The Modern Mind

by Peter Watson

  Having described the changed nature of the university student (in America, though elements were clearly recognisable elsewhere), in his second section he deliberately examined some of the large questions, the ‘big words that make us afraid,’ as James Joyce said: ‘the self,’ ‘creativity,’ ‘culture,’ ‘values,’ ‘our ignorance.’ His aim was to show that however much students have changed, and however much they think the world has changed around them, the big issues have not changed. He did this by showing that his beloved philosophers of the past – Plato, Aristotle, Rousseau, and Locke in particular – still have the power to inform us, ‘to make us wise,’ and to move us. He showed that many of the ideas discovered, or rediscovered, by the social sciences, were in fact introduced by mainly German thinkers, who included Hegel, Kant, Nietzsche, Weber, Husserl, and Heidegger.6 His aim was to show that freedom, and reason, two givens that so many take for granted, were fought for, thought for; that true culture – as opposed to the drug culture, or street culture – has a depth, a reasoned, earned quality that points toward what is good; that there is a unity to knowledge ‘which goes by the name of wisdom.’ A serious life, he says, means being fully aware of the alternatives that face us in the great divisions we encounter: reason—revelation, freedom—necessity, good—evil, self—other, and so on: ‘That is what tragic literature is about.’ In the third and final part of the book he attacked the universities, for what he thought was their enormous dereliction of duty to be islands of reason and autonomy in an ever more politically correct world. ‘The essence of philosophy is the abandonment of all authority in favour of individual human reason…. [The university] must be contemptuous of public opinion because it has within it the source of autonomy – the quest for and even discovery of the truth according to nature. It must concentrate on philosophy, theology, the literary classics, and on those scientists like Newton, Descartes and Leibniz who have the most comprehensive scientific vision and of the relation of what they do to the order of the whole of things. These must help preserve what is most likely to be neglected in a democracy.’7 Bloom also had some harsh things to say about the 1960s (‘barbarians at the gate’), about university colleagues who caved in to student pressure, about the ‘new’ disciplines of social science (‘parts without a whole’), and above all about the M.B.A., the master’s degree in business administration, ‘a great disaster’ because students’ lives were never radically changed by it, as they should be in a proper education.

  In saying all this, Bloom naturally managed to annoy or irritate a great number of people. But the people he annoyed most were his colleagues in the humanities. Bloom’s main plea, echoing F. R. Leavis and Lionel Trilling, was that the university should be above all the home of the humanities, by which he meant ‘that the study of high culture, particularly that of Greece, would provide the models for modern achievement.’8 He made it abundantly clear that he considered the ancient philosophers, novelists and poets – generally speaking the authors of the ‘great books’ – as the men from whom we have most to learn. Their survival is no accident; their thoughts are the fittest.

  Bloom unleashed a whirlwind. The conference at Chapel Hill articulated the opposing view, the view that Bloom was seeking to counter. The conference’s participants denounced what they said was a ‘narrow, out-dated interpretation of the humanities and of culture itself, one based, they frequently pointed out, on works written by “dead white European males.” … The message of the North Carolina conference was that American society has changed too much for this view to prevail any longer. Blacks, women, Latinos and homosexuals are demanding recognition for their canons.’ Professor Fish added, ‘Projects like those of… Bloom all look back to the recovery of the earlier vision of American culture, as opposed to the conception of a kind of ethnic carnival or festival of cultures or ways of life or customs.’9

  We have been here before. Allan Bloom’s book was much longer than T. S. Eliot’s Notes Towards a Definition of Culture and was a more passionate and eloquent account, but the overlap in argument was plain. What was different was that the forty years in between had seen a vast change in the world, in the position of minorities, in universities themselves, in politics. But that change also meant that the response to Bloom’s work was very different from the response to Eliot’s, which had been muted, to say the least.

  Many people took issue with Allan Bloom, but in 1994 he received powerful support from his near-namesake at another American University, Harold Bloom of Yale. In The Western Canon, Harold Bloom was also uncompromising.10 Dismissing feminism, Marxism, multiculturalism, neo-conservatism, Afrocentrism and the postmodern cultural materialists, at least as applied to great literature, Bloom asserted the view that ‘things have however fallen apart, the center has not held, and mere anarchy is in the process of being unleashed upon what used to be called “the learned world.” ‘In great style and at even greater length, he argued that there is such a thing as an aesthetic value in life, that it was his experience, ‘during a lifetime of reading,’ that the aesthetic side to life is an autonomous entity ‘irreducible’ to ideology or metaphysics: ‘Aesthetic criticism returns us to the autonomy of imaginative literature and the sovereignty of the solitary soul, the reader not as a person in society but as the deep self, our ultimate inwardness…. Aesthetic value rises out of memory, and so (as Nietzsche saw) out of pain, the pain of surrendering easier pleasures in favour of much more difficult ones.’11

  After making it plain that he considers the current age ‘the worst of all times for literary criticism,’ he set about constructing, and justifying, his own Western canon, consisting of twenty-six authors whom he considers vital for anyone with an interest in reading, but with the following ‘health warning’: ‘Reading deeply in the Canon will not make one a better or a worse person, a more useful or more harmful citizen. The mind’s dialogue with itself is not primarily a social reality. All that the Western Canon can bring one is the proper use of one’s own solitude, that solitude whose final form is one’s confrontation with one’s own mortality.’12 For Bloom, the centre of the canon is Shakespeare, ‘the largest writer we ever will know,’ and throughout his book he returns time and again to the influences on Shakespeare and his influences on those who came after him. In particular Bloom dwells on Hamlet, King Lear, Othello, and Macbeth, the great tragedies, but also on Falstaff, perhaps the greatest character ever invented because, through him, Shakespeare offers us the ‘psychology of mutability,’ ‘the depiction of self-change on the basis of self-overhearing.’13 For Bloom, what merits inclusion in the canon is a quality of weirdness, of strangeness, of monumental originality that ‘we can never altogether assimilate’ and yet at the same time ‘becomes such a given that we are blinded to its idiosyncrasies.’ After Shakespeare he includes in his list Dante, Chaucer, Cervantes, Milton, Montaigne and Molière, Goethe, Wordsworth, and Jane Austen. He regards Walt Whitman and Emily Dickinson as the centre of the American canon, Dickens’s Bleak House and Eliot’s Middlemarch as the canonical novels, Tolstoy, Ibsen, Joyce, Woolf and Kafka, Borges and Neruda, as worthy of inclusion. But Beckett, Joyce, and Proust are related back to Shakespeare, and in one chapter he argues that Shakespeare, ‘the major psychologist in the world’s history,’ tells us far more about Freud than Freud ever could about the Bard. In fact, in that chapter, Bloom is astute in his reading of several lesser known papers by Freud in which, Bloom shows, Freud (who read Shakespeare in English all his life) acknowledges his heavy debt.’14 In acknowledging Freud as a great stylist, Bloom dismisses the psychoanalytic view of the world as a form of shamanism, ‘an ancient, worldwide technique of healing’ and which, he concludes, may well constitute the final fate of psychoanalysis. In dismissing feminism, multiculturalism, and Afrocentrism as ways to approach literature, because that assimilation must be personal rather than ideological, Bloom does not see himself as being ethnocentric. On the contrary, he specifically says that all great writers are subversive, and he points out that t
he culture of Dante or Cervantes is far more different from, say, the late-twentieth-century East Coast society than is, for example, twentieth-century Latin American society, or black North American society.

  The canon, he says, can never be written in stone, but in the act of achieving it, or trying to achieve it, a sense of competition exists in which people are thinking, judging, weighing one entity against another. People – readers – are ‘enlarging their solitude.’ ‘Without the Canon, we cease to think. You may idealize endlessly about replacing aesthetic standards with ethnocentric and gender considerations, and your social aims may indeed be admirable. Yet only strength can join itself to strength, as Nietzsche perpetually testified.’15 Bloom also coined the phrase ‘anxiety of influence,’ by which he meant that all writers are influenced by other great writers and that, therefore, later writers must know what earlier great writers have written. This does not make imaginative literature the same as scientific literature – i.e., cumulative, not in any direct sense anyway. But it does suggest that later works, in a rough way, develop out of earlier works. This is not evolution in a classically biological sense, but taken in conjunction with the struggle to construct the canon, it does imply that the development of imaginative literature is not entirely random either.

  The Blooms evoked a counter-attack. This took several forms, but responses mostly had one thing in common: whereas the Blooms had written very personal polemics, in a combative, ironic, and even elegiac style, the replies were more prosaic, written ‘more in sorrow than in anger,’ and used detailed scholarship to refute the charges.

  Lawrence Levine’s The Opening of the American Mind was published in 1996.16 Levine, a professor emeritus in history at the University of California at Berkeley, had earlier published a book, Highbrow Lowbrow, which had examined the history of Shakespeare in the United States and concluded that before the nineteenth century ‘high culture’ in America had been enjoyed by all classes and many different ethnic groups. It was only in the second half of the nineteenth century that, in regard to Shakespeare and Grand Opera in particular, a process of ‘sacralisation’ took place, when the distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ culture was stressed. The Opening of the American Mind made a number of points. One, that fights over the canon, and the curriculum, have been going on for more than a hundred years, so the Blooms are nothing new. Such fights, Levine says, are inevitable as a nation changes and redefines itself. He argues that minority groups, ethnic groups, immigrant groups, don’t want to throw out the canon as described by, say, Allan and Harold Bloom, but they do want to add to it works that have been overlooked and that reflect their own experience. 17 And he says that in a country like America, with many immigrants, many different racial and ethnic groups, in a country lacking a central tradition (like France, say), that a narrow canon of the kind suggested by the Blooms is simply impractical, failing the needs of the many different kinds of people, with different experiences. He defends the universities for at least seeking to address America’s changing social structure rather than stick with a past that is not only imaginary but may never have existed. But Levine’s most original contribution was to show that, in fact, the idea of a canon of ‘Great Books’ and ‘Western Civilisation,’ at least in America, ‘enjoyed only a brief ascendancy.’ The idea emerged, he says, after World War I and declined after World War II. He further shows that the inclusion of ‘modern’ writers, like Shakespeare and Walt Whitman, ‘came only after prolonged battles as intense and divisive as those that rage today.’ Going through various accounts of university education in the early nineteenth century, for example, Levine found that James Freeman Clark, who received his A.B. from Harvard in 1829, complained, ‘No attempt was made to interest us in our studies. We were expected to wade through Homer as though the Iliad were a bog…. Nothing was said of the glory and grandeur, the tenderness and charm of this immortal epic. The melody of the hexameters was never suggested to us.’18 Charles Williams Eliot, who assumed the Harvard presidency in 1869, conducted a famous debate with the Princeton president, James McCosh, in the winter of 1885, in favour of diversity over uniformity. Eliot argued that a university ‘while not neglecting the ancient treasures of learning has to keep a watchful eye upon the new fields of discovery, and has to invite its students to walk in new-made as well as in long-trodden paths.’ Columbia University began its celebrated Great Books courses in 1921, ‘which married the Great Books idea with an Aristotelian scholasticism that stressed order and hierarchy.’ The problem then was to have American literature regarded as fit for inclusion in the canon. In the 1920s, for example, Lane Cooper, a professor of English at Cornell, wrote to a colleague, ‘I have done my best to keep courses in American Literature from flourishing too widely,’ adding that such courses ‘have done harm by diverting … attention from better literatures…. There was no teaching of American literature as such in my day at Rutgers.’19 Levine himself cites World War II as hastening change, allotting an important role to Alfred Kazin’s On Native Grounds (1942), which identified the enormous body of imaginative writing and the remarkable ‘experience in national self-discovery’ that had characterised the depression decade and was intensified by ‘the sudden emergence of America as the repository of Western culture in a world overrun by Fascism.’20 Levine did not object to canons as such, merely to their immutability and the very tendency of immutability where canons exist at all. And he acknowledged that the American experience is different from anywhere else, America being a nation of immigrants without a national culture, however much certain scholars might pretend otherwise. This was a reference to the celebrated ‘hyphenated Americans’ – native American, Afro-American, Mexican-American, Italian-American. For Levine, therefore, the arguments over the canon, over history, over high as opposed to low culture, must always be sharper in the United States than elsewhere, precisely because these are arguments about identity.21

  The most fundamental attack on the ‘canon’ came in 1987 from a British academic trained in Chinese studies who was a professor of government at Cornell in America. Martin Bernal is the son of J. D. Bernal, who was himself a distinguished scholar of Irish birth, a Marxist physicist who won the Lenin Peace Prize in 1953 and was author of the four-volume Science in History.

  In the mid-1970s, aware that the Mao era in China was coming to an end, Martin Bernal began to sense that ‘the central focus of danger and interest in the world’ was the east Mediterranean, and he began to study Jewish history. There were, he says, ‘scattered Jewish components’ in his own ancestry, and an interest in his roots led him to study ancient Jewish history and the surrounding peoples. This led to an examination of early Mediterranean languages for the light they threw on prehistory, in particular the ancestry of classical Greece. His research took him ten years before it appeared in book form, but when it was published, it proved very subversive. Bernal eventually demonstrated to his own satisfaction that classical Greek culture – the very basis of the canon – did not develop of its own accord in ancient Greece around 400 BC, as traditional scholarship has it, but was actually derived from North African peoples who were black.

  Black Athena: The Afroasiatic Roots of Classical Civilisation (1987–91) is a massive three-volume work incorporating and synthesising material in philology, archaeology, history, historiography, biblical studies, ethnic studies, sociology, and much else, and so it is not easy to do justice to Bernal’s complex arguments.22 In essence, however, he makes the following points. One is that North Africa, in the form of ancient Egypt – several of whose dynasties were black, in the sense of Negroid – was the predominant influence on classical Greece; that there were extensive trading links; that ancient Egypt was a military power in the area; that many place names in Greece show North African influence; and that the finding of objects of North African origin at classical Greek sites cannot be dismissed as casual trading exchanges. No less controversially, Bernal also claimed that this view of Greece was ‘standard,’ had always pr
evailed in European scholarship, until it was deliberately ‘killed off by ‘racist’ north European scholars in the early nineteenth century, men who wanted to show that Europe, and northern Europe at that, had a monopoly on creative and imaginative thought, that civilisation as we know it was born in Europe, all as one of a number of devices to help justify colonialism and imperialism.23

  Bernal believed that there was once a people who spoke Proto-Afro-Asiatic-Indo-European, which gave rise to all the peoples and languages we see on these continents today. He believes that the break between Afro-asiatic and Indo-European came in the ninth millennium B.C. and that the spread of Afro-Asiatic was the expansion of a culture, long established in the East African Rift Valley at the end of the last ice age in the tenth and ninth millennia BC. These people domesticated cattle and food crops and hunted hippopotamus. Gradually, with the spread of the Sahara, they moved on, some down the Nile valley, some into Saudi Arabia and thus into Mesopotamia, where the first ‘civilisations’ arose.24 Furthermore, civilisation, including writing, developed across a swath of Asia, stretching from India to North Africa, and was in place by 1100 BC or earlier. Bernal introduces evidence of a succession of Upper Egyptian black pharaohs sharing the name Menthope who had as their divine patron the hawk and bull god, Mntw or Mont. ‘It is during the same century that the Cretan palaces were established and one finds the beginnings there of the bull-cult which appears on the walls of the palaces and was central to Greek mythology about King Minos and Crete. It would therefore seem plausible to suppose that the Cretan developments directly or indirectly reflected the rise of the Egyptian Middle Kingdom.’25 But this is only a beginning. Bernal examined classical Greek plays, such as Aeschylus’s The Supplicants, for Egyptian influences; he looked at correspondences between their gods and functions; he looked at loan words, river and mountain names (Kephisos, the name of rivers and streams found all over Greece with no explanation, he derives from Kbh, ‘a common Egyptian river name “Fresh” ’). In a chapter on Athens, he argues that this name is derived from the Egyptian Ht Nt: ‘In Antiquity, Athena was consistently identified with the Egyptian goddess Nt or Neit. Both were virgin divinities of warfare, weaving and wisdom. The cult of Neit was centred on the city of Sais in the Western delta, whose citizens felt a special affinity with the Athenians.’26 And so on into pottery styles, military terms, and the meaning of the sphinxes.