Dale Easley's Favorite Quotations
| The Closing of the American Mind |
| Bloom, Allan |
| Second Note Page The condition of natural science in the Soviet Union is the dreadful culmination of Swift's prediction. It is a tyranny founded on science. And natural science, alone among the learned disciplines, and natural scientists, alone among human beings, have been able to force the tyrants to leave them alone. A Soviet mathematician is as much as mathematician as an American methematician, whereas a historian or a political scientist {\it must} be a sham, a pary hack. Natural science can now flourish in the Soviet Union, because Soviet tyrants have finally recognized their unconditional need of the scientists. They cannot endure the historians or political scientists, and they do not have to. These latter are not of the same species as the natural scientists, either in the eyes of the natural scientists or those of the tyrants. [p.~297] In general it [science] increases man's power without increasing his virtue, hence increasing his power to do both good and evil. [p.~298] An inverse Socrates, he [Rousseau] reasserted the permanent tension between science and society, and he took the side of society. Virtue, `the science of simple souls,' is what is most necessary, and science undermines virtue. It teaches a slack and selfish relation to other men and to civil society, it calls into question the principles of virtue, and it requires a luxurious and loose society in which to flourish. [p.~298] ****important section on natural science **** The method of the sciences is designed to see only what is everywhere and always, whereas what is particular and emergent is all that counts historically and culturally. [p.~308] The awareness of the highest is what points the lower upward. [p.~321] Anger, to sustain itself, requires an unshakable conviction that one is right. [p.~327] What we see so often happening in general happened here [in the university], too; the insistent demand for greater community ended in greater isolation, Old agreeements, old habits, old traditions were not so easily replaced. [p.~338] Scientific progress, they [natural scientists] believe, no longer depends on the kind of comprehensive reflection given to the nature of science by men like Bacon, Descartes, Hume, Kant and Marx. This is merely historical study, and for a long time now, even the greatest scientists have given up thinking about Galileo and Newton. Progess is undoubted. The difficulties about the truth of science raised by positivism, and those about the goodness of science raised by Rousseau and Nietzsche, have not really penetrated to the center of scientific consciousness. Hence, no Great Books, but incremental progess, is the theme for them. [p.~345] Hobbes said that if the fact that two and two makes four were to become a matter of political relevance, there would be a faction to deny it. [p.~354] All that is human, all that is of concern to us, lies outside of natural science. That should be a problem for natural science, but it is not. It is certainly a problem for us that we do not know what this thing is, that we cannot even agree on a name for this irreducible bit of man that is not body. Somehow this fugitive thing or aspect is the cause of science and society and culture and politics and economics and poetry and music. We what these latter are. But can we really, if we do not know their cause, know what its status is, whether it even exists? [p.~357] Men may live more truly and fully in reading Plato and Shakespeare than at any other time, because they are participating in essential being and are forgetting their accidental lives. The fact that this kind of humanity exists or existed, and that we can somehow still touch it witht the tips of our outstretched fingers, makes our imperfect humanity, which we can no longer bear, tolerable. [p.~380] The real community of man, in the midst of all the self-contradictory simulacra of community, is the community of those who seek the truth, of the potential knowers, that is, in principle, of all men to the extent they desire to know. But in fact this includes only a few, the true friends, as Plato was to Aristotle at the very moment they were disagreeing about the nature of the good. Their common concern for the good linked them; their disagreement about it proved they needed one another to understand it. They were absolutely one soul as they looked at the problem. This, assording to Plato, is the only real friendship, the only real common good. It is here that the contac people so desperately seek is to be found. [p.~382] |