thin Mary Gregor, bent in a question mark of deference to her neighbor, Douglas Dryer, a long—time Kant scholar from Canada. As the only real expert present on the subject of the conference — she is the author of the major commentary on the work under discussion — Gregor was of course almost silent during the three days. Genuine technical knowledge was in short supply, and would, if too often dis­played, have tended to inhibit the free flow of conversation.

Casting something of a pall on the proceedings was Professor Dr. Wolfgang Naucke of Frankfurt University, a Professor of Law and a Judge. For Naucke, it appeared, Kant constitutes the last barrier separating western civilization from barbarism, although whether from the left or from the right remained for a while unclear. Naucke's discussion of Kant was couched in a grammatical mode that might be dubbed the incantatory imperative, inspiring in the listener contradictory impulses to cheer and salute. Naucke's true colors were revealed almost by accident, midway through the discussion of his paper. Asked directly and flatly whether he considered Kant's jurisprudence incompatible with the welfare state, he replied, laconically, yes. At that, Wolff, who had been dozing, sat bolt upright like the dormouse at the Mad Hatter's tea party and confessed himself suddenly to have recaptured an interest in the proceedings.

In striking contrast to Naucke, Herbert Morris, Dean of Humanities at UCLA, brought a welcome touch of laid—back California cool to the conference, taking the sting out of the Morningside Heights intensity of Ackerman, Rapaczynski, et al. Morris is well known for his philosophical discussions of the theory of punishment, and had in previous years carried on a debate in the literature on that subject with one of the Kant scholars present, Jeffrie Murphy of Arizona State. Prompted by a question during the discussion of Murphie's paper, Morris treated the conference to an exquisite illustration of how to expound a systematic philosophical position while appearing merely to reminisce about an experience on a California freeway. Morris' impromptu remarks were one of the few moments of genuine style in an otherwise pedestrian three days.

The non—Canadian North Americans around the table were intermittently chivvied, with ironic deprecation, by crypto—Thomist Ernest Weinrib from the University of Toronto. Weinrib, and his killer rabbit sidekick Peter Benson from McGill, were the only lawyers at the conference who appeared seriously to be interested in the substance of the law. Weinrib's complaint, the internal incoherence of tort law south of his border, and the contrasting beauty and elegance of Canadian tort law, utterly mystified the philosophers around the table, but appeared to be an old familiar tune to the other lawyers.

 As Spinoza noted, the self comes to know itself only as it sees itself reflected in others. Hence lovers need the beloved, actors crave audiences, and professors tolerate students. Fletcher, understanding these needs, had, like a good host, provided a symbolic student presence in the form of the editorial board of the Columbia Law Journal. They were of course enjoined from interrupting the heavenly discourses by juvenile interventions, but they were permitted to be present at the proceedings, with the understanding that they would in due course turn over the pages of their journal to the finished products.

The relation of the students to the conference participants, peripheral though it was to the main action, offered a lovely example of the sort of ironic misperception of which Jane Austen made such elegant sport. The students were of course perceived by their mentors as adoring acolytes, consumed by academic primal scene scopophilia [a technical term from psychiatry, meaning the obsession to observe one's intellectual parents in rational intercourse]. The students, all of whom had done philosophy either as grad­uates or as undergraduates, were in a state of shocked dismay, quite well aware of the philosophical shambles unfolding before them, and unable to im­agine how they could in good conscience feed the audience of their journal so thin a gruel. 

And there they all were, removed from the distractions of Manhattan, fed and cared for by a silent, efficient Arden House staff, serenaded by a chamber trio on the second evening, and embarked on twelve hours of investi­gation Of the Rechtslehre, Part One of Kant's late, minor work, THE METAPHY­SICS OF MORALS.

Each two^-hour session was devoted to one of the prepared papers, which all conference participants had received in advance. Robert Paul Wolff led off on the first afternoon. Wolff, accustomed to the terse prose style of the philosophical world, and mistakenly expecting to have to read his paper aloud, had been well along in the drafting of eighteen or twenty carefully crafted pages when a chance phone call to Fletcher had revealed that the other participants were producing 'fifty to eighty pages.' Panicked by the potential mortification of showing up with the shortest paper on the block, Wolff discarded his draft and began again. Since the paper was intended for non^-philosophers, he reasoned, a fair amount of space could usefully be de­voted to teaching them something about Kant. Having written two books on Kant's philosophy, and having taught Kant for thirty years, Wolff found it no great strain to churn out fifty pages in the next four days, and it was this effort that the conferees had all read. [Wolff was inordinately pleased with his effort, and much excited by the prospect of publishing a fifty-page paper in the Columbia Law Journal. The students, not fooled for a moment, spoke many kind words to him but chose not to publish.]

The gravamen of Wolff's effort was that just as Kant's moral philosophy has to be read in the light of the deeper doctrines of the CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON, in which context it becomes clear that there are fundamental contradictions between the two which mortally undermine the moral philosophy, so too Kant's legal philosophy must be interpreted through its relation to Kant's fundamental epistemological teachings, with equally disastrous consequences. The implication of Wolff's remarks was that the Kantian legal philosophy was without defensible foundation. Consequently, although the session was pronounced a great success, and was said to have started the conference off in fine style, Wolff's argument was henceforth completely ignored.

A break for drinks and dinner, and the participants returned, fueled and lubricated, for an evening discussion of Fletcher's 89 page note. Fletcher's paper bearing only a parametric relation to Kant, there was considerable hermeneutical space between object—text and subject—discourse within which an unfettered conversation could develop, and everyone pitched in with enthusiasm.

And so it went for two more days. The next morning, Naucke's apocalyptic warnings were followed by Weinrib's animadversions, with Murphy's scholarly and professional addendum to his well—known writings on Kant's retributive theory of punishment preparing the group for the chamber music to follow. The conference was brought to a close with an elegantly evasive defense, by the cultivated Oxford homophobe John Finnis, of his utterly appalling paper.  David Richards, a principal target of Finnis' crabbed and ungenerous remarks, conducted himself with a restraint that was made all the more effective by the eloquence of his reply. The Finnis session was graced by the one moment of genuine scholarship: in rebuttal of Finnis' implausible attempt to claim Kant's support for his own sectarian views, Mary Gregor, apparently from memory, conjured an obscure Kantian text that decisively demonstrated the incorrectness of Finnis' interpretation. Finnis, his hands contorted into twisting claws of emphasis in the characteristic third—generation Wittgensteinian manner, was momentarily reduced to silence.

And so we return to the question that provoked Wolff to a restless quizzing of his fellow conferees: why Kant? What were busy, successful, worldly lawyers [worldly, at the very least, by philosophical standards] doing locked in three days of debate about Kant?  Some of the participants suggested that they were looking for a shtick to beat the utilitarianism of the left. Others identified the 'law and economics' of the right as their target. But neither group gave any indication of a serious interest in the arguments with which Kant had sought to establish his arcane and rather paradoxical philosophical theses. Arguments, unlike shticks, not being adaptable to purposes other than those for which they were fashioned, what did anyone at the conference hope to get from Kant?

The answer is this: lawyers, unlike serious philosophers [but, in this regard, quite like second—rate philosophers], do not actually seek to demonstrate the positions they defend. Rather, they aim to assimilate issues with which they are concerned to the existing structure of laws and precedents in hopes that courts will construe those issues in ways that favor their clients. For this purpose, lawyers need a large and versatile armamentarium of concepts, categories, distinctions, and argument fragments with the aid of which they can articulate intuitions, convictions, or interests to which they are already committed. Both utilitarianism and cost/benefit analysis provide just such weapons to advocates of the left or the right, none of whom can be said ever to Prove their positions, but all of whom gain argumentative leverage from their ability to embed their advocacy in a preexisting proof—structure.

Kant's philosophy is a rich resource of arguments, concepts, and dis­tinctions, already elaborated into an architectonic of subordinations and coordinations, incomparably high in intellectual and academic status, and lying entirely within the public domain. Philosophically speaking, it is to utilitarianism, cost/benefit analysis, or Rawls' THEORY OF JUSTICE what a strategic nuclear weapon is to a medium tank. Invocations of the Categorical imperative or the noumena/phenomena distinction instantaneously confer on the author vast quantities of what teen-age players of Dungeons and Dragons call 'hit points.' In the jargon of the old gangster movies, Kant is the Equalizer. Since lawyers are a combative lot, and good lawyers are winners, three days at Arden House probably seemed like a pretty fair price to pay for a chance at a secret weapon.

Did the Liberty Fund get its money's worth? One hopes not, considering that organization's political orientation. Perhaps the readers of this journal can decide for themselves, having read the best of the papers re­vised and refined in the light of three days of debate. After the partici­pants had left for their several homes, the following notes were discovered at the seat that had been occupied by Robert Paul Wolff. Wolff apparently found the Weinrib paper philosophically suggestive and worthy of serious consideration. His fragmentary jottings have been Englished, as editors like to say, and are offered hare for what they might be worth.

Comments by Robert Paul Wolff on Ernest Weinrib's Paper

A very interesting piece of work. W. is clearly a Thomist who sees in K.'s notion of an 'Idea of Reason' a modern rationale for the Aristotelian-Thomist conception of the telos or internal purpose of a natural kind. Ex­cept that the law, being a human product, can have no other telos than what its makers impute to  it. W. seems hesitant to come out from behind Kant's skirts and declare himself. It is difficult, merely from the text, to tell whether he endorses the notion that the unity of the law is an idea of Reason, or merely attributes it to Kant. But the evident passion with which W. advances his views decides clearly for the former.

W. is certainly correct in his diagnosis of Fletcher and Calabresi on torts [whatever they are], but a diagnosis is not yet a condemnation, let alone a refutation. Why shouldn't those two merely grant W's point, and agree that, absent a purposeful God who has set for Mankind the task of articulating an internally coherent Law, our legal institutions quite properly reflect the fundamental disunity of our society? [Probably Calabresi would be more comfortable with that response than Fletcher.]

But leaving aside such considerations, which bear merely on the truth of W's position, there are serious difficulties with his appropriation of Kant. The problems center on the Critical doctrine of Ideas of Reason.

According to Kant, the intellectual powers of the human mind have both a merely logical and a real employment. In their merely logical employment, our rational capacities are used to compare, contrast, order, and systematise such mental contents as they are presented with, from whatever source. So the arrangement of objects of perception by genera and species, the classification of sense—contents into the familiar five senses, the rearrangement of judgments into the form of syllogisms, and so forth, are all in—stances of the merely logical employment of intelligence. Nothing is created thereby, and the result is no more than a sorting out and neatening up of the materials presented to intelligence.

The real employment, on the other hand, is genuinely creative, resulting in cognitively significant thoughts, or representations, as Kant calls them, that did not exist before, and could not have been arrived at by any process of the comparison, reorganization, or abstraction from presented materials of consciousness.

In the CRITIQUE OF PURE REASON, Kant differentiates between two intellectual powers of the mind, which he labels Understanding and Reason. The real use of Understanding, he says, produces the Pure Concepts of Understanding, or, as they are usually referred to, the categories, among which are Substance and Accident, Cause and Effect, Possibility, Necessity, and so forth.

Reason, personified by Kant as a purposive agent, is said always to strive to complete the processes of organization and arrangement which it undertakes in its merely logical employment, seeking everywhere for the first cause in the series of causes, for the necessary being on whose existence rests the possibility of contingent beings, the first premise from which all syllogistic reasoning descends, and so forth. Kant calls this the quest for the unconditioned, and he claims that the product of the real employment of reason is the concept of the unconditioned. For reasons of piety and historical pendulation [to use Harnack's lovely neologism], Kant resurrects the Platonic term 'Idea,' and calls the various articulations of the concept of unconditionality 'Ideas of reason.'

Kant knows, of course — indeed, he insists — that such Ideas can never find instantiation in experience, for on Kant's own teaching, all experience is conditioned by the mind—dependent constraints under which things can be objects for us in space and time. Hence we can never find a first cause, a free will, a necessary being, or, for the same reasons, a system of law that achieves full inner coherence. Nevertheless, Kant claims, with absolutely no justification whatsoever, would not instill in us the unconquerable urge to seek the Unconditioned unless She had some useful purpose thereby. So we may conclude that although the search can never be completed, the quest is set us as a task. The search for an internally coherent tort law, like the search for a single unified theoretical foundation for the sciences, or a single set of logical premises from which all true mathematical theorems follow as logical consequences, or a first cause, a free will, a necessary being, is a search dictated by the inner telos of reason, setting for us, as an unattainable goal, an Ideal of Reason. [It is not clear why Wolff reminds himself here of certain elementary facts about Kant's philosophy with which he would be thoroughly familiar. I. C.]

But though Kant talks this way all the time, he offers no argument at all for the repeated invocation of Nature's purposes with which the introductory and less central portions of his writings are filled. In fact, of course, Kant himself, through his devastating refutations of the traditional attempts at proving the existence of God, is, together with David Hume, the Enlightenment executioner of this way of speaking. It is entirely incompatible with the deeper teaching of the CRITIQUE to speak of the inner coherence of tort law as though its achievement were an objectively necessary task set us by the inner purposes of Reason itself. Rather, we must recognize that ideal for what it is: one ideal among many that lawyers or theorists of law may set for themselves, for their own political, aesthetic, moral, or professional purposes.

So, in the end, W.'s essay is little more than a cri de coeur, and Fletcher's two—stage process of considerations of right followed by considerations of humanity is as legitimate as any other. W's use of Kant here illustrates a more general difficulty with the too—quick appropriation of portions of a philosophy, as though they were bits and pieces of material that could be separated from the main body of theory and bent to purposes of one's own. The philosophy of a great thinker like Kant is an organic unity unfolding from one, or at most a very few, central insights. One's under­standing of every element in that philosophy, however secondary or peripher­al, is thoroughly conditioned by one's construal of those central insights. Before we can 'use' the Kantian notion of an idea of reason, for example, we must decide how we understand the revolutionary teaching that concepts are rules for the organization of a diversity of sense-contents, and hence have not even problematic application beyond the limits of sense experience

W. cannot escape the necessity of stating, and defending, his aesthet­ic, moral, political or professional reasons for seeking internal coherence in the tort law, or in any other set of institutional practices, for that matter. But this was simply the message of my opening presentation.  I guess it really was the waste of time it seemed.

GOLDEN OLDIE NUMBER ONE

The Chronicle of Higher Education plays no role in the life of the various academic disciplines but it features a classified ads section that lists administrative positions in colleges and universities and it is therefore much read by those aspiring to rise in the Academy. In 1987 the Chronicle asked me to review a new book by a University of Chicago professor named Allan Bloom. What follows was my attempt to come to terms with a really awful book. The readership of the Chronicle being what it is, a good many people failed to note the ironic tone of the review and I heard through the grapevine that a number of them actually called the University of Chicago to find out whether Bloom was real.

 

Enjoy.

 

Aficionados of the modern American novel have learned to look to Philip Roth for complex literary constructions that play wittily with narrative voice and frame. One thinks of such Roth works as My Life as a Man and The Counter Life, Now Saul Bellow has demonstrated that among his other well-recognized literary gifts is an unsuspected bent for daring satire. What Bellow has done, quite simply, is to write an entire corruscatingly funny novel in the form of a pettish, bookish, grumpy, reactionary complaint against the last two decades. The "author" of this tirade, one of Bellow's most fully realized literary creations, is a mid- fiftyish professor at the University of Chicago, to whom Bellow gives the evocative name, "Bloom." Bellow appears in the book only as the author of an eight-page "Foreword," in which he introduces us to his principal and only character. The book is published under the name "Allan Bloom," and, as part of the fun, is even copyrighted in "Bloom's" name. Nevertheless, Bellow is unwilling entirely to risk the possibility that readers will misconstrue his novel as a serious piece of nonfiction by a real professor, and so, in the midst of his preface, he devotes more than a page to a flat- footed explanation of his earlier novel, Herzog, in which, he tells us straight out, he was deliberately trying to satirize pedantry. This bit of hand waving and flag raising by Bellow detracts from the ironic consistency of the novel, but he may perhaps be forgiven, for so compellingly believable is this new academic pedant, "Bloom," that without Bellow's warnings, The Closing of the American Mind might have been taken as a genuine piece of academic prose.

 

The novel is, for all its surface accessibility, a subtly constructed palimpsest concealing what old Hyde Park hands will recognize as a devastating in-house attack by Bellow on his own stamping ground, the Committee on Social Thought. ("Bloom" is described on the jacket as a professor in the Committee on Social Thought.) The real target, indeed, is a former member of that committee, the late Leo Strauss, a brilliant, learned, utterly mad historian of political thought who spawned, nurtured, reared, and sent out into the world several generations of disciples dedicated to his paranoid theories of textual interpretation. (Strauss, whose hermeneutics placed special emphasis on concealment, absence, and misdirection, appears only once in the book, in an aside. Bellow leaves it to the cognoscenti to recognize the true significance of the allusion.)

 

As conceived by Bellow, "Bloom" is the quintessential product of the distinctive educational theories that flourished at the college of the University of Chicago during and after the heyday of Robert Maynard Hutchins. The key to those theories was the particular mid-western, upwardly mobile first-generation version of the Great Conversation that came to be known, in its promotional publishing version, as The Great Books.

 

According to this pedagogical conception, Western civilization is a two-millennia-old conversation among a brilliant galaxy of great minds, permanently encapsulated in a recognized sequence of great texts, with Aristotle's plan for the organization of human knowledge as the architectonic armature. Plato, Aristotle, Aeschylus,  Thucydides, St. Augustine, St. Thomas, al Farabi, Maimonides, Erasmus, Cervantes, Bacon, Shakespeare, Descartes, Hobbes, Locke, Spinoza, Leibniz, Newton, on and on they come, reflecting on the relationship between man and the universe, chatting with one another, kibitzing their predecessors, a rich, endless, moveable feast of ideas and intellectual passions. The list, by now, has grown enormously long, but- and this is the secret of its mesmerizing attraction to the eager young students who were drawn to Chicago- it is finite. However much work it may be to plow through the great books, once one has completed the task, one is educated! One can now join the Great Conversation, perhaps not as an active participant, but certainly as a thoughtful listener. And this is true, regardless of one's family background, upbringing, lack of private schooling, or inappropriate dress. Unlike the Ivy League, where the wrong social class marked one permanently as inferior, Chicago offered a "career open to talents."

 

The virtue of a Chicago education was a certain intoxication with ideas, especially philosophical ideas, that sets off graduates of the Hutchins era from everyone else in the American intellectual scene. When I taught there briefly, in the early 1960s, I was enchanted to find professors of music reading books on Kant, and biologists seriously debating the undergraduate curriculum in Aristotelian terms. The vice of that same system is a mad, hermetic conviction that larger world events are actually caused or shaped by the obscurest sub-quibbles of the Great Conversation. By a fallacy of misplaced concreteness, of the sort that the young Marx so brilliantly burlesqued in The Holy Family, Chicago types are prone to suppose that it is the ideas that are real, and the people in this world who are mere epiphenomena. Bellow captures this distorted mentality perfectly in "Bloom," who, as we shall see, traces the cultural ills of the past twenty years implausibly, but with a wacky interior logic, to the twisted theories of two German philosophers.

 

The novel (which is to say, Bellow's "Foreword") begins with what turns out to be a bitingly ironic observation. "Professor Bloom has his own way of doing things." And indeed he does! Once "Bloom" has begun his interminable complaint against modernity- for which, read everything that has taken place since "Bloom" was a young student in the 1940s at the University of Chicago- we are treated to a hilarious discourse of the sort that only a throwback to the Hutchins era could produce.

 

"Bloom's" diatribe opens with some animadversions upon the culture of the young. After a few glancing blows at feminism, he quite unpredictably launches upon an extended complaint about the music that the young so favor. Bellow's image of a middle-aged professor trying to sound knowledgeable about hard rock is a miniature comic masterpiece.

 

Now "Bloom" arrives at his real message. The deeper cause of the desperate inadequacies of our contemporary culture, it seems, is the baleful effect upon us of Friedrich Nietzsche and Martin Heidegger! Inasmuch as only a handful of American intellectuals can spell these gentlemen's names, let alone summarize their doctrines, "Bloom's" thesis has a certain manifest implausibility. But, as Bellow well knows, true Straussians spurn the obvious, looking always in silences, ellipses, and guarded allusions for the true filiations that connect one thinker with another, or a philosophical tradition with the cultural and political world.

 

"Bloom's" expository style, so skillfully manipulated by Bellow, makes it extraordinarily difficult to tell what he is actually saying. Its most striking surface characteristic is an obsessive name- dropping that turns every page into a roll call of the Great Conversation. Consult the book at random (my copy falls open to pages 292-93), and one finds, within a brief compass, mention of Christopher Marlowe, Machiavelli (a Straussian buzzword, this), Bacon, Descartes, Hobbes, Leibniz, Locke, Montesquieu, Voltaire, Jacques Maritain, T.S. Eliot, Rousseau, Newton, Socrates, Moses, Cyrus, Theseus,  Romulus, Swift, and Aristophanes.

 

But despite the talismanic invocation of these and many other great names, there is precious little real argumentation in "Bloom's" "book." Indeed, despite his academic style of exposition, "Bloom" rarely enunciates a thesis that he is prepared to stand behind. All is irony, allusion, exposition, and under- cutting reserve. Eventually, one realizes that Bellow is deliberately, and with great skill, conjuring for us a portrait of a man of Ideas, if not of ideas, whose endless ruminations on moral and intellectual virtue conceal a fundamental absence of either.

 

The turning-point in "Bloom's" monologue comes late in the novel, in a chapter entitled "The Sixties." Suddenly, the mist disperses, the allusions evaporate, and we discover what is really eating away at "Bloom's" innards. It seems that, in the course of his distinguished academic career, "Bloom" taught at Cornell University during the late sixties. Two decades later, "Bloom" is so dyspeptic about the events there that he can scarcely contain himself. "Servility, vanity and lack of conviction," "pompous," "a mixture of cowardice and moralism" are among the phrases with which he characterizes his colleagues of that time. For "Bloom," at Cornell, Columbia, and elsewhere, the rebellious students were blood brothers to the Brown Shirts who supported nazism. "Whether it be Nuremberg or Woodstock, the principle is the same."

 

Stepping back a bit from the fretwork of the novel, we may ask ourselves what Bellow's purpose is in committing an entire book to the exhibition of "Allan Bloom." Clearly, simple good- hearted fun must have played some motivating role, as well, we may suppose, as a desire to set the record right concerning the Committee on Social Thought. But as the final portion of the book makes manifest, Bellow has a deeper aim, one that is intensely earnest and, in the fullest and most ancient sense, moral. The central message of the Greek philosophers whom "Bloom" so likes to cite is that ultimately morality is a matter of character. Plato's brilliantly rendered portraits not only of Socrates but also of Gorgias, Callicles, Thrasymachus, and the others is intended to show us how virtue is grounded in character, and right action in virtue. Merely to know what can be found in books, or indeed on clay tablets, is no guarantee of virtue. As Aristotle remarks in a celebrated ironic aside, one cannot teach ethics to young men who are not well brought up. "Bloom," as Bellow shows us across three hundred tedious pages, is as intimate with the Great Conversation as any Chicago undergraduate could ever hope to become. And yet, at the one critical moment in his life, when he confronts inescapably the intersection between political reality and his beloved Great Books, "Bloom's" vision clouds, his capacity for intellectual sympathy deserts him, and he cries "the Nazis are coming" as he shrinks from America's most authentically democratic moment of recent times.

 

In the end, Bellow is telling us, the Great Conversation is not enough. One needs compassion, a sense of justice, and moral vision. Without these, the Great Books are merely dead words in dead languages. I strongly recommend The Closing of the American Mind to anyone who desires a fiction of the mind that takes seriously the old question of the role of reason in the formation of virtuous character.

 

 

 

WHAT i PLAN FOR THE NEXT SEVERAL DAYS

I have been about this business of writing and publishing for quite some time now. My very first publication occurred almost 70 years ago. I was a young sophomore at Harvard during what is now referred to as the McCarthy era. I was living in a cavernous single in an overflow dormitory called Claverly (in those days at the end of your freshman year you had to interview to get into one of the Harvard houses and because I refused on principle to do so I was stuck in Claverly.) The president of Harvard was a distinguished scientist named James Bryant Conant, who later went on to be the first High Commissioner of the American zone of Germany. Conant had stated publicly that although he would not fire a member of the Harvard faculty who was found to belong to the Communist Party, he would not hire a communist either. Having just read John Stuart Mill’s On Liberty I drew myself up to my full 17 years of height and wrote a letter to the Harvard Crimson protesting Conant’s statement and calling on him to “step down from his high position” if he was unwilling to defend the principles of academic freedom. Conant did in fact step down at the end of the next academic year, though I seriously doubt that his decision was influenced by my letter.

 

My second publication came a year and a half later and again it was a letter, this time to my favorite pulp science fiction magazine, Astounding Science Fiction. (In those days the two leading pulp science fiction magazines were Astounding and Galaxy. I was a fan of the first.) Some science fiction writers had embraced something called non-Aristotelian logic and in fact one of the greatest of the science fiction writers, A. E. Van Vogt, had written a novel, first serialized in Astounding, called The World of Null-A. At that time I was still a logic student at Harvard and I was offended by what I considered an elementary misunderstanding of Aristotle so once again I drew myself up and wrote a letter to protest, which they published.

 

Thus launched on my writing career, I never looked back, and I have been at it ever since. When I was young, I very much wanted my voice to be heard and I wrote constantly, obsessively, publishing books and articles with abandon. As I grew older, my work became more interior. What was important to me was not being heard but rather making clear and coherent what was in my mind so that I could put my thoughts on paper, whether to be published or simply to be put back finished in my file drawers. Now that I am old, more and more I find myself looking back at this long 70 year period of thinking and writing.

 

When I started this blog I was a young man of 75, full of energy and badly in need of a medium in which I could articulate the thoughts that had been in my mind for so many decades. Now, 12 years later, it gives me pleasure to run my mind over the millions of words I have assembled into sentences and to identify those bits of writing of which I am particularly fond.

 

Leaving to one side my most serious work – the two books and many articles on the philosophy of Immanuel Kant and the two books and many more articles on the thought of Karl Marx – there are three little pieces of writing that stand out as my favorites. Only one of them was actually published; the second was written for publication but was rejected in horror by the editors of the Journal where it was intended to appear, and the third was a speech that it never occurred to me to try to publish (although a version of it actually was published as part of an article co-authored by myself and my brilliant son Tobias Barrington Wolff – for that reason undoubtedly my all time favorite publication.)

 

I actually reproduced all three of these little pieces in this blog seven years ago but because I am so fond of them I am going to do it all over again in the next several days. I make no apology for this. If I were capable of composing a violin concerto or string quartet, it would never occurred to me to arrange for it to be played only once and then be put away.

 

The three pieces to which I am referring are a review of a book by Allan Bloom, a report of a conference on Kantian legal theory, and a talk given at the annual colloquium organized by the philosophy department of the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. All three of these pieces have in common the fact that they are written ironically, they are not what at first appearance they seem to be. This is no accident, as I shall try to explain when I am finished posting them one after the other on this blog.

 

While I am preparing to do this, the House of Representatives is going through the last tedious steps before approving and sending to the president for his signature the extraordinary $1.9 trillion Recovery Act that Biden has put forward and successfully seen to its realization. This is an accomplishment of such magnitude that it will require some commentary after I have finished my stroll down memory lane.

A GOOD DAY

As I have remarked before, I love watching votes come in even though it can be about as exciting as watching paint dry. Therefore it will come as no surprise to anyone that I spent much of the morning watching the series of votes on amendments in the Senate prior to the final vote on the $1.9 trillion package proposed by Joe Biden. It is an extraordinary accomplishment by Biden and will actually make a very large difference to a great many people. The discipline of the Democrats was admirable. While I was watching the paint dry, I heard reports that we are now up to 2 million vaccinations a day. I have spent so much of my life being so unhappy about what happens in America that I really have to spend a little time just enjoying victories, whenever they pop up. Add to that the delightful fact that the idiot who posed with his feet on Nancy Pelosi’s desk is now complaining loudly that the judge will not let him out of jail pending his trial and I think we can all agree that it has been a pretty good 48 hours.

 

I am still waiting to hear whether I will be able to teach my new course at Columbia next year. I have delivered the opening lecture so often in my head that if I actually get to teach the course I may just walk into the seminar the first day and say “Well you have all heard what I have to say, what is your reaction?”

SENIOR MOMENTS

Those of you who are at or near my age are undoubtedly familiar with the expression “senior moment.” It is a polite way of saying that one is going gaga. I have for a long time now had senior moments and they always take exactly the same form. I simply cannot call to mind a name. For example, for the longest time some years ago I could not remember the name of the great classical soprano Kathleen Battle. I could remember what she looked like, I could remember how she sounded, I could remember that she had recorded a glorious CD of Baroque arias for soprano and trumpet with Wynton Marsalis. I could even remember that she had been bounced from the Met because she was apparently impossible to work with. I simply could not remember her name. I would run to the shelf where I had the CD and look at it to remind myself. After a while I tried to recall KB but then I could not even recall that.

 

Just yesterday, I could not recall Martha Nussbaum’s name although I could recall what she looked like and a fair amount about her career and even a funny story involving her when she was an assistant professor in the Harvard philosophy department but I could not recall her name. Among the other people whose names I have blanked on are David Souter, Thomas Piketty (even though I knew I had written a 9000 word review of his first big book) and my old student Tom Cathcart (although I could remember his first name.)

 

The fact that I have senior moments does not surprise me. This is quite common among us 87-year-olds. But it mystifies me that it always takes precisely this form. Very likely there is some precise neurological explanation for this but I have not a clue what it is. Anybody know?

DISTRACTED

I have to confess my attention has not been focused on political developments these past few days. I have been trying to find a way to teach my course on Karl Marx, Sigmund Freud, and Herbert Marcuse next year at Columbia and during my morning walks, my head has been filled with fragments of lectures I would like to deliver.  Now that the golden calf episode is over and the normal politics of legislation and administration are ongoing, there is really not much to say. I find it astonishing that Biden has been able to move up from the end of July to the end of May the date at which there will be enough vaccine for all the adults in the United States. I am neither surprised nor particularly angered by the fact that Joe Manchin is causing problems for the passage of Biden's big bill. Manchin represents as a Democrat a state that Trump won by something like 40 points. Without that unlikely happenstance, Mitch McConnell is still the majority leader and nothing at all gets done. I am enormously impressed by the hard-nosed sensibility of the left wing of the Democratic Party at this moment.  Bernie Sanders turns out to be the adult in the room.

All of our attention must be focused on winning some extra seats in the House and picking up one or two Senate seats in 2022.That is not exciting is, it  not intellectually interesting – it is merely essential.

I had thought to reproduce here what I consider the most exciting idea in One-Dimensional Man, as a kind of preview of my course, but a little checking revealed that I had done that twice before in the past 10 years on this blog so I shall simply let those of you who were interested look it up.