Who Bloom Was

Allan Bloom is the late-twentieth-century philosopher who took the perennialist tradition into a public confrontation with American higher education. The article works through his life, his major works, and the themes that would shape his educational philosophy: self-knowledge, self-discovery, and the defence of the classics against what he saw as the disintegration of the modern mind.

The life and influences

Allan Bloom was an American philosopher whose career was shaped by two unusual influences. The first was Leo Strauss, the German-American political philosopher who taught Bloom and many of the other prominent conservative philosophers of the late twentieth century. Strauss combined a deep engagement with the classical political philosophers (Plato, Aristotle, Maimonides, Spinoza) with a sharp suspicion of modern progressive thought. Bloom inherited both halves of this approach.

The second was Friedrich Nietzsche, the nineteenth-century German philosopher whose work Bloom took seriously even though he opposed most of what Nietzsche concluded. Nietzsche had argued, among other things, that traditional values were being undermined and that a new evaluation of values was needed. Bloom thought Nietzsche had diagnosed the modern condition accurately and that the diagnosis was a warning rather than an aspiration. Modern American culture, Bloom argued, was living out the consequences of the value-erosion Nietzsche had predicted, without the seriousness or self-awareness Nietzsche himself had brought to the problem.

Bloom’s areas of interest were Greek philosophy, the history of philosophy, political philosophy, and politics. The list is broader than most academic philosophers manage. The breadth shaped the kind of writing he did: not narrow specialised research but engagement with the largest questions of the political and intellectual life, drawing on the long tradition rather than on the narrow specialism.

His major scholarly work was Plato’s Republic, published in 1968, a translation and interpretation that became the standard scholarly edition for a generation of American students. The work shows the depth of Bloom’s engagement with Plato and his belief that Plato remained directly relevant to modern problems, not just as a historical figure but as a thinker whose questions were still the right questions to ask.

Flashcard

What two influences shaped Allan Bloom's philosophy most significantly?

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Answer

Leo Strauss and Friedrich Nietzsche

Leo Strauss combined deep engagement with classical political philosophers (Plato, Aristotle, Maimonides, Spinoza) with sharp suspicion of modern progressive thought; Bloom inherited both halves. Friedrich Nietzsche had argued traditional values were being undermined; Bloom took the diagnosis seriously even though he opposed most of what Nietzsche concluded. He thought American culture was living out the value-erosion Nietzsche predicted, without the seriousness Nietzsche himself brought to the problem.

The Closing of the American Mind

The book that made Bloom famous was The Closing of the American Mind, published in 1987. The book is, in form, a sustained criticism of contemporary American higher education. It became an unlikely bestseller and provoked one of the largest public debates about university education in the late twentieth century.

The diagnosis the book offered was that American students were undergoing a spiritual disintegration by the time they reached university. The students arrived at college already shaped by a culture that had abandoned serious engagement with the major questions of human life. The universities, instead of supplying what was missing, made things worse by accepting and reinforcing the cultural disintegration rather than pushing back against it.

Bloom blamed several specific developments for the disintegration. The post-modern and multicultural trends in education had, on his account, undermined the claim that some works were greater than others and that any tradition had more to offer than any other. The cultural relativism that resulted left students with no standards by which to judge anything and no reason to take any particular work seriously.

Nietzschean relativism was a deeper version of the same problem. Nietzsche had argued that values are relative to the goals and self of the person holding them; Bloom thought American students had absorbed a popularised version of this view and now treated all values as equally valid. The result was a generation that could not seriously hold any value at all because any value held was suspected of being arbitrary.

The sexual revolution of the 1960s through 1980s had, on Bloom’s account, removed traditional restraints on sexual behaviour without supplying any substitute framework for human relationships. The result was relationships that were casual and unserious, and a generation of students who had not developed the capacity for the deeper kinds of love that older traditions had supported.

The book’s title captured the diagnosis. American minds were being closed by the very developments their proponents had described as opening them. Multiculturalism, supposed to open minds to other cultures, had on Bloom’s reading closed them to any serious engagement by removing the standards that made comparison possible. The sexual revolution, supposed to open minds to fuller human relationships, had closed them to the deep relationships it claimed to enable. The opening was an illusion; the closing was real.

Flashcard

What does Bloom diagnose in *The Closing of the American Mind*?

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Answer

Spiritual disintegration of American students, blamed on post-modern multiculturalism, Nietzschean relativism, and the sexual revolution

Students arrived at university already shaped by a culture that had abandoned serious engagement with the major questions of human life. The universities reinforced the disintegration rather than pushing back. Multiculturalism removed standards by which to judge anything; popularised Nietzschean relativism left students unable to hold any value seriously; the sexual revolution removed traditional restraints without supplying substitutes. The book’s title captures the central claim: minds being closed by what was supposed to open them.

The theme of education

The deepest theme running through all Bloom’s educational writing is that education is, finally, about self-knowledge and self-discovery. The Socratic motto know thyself names what Bloom thought education should be aiming at across all its forms.

The theme connects Bloom to the perennialist tradition through Plato, to Aristotle through the engagement with human nature, and to the long line of Western philosophers who treated the question what is a human being? as the central question of philosophy. A real education, on this account, helps the student work out what they themselves are. It does not just supply them with information about external matters; it helps them understand the kind of being they are and what their being requires of them.

The contrast with much modern education is sharp. A school that focuses on credentials, on skill acquisition, on preparing students for jobs, on civic participation, none of these directly addresses the question of self-knowledge. The student may graduate with all the conventional markers of educational success and have never seriously considered who they are or what they should make of their existence. By Bloom’s standard, that student has not been educated, however successful they appear by the conventional measures.

The theme also connects Bloom to the existentialist tradition the previous chapter covered. Both perennialism and existentialism treat self-knowledge and self-actualisation as central to education, though they understand the underlying philosophy differently. Bloom would have rejected the existentialist denial of fixed human nature, but the educational commitment to helping students discover who they are is shared across the two traditions.

A modern teacher who takes Bloom seriously will reserve space, in whatever curriculum they teach, for the self-discovery work. This may take the form of conversations about what the student wants, of reading texts that pose the deeper questions, of assignments that require the student to reflect on themselves. The space is not optional for a Bloom-influenced education; it is the heart of what the education is for.

Flashcard

What does Bloom say is the deepest theme of education?

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Answer

Self-knowledge and self-discovery, the Socratic know thyself

A real education helps the student work out what they themselves are. It does not just supply information about external matters; it helps the student understand the kind of being they are and what their being requires. A school focused on credentials, skills, or jobs may produce graduates with all the conventional markers of success who have never seriously considered who they are. By Bloom’s standard, that student has not been educated.