Ep. 192: “The Closing of the American Mind”: Allan Bloom on Education (Part One)

0:00 Mark: You are listening to the Partially Examined Life, a podcast by some guys who are at one point set on doing philosophy for a living, but then thought better of it. Our question for episode 192 is something like, what is the role of the university in our democracy? And we read Allan Bloom's the Closing of the American Mind, How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today's students from 1987. For more information, please check out Partially Examination. This is Mark Linsenmayer imitating Mick Jagger to make others esteem me and increase my self esteem in Madison, Wisconsin. That's a quote from page 79.

0:34 Seth: This is Seth Paskin in Austin, Texas.

0:36 Wes: This is Wes Alwan in Cambridge, Massachusetts.

0:39 Dylan: This is Dylan Casey participating in my essential being and ignoring my accidental life in Madison, Wisconsin.

0:45 Mark: So this Allan Bloom fellow, I believe, Wes, you suggested this originally and then it turns out all three of you had read this. I was the only one that hadn't read this.

0:54 Wes: When did I suggest this?

0:55 Mark: I think it was in the context of that. Our next guest, Peter Kanelos. Yes. So he's the president of St. John's College and he's going to be our guest next time. We'll be reading some texts about the value of a liberal education. And I think this had been on our radar before. And so at least then, Wes, I believe, is when you had said that we should do this in preparation for that.

1:15 Wes: That makes sense. Yeah.

1:16 Dylan: This was a huge book. It makes sense to me that Wes and. And I'm a little surprised you didn't read it, Mark, because it was such a big book in the late 80s talking about liberal education. There's a whole raft of books like this was probably the one that got the most press and was the most intellectually articulate. I met him, actually. He can't have died much later. He died in like 1992 or 93. So he came to Michigan State and gave a lecture. He taught my political philosophy professor Richard Zinman when he was at Cornell.

1:47 Wes: We should say that this book was a really like, enormous cultural phenomenon at the time when it was published. So it's unique in that sense. I think he sold. I don't know, did he sell millions of copies? I kind of want to say that, but it turned him into a celebrity and it made him rich. It's just one of these sort of rare feats of public intellectualism that resonated with a really broad audience.

2:10 Mark: And that seems ironic that he's arguing in favor of the obscure, the elitist, the useless and and against. Oh, those guys like Marcuse, they used to do respectable stuff back in Germany, but then came and did these pop philosophy books that sold lots of copies and they sucked. So the fact that he was so successful.

2:30 Dylan: Well, I understand there's a lot of intellectual history and maybe there's a bit of a philosophical argument going on, but it's really an essay about education, which is different than a pop essay about philosophy. It's not exactly a philosophy for the masses. Right. Or do you think it is? Do you think he's trying to educate at the same time?

2:50 Seth: I think in section two, it's not pedagogic, but he's definitely trying to trace the way that this thought came to the United States and the impact that it had on American thinkers. It's not easy, though. It was not easy reading this book,

3:05 Wes: which was sort of my bible at one time. Something that, because of my association with St. John's and was such a strong argument for something I believed in and still believe in to some extent, but a great deal. Yeah, this had an enormous impact on me. And it's the kind of thing I could read and go, yeah, every few paragraphs. Now, I have a much, much lower opinion of this book, I'm afraid to say. I don't want to get us off track into that right now, but I will say this is a popularizing work and it talks a lot about the need to go deep, but it doesn't itself go deep. It's not itself a profound philosophical work. It's a cultural critique. It's the sort of thing you might see in a magazine piece. It's an erudite cultural critique, but it's not a work of philosophy.

3:57 Seth: No, but he also. Obviously he didn't intend it as such.

4:01 Wes: No, I know. I'm not saying that. That part I should have been clear. I'm not critical of it because of that. I'm critical of. Of some of the overreach and some of his characterizations of Nietzsche and Freud.

4:14 Dylan: I thought that when I was reading that again, I thought, oh, Wes is

4:18 Wes: going to be pissed about this. But just in general, and maybe this is just bitterness, right. Because I didn't get to lead this sort of life and become a St. John's professor. I didn't get to live this ideal life that he describes as being the most important thing, this life of the mind. So it's well and good to be able to live the kind of life he did. Is great to be professor at the Committee on Social Thought and to have Gone to the Committee on Social Thought, which is this very St. John style graduate program at the University of Chicago and a great, great book style program.

He wasn't in a publish or perish situation. He was in a unique position where he could focus on teaching and just reading these books and talking about them. That's a great sort of life. And this book is an argument for the importance of that sort of life. But unfortunately it's not a life that most people can lead or will get to lead. I think the idealization of it, I just think only someone who spent their life in a university could write this kind of book. It's idealizing to the point. This used to be my religion, so I understand it. But I am like someone who has lost the religion.

Not entirely. I mean I still appreciate obviously the Great Books education. I still think it's a really, really important thing. But I no longer feel as fanatical about it. And to read something that's this fanatical about it, I really irritating. So I guess I was going to wait to talk about my evaluation, but there we go, it's up front.

5:41 Dylan: Well, we'll come back to it. I'd be interested what Seth's story is. I read this book right when it came out in 1988 as undergrad in a reading group that I had helped start. And I have a number of places in here where I have lots of frowny faces because unlike Wes, I didn't go to a Great Books undergraduate school. But I was self consciously trying to do something like a liberal education when I was at Michigan State, partly under the influence of teachers that I'd had and partly under the fact that I had really wanted to go to some small liberal arts college.

But my circumstances were such that I went to a residential college within a big university. But I was thinking about liberal education all the time and the notion that the single canonical best way to do it was only by reading great books. I had lots of frowny faces there like, because it was like, well, what is it that I'm trying to do? I felt like what I was trying to do, even if it was problematic, had a legitimacy. And then the students and the professors that we read this together, they ran a gamut. None of them were as old as he was, but they had all been through the 60s.

So their point of view on his own trauma going through the 60s as a professor at Cornell was also interesting.

7:02 Mark: Seth, what is your background with this, your opening reaction to it?

7:05 Seth: I guess I'm probably more similar to Wes. I went to read. I feel like I must have read it over a winter break or over the summer. I have this image in my head of reading it at my parents house, like staying at my parents over the summer or something like that. I'm very much aligned with the general thrust. And Read is not a great books program, but it has a very conservative curriculum which is currently under discussion and maybe we'll talk about that this time or next time. Every student at Reed, at least since 1911, has had to take Humanities 110, which is basically as a freshman, you come in and it's a general survey course in Greece and Rome.

And regardless of what you want to major in, and regardless of what you're interested in, you have to take this course. And it's taught with a lecture style that is contributed to by all professors, regardless of what departments they're in. And then you break out into discussion groups and it's kind of a mix. You might be in there with poetry and mathematics and physics and philosophy people, whatever their interests are. And it's supposed to build community and create a shared foundation. And my experience with it is that it did even 30 years on.

There are jokes that we can make amongst Reedies, whether they're of my cohort or not. And we all get it because, you know, we all read the Iliad, right. We all know Herodotus. So it was a very meaningful, informative part of my education. And so when he talks about this kind of classical tradition creating the possibility of shared values and community, I really believe it. But again, reading it now, it definitely feels a little bit polemical. And get off my lawn.

8:52 Unknown speaker: Sure.

8:53 Wes: Yeah, I had the same phrase. The get off my lawn thing occurred to me.

8:57 Dylan: Yeah, I don't know if this was the reputation of Reed when you were there, if you know this, but my youngest son has been applying to schools, was very interested in going to a liberal arts college and he applied to Reed and they let him in. Even from the beginning, the opinion that he had of it was from just looking into it was a bunch of very snooty, self absorbed intellectuals that did a lot of drugs. That was the impression.

9:26 Seth: Now your son hasn't spent enough time with me to pass judgment. I think like that he has not

9:31 Dylan: spent any time there, though he did fall in love with Portland.

9:33 Seth: I very much wanted to go to a small liberal arts school. I had no desire to go to a large school and I had no desire to go to a technical. So I, I applied to like Reed, Oberlin, Occidental that type of school. But when I was visiting, I visited. My dad flew with me, and we went and visited all the campuses. And when we went to visit Reed, we were assigned a student tour guide, and we were having lunch, and he had a. Like a packet thing out. And my dad said, oh, what's that? And he said, oh, we are trying to get the college to divest. This was divest from South Africa.

10:10 Dylan: Yeah, that was big in the mid-80s.

10:12 Seth: Big in the mid-80s. Another thing you can go Google when you Google this book. So we've done an analysis of the school's portfolio and how it's currently performing, and we're providing an alternative portfolio of divested stocks that will actually yield a higher rate of return. And my dad, who was an engineer that managed the systems project Office for the F16 for the Air Force, said, what class is this for? And it's like the guy said, oh, well, it's not for a class. We're just. We're doing it. And my dad read it and he said, there's nobody that works for me that can do this.

This kind of. This quality of work. And he turned to me, he said, you're going here. So that's awesome. As much as Reed had that reputation, and it did. It's an intense academic environment. It's very challenging and difficult, and there's every expectation that you're going to put all your energy towards academics. And there was definitely a lot of drug use when I was there, but I think it's probably changed a lot since then. There was also that there were a lot of Reedies the year that I graduated. One of the guys for his senior thesis studied the downstream effects of, like, waste water from a plant and what it did to frogs downstream.

And it got picked up and turned into an action against the company. That's just the kind of place it was. It. It still is, I think.

11:30 Dylan: Reid also has its own nuclear reactor that the students get to run.

11:33 Seth: That's correct.

11:35 Wes: When they're not doing drugs, One hopes.

11:39 Mark: For my opening statement, I would like to summarize the book because I spent a lot of damn time on this. I had not read it before. It's almost 400 pages. I did a big chunk of it as an audiobook as I was traveling. There's the polemical aspect, and we can say in a minute what his thesis is. I mean, we were saying he's arguing in favor of a great books program. He's in favor more generally of the Examined Life and the role of the university as a place, a unique place against the practical world where you're shielded a time in your life where hopefully you're not just being trained for a job.

But if you're getting a liberal education, you're being exposed to radically different ways of thinking that enable you to ask the question, you know, what is a human being? What is human nature? What is the meaning of life? Et cetera. So he really does consider philosophy to be a central part of this liberal education as the queen of the sciences, really, and has a lot of specific things to say about. It's not enough, as schools do now, to say, well, you have to take something from the humanities and you have to take something from the social sciences, and you have to take something from this and that.

Because he would rather that, like in a good great books program, that some master of curriculum link all these things together. And so you can really see the historical conversations over time. That's the way you have to see one of the examples he gives. Hobbes and Aristotle both talk about human nature, talk about ethics. And you can see how Hobbes reacting to and objecting to Aristotle and getting these things, getting these geniuses out there arguing these things in front of you. That is what really teaches you how to think for yourself. And so along with that, he has a critique, both of the students and about the current intellectual culture, both inside and outside the university.

And this is where the bulk of the book is actually two different intellectual histories, one of which is the history of the university, starting with Socrates, who of course did not himself found a university, but he thinks that the first universities were sort of temples to the Socratic spirit. He puts this in terms of Socrates. Of course, everybody knows about his conflict with the city. He got killed by the city. What is the relationship between the philosopher, on the one hand, and the state? And that's comparable, you know, that's genealogically the antecedent of the relationship between the university and the wider society.

So he goes through the Enlightenment where things went wrong, why we're in the degraded place we are now. He places a lot of the blame on the 1960s. Coupled with that is an analysis of what the American intellectual character is. And he starts with Tocqueville, which is great that we read that, and Tocqueville characterizing the Americans as thinking very abstractly, thinking in generalizations. They don't have an aristocracy to turn to or priests to turn to. So they're all supposed to think for themselves. But really what that means is they kind of end up going with common opinion.

So America ends up being very conformist and. And the ways in which we are conformists now, the ideas he thinks, have seeped into our DNA. Of the students that are here, his main complaint is cultural relativism is really relativism of all sorts. And so he traces the intellectual history of this and why we have this. And he's obviously a very big fan of Nietzsche. And really the account he's given is sort of like, just like Nietzsche said, God is dead. But we have to figure out what the implications of that are. Well, the culture at large, at least American culture, has said everybody's opinion is just as good as everybody else's.

And that, of course, means that there's no rationale for having great geniuses and a canon of literary books. Everyone must read Shakespeare, everyone must read Aristotle. But he thinks that the implications of that are wide ranging and horrible. And so he's trying to spell those out. Any issues with that characterization?

15:30 Dylan: He certainly thought of Nietzsche as being one of the great minds and incredibly important to read. But he definitely considers Nietzsche also very dangerous.

15:41 Mark: Well, dangerous in his intellectual effects. And this is why I think this is a book about tracing intellectual history. So it's not even so much like if you were a good reader of Nietzsche, this is what you'll think. It's that the effect of Nietzsche's popularity was blah, blah, blah. And we've seen, like when we talked to Eva Brann, that she had a similar thing about Nietzsche and was saying things that we, as liberal interpreters of Nietzsche would not like to see attributed to him, you can't hold him responsible for Nazism. Well, Bloom is essentially saying that in.

In that same way, even though Nietzsche himself was very conscientious about this. And he says the same thing about Max Weber is actually the missing link is that Max Weber read Nietzsche also Freud read Nietzsche. But he thinks that even though Max Weber, he says really nice things about how conscientious and liberal he was, the result of the popularity of the ideas from Weber and from Freud, who he has many fewer good things to say about. But the combined, you know, secondhand Nietzsche isms that got into the culture, he thinks have been disastrous, that that's what the cultural relativism.

And really, even though Nietzsche was worried about nihilism and the last man, that's essentially where we're at right now is that the bourgeois really are the last Man. The general society that doesn't care about philosophy, doesn't care about liberal thinking. That's exactly the the thing that Nietzsche feared is what has come to pass, partially ironically, as a result of his influence.

17:01 Dylan: Yeah. And Bloom both laments the lack of the life of the mind, the lack of the theoretical life, but also considers it politically very, very dangerous to not have people who have cultivated minds, who can be essentially the leaders of society, and that the position that we're in is one that is very tenuous, that leads the public to be susceptible people in general, the culture, to be susceptible to all kinds of craziness because they don't have enough general intellectual knowledge and fortitude and background to actually hold themselves together against tyranny.

17:40 Seth: His thesis is that for liberal democracy to work, liberal democracy is essentially, it's the result, and it indicates the success of the Enlightenment project, and it's the triumph of reason over tradition, over family, over class and so on. And so if you are going to have a liberal democracy, you need to have people that have the ability to reason, because reason and discourse is what makes liberal democracy possible. Otherwise, you might as well just have a different form of government. And in the Enlightenment project, the belief was in the universality of human reason, the ability for all people to attain the appropriate level of reason and education and so forth, so they could be participants in the democracy.

And he spends some time talking about that versus what came before Enlightenment. But his essential thesis is that it's probably not true that everybody's capable of doing that, but for liberal democracy to work, some people have to do it. And the institution that's going to safeguard that and make that possible and create those people is the university.

18:42 Dylan: Yeah. And also that the seeds of that demise are in liberal democracy itself.

18:48 Seth: Yeah. Well, I'd rather start with De Tocqueville than Nietzsche. It's a smaller can of worms.

18:55 Dylan: Well, the first section is about students, and the second section's about with nihilism, American style. And the third section is the university, just like Mark outlined. Do we want to say anything about the way he presents the students that come to the university, or do we not really care about that?

19:10 Mark: One of the main points he's got, the thing that I was quoting from my intro was from a chapter on music, which I think is the funniest damn chapter. It's not really worth our time to talk about so much, but where he's sort of the most of a grumpy old man, because he's just talking really about what cheap thrills that young people today have instead of authentic culture. But that follows a section on books which is quite, I think, better and the fundamental complaint is that, you know, people in the olden days, they used to have favorite books.

You know, of course, people used to, like, quote poetry. Who the hell quotes poetry anymore? And when I ask my students now, he says, what's your favorite books? They most don't have anything. Of course, now people might say, the Harry Potter books. I don't. I feel like there's been a renaissance, perhaps after he wrote this, perhaps because of Rowling. But I'm sure that he would say in the same way he doesn't like rock music, that that is a terrible substitute for what counted as intellectual depth. When people used to say, I love Dickens and I carry the Dickens around with me all the time or whatever, that gave them a background in how to think in the way that kids don't have now because of TV and all that.

20:15 Dylan: But his critique is also that at least rock music doesn't appeal to our reason at all. It only appeals to our baser instincts. And so it's fundamentally centered on pleasing us without evoking other parts of our soul. That's his basic critique.

20:31 Wes: Every student knows that rock music has the beat of sexual intercourse.

20:37 Seth: Ah. So the general thesis of that first section is years ago when he started, he would ask students, what's their favorite book? And they would have answers. Now they come, and they don't have answers. They aren't even reading in high school. They certainly aren't writing right. They just don't read anymore. The second is, as Dylan said, they aren't listening to classical music. They're listening to rock music, you know, and he talks about an era when everybody had a favorite, like at least a little Beethoven or Brahms or something, which I'd certainly never experienced from my family.

But a key part of it is that they have since the 60s. And he's writing in the 80s, so he's probably still thinking very fresh about the 70s as well, is that they no longer believe in truth, that democracy, for them means equality. But it doesn't mean equality in the sense of, like, natural rights. It means equality in the sense of whatever it is that you do or whoever you are, is just fine. It's an equality of tolerance. And so they come with this idea that justice is tolerance, and there's no such thing as truth. It's just that these are the conditions of what it means to live in a democratic society.

And since they don't believe in truth, there's nothing for them to actually go inquire after. So it's no surprise that they don't read.

21:54 Dylan: And what you just said is one of the really important distinction for him is that they don't have any ambition. From his perspective. He sees the students and they come in and he doesn't see them as having ambitions to become something more than they are now. And the constraints of the past, from his perspective, had the effect of either having people come to the university, having a glimpse of something they wanted to become. Or maybe even having a glimpse of something they just wanted to run away from. But they had a direction. And it might have been amorphous, but it amounted to being a motion that their souls had that was going on.

And it would then have the opportunity to be directed, to be honed and to be cultivated. And from his perspective, the great problem with the American student is there isn't that motion that is ready to be directed or honed. So I think he feels like there's not a lot you can do with it. It's hard to do anything with it. You have to actually start from further back and try to get motion out of them so that they can start going in some direction. And as you said, that direction would have been towards truth. To him, that's the most salient, most powerful one.

23:03 Mark: Right.

23:03 Dylan: They come to the universe. They want to know how to live a good life. What's true about the world.

23:07 Seth: True. The good Self fulfillment. Yeah.

23:10 Mark: Here's A quote, page 61. The loss of books has made them, the students nowadays, narrower and flatter. Narrower because they lack what is most necessary. A real basis for discontent with the present. And awareness that there are alternatives to it. They are both more contented with what is. And despairing of ever escaping from it. The longing for the beyond has been attenuated. The very models of admiration and contempt have vanished. Flatter because without interpretations of things, without the poetry or the imagination's activity, their souls are like mirrors not of nature, but of what is around. The refinement of the mind's eye that permits it to see the delicate distinctions among men, among their deeds and their motives, and constitutes real taste is impossible without the assistance of literature in the grand style. So that's kind of typical of the style of his argument.

23:56 Dylan: Well, I mean, I think that it's again, pointing to this cultivation of baser versus higher instincts kind of thing. I think in the end, he believes the triumph of reason is necessary for the cultivation of our souls. And to keep us from being brutes and being sure that we're genuinely human. But that the course of events that is exemplified in the University is that reason in some ways has triumphed without being able to talk about itself and justify itself. And therefore we're sort of lost. And it's a pity because you have individuals who don't know what they're missing, don't know how to cultivate their souls to be as good as they can be and dangerous because it is bad for culture and liberal democracy, because it opens the door for tyranny.

24:44 Mark: So this reason has triumphed without being able to justify itself. I mean, I know the kind of thing he has in mind is you should be able to give a genealogy. You should be able to say why we have the concept of reason we did from Plato passed on to the Enlightenment. Then you get a sense. And then to understand the ills of our time, you have to then understand how Marx and Nietzsche and those folks influenced why we have relativism now. And so really, this whole genealogy lesson that he gives, as he describes in a very quick fashion, I mean, he's not pretending that each step of this history he's laying out in a way that if you have a problem with it, you're really going to be able to engage with the text.

And, you know, he's not arguing for each step, but he's giving it as an example of the kind of understanding that if you have this, then you would be able to defend reason. You'd be able to see what the scope of reason is.

25:34 Wes: The relationship to reason is complex in this. Right. In some ways this is an argument for revelation rather than just reason. I think he has an objection to reason insofar as it's become untethered to tradition in this very American style. So there are the parts, for instance, where he argues for reading these books as live possibilities, even when they have things to say that are seem obviously wrong to us now. Or reading the Bible as a possible truth, for instance, rather than just as a sociological or a document or as a piece of literature.

26:12 Dylan: There's a related great quote, reason transformed into prejudice is the worst form of prejudice because reason is the only instrument for liberation from prejudice.

26:22 Wes: Yeah. Reason cannot establish values, and its belief that it can is the stupidest and most pernicious illusion. Or actually he might be characterizing Weber there. Right. I think he's right.

26:33 Mark: He actually thinks fact value distinction is a destructive thing to have crept into our lexicon.

26:39 Wes: Right.

26:40 Mark: So page 374. I'm just looking for every instance of the Bible. The contents of the classic books have become particularly difficult to defend in modern times. The professors who now teach them, do not care to defend them, and are not interested in their truth. One can most clearly see the latter in the case of the Bible. To include it in the humanities is already a blasphemy, a denial of its own claims. There it is almost inevitably treated in one of two ways. It is subject to modern scientific analysis called the Higher Criticism, where it is dismantled.

Show how sacred books are put together and they're not what they claim to be, or else the Bible is used in coercive comparative religion. Moving down. A teacher who treated the book, the Bible naively, taking it its word or word, capital W, would be accused of scientific incompetence and lack of sophistication. That these books have been neutered, these things that were so influential that the fact that people are not reading them with the proper seriousness, as opposed to reading them merely as history, means that we're not actually getting the benefit from them.

27:33 Wes: Yeah, that's part of it. So this is on page 251. Thus, the mere announcement of the rule of reason does not create the conditions for the full exercise of rationality. And in removing the impediments to it, some of its supports are also dismantled. Reason is only one part of the soul's economy and requires a balance of the other parts in order to function properly. The issue is whether the passions are its servitors or whether it is the handmaiden of the passions. The latter interpretation, which is Hobbes, plays an important role in the development of modern democracy and is a depreciation as well as an appreciation of reason.

Older, more traditional orders that do not encourage the free play of reason contain elements reminiscent of the nobler philosophic interpretation of reason and help to prevent its degradation. Those elements are connected with the piety that prevails in such orders. They convey a certain reverence for the higher, a respect for the contemplative life, understood as a contemplation of God and the peak of devotion, and a cleaving to eternal beings that mitigates absorption in the merely present or current. These are images of philosophic magnificence.

And then, if we go down a little bit, much of the theoretical reflection that flourishes in modern democracy could be interpreted as egalitarian resentment against the higher type, represented by Pascal denigrating it, deforming it, and interpreting it out of existence. Marxism and Freudianism reduced his motives to those all men have. Historicism denies him access to eternity. So I just wanted to get at the sense in which he's he talks a lot about reason and is pro reason in some sense, but it's more complicated because he's thinking about it in this more traditional way as a connection to something higher.

And he's not merely talking about the instrument, mental use of reason as a kind of cleverness or as any sort of smart thing you can do in the humanities or the social sciences, especially stuff that's reductive, right, that's highly rational. In a sense, it's Cartesian as opposed to Pascalian. But he thinks that's bad.

29:46 Dylan: And that's why, describing what he praises as the theoretical life or, as Socrates said, the examined life, I think is. You have to put that alongside his praise of reason and his trying to defend reason.

30:00 Wes: The parallel here is the aristocracy versus the democracy. And his argument is essentially that in a democracy, the aristocratic institution of choice, or the only one that can any longer exist, is the university. And it ought to be that, and it ought to be insulated from the pressures of democracy to turn everything into something that's of instrumental value, for instance. So making it. Turning the humanities and social sciences into sort of social justice projects, which he'd be horrified if he saw the extent of that today. So there's reason and then there's reason.

There's the democratizing reason of the. There's a sense and you know, as Tocqueville pointed out, where there's hyper rationality to Americans because they're free in some sense of those traditions, they're untethered from them and they're smart and more open minded. And there's. There's a lot of. They're innovative. There's a lot of benefits to being, you know, to that lack of tethering to tradition. But there's something that's lost as well. That's his argument. So it's reason in this older sense, and that's connected to tradition that I think he's arguing for, at least in some certain part of American society at the university.

31:12 Dylan: Let me read a line from Just right, that section that you were in that brings Tocqueville into it. The possibility of such a human type, the theoretical type, is, according to Tocqueville, most threatened in democracy. And it must be vigorously defended if humanity is not to be grievously impoverished. When he talks that way, it makes me think a lot of the way in which people talk about the degradation of our ecology in our environment, where after a generation or two, everybody thinks, oh, you know, the Great Lakes are really beautiful and they're getting cleaned up or whatever, when they are a faint shadow of what their former vigor was 80 or 100 years ago.

And it's because of the impoverished experience with it that you get a kind of new normalization that without knowing something about what it was before, just knowing about the present, you miss it. And I think there's a way in which his argument about the university is one of this kind of progressively depleted environment. Whether you agree with it or not, that's the kind of argument that he's making.

32:18 Wes: Later on, he'll go on more at length about these reductive explanations, Marx and Freud and so on, and the abstractness of it. You know, there's something. For him, philosophy ought to be ultimately concrete. And he refers back to some of those terms that he's discussed earlier in the book, like values and lifestyle and things, and then says our temptation is to prefer the shiny new theory to the fully cognized experience. Even our famous empiricism is more of a theory than an openness to experience. Concreteness, not abstractness, is the hallmark of philosophy.

Then later on, he takes a jab at deterministic explanations of events that make it seem as if we don't have any freedom or choice. So for instance, they are too open to theories that teach that they are weak, which, by making individuals think that controlling action is impossible, have the effect of weakening them further. The antidote is again the classic, the heroic Homer Plutarch.

33:14 Mark: So I want to clarify this relation, what you're saying, the relationship between reason and tradition. I think reason is still a matter of self sufficiency, but it's a matter of how do people actually gain self sufficiency? And I believe that's one of the ways our autonomy is one of the ways. He characterized the philosophic project at some point that the reason why we're figuring out the nature of man, the reason why we're examining is to make decisions that really are authentically are not just a matter of us being bamboozled. Whatever the common opinion is, taking something that's handed down.

So reason is not a matter of submitting to authority. But you don't know actually how to use reason unless you can really have examples which are going to be from tradition to bounce off of. And he always says that has been said here that the university is supposed to provide an antidote to whatever the society is like. So if the society was an aristocracy, well, a more democratic type thought in the university might be better. But so the. The reason that the heroic might be the response is Just because that's just the thing that's lacking. It's just a way to get a different, a wider perspective, which gives you the tools to then think for yourself.

It's not that we're supposed to yield to the heroic or something, that that's what bringing tradition to reason means.

34:38 Wes: Yeah, I think he definitely says that. Although there is a sort of reverence throughout this book, it's hard not to come away from this thinking that in a way he's on the side of the aristocratic values and reason in this capital R sense. But you're right, he does say yes, if we were living in an aristocracy, the best thing would be for the university to be democratic counterweight.

35:03 Mark: So you were saying that some of the problem with Americans, according to Tocqueville, is this abstraction. And concretely, what that means for us in terms of what's wrong with our thinking or what's wrong with students thinking nowadays, is that, for instance, economists make these simplifying assumptions about people that we make our rational decision making and this sort of stuff. And he thinks that once you're thinking too much in terms of that, the economic theory, then that actually makes it so you are no longer able to see the richness of detail that that particular theory was abstracted from.

Reason was used to generate the abstraction. But if we lose track of the history of the abstraction, if we can't do a genealogy, why economists? Why Adam Smith came up with the theory he did, if you've never actually read Adam Smith himself, because that's obsolete and you're just interested in the progressive science of economics, all these social sciences pretending to be like the natural sciences and neglecting history, then you end up with false theories. And he says when these theories are used to drive policy, they actually create individuals that are accurately described by the theories.

Selfish consumers. In the case of economics, hallelujah.

36:18 Wes: Sing it at St. John's we got to read the original texts and talk about them and confront them. And we didn't even read secondary literature and we weren't lectured to. These were live debates for us and live texts that we gave thought to. So instead of simply writing down some professor's summary, some abstraction, then say, oh, okay, yeah, I get that it's supply and demand or something like that. You read a chain of reasoning, you're engaged with this concrete thing, and above all, you talk about it with other people. It's a completely different kind of relationship to the, I guess, knowledge in a way.

36:54 Dylan: Well, part of it is that those books, either historical or maybe Just because of the kind of books they are. Engaging questions at a very, very low level. Someone like Adam Smith, for instance, we're talking about one of the first books about economy at all, capitalist economy at all. It ends up engaging in questions about how an economy fundamentally works and whether it's good for people or not. Whereas once you take enough things for granted, you end up not asking those questions. Another reason why reading some original piece of scientific text can become much more enlivening, because you are reading a text that is asking the question, well, how do things move? Rather than having it all distilled down? And that sort of. That very potent original question is absent from it.

37:41 Wes: And if you're lucky, you're encouraged to sort of work ahead in advance of the authority. Put down the book and you think, what would I write down here? Or what are my thoughts on this? What do we mean by economy at a very fundamental level? And then you think about it until you get stuck, and then you continue reading. So there's this retracing of a path that if someone just hands you the result, it's not as much a part of you, and you don't possess it as fully with as much nuance. And that's part of where this whole idea of a relation to tradition comes in and is important. It's not just that we can be handed these endpoints. If we want a deeper understanding, we have to be able to retrace these paths and recreate some of the original thinking, recreate some of the thoughts that went into producing those texts or those ideas.

38:31 Seth: I agree with that, Wes. And I think this has some interesting touch points on a number of things that we've done in the not too distant past. You know, there's a point where he's talking about the way that Americans appropriated the ideas of these German thinkers. I don't say appropriated. The way they consumed them, I guess, would be the right way. And where the German thinkers were connected to the tradition and there was an evolution. And so, in a sense, like what Weber and Nietzsche and these guys meant in Heidegger when they said these things, that then becomes kind of facile in America because we don't take the tradition with it.

We just took the ideas out of context. There's connecting to the tradition and understanding what the ideas are in reaction to. And literally, like what the words mean. What's the significance of positioning something one way or the other, something another way? That's definitely part of it. And a second part of it is the idea of Authorial intent, which we just recently had a podcast on. And Bloom comes down on the side of authorial intent and against the American disposition. It's all subject to interpretation, which goes back to this notion of the self and inward looking and so forth, which we didn't really touch on too much, but is a big part of section one.

But he also believes we grow and we learn through dialogue and engagement. He has his back and forth with Socrates, but the dialectical method, it's that engagement with the tradition that gives us our foil. Not for the purposes of dialectic, thesis, antithesis, synthesis, but rather dialectic in the sense of having a conversation. And I remember at this similar time as this, I think Richard Rorty name drop came out with a book. He's talking about the great cocktail conversation. He describes the liberal education is like going to a great cocktail party or something with all these great thinkers.

And it's about engaging in that kind of conversational aspect with the past. And I think that's a big part of this as well, that if you just get the Cliff Notes, you're getting the answer to a question that that's not even really the right question. You're getting the answer to a question that's being asked by somebody else. You're not actually engaging and discovering what questions there are to even be asked.

40:36 Mark: So I was wondering this picture that he gives of the great geniuses of history speaking to each other. Hobbes had Aristotle specifically in mind when writing about virtue. And I feel like that is an oversimplifying abstraction that say, when we read Nietzsche and try to understand Nietzsche, a lot of the people that he's reacting to, if we really wanted to understand all the references, he's not just reacting straight to Plato, to Socrates, that's definitely in there. He's not reacting simply to Schopenhauer, but he's reacting to all these more minor thinkers that represent the gestalt of the time.

Such that I feel like to get part of the story, if that's one take on Nietzsche, that the essence of the Birth of Tragedy is what he had to say about Socrates as the villain and how his project is advancing that he's the artistic Socrates over what Socrates himself was doing, which is ultimately this will to truth that's sufficiently unreflective about its own origins and ultimately nihilistic. That gets at some themes in Nietzsche, but just as much of it. I want to discount this in the spirit of the death of the author. The other stuff we just read for the authorial Intent.

I feel like it's not just geniuses getting with each other over time. It's somebody reacting to the thicket of intellectual life that's going on around them that's not reducible to some particular genius. You're not getting anything close to the whole story just by oversimplifying it, pretending that there's a handful of geniuses. And once you read those, you have the story of philosophy. You have the story that is enough for you to unravel what the soul is.

42:07 Dylan: Interesting. Mark, I'm not so sure that he would agree that you would be able to unravel what the soul is from having done that. I think it's more of an argument about what kind of education would prepare you to do that yourself.

42:23 Seth: I think that. And I think it's also a statement about understanding the intellectual tradition that the people you're reading are coming from. If you read Hobbes and you don't have Aristotle in mind, you miss something. There's probably a lot of people you have to have in mind. That's why people devote their careers to studying people like that is you have to unpack all the various types of influences and responses, especially when it's not explicit in that respect. I don't know that it's fair to say that you need to be a Hobbes scholar in order to be able to get something out of Leviathan?

But I think he's trying to make the point that there's some degree of familiarity with the narrative, the story of Western intellectual development, Greece, Rome, the Middle Ages, that if you don't understand these things, if you don't know the trend and know the chronology and the relationships, then you're missing out.

43:18 Mark: You might respond to that by saying, well, what about alternative chronologies? What about the history of Chinese thought? Why am I not equally on the hook to be a whole human being? Or could I not have read Homer or any ancient Greeks or any of that tradition at all, but only read the ancient Chinese up to the present? Would that also get me the same thing? Or is it that he thinks the Western tradition has uniquely created, has had this notion of reason, has had this notion of self criticism that you're not going to find in ancient Chinese texts or something, the fact that we find ourselves in America, in a democracy. And so that's the thing that we have to research the foundations of to understand, understand ourselves, not some alternative history of some other nation.

44:02 Dylan: He doesn't make that argument here. I suspect that he would say two things. One, Is it's the appropriate one for, say, American students. Because that's the intellectual history they come from. That's sort of the weaker version of the argument. I also think he would make the stronger version of the argument, which is that philosophy is a Western phenomenon.

44:26 Mark: One of the things that he's politically arguing against at the beginning is the way that we've described, like why you would want to read Homer is because you want to have a viewpoint that's fundamentally foreign to the common opinions of today. You want to have some ammunition to use against the common opinions of today. Well, academics that he was having a problem with, administrators, school administrations, were saying, what you should do is have to take a class on some foreign culture. If you do African studies or something like that, then that'll also give you some ammunition that is fundamentally foreign to the Western tradition, in fact, is way more foreign than something that's just chronologically back in time from the tradition.

And so can't that also give you the detachment from the current intellectual landscape to be able to think for yourself? He argues that that's actually not how it works out. That the only thing that that results in is you saying, oh, well, I guess it's just a matter of historical accident that I have the opinions that I do. Other places have different opinions. It just leads to historical relativism and not wanting to have us take a strong position about anything.

45:27 Dylan: Yeah, I mean, this is where his argument for an education that has a certain kind of wholeness rather than a heapness is really important. And that's one of the features of authentic liberal education for him, is that the parts of your education have to speak to one another. And we're talking about one way in which he insists that speaking to one another, that is, the authors that you're reading ought to be ones that are talking to one another.

45:54 Mark: And St. John's now has an Eastern classics program.

45:57 Dylan: They've had it for a very long time.

45:58 Mark: The fact that there are multiple traditions doesn't say anything against this. It's just the fact that there's a multiplicity and it's the same thing. The fact that there's plurality of values doesn't mean that there's a pure relativism. In other words, all values have the same value. The fact that there's two different lines of geniuses in history, and maybe there are several more that you could trace. Maybe you could do one from African philosophical history or something and find the particular virtues of that. But what's important is the unity and coherence of that. Not just take a little of this and a little of that. That doesn't add up to actually giving you the skills to think.

46:34 Dylan: Those are two different arguments. Right. Whether or not there's traditions that are to be preferred over one another in terms of being better for one's education. That's one argument. Another dimension is having an education that constitutes a whole is itself its own good. It operates as an education more authentically.

46:55 Seth: Yeah. I don't want to lose sight of the fact, though, that all of this is in the service of maintaining a healthy liberal democracy. It's not a theoretical exercise about discovering the self for the sake of discovering the self. He makes the point several times in the book when he's talking about Aristotle's notion of political economy. And we don't read Aristotle because we think he got it right about slavery and forms of government and all that. We read Aristotle because that's the beginning of the history that ends where we are right now.

47:27 Dylan: Well, he would say it's stronger than that.

47:29 Seth: Right.

47:29 Dylan: Is that for him, the Ethics is a live book about how one ought to live. It's not merely historical.

47:39 Mark: He says that about Plato's Republic. Is the book about education.

47:43 Seth: I wasn't talking about the ethics. I was talking about the politics.

47:46 Dylan: For him, these books and the ones we just mentioned are examples of. But I think he would say this strongly of most of them are books that aren't located in strictly in time. If you read them merely historically.

47:59 Seth: Okay, I understand what you're saying. I'm sorry. No, I agree. What I was trying to say was you don't read Aristotle because of an answer that he gives. Or you don't not read Aristotle because he has the views on slavery that he does. You read Aristotle because the way in which he engages with the question of what it means to be a human being and to flourish, to participate in a society and all that is very much alive. And he has an answer which informed somebody else's later answer, which informed somebody else's later response, which ultimately leads to where we are now. So you're right, it's very much a live book, but it's live in the sense that it's connected with what we're trying to accomplish, what type of people we need to be to accomplish what needs to be accomplished in this political system that we're in now, which comes.

48:47 Mark: So some of this sounds like the argument that we saw in Mill recently in our free speech episode in our one on Mill, that we can't just take for granted, for instance, that everybody deserves equal respect. That seems obvious to us. But why do we think it's obvious? Well, because of a long history of people actually arguing about that. And so in order to really understand what we believe right now, we have to have some challenges to it. But remember, the way that Mill put that argument was not in terms of history. It just means that we have to be open to people arguing with it right now that that should.

There should be no taboo subjects, nothing that we just purely take for granted. And so the safe space of the university is a safe space for arguing about stuff that even sounds offensive to even argue about. It shouldn't be a safe space that you don't have to hear challenges to things that will hurt your feelings.

49:40 Seth: No, that's a really good point. Mark, at the part of the book where he advocates for the universities kind of being more aristocratic, he's got a reason for saying that it's not elitist in the strictest sense. It's that he's trying to position an aristocratic class against more of a demos or democratic class. And that when you had aristocracy and when you have like a working class, they naturally are at odds with each other. And so there's a possibility of dialogue and confrontation in ideas. But when we're just a democracy, where it's completely flat, that point of view disappears. So there's not the natural inbuilt, conflicting or opposing position that would normally be represented by a different class.

50:18 Mark: The relationship between just having a dissenting point of view versus knowing the history.

50:23 Seth: Yes. So the point is, just like you said, that the safety of the university is not safety from hearing things, it's safety, the safety to speak, not the safety to be protected from speech. Right. And that's because he thinks the university is the only place where that kind of conversation can meaningfully be had, because it just doesn't exist out in a broader society.