Allan Bloom Quotes

True openness is the accompaniment of the desire to know, hence of the awareness of ignorance. To deny the possibility of knowing good and bad is to suppress true openness.

To recognize that some of the things our culture believes are not true imposes on us the duty of finding out which are true and which are not.

Historicism and cultural relativism actually are a means to avoid testing our own prejudices and asking, for example, whether men are really equal or whether that opinion is merely a democratic prejudice.

There is no real teacher who in practice does not believe in the existence of the soul, or in a magic that acts on it through speech.

Professors of Greek forget or are unaware that Thomas Aquinas, who did not know Greek, was a better interpreter of Aristotle than any of them have proved to be, not only because he was smarter but because he took Aristotle more seriously.

I simply try to act as an honest broker for greater persons and writers than I am ... I present no theory, nor do I have one ... I have constructed no Schema ... in terms of the struggle between Eros and agape and the futility of the former in the face of the latter. I have no aspirations, hoping only to show you what some great writers thought these things are.

Students now arrive at the university ignorant and cynical about our political heritage, lacking the wherewithal to be either inspired by it or seriously critical of it.

The facile economic and psychological debunking of the theoretical life cannot do away with its irreducible beauties.

The de-eroticization of the world, a companion to its disenchantment ... seems to result from a combination of causes our democratic regime and its tendencies toward leveling and self-protection, a reductionist-materialist science that inevitably interprets eros as sex, and the atmosphere generated by "the death of God" and of the subordinate god, Eros.

Bacon , Locke , Descartes , Hume , and all the others knew they were giving rights to vulgarity. But in so doing in addition to caring for man's well-being they were providing rights for themselves.

Various kinds of self-forgetting, usually accompanied by illusions and myths, make it possible to live without the intransigent facing of death-in the sense of always thinking about it and what it means for life and the things dear in life-which is characteristic of a serious life.

All literature up to today is sexist. The Muses never sang to the poets about liberated women. It's the same old chanson from the Bible and Homer through Joyce and Proust.

The artist is the most interesting of all phenomena, for he represents creativity, the definition of man.

Self-interest is hostile to the common good, but enlightened self-interest is not. And this is the best key to the meaning of enlightenment.

Continental thinkers have been obsessed with bourgeois man as representing the worst and most contemptible failure of modernity, which must at all costs be overcome. Nihilism in its most palpable sense means that the bourgeois has won, that the future, all foreseeable futures, belong to him, that all heights above him and all depths beneath him are illusory and that life is not worth living on these terms.

There is a perennial and unobtrusive view that morality consists in such things as telling the truth, paying one's debts, respecting one's parents and doing no voluntary harm to anyone. Those are all things easy to say and hard to do; they do not attract much attention, and win little honor in the world.

Reason cannot establish values, and its belief that it can is the stupidiest and most pernicious illusion.

Education in our times must try to find whatever there is in students that might yearn for completion, and to reconstruct the learning that would enable them autonomously to seek that completion.

Rock gives children, on a silver platter, with all the public authority of the entertainment industry, everything their parents always used to tell them they had to wait for until they grew up and would understand later.

Intellectuals ... advertise their superiority to political practice but are absolutely in its thrall ... It is no accident that Marxist theory and practice use the intellectuals as tools and keep them in brutal subservience.

[A]ny notion of the serious life of leisure, as well as men's taste and capacity to live it, had disappeared. Leisure became entertainment.

Law may prescribe that the male nipples be made equal to the female ones, but they still will not give milk.

The sirens sing sotto voce these days, and the young already have enough wax in their ears to pass them by without danger.

Americans ... do not naturally apply the term "bourgeois" to themselves, or to anyone else for that matter. They do like to call themselves middle class, but that does not carry with it any determinate spiritual content ... The term "middle class" does not have any of the many opposites that bourgeois has, such as aristocrat, saint, hero, or artist all good.

Culture as art is the peak expression of man's creativity, his capacity to break out of nature's narrow bounds, and hence out of the degrading interpretation of man in modern natural and political science.

Most of all I admire Mozart's capacity to be both deep and rational, a combination often said to be impossible.

Utopianism is, as Plato taught us at the outset, the fire with which we must play because it is the only way we can find out what we are. We need to criticize false understandings of Utopia, but the easy way out provided by realism is deadly.

Only Socrates knew, after a lifetime of unceasing labor, that he was ignorant. Now every high-school student knows that. How did it become so easy?

The end result is that there can be no more truth or goodness and no need or even ability to make tough choices. Where the purpose of higher education once was to enable the student to find truth, the modern university teaches that there is no truth, only 'lifestyle.

Error is indeed our enemy, but it alone points to the truth and therefore deserves our respectful treatment.

Our Nation, a great stage for the acting out of great thoughts, presents the classic confrontation between Locke's views of the state of nature and Rousseau's criticism of them ... Nature is raw material, worthless without the mixture of human labor; yet nature is also the highest and most sacred thing. The same people who struggle to save the snail-darter bless the pill, worry about hunting deer and defend abortion. Reverence for nature, mastery of nature- whichever is convenient.

It may well be that a societys greatest madness seems normal to itself.

Education is the movement from darkness to light.

Shakespeare is to me the purest voice of nature, and he does no meddle with nature. His plays provide us with the greatest variety of erotic expression, and with Shakespeare eros is the proper term to use.

I have no desire ... to preach a high-minded and merely edifying version of love

Openness, as currently conceived, is a way of making surrender to whatever is most powerful, or worship of vulgar success, look principled.

It tried to rescue sex from Christian original sin and to recover the union of body and soule of Platonic eros while guaranteeing the reciprocity missing from the Platonic understanding of love and friendship..

Nothing is more singular about this generation than its addiction to music.

Every age is blind to its own worst madness.

Socrates' way of life is the consequence of his recognition that we can know what it is that we do not know about the most important things and that we are by nature obliged to seek that knowledge.

There is one thing a professor can be absolutely certain of: almost every student entering the university believes, or says he believes, that truth is relative.

The substance of my being has been informed by the books I learned to care for.

The self is the modern substitute for the soul.

There is no real education that does not respond to felt need; anything else acquired is trifling display.

The distinction between private and public undermines the unity of spiritual strength, draining the public of the transcendent energies while trivializing them because the merely private life provides no proper stage for their action.

Education is not the taming or domestication of the soul's raw passions - not suppressing them or excising them, which would deprive the soul of its energy - but forming and informing them as art ...

It was not necessarily the best of times in America when Catholics and Protestants were suspicious of and hated one another; but at least they were taking their beliefs seriously, and the more or less satisfactory accommodations they worked out were not simply the result of apathy about the state of their souls.

The liberally educated person is one who is able to resist the easy and preferred answers, not because he is obstinate but because he knows others worthy of consideration.

The failure to read good books both enfeebles the vision and strengthens our most fatal tendency
the belief that the here and now is all there is.

Locke had illegitimately selected those parts of man he needed for his social contract and suppressed all the rest, a theoretically unsatisfactory procedure and a practically costly one. The bourgeois is the measure of the price paid, he who most of all cannot afford to look to his real self, who denies the existence of the thinly boarded-over basement in him, who is most made over for the purposes of a society that does not even promise him perfection or salvation but merely buys him off.

This nation's impulse is toward the future, and tradition seems more of a shackle to it than an inspiration.

One has to have the experience of really believing before one can have the thrill of liberation.

Did Romeo and Juliet have a ... "relationship"? The term "relationship" ... betokens a chaste egalitarianism leveling different ranks and degrees of attachment.

Children tend to be rather better observers of adults' characters than adults are of children's, because children are so dependent on adults that it is very much in their interest to discover the weaknesses of their elders.

Life, liberty, and the pursuit of property were just what Aristotle did not talk about. They are the conditions of happiness; but the essence of happiness, according to Aristotle, is virtue. So the moderns decided to deal with the conditions and to let happiness take care of itself.

Commitment is a word invented in our abstract modernity to signify the absence of any real motives in the soul for moral dedication.

The expectation of substantive unity between natural science and social science has faded ... Gone is the cosmic intention of placing man in the universe.

I do not believe that my generation, my cousins who have been educated in the American way, all of whom are MDs or PhDs, have any comparable learning ... I am not saying anything so trite as that life is fuller when people have myths to live by. I mean rather that a life based on the Book is closer to the truth, that it provides the material for deeper research in and access to the real nature of things. Without the great revelations, epics, and philosophies as part of our natural vision, there is nothing to see out there, and eventually little left inside. The Bible is not the only means to furnish a mind, but without a book of similar gravity, read with the gravity of the potential believer, it will remain unfurnished.

I am now even more persuaded of the urgent need to study why Socrates was accused. The dislike of philosophy is perennial, and the seeds of the condemnation of Socrates are present at all times, not in the bosoms of pleasure-seekers, who don't give a damn, but in those of high-minded and idealistic persons who do not want to submit their aspirations to examination.

Human nature must not be altered in order to have a problem-free world. Man is not just a problem-solving being, as behaviorists would wish us to believe, but a problem-recognizing and -accepting being.

I suggest that we need a generation or two not of theory but of an attempt to discover the real phenomena of eros.

But nowhere is this a more urgent task than in matters of eros, the first and best hope of human connectedness in a world where all connectedness has become problematic

Never did I think that the university was properly ministerial to the society around it. Rather I thought and think that society is ministerial to the university, and I bless a society that tolerates and supports an eternal childhood for some, a childhood whose playfulness can in turn be a blessing to society.

The most important function of the university in an age of reason is to protect reason from itself.

Sycophancy toward those who hold power is a fact in every regime, and especially in a democracy, where, unlike tyranny, there is an accepted principle of legitimacy that breaks the inner will to resist ... Flattery of the people and incapacity to resist public opinion are the democratic vices, particularly among writers, artists, journalists and anyone else who is dependent on an audience.

These sociologists who talk to facilely about the sacred are like a man who keeps a toothless old circus lion around the house in order to experience the thrills of the jungle.

The most successful tyranny is not the one that uses force to assure uniformity but the one that removes the awareness of other possibilities, that makes it seem inconceivable that other ways are viable, that removes the sense that there is an outside.

Openness used to be the virtue that permitted us to seek the good by using reason. It now means accepting everything and denying reason's power.

Fathers and mothers have lost the idea that the highest aspiration they might have for their children is for them to be wise
as priests, prophets or philosophers are wise. Specialized competence and success are all that they can imagine.

Reason transformed into prejudice is the worst form of prejudice, because reason is the only instrument for liberation from prejudice.

Government exists to protect the product of men's labor, their property, and therewith life and liberty. The notion that man possesses inalienable natural rights, that they belong to him as an individual prior, both in time and in sanctity, to any civil society, and that civil societies exist for and acquire their legitimacy from ensuring those rights, is an invention of modern philosophy. Rights, like the other terms discussed in this chapter, are new in modernity, not a part of the common-sense language of politics or of classical political philosophy." from "Closing of the American Mind" by Allan Bloom, Saul Bellow, Andrew Ferguson

The most striking fact about contemporary university students is that there is no longer any canon of books which forms their taste and imagination...This state of affairs itself reflects the deeper fact of the decay of the common understanding of - and agreement on - first principles that is characteristic of our times.

The old view was that delicacy of language was part of the nature, the sacred nature, of eros and that to speak about it in any other way would be to misunderstand it. What has disappeared is the risk and the hope of human connectedness embedded in eros. Ours is a language that reduces the longing for an other to the need for individual, private satisfaction and safety.

We are like ignorant shepherds living on a site where great civilizations once flourished. The shepherds play with the fragments that pop up to the surface, having no notion of the beautiful structures of which they were once a part.

Plato ... says a multitude can never philosophize and hence can never recognize the seriousness of philosophy or who really philosophizes. Attempting to influence the multitude results in forced prostitution.

The spirit is at home, if not entirely satisfied, in America.

University convention submerges nature. It issues licenses, and hunting without one is forbidden.

[Rock and the intellectual Left] must both be interpreted as parts of the cultural fabric of late capitalism. Their success comes from the bourgeois' need to feel that he is not bourgeois.