Dale Easley's Favorite Quotations

Dale Easley's Favorite Quotations

Bloom, Allan

The Closing of the American Mind

Bloom, Allan

Most students will be content with what our present considers relevant; others will have a spirit of enthusiasm that subsides as family and ambition provide them with other objects of interest; a small number will spend their lives in an effort to be autonomous. It is for these last, especially, that liberal education exists. They become the models for the use of the noblest human faculties and hence are benefactors to all of us, more for what they are than for what they do. [p.~21]

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. [p.56] **** A good section on religion follows ****

As it now stands, students have powerful images of what a perfect body is and pursue it incessantly. 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. [p.~67]

Modern psychology at its best has a questionable understanding of the philosophic life, and no understanding of education. So children who are impregnated with that psychology live in a sub-basement and have a long climb just to get back up to the cave, or the world of common sense, which is the proper beginning for their ascent toward wisdom. They do not have confidence in what they feel or what they see, and they have an ideology that provides not a reason but a rationalization for their timidity. [p.~121]

That man is not made to be alone is all very well, but who is made to live with him? This is why men and women hesitated before marriage, and courtship was thought necessary to find out whether the couple was compatible, and perhaps to give them basic training in compatibility. No one wanted to be stuck forever with an impossible partner, But, for all that, they knew pretty much what they wanted from one another. The question was whether they could get it whereas our question today is much more what is wanted). [p.~126]

The arrangement implicit in marriage, even if it is only conventional, tells those who enter into it what to expect and what the satisfactions are supposed to be. Very simply, the family is a sort of body politic in which the husband's will is the will of the whole. The woman can influence her husband's will, and it is supposed to be informed by love of wife and children. [p.~126]

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. The principle of contradiction has been repealed.
This is the direct result of the two state-of-nature teachings. Locke's is responsible for our institutions, justifies our absorption with private property and the free market, and gives us our sense of right. Rousseau's lies behind the most prevalent views of what life is about and how to seek healing for our wounds. The former teaches that adjustment to civil society is almost automatic; the latter that such an adjustment is very difficult indeed and requires all kinds of intermediaries between it and lost nature. The two outstanding intellectual types of our day represent these two teachings. The crisp, positive, efficient, no-nonsense economist is the Lockean; the deep, brooding, somber psychoanalyst is the Rousseauan. In principle their positions are incompatible, but easygoing America provides them with a {\it modus vivendi.} Economists tell us how to make money; psychiatrists give us a place to spend it. [p.~172]
And it is indeed possible to soften men. But to make them `care' is another thing, and the project must inevitably fail. It must fail because in an age of individualism, persons of either sex cannot be forced to be public-spirited, particularly by those who are becoming less so. Further, caring is either a passion or a virtue, not a description like `sensitive.' [p.~129]

When wives and children come to the father and say, `We are not your property, we are ends in ourselves and demand to be treated as such,' the anonymous observer cannot help being impressed. But the difficulty comes when wives and children further demand that the man continue to care for them as before, just when they are giving an example of caring for themselves. They object to the father's flawed motive and ask that it be miraculously replaced by a pure one, of which they wish to make use for their own ends. The father will inevitably constrict his quest for property, cease being a father and become a mere man again, rather than turning into a providential God, as others ask him to be. [p.~130]

Better a real city tainted by selfish motives than one that cannot exist, except in speech, and that promotes real tyranny. [p.~130]

Law may prescribe that the male nipples be made equal to the female ones, but they still will not give milk. [p.~131]

Aristotle said that man has two peaks, each accompanied by intense pleasure: sexual intercourse and thinking. [p.~137]

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. The principle of contradiction has been repealed. \newparagraph. This is the direct result of the two state-of-nature teachings. Locke's is responsible for our institutions, justifies our absorption with private property and the free market, and gives us our sense of right. Rousseau's lies behind our most prevalent views of what life is about and how to seek healing for our wounds. The former teaches that adjustment to civil society is almost automatic; the latter that such adjustment is very difficult indeed and requires all kinds of intermediaries between it and lost nature. The two outstanding intellectual types of our day represent these two teachings. The crisp, positive, efficient, no-nonsense economist is the Lockean; the deep, brooding, somber psychoanalyst is the Rousseauan. In principle their positions are incompatible, but easygoing America provides them with a {\it modus vivendi.} Economists tell us how to make money; psychiatrists give us a place to spend it. [p.~172]

The artist, not the scientist, has become the admired human type; and science senses that it must assimilate itself to that type in order to retain its respectability intact. When every man was understood to be essentially a reasoner, the scientist could be understood to be a perfection of what all men wanted to be. That was Enlightenment;s way of establishing the centrality of science and making it admired. This change in self-description shows how the {\it Zeitgeist} has altered and how science, instead of standing outside of it and liberating men from it, has been incorporated into it. The theoretical life has lost its status. Now the scientist scrambles to recover his position as the perfection of what all men want to be; but what men want to be has changed, undermining the natural harmony between science and society. [p.~182]

In spite of all of society's machinery, untamed desire is always there. It is natural. It can be pushed down, but never completely, and it always has its revenge in one way or another. A man in this condition can never be happy. But a man who is deeply in love with a woman both desires and, for the moment at least, really cares for another. If this latter condition can be made permanent, desire and morality practically coincide. The free choice of marriage and the capacity to stick to it, not merely outwardly but also inwardly, is a proof of culture, of desire informed by civility. It is also proof of human freedom, of the overcoming of nature for the sake of morality, without making man unhappy. The exclusive preference for one person whose attraction is founded on ideas of beauty and virtue unknown to natural man makes sex sublime or sublimates it. This is love, and love seeks expression in poetry and music. Thus sublimated, sexual desire culminates in art. [p.~186]

Chaos, the war of opposites, is, as we know from the Bible, the condition of creativity, which must be mastered by the creator. [p.~198] ****Great discussion of Nietzsche

Nietzsche, and all those serious persons who in one way or another accepted his insight, held that inequality among men is proved by the fact that there is no common experience accessible in principle to all. Such distinctions as authentic-inauthentic, profound-superficial, creator-created replace true and false. The individual value of one man becomes the polestar for many others whose own experience provides them with no guidance. The rarest of men is the creator, and all other men need and follow him. \newparagraph Authentic values are those by which a life can be lived, which can form a people that produces great deeds and thoughts. Moses, Jesus, Homer, Buddha: these are the creators, the men who formed horizons, the founders of Jewish, Christian, Greek, and Indian culture. It is not the truth of their thought that distinguished them, but its capacity to generate culture. A value is only a value if it is life-preserving and life-enhancing. The quasi-totality of men's values consists of more or less pale carbon copies of originator's values. Egalitarianism means conformism, because it gives power to the sterile who can only make use of old values, other men's values, which are not alive and to which their promoters are not {\it committed.} Egalitarianism is founded on reason, which denies creativity. Everything in Nietzsche is an attack on rational egalitarianism, and shows what twaddle the habitual talk about values is these days---and how astonishing is Nietzsche's respectability on the Left. \newparagraph Since values are not rational and not grounded in the natures of those subject to them, they must be imposed. They must defeat opposing values. Rational persuasion cannot make theme believed, so struggle is necessary. Producing values and believing in them are acts of the will. Lack of will, not lack of understanding, becomes the crucial defect. {\it Commitment} is {\it the} moral virtue because it indicates the seriousness of the agent. Commitment is the equivalent of faith when the living God has been supplanted by self-provided values. It is Pascal's wager, no longer on God's existence but on one's capacity to believe in oneself and the goals one has set for oneself. Commitment values the values and makes them valuable. Not love of truth but {\it intellectual honesty} characterizes the proper state of mind. [p.~201]

Since values are not rational and not grounded in the natures of those subject to them, they must be imposed. They must defeat opposing values. Rational persuasion cannot make them believed, so struggle is necessary. Producing values and believing in them are acts of will. Lack of will, not lack of understanding, becomes the crucial defect. {\it Commitment} is {\em the} moral virtue because it indicates the seriousness of the agent. [p.~201]

Cultural relativism, as opposed to relativism simple, teaches the need to believe while undermining belief. [p.~203]

Yet everyone likes cultural relativism but wants to exempt what concerns him. The physicist wants to save his atoms; the historian, his events; the moralist, his values. But they are all equally relative. [p.~203]

It is not the immorality of relativism that I find appalling. What is astounding and degrading is the dogmatism with which we accept such relativism, and our easygoing lack of concern about what that means for our lives. [p.~239]

Because we have come to take the unnecessary to be necessary, we have lost all sense of necessity, either natural or cultural. [p.~234]

Tocqueville found that Americans talked very much about individual right but that there was a real monotony of thought and that vigorous independence of mind was rare. [p.~247]

Freedom of the mind requires not only, or not even especially, the absence of legal constraints but the presence of alternative thoughts. [p.~249]

The university's task is thus well defined, if not easy to carry out or even keep in mind. It is, in the first place, always to maintain the permanent questions front and center. This it does primarily by preserving--- by keeping alive---the works of those who best addressed these questions. [p.~252]

Enlightenment begins from the tension between what men are compelled to believe by city and religion, on the one hand, and the quest for scientific truth on the other. To think and speak doubts about, let alone to propose substitutes for, the fundamental opinions was forbidden by every regime previously known to man. Doing so was thought to be, and in fact was, disloyal and impious. [p.~257]

Only in liberal democracy is the primacy of reason accepted, even though its citizenry is not understood to be simply and always reasonable. [p.~259]

When I think the Pythagorean theorem, I know that what is in me at that moment is precisely the same as what is within anyone else who is thinking that theorem. Every other supposedly common experience is at best ambiguous. [p.~271]

But if the faith disappears, if the experiences reported by the prophets and saints become unbelievable or matters of indifference, the temple is no longer a temple, no matter how much activity of various kinds goes on in it. It is alien to the tourists who pass idly through it. Although the comparison is not entirely appropriate, the university is also informed by the spirit, which very few men can fully share, of men who are absent, but it must preserve respect for them. It can admit almost anyone, but only if he or she looks up to and can have an inkling of the dignity of what is going on in it. [p.~272]

The hopes of changing mankind almost always end up in changing not mankind but one's thought. [p.~279]

Science, in freeing men, destroys the natural conditions that make them human. Hence, for the first time in history, there is the possibility of tyranny grounded not on ignorance, but on science. [p.~295]

The Closing of the American Mind
Bloom, Allan
Most students will be content with what our present considers relevant; others will have a spirit of enthusiasm that subsides as family and ambition provide them with other objects of interest; a small number will spend their lives in an effort to be autonomous. It is for these last, especially, that liberal education exists. They become the models for the use of the noblest human faculties and hence are benefactors to all of us, more for what they are than for what they do. [p.~21] 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. [p.56] ** A good section on religion follows As it now stands, students have powerful images of what a perfect body is and pursue it incessantly. 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. [p.~67] Modern psychology at its best has a questionable understanding of the philosophic life, and no understanding of education. So children who are impregnated with that psychology live in a sub-basement and have a long climb just to get back up to the cave, or the world of common sense, which is the proper beginning for their ascent toward wisdom. They do not have confidence in what they feel or what they see, and they have an ideology that provides not a reason but a rationalization for their timidity. [p.~121] That man is not made to be alone is all very well, but who is made to live with him? This is why men and women hesitated before marriage, and courtship was thought necessary to find out whether the couple was compatible, and perhaps to give them basic training in compatibility. No one wanted to be stuck forever with an impossible partner, But, for all that, they knew pretty much what they wanted from one another. The question was whether they could get it whereas our question today is much more what is wanted). [p.~126] The arrangement implicit in marriage, even if it is only conventional, tells those who enter into it what to expect and what the satisfactions are supposed to be. Very simply, the family is a sort of body politic in which the husband's will is the will of the whole. The woman can influence her husband's will, and it is supposed to be informed by love of wife and children. [p.~126] 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. The principle of contradiction has been repealed. This is the direct result of the two state-of-nature teachings. Locke's is responsible for our institutions, justifies our absorption with private property and the free market, and gives us our sense of right. Rousseau's lies behind the most prevalent views of what life is about and how to seek healing for our wounds. The former teaches that adjustment to civil society is almost automatic; the latter that such an adjustment is very difficult indeed and requires all kinds of intermediaries between it and lost nature. The two outstanding intellectual types of our day represent these two teachings. The crisp, positive, efficient, no-nonsense economist is the Lockean; the deep, brooding, somber psychoanalyst is the Rousseauan. In principle their positions are incompatible, but easygoing America provides them with a {\it modus vivendi.} Economists tell us how to make money; psychiatrists give us a place to spend it. [p.~172] And it is indeed possible to soften men. But to make them `care' is another thing, and the project must inevitably fail. It must fail because in an age of individualism, persons of either sex cannot be forced to be public-spirited, particularly by those who are becoming less so. Further, caring is either a passion or a virtue, not a description like `sensitive.' [p.~129] When wives and children come to the father and say, `We are not your property, we are ends in ourselves and demand to be treated as such,' the anonymous observer cannot help being impressed. But the difficulty comes when wives and children further demand that the man continue to care for them as before, just when they are giving an example of caring for themselves. They object to the father's flawed motive and ask that it be miraculously replaced by a pure one, of which they wish to make use for their own ends. The father will inevitably constrict his quest for property, cease being a father and become a mere man again, rather than turning into a providential God, as others ask him to be. [p.~130] Better a real city tainted by selfish motives than one that cannot exist, except in speech, and that promotes real tyranny. [p.~130] Law may prescribe that the male nipples be made equal to the female ones, but they still will not give milk. [p.~131] Aristotle said that man has two peaks, each accompanied by intense pleasure: sexual intercourse and thinking. [p.~137] 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. The principle of contradiction has been repealed. \newparagraph. This is the direct result of the two state-of-nature teachings. Locke's is responsible for our institutions, justifies our absorption with private property and the free market, and gives us our sense of right. Rousseau's lies behind our most prevalent views of what life is about and how to seek healing for our wounds. The former teaches that adjustment to civil society is almost automatic; the latter that such adjustment is very difficult indeed and requires all kinds of intermediaries between it and lost nature. The two outstanding intellectual types of our day represent these two teachings. The crisp, positive, efficient, no-nonsense economist is the Lockean; the deep, brooding, somber psychoanalyst is the Rousseauan. In principle their positions are incompatible, but easygoing America provides them with a {\it modus vivendi.} Economists tell us how to make money; psychiatrists give us a place to spend it. [p.~172] The artist, not the scientist, has become the admired human type; and science senses that it must assimilate itself to that type in order to retain its respectability intact. When every man was understood to be essentially a reasoner, the scientist could be understood to be a perfection of what all men wanted to be. That was Enlightenment;s way of establishing the centrality of science and making it admired. This change in self-description shows how the {\it Zeitgeist} has altered and how science, instead of standing outside of it and liberating men from it, has been incorporated into it. The theoretical life has lost its status. Now the scientist scrambles to recover his position as the perfection of what all men want to be; but what men want to be has changed, undermining the natural harmony between science and society. [p.~182] In spite of all of society's machinery, untamed desire is always there. It is natural. It can be pushed down, but never completely, and it always has its revenge in one way or another. A man in this condition can never be happy. But a man who is deeply in love with a woman both desires and, for the moment at least, really cares for another. If this latter condition can be made permanent, desire and morality practically coincide. The free choice of marriage and the capacity to stick to it, not merely outwardly but also inwardly, is a proof of culture, of desire informed by civility. It is also proof of human freedom, of the overcoming of nature for the sake of morality, without making man unhappy. The exclusive preference for one person whose attraction is founded on ideas of beauty and virtue unknown to natural man makes sex sublime or sublimates it. This is love, and love seeks expression in poetry and music. Thus sublimated, sexual desire culminates in art. [p.~186] Chaos, the war of opposites, is, as we know from the Bible, the condition of creativity, which must be mastered by the creator. [p.~198] **Great discussion of Nietzsche Nietzsche, and all those serious persons who in one way or another accepted his insight, held that inequality among men is proved by the fact that there is no common experience accessible in principle to all. Such distinctions as authentic-inauthentic, profound-superficial, creator-created replace true and false. The individual value of one man becomes the polestar for many others whose own experience provides them with no guidance. The rarest of men is the creator, and all other men need and follow him. \newparagraph Authentic values are those by which a life can be lived, which can form a people that produces great deeds and thoughts. Moses, Jesus, Homer, Buddha: these are the creators, the men who formed horizons, the founders of Jewish, Christian, Greek, and Indian culture. It is not the truth of their thought that distinguished them, but its capacity to generate culture. A value is only a value if it is life-preserving and life-enhancing. The quasi-totality of men's values consists of more or less pale carbon copies of originator's values. Egalitarianism means conformism, because it gives power to the sterile who can only make use of old values, other men's values, which are not alive and to which their promoters are not {\it committed.} Egalitarianism is founded on reason, which denies creativity. Everything in Nietzsche is an attack on rational egalitarianism, and shows what twaddle the habitual talk about values is these days---and how astonishing is Nietzsche's respectability on the Left. \newparagraph Since values are not rational and not grounded in the natures of those subject to them, they must be imposed. They must defeat opposing values. Rational persuasion cannot make theme believed, so struggle is necessary. Producing values and believing in them are acts of the will. Lack of will, not lack of understanding, becomes the crucial defect. {\it Commitment} is {\it the} moral virtue because it indicates the seriousness of the agent. Commitment is the equivalent of faith when the living God has been supplanted by self-provided values. It is Pascal's wager, no longer on God's existence but on one's capacity to believe in oneself and the goals one has set for oneself. Commitment values the values and makes them valuable. Not love of truth but {\it intellectual honesty} characterizes the proper state of mind. [p.~201] Since values are not rational and not grounded in the natures of those subject to them, they must be imposed. They must defeat opposing values. Rational persuasion cannot make them believed, so struggle is necessary. Producing values and believing in them are acts of will. Lack of will, not lack of understanding, becomes the crucial defect. {\it Commitment} is {\em the} moral virtue because it indicates the seriousness of the agent. [p.~201] Cultural relativism, as opposed to relativism simple, teaches the need to believe while undermining belief. [p.~203] Yet everyone likes cultural relativism but wants to exempt what concerns him. The physicist wants to save his atoms; the historian, his events; the moralist, his values. But they are all equally relative. [p.~203] It is not the immorality of relativism that I find appalling. What is astounding and degrading is the dogmatism with which we accept such relativism, and our easygoing lack of concern about what that means for our lives. [p.~239] Because we have come to take the unnecessary to be necessary, we have lost all sense of necessity, either natural or cultural. [p.~234] Tocqueville found that Americans talked very much about individual right but that there was a real monotony of thought and that vigorous independence of mind was rare. [p.~247] Freedom of the mind requires not only, or not even especially, the absence of legal constraints but the presence of alternative thoughts. [p.~249] The university's task is thus well defined, if not easy to carry out or even keep in mind. It is, in the first place, always to maintain the permanent questions front and center. This it does primarily by preserving--- by keeping alive---the works of those who best addressed these questions. [p.~252] Enlightenment begins from the tension between what men are compelled to believe by city and religion, on the one hand, and the quest for scientific truth on the other. To think and speak doubts about, let alone to propose substitutes for, the fundamental opinions was forbidden by every regime previously known to man. Doing so was thought to be, and in fact was, disloyal and impious. [p.~257] Only in liberal democracy is the primacy of reason accepted, even though its citizenry is not understood to be simply and always reasonable. [p.~259] When I think the Pythagorean theorem, I know that what is in me at that moment is precisely the same as what is within anyone else who is thinking that theorem. Every other supposedly common experience is at best ambiguous. [p.~271] But if the faith disappears, if the experiences reported by the prophets and saints become unbelievable or matters of indifference, the temple is no longer a temple, no matter how much activity of various kinds goes on in it. It is alien to the tourists who pass idly through it. Although the comparison is not entirely appropriate, the university is also informed by the spirit, which very few men can fully share, of men who are absent, but it must preserve respect for them. It can admit almost anyone, but only if he or she looks up to and can have an inkling of the dignity of what is going on in it. [p.~272] The hopes of changing mankind almost always end up in changing not mankind but one's thought. [p.~279] Science, in freeing men, destroys the natural conditions that make them human. Hence, for the first time in history, there is the possibility of tyranny grounded not on ignorance, but on science. [p.~295]

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