PREVIEWS-Eps 192-193 Allan Bloom & Liberal Education Follow-Ups

0:06 Mark: Hey, Partially Examined Life fans, this is another preview to show you what you're missing and make you miss slightly less. Episodes 192 and 193 on liberal education were very thought provoking for us and thanks to the generous support of Pel listeners, we were able to fund recording and full editing on two more follow up discussions. I'm going to play some samples for you of them here so you are not totally in dark to hear the discussions in full. You need to become a Partially Examined Life citizen or a Patreon supporter at the $5 level. Either way, you can go to partiallyexaminedlife.com support to learn how to get in on the full fun.

So episode 192, as you recall, was on Allan Bloom's the Closing of the American Mind. Wes and Seth and I recorded for about an hour to follow up on parts of the book we didn't treat. I'm going to play for you here the introduction to the main part of the discussion. So I would characterize this as if I had to give an episode title for this. He actually uses the phrase in here, the tools of Last Manhood.

So he's concerned about.

He does like Nietzsche a lot and maybe idiosyncratic take on Nietzsche, but his condemnation of his peers, of his students seems like it very explicitly uses the language of Nietzsche's last Man.

So the tools of last Manhood being anything practical, right? Any an MBA or anything that you learn that you can use to make a living is that the.

The context which he actually brought it up was psychoanalysis. That that being one of the things which is, you know, if you wanted we could talk about what he has to say about Freud. I guess before we get embroiled in that. Seth, what was really bugging you or what was the thing about this text that you had not yet gotten to talk about?

1:49 Wes: I thought the whole conversation, his thesis that, you know, the discussion of values and value relativism was directly relatable to the influence of German thinkers. Specifically, right. Nietzsche. And then he identifies Heidegger, Weber, Nietzsche and Heidegger and their, let's call it, offspring. So I thought that was interesting. And the notion that German thinkers were reacting in context and that we as Americans kind of stripped it of context and hence we sort of stripped it of a lot of its value and meaning and confused it. Where he talks about Nietzsche's become a hero to the left, even though on Bloom's interpretation he was very conservative. And so it was just that whole discussion that I found interesting. And Wes had said that he had some issues with Bloom's interpretation of Nietzsche. So I wanted to hear about those.

2:38 Mark: All right, so that gives you a sense of what our agenda is. I'm actually going to give you a portion of our discussion of Nietzsche in particular here it is.

2:44 Wes: Nietzsche's call for a re evaluation of all values to get beyond good and evil was appropriated and in the American context became value relativism. So Let me read two quotes. This is on page 141. The new language is that of value relativism. And it constitutes a change in our view of things moral and political as great as the one that took place when Christianity replaced Greek and Roman paganism. Then a couple pages later, he's talking specifically about Nietzsche, and he says, thus our use of the value language leads us in two opposite directions.

To follow the line of least resistance and to adopt strong poses and fanatic resolutions. But these are merely different deductions from a common premise. The values are not discovered by reason, and it is fruitless to seek them to find the truth of the good life. The quest begun by Odysseus and continued over three millennia has come to an end with the observation that there is nothing to seek. So then he connects that to God is dead from Nietzsche. But then he says, but of course, modern democracy was the target of Nietzsche's criticism. Its rationalism and egalitarianism are the contrary of creativity.

So he does point out that Nietzsche's call to reevaluate values and to revolt against the equalizing forces of democracy and the Last man and all that are because he's making a call for greater spirits. Right? Bloom's Nietzsche is the Nietzsche of Zarathustra. So it's all about how, and I think what he's saying is Nietzsche was terribly misread in almost like the way that undergraduates read him, right? Every undergraduate philosophy major gets infatuated with Nietzsche at some point, and they're infatuated with him because of his snarky wit and aphoristic style and sharp critique, without a strong commitment necessarily to systematizing.

Right? And yet, as we all have come to understand, is that the mature reading of Nietzsche is incredibly rich and is, like you said, he's much more absolute and much less a wishy washy, lefty critique critic as he is something else.

4:49 Mark: So the quest begun by Odysseus and continued over three millennia has come to an end with the observation that there's nothing to seek. And then he says Nietzsche announced this with God is dead. Well, that's not what Nietzsche is doing with God is dead. He's not saying there's nothing to seek. The whole point of gay science is that there's still science, right? There's this fusion, there's this newfound respect for the instinctual in Nietzsche, but it's not a rejection of the rational and the scientific per se. That, say, to me, is a really simplistic reading of Nietzsche.

And then Nietzsche exemplifies the truth seeking in his writing. He hasn't given up philosophy, he hasn't given up truth seeking. But this whole God is dead thing that comes from gay science, where he describes a madman coming down and saying, whither is God? He cried, I will tell you, we have killed him, you and I, all of us are his murderers. And so on. What the madman is doing in that context, he's just announcing to the nihilists, the Western European nihilists who still pretend that they believe in God, that God is actually not around anymore, that in fact that belief is no longer real and that the central value of the society as far as it's exemplified in the way people act is nihilism.

And Nietzsche wants to announce that, like the madman, because he wants to say, okay, now we have to figure out what to do about that.

Now. After the discussion on Liberal education with Pano Kanelos for episode 193, I encouraged Dylan and Wes to have a discussion about two essays that Dylan had identified for the podcast, but which I ended up nixing just to focus the discussion. But the essays were interesting. They were Leo Strauss's Liberal Education and Mass Democracy from 1967 and Richard Rorty's Democracy and Philosophy from 2007. I'm going to play a couple clips for you. In the first one here, you get to hear about who Leo Strauss was and why he's been relevant to the thinking of certain people on the podcast.

So we should say Leo Strauss is kind of a controversial. So he actually taught at St. John's

6:43 Dylan: right, for like a year or two in 1967. 68. He had a kind of weird position. I think he might have had the only sort of endowed chair type position ever at St. John John's College. He was a good friend of Jacob Klein.

6:57 Mark: Yeah. So our two other readings from the

6:59 Dylan: main podcast, he was a teacher of Alan Bloom. And you can get that sense of how Alan Bloom was a student of Leo Strauss.

7:07 Mark: As far as the controversy goes, I would say, and this is echoing some of Nussbaum's criticism of Bloom, he has. What are considered unorthodox readings of ancient classics. So, for instance, one of the things Nussbaum critiqued in Bloom was this idea that. Where it's supposed to give an ironic reading of Plato's Republic and the possibility of the kind of state that he describes, we're meant to think that Plato is actually being critical of it and not advocating this sort of quasi authoritarian type of regime. That's actually an argument I was influenced by from a very young age via my mom.

So this sort of Straussian kind of idea has got around and I think has been influential at St. John's as well. And that's kind of my inclination when reading Plato is to see some of the irony or not take some of the stuff at face value. But as Nussbaum points out, even Aristotle took that seriously. And these are not orthodox readings.

8:06 Wes: I don't know.

8:06 Mark: I'm trying to get it just a general way to describe the way Strauss approaches text and his reputation in academia.

8:13 Dylan: The basic idea is that truly great writers have multiple meanings in their texts that speak to the right sorts of people, and that that is one way of interpreting the irony in Plato and Socrates. And I would say it's not the only way you could have understanding that there is an ironic element in lots of these writings. It seems most clear to me when you're reading things that were written by sophisticated people at times of great political tension. And so Machiavelli and Descartes and Plato, you know, all of them get this kind of esoteric reading, though that's a typical Straussian technique.

8:54 Mark: And now the fellows get into Strauss's basic thesis in the essay.

A lot of the Closing of the American Mind, the basic thesis is kind of really has its origins in Strauss, and you just see a ton of it in this essay.

9:07 Dylan: Well, just the very beginning. Right. Liberal education is education in culture or towards culture. The finished product of a liberal education is a cultured human being.

9:16 Mark: Yeah. And then we get this suggestion that a lot of the point of a liberal education is to educate certain elites who have the nature to be educated in such a way, such that they can put the brakes on the more vulgar, decadent parts of democracy, so that they can preserve an aristocratic element in the same way that Bloom thought the university would preserve an aristocratic element within democracy.

9:44 Dylan: I think that's right, except I would pause at that. Most of that discussion involves a kind of historiography of what an educated person was and what a liberal education meant over time, starting with contrasting with the ancients and then moving into sort of an Enlightenment period where he sees a lot of things in common with them. In particular this idea that the educated person would be one of the few and that a liberal education would be the education of the not slave person than the not poor person, where basically they just had enough, they had the economic advantages that they could not worry about day to day living.

And then included in that was the common idea in both ancient times and modern times that even for democracy, the denominator, the whole for a democracy wasn't everybody in ancient Greece, it was all the men, all the free men, right? And even in Enlightenment times, he says that look, the kind of democracy that we have right now and the level of egalitarianism he contends that the founders of the American democracy would find completely strange. I'm not so sure I agree with him about that. But that's his contention that they were knowingly and self consciously capitalizing on a natural aristocracy that the goal of the American democracy was to cultivate through education a natural aristocracy that he says ultimately fails.

11:07 Mark: Well, ideally, right. The philosopher would rule the city. It's just something that can't happen.

11:12 Dylan: Yes.

11:13 Mark: And here's a chunk of the discussion of Rorty, starting with a quote from Rorty, who is discussing Habermas at this point.

Habermas believes that philosophical reflection can indeed provide moral and political guidance, for it can disclose principles that have what he calls universal validity. Habermas has this thing where he, it says a very Kantian thing, where he can sort of transcendentally, at an a priori, in an a priori way, derive political and moral guidance from what he calls the presuppositions of rational communication. That's what Rorty is describing as foundationalism. And he says, well, many leftist intellectuals would actually agree with that and that democracy is founded in that sort of.

That idea of. They too think that certain central moral and political truths are, says Rorty, if not exactly self evident, nonetheless, transcultural and ahistorical, the product of human reasons as such, not simply of a certain sequence of historical events. And then moving on a little bit, we anti foundationalists, however, regard Enlightenment rationalism as an unfortunate attempt to beat religion at religion's own game. The game of pretending that there is something above and beyond human history that can sit in judgment of that history. We argue that although some cultures are better than others, there are no transcultural criteria of betterness that we can appeal to when we say modern democratic societies are better than feudal societies, or that egalitarian societies are better than racist or sexist ones.

See, this is the thing that's so unsatisfying about Rorty when he's on his anti foundationalist kick.

12:41 Dylan: No, I agree with you on it because there's a funny way which you want to just say, isn't it just the case that the twist would be you're very pragmatic in a scientific way about the way you take those enduring truths. Right. And though he contends at the end of the next page, he says philosophy is not and never will be a science in the sense of a progressive accumulation of enduring truths.

13:04 Mark: Yeah. So it's just in the parts I read, it's like, okay, he's rejecting the view from nowhere. He's rejecting this idea of criteria that we can appeal to to say some cultures are better than others. Say for instance, that a democratic society is better than a feudal society. But he still wants to say that. And he seems to be suggesting that he can say that simply by appealing to the fact that, oh well, we happen to say that that just happens to be what we believe.

13:31 Dylan: I think it's a little bit stronger than that in that he would say that the reason that we make that argument is a kind of value distinction. And he would point not to like say the principles of democracy as the rule of the many versus the rule of the few. But he would point to things like other kinds of principles which are sort of more patently pragmatic and less truth oriented, like the minimization of cruelty is a good thing. And as far as we can tell, individuals have equal capabilities of their own, becoming more or less, and that it's better to treat them as ends rather than means.

14:10 Mark: But to say that we have certain moral intuitions just is a form of foundationalism. You say, okay, well, we can't really demonstrate any of this. We can't say why, but these are our moral intuitions. I don't think that's anti foundationalist in the way that Rorty thinks it is. You know, we have with Descartes, rationalist, early modern philosophers would call self evident truths at some point.

14:31 Dylan: It's a funny kind of scab picking. Right? You know, as soon as somebody says, well, this is true, he wants to like smash it over even though he agrees that it's true. Right. Even with a little T. Right. He wants to fight a lot. He gets distracted by fighting a lot about the status of something and the claim about whether it's true with a big T or a little T. Even if the structure of that argument is not one that is dogmatic.

14:58 Mark: So that was a nice transition in that we're going to be talking about truth for the next three episodes after this. And for the final clip, I want to play another chunk from the first discussion reflecting on the future of our effort in producing audio plays so we can get your feedback on that. So I thought about doing a Kickstarter because we can't really justify just doing a lot of these. It's a little beside the point to our mission and there are costs involved and if we did a bunch of them, in fact, I'd like to throw a little money at the actors because they just all volunteered this time.

But I thought about, you know, making this an actual project of doing a a Kickstarter to specifically fund doing six of these a year or something. Do them with some frequency More Aristophanes I'm certainly interested in reading the Clouds, which Bloom referred to because it was the one that depicts Socrates as well as perhaps some other ones. And of course there's a lot of other things in the world of theater, philosophical theater, or even just keeping to ancient Greek theater, but probably not let us know in the comments of this whether that's the kind of thing that you would pay extra money to see happen in the world.

And I'll see whether if I can, if I can get a little support, then maybe it'll be worth my time to put together. Alright, I hope these bits were helpful. I hope even more that they whetted your appetite and will lead you to partiallyexaminedlife.com support to get the full discussions. This is not the end of the bonus content. There are at least three more things like this already recorded, and while we don't want to put 6 hours total talking about liberal education on the public feed, if you find these discussions nourishing, we hope you will fully participate and become members.

So long.