The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students

In the final section of the book, Bloom addresses the roles of the intellectual and the university in society. Bloom begins by remembering the grand impression that the University of Chicago made upon him as a teen, inspiring a noble vision of what constitutes a university. His undergraduate years were a transformative experience, dictating the course of his life in academia. In the university he recognized a select community of individuals dedicated to a common good, the pursuit of truth and the theoretical life of reason—a perception that proved naïve and idealistic in hindsight but partially true and continually inspiring. The beauties of this intellectual life, he laments, have been under persistent attack by unworthy economic and psychological motives, obscuring the special value and purpose of the university today.

The university has a singular and often paradoxical function within democratic society. As an institution dedicated to reason, the principle upon which liberal democracy is based, it preserves and protects the pure pursuit of knowledge from the prejudices endemic to egalitarian regimes. Tocqueville observed that the great danger in democracy is the tyranny of public opinion. The university’s role is therefore corrective: It counters the democratic bias for the present and ephemeral by preserving the classics and balances democracy’s anti-elitist tendencies by emphasizing the heroic and the noble. The university must preserve the intellectual alternatives that liberal society suppresses, thereby protecting absolute freedom of thought.

From these preliminary comments, Bloom turns to the fundamental and enduring problem of the theoretical life within society. Before the Enlightenment, the philosopher or scientist (the terms were interchangeable up until the 19th century) occupied a marginal station politically and socially. Though Plato and Aristotle theorized extensively about ethics, morality, and the best form of government, ancient philosophers had little expectation that their ideas of virtue and truth would influence the rulers or be accepted by the public at large. Socrates epitomizes the problematic relation of the theoretical type within the political order; the first complete portrait of a philosopher we have ends with his trial and execution by the civil authorities for impiety. Socrates’ defense against the charges of atheism and corrupting Athens’ youth, immortalized in Plato’s Apology, was directed toward the aristocrats who did not understand his passion for the pure intellectual life but sensed something noble in it and sympathized with him. Bloom contends that philosophers and scientists have courted the support of that small but influential elite for two millennia to secure their safety and that of their vocation.

The watershed moment for the integration of science within political society came during the Enlightenment. The political aims of the Enlightenment were unprecedented: For the first time, governance was to be based on the rational understanding of man, his primary needs, and the natural rights that reflected those wants. Enlightenment thinkers devoted themselves to the education of rulers and public alike, who, taught to reason, would abandon superstition and perceive rational truths with the light of their own minds. As reason was the foundation of the political liberalism benefitting mankind, the scientist, dedicated to reason, became the ideal human type, socially admired and granted the privilege of academic freedom. The idea of universal human rights, Bloom argues, encouraged cosmopolitanism and an atmosphere in which the free university could develop, since the advance of knowledge was believed by the powerful elites to benefit themselves and society as a whole. Liberal democracies can only exist where there are free universities, Bloom observes, and free universities can only survive in liberal democracies (259). Reason and liberalism enjoy a symbiotic relationship.

The Enlightenment’s remarkably successful project posed the question of the extent to which reason is justified in dictating the forms and content of political and social life. Jonathon Swift, in Gulliver’s Travels, contemptuously satirizes the scientism of the Enlightenment, distantly echoing Aristophanes’ lampooning of the anus-gazing Socrates in The Clouds. Swift contends that the scientific rationalism of the 17th and 18th centuries glorified the mathematical and abstract while losing sight of the humane and spiritual. It is a criticism that Rousseau picks up a century later, adding the charge that “science undermines virtue” (298). Rousseau doubts that science can result in man’s happiness and concludes that reason cannot be the faculty that uniquely distinguishes humankind from the animals. The prolific influence of Rousseau points the way toward recognition of the importance of the irrational dimensions of human experience and identity—sentiment, associative memory, the unconscious, the indeterminate, and the possibility of freedom beyond the determinism of nature. 

Immanuel Kant explored these themes in his three Critiques, works of extraordinary intellectual ambition that prescribe the legitimate limits of reason as it relates to the distinct realms of nature, morality, and aesthetics. The monumental influence of Kantian philosophy transformed the organization of knowledge in the German university, leading to a division of the natural and human sciences according to the types of causality operating within each of them. The effect of this reorganization was liberating for each domain. The hard mathematical sciences were able to flourish without the distracting influence of philosophical or theological ideas, while the humanities experienced a renaissance, especially in history and the study of languages.

The revitalization of the human sciences in the 19th century was influenced by two important ideas that ultimately led to the crisis of values in the university and in society: historicism and evolution. The historicist mode of interpretation viewed all human culture as the product of specific historical developments, while Darwin’s theory of evolution radically transformed the understanding of man’s origins, identity, and position within nature. The effect of these ideas was to challenge reason’s claim to universality and destabilize the very notion of moral absolutes. The mind, as well as the body, is a product of historical evolution; therefore, reason and the truths it purports to discover are historical constructs arising from specific environmental conditions. Philosophy could no longer lay claim to its special privilege as the handmaiden of reason, and philosophical pessimism was the response to this loss of faith. The humanist intellectual, dedicated to reason, could no longer assume moral authority on the basis of the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake. The idea of culture, a collection of activities and practices, superseded the idea of theoretical knowledge and the type of individual for whom it was a vocation. The seminal force lay within culture; action rather than reflection generates culture, the primary source of life-affirming energies. This turn away from reason and the theoretical life was dramatized by Goethe in Faust; the creator’s intuitive deed, not the thought that precedes it, is the fundamentally important thing.

Nietzsche realized with astonishing clarity that historicism meant that truth was merely an enabling fiction. Objectivity was a dream; everything depended on one’s perspective, and thus scholarship was no longer possible. The crisis of value relativism, prophesied by Nietzsche, came to fruition in the 1930s when the German universities conceded to the demands of the Nazi regime. Bloom notes that the German philosophy of the preceding hundred years tragically results in the conundrum that “[r]eason itself is rejected by philosophy itself” (311). On becoming rector of Freiburg University in 1933, Heidegger praised the ideological fervor of his young students and joined the Nazi party himself a month later, becoming an active sympathizer of the movement. Heidegger’s genuflection to “culture” in the guise of a fascist revolution that he justified as the self-revelation of Being marks the nadir of the modern academic’s relation with society for Bloom. It constitutes the complete abdication of the university’s role within the liberal tradition.