Closing of the American Mind

by Allan Bloom

  More recently, however, this has changed. The violence has a certain charm of its own, the joy of the knife. It proves decision or commitment. The new order is not waiting, but has to be imposed by the will of man; it is supported by nothing but the will. Will has become the key word, both Right and Left. In the past it was, to be sure, thought that will is necessary but secondary—that the cause came first. Nietzsche formulated the new way most provocatively when he said, “A good war makes sacred every cause.” The causes have no status; they are values. It is the positing that is essential. The transformation of violence from a means to at least a kind of end helps to show the difference, and the link, between Marxism and Fascism. Georges Sorel, the author of Reflections on Violence, was a man of the Left who influenced Mussolini. The crucial thought goes back to Nietzsche by way of Bergson: If creativity presupposes chaos—hence strife and overcoming—and man is now creating an order of peace in which there is no strife, is successfully rationalizing the world, the conditions for creativity, i.e., humanity, will be destroyed. Therefore chaos must be willed, as against the peace and order of socialism. Marx himself recognized that man’s historical greatness and progress came from contradictions he had to struggle to overcome. If, as Marx promises, there are to be no more contradictions after the revolution, will there be man? Older revolutionaries were willing peace, prosperity, harmony and reason, i.e., the last man. The newer breed wills chaos. Hardly anyone swallowed what Nietzsche prescribed whole, but the argument was infectious. It surely was impressive to Italian and German intellectuals in whose eyes the Fascist and Nazi “movements” found favor. Self-assertion, not justice or a clear view of the future, was the crucial element.

  Thus determination, will, commitment, caring (here is where this now silly expression got its force), concern or what have you become the new virtues. The new revolutionary charm became evident in the U.S. in the sixties, much to the distaste of old Marxists. There is also something of this in the current sympathy for terrorists, because “they care.” I have seen young people, and older people too, who are good democratic liberals, lovers of peace and gentleness, struck dumb with admiration for individuals threatening or using the most terrible violence for the slightest and tawdriest reasons. They have a sneaking suspicion that they are face to face with men of real commitment, which they themselves lack. And commitment, not truth, is believed to be what counts. Trotsky’s and Mao’s correction of Marx in calling for “permanent revolution” takes account of this thirst for the act of revolution, and its appeal lies therein. The radical students of the sixties called themselves “the movement,” unaware that this was also the language used by young Nazis in the thirties and was the name of a Nazi journal, Die Bewegung. Movement takes the place of progress, which has a definite direction, a good direction, and is a force that controls men. Progress was what the old revolutions were evidence of. Movement has none of this naive, moralistic nonsense in it. Motion rather than fixity is our condition—but motion without any content or goal not imposed on it by man’s will. Revolution in our times is a mixture of what it was earlier thought to be and what André Gide called a gratuitous act, represented in one of his novels by the unprovoked and unmotivated murder of a stranger on a train.

  The continuing effort of the mutant breed of Marxists has been to derationalize Marx and turn Nietzsche into a leftist. Nietzsche’s colossal political failure is attested to by the facts that the Right, which was his only hope that his teaching would have its proper effect, has utterly disappeared, and he himself was tainted in its ugly last gasp, while today virtually every Nietzschean, as well as Heideggerian, is a leftist. Georg Lukacs, the most prominent Marxist intellectual of this century, set the ball rolling. As a young man in Germany, he frequented the circle of Stefan George as well as that of Max Weber and was aware of the power of the things being discussed there about history and culture. This affected his later work and made him take a look back toward the much richer Hegel, who, for older Marxists, had been simply superseded by Marx.6

  The mature Marx had almost nothing to say about art, music, literature or education, or about what the life of man would be when the yoke of oppression was lifted. His early “humanistic” writings were looked to by some for the inspiration lacking in the later ones, but they turned out to be thin and derivative stuff. Since the Nietzscheans spoke so marvelously well about all these things, why not just appropriate what they said? So they took over “the last man,” whom they identified with Marx’s bourgeois, and “the superman,” whom they identified with the victorious proletarian after the revolution. The diminution of man and the impoverishment of his spiritual life as inimitably described by Nietzsche strengthened Marx’s position, if one just believed that somehow or other capitalism was the cause of “the last man” and that, with capitalism removed, new energies would be released. Radical egalitarism is the cure for the evils of egalitarianism so marvelously portrayed by Nietzsche.

  To take another example: Freud talked about interesting things not found anywhere in Marx. The whole psychology of the unconscious was completely alien to Marx, as was its inner motor, eros. None of this could be incorporated directly into Marx. But if Freud’s interpretation of the cause of neuroses and his treatment of the maladjusted could itself be interpreted as bourgeois errors that serve enslavement to the capitalist control of the means of production, then Marx would move in on the Freudian scene. What Freud said were permanent contradictions between human nature and society could be set in motion dialectically, and in a socialist society there would be no need for the repression that causes neuroses. So Freud was neatly enrolled in the Marxist legions, adding to the charm of economics that of eros, and thereby providing a solution to the problem of what men are going to do after the revolution—a problem left unsolved by Marx. This is what we find in Marcuse and many others, who simply do not talk about the difficulty posed by the contradiction between Marx’s fundamental principles and those of Freud. Two powerful systems are served up in a single package. Freud is the really meaty part of the concoction. Marx provides a generalized assurance that capitalism is indeed at fault and that the problems can be solved by more equality and more freedom, that the liberated people will possess all the virtues.

  “The last man” interpretation of the bourgeois is reinforced by a certain ambiguity in the meaning of the word “bourgeois.” Bourgeois is associated in the popular consciousness, especially in America, with Marx. But there is also the bourgeois as the enemy of the artists. The capitalist and the philistine bourgeois are supposed to be the same, but Marx presents only the economic side, assuming, without adequate warrant, that it can account for both the moral and esthetic deformities of the bourgeois described by the artists, and for the artists themselves. Doubt that this treatment of the bourgeois and the artist really works is one of the prime motives of those attracted to Nietzsche, whose central theme is the artist. As I have said many times and in many ways, most of the great European novelists and poets of the last two hundred years were men of the Right; and Nietzsche is in that respect merely their complement. For them the problem was in one way or another equality, which has no place for genius. Thus they are the exact opposite of Marx. But somehow he who says he hates the bourgeoisie can be seen to be a friend of the Left. Therefore when the Left got the idea of embracing Nietzsche, it got, along with him, all the authority of the nineteenth- and twentieth-century literary tradition. Goethe and Flaubert and Yeats hated the bourgeosie—so Marx was right: these writers simply had not recognized that the bourgeosie could be overcome by the proletariat. And Nietzsche, taken from the correct angle, can be said to be a proponent of the Revolution. When one reads the early Partisan Review, edited entirely by leftists, one sees its unlimited enthusiasm for Joyce and Proust, whom they were introducing to this country, apparently in the opinion that they represented the art of the socialist future, although these artists thought the future of art lay in the opposite direction.

  The later Marxists in G
ermany were haunted by the idea of culture, repelled by the vulgarity of the bourgeoisie, and perhaps wondering whether they could still write out a blank check to culture in the socialist future. They wanted to preserve past greatness, of which they were much more conscious than their predecessors. Their Marxism had really shrunk back within the confines of the traditional hatred of the bourgeois, plus a vague hope that the proletariat would bring about cultural renewal or refreshment. One can easily see this in Adorno. But it is also easy to see that in Sartre and Merleau-Ponty, too, the bourgeois is the real concern. The working-class Marxists still thought about surplus value and other such authentic Marxist concerns. The intellectuals were obsessed by culture and, as Leszek Kolakowski has so aptly pointed out, found themselves without a proletariat. This is why the students of the sixties were so welcome to many of them. But so were they to Heidegger. They reminded him of something.

  It is well to point out, in addition, that as prosperity increased, the poor began to become embourgeoisé. Instead of an increase in class consciousness and strife, there was a decrease. One could foresee a time, at least in the developed countries, when everybody would be a bourgeois. So another prop was knocked out from under Marxism. The issue is not really rich and poor but vulgarity. Marxists were coming perilously close to the notion that egalitarian man as such is bourgeois, and that they must join him or become culture snobs. Only an absolutely unsubstantiated dogma that the bourgeois worker is just an illness of our economic system and a product of false consciousness keeps them from saying, as did Tocqueville, that this is the nature of democracy and that you must accept it or rebel against it. Any such rebellion would not be Marx’s revolution. One might be tempted to assert that these advanced Marxists are just too cultured for egalitarian society. They only avoid that recognition by calling it bourgeois.

  In general, sophisticated Marxism became cultural criticism of life in the Western democracies. For obvious reasons it generally stayed away from serious discussion of the Soviet Union. Some of that criticism was profound, some of it superficial and petulant. But none of it came from Marx or a Marxist perspective. It was, and is, Nietzschean, variations on our way of life as that of “the last man.” If we look again at that psychology so influential in America of which I spoke in the beginning of this chapter, we are now in a position to see that tradition-directed, other-directed and inner-directed are just slight modifications of Weber’s three kinds of legitimacy, with other-directed (read bourgeois) derived from economic or bureaucratic rationality guided by the demands of the market or public opinion, and inner-directed identical to charismatic, to the value-giving self. Weber’s prophet is replaced by the socialist, egalitarian individual. There is not a single element of Marx in any of this, other than the absolutely unsubstantiated assertion that the socialist is the self-legislator. Discussion of the inner-directed man is empty. There are no examples that can be pointed to. Weber at least provided some examples, even though his definition may have been problematic. One wonders whether Weber’s contention that the value giver is an aristocrat of the spirit is less plausible than that of those who say that just anyone is, if he has the right therapist, or if a socialist society is constructed for him. This egalitarian transformation of Weber permitted anyone who is not to the left to be diagnosed as mentally ill. Left critics of psychoanalysis called it a tool of bourgeois conformism; one wonders, however, whether the critics are not manipulators of psychological therapy in the service of Left conformism. Adorno’s meretricious fabrication of the authoritarian and democratic personality types has exactly the same sources as the inner-directed-other-directed typology, and the same sinister implications.

  So Nietzsche came to America. His conversion to the Left was easily accepted here as genuine, because Americans cannot believe that any really intelligent and good person does not at bottom share the Will Rogers Weltanschauung, “I never met a man I didn’t like.” Nietzsche’s naturalization was accomplished in many waves: some of us went to Europe to find him; he came with the emigrès; and most recently professors of comparative literature have gotten heavily into the import business, getting their goods from Paris, where deconstructing Nietzsche and Heidegger and reconstructing them on the Left has been the principal philosophical métier since the Liberation. From this last source Heidegger and Neitzsche now come under their own names, treading on the red carpet rolled out for them by their earlier envoys. Academic psychology, sociology, comparative literature and anthropology have been dominated by them for a long time. But their passage from the academy to the marketplace is the real story. A language developed to explain to knowers how bad we are has been adopted by us to declare to the world how interesting we are. Somehow the goods got damaged in transit. Marcuse began in Germany in the twenties by being something of a serious Hegel scholar. He ended up here writing trashy culture criticism with a heavy sex interest in One Dimensional Man and other well-known books. In the Soviet Union, instead of the philosopher-king they got the ideologist tyrant; in the United States the culture critic became the voice of Woodstock.

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  6 Anyone wishing to see this now popular mixture of Marx with Hegel and Nietzsche-Heidegger in a philosophically serious expression must turn to the works of Alexandre Kojève, the most intelligent Marxist of the twentieth century. He was forced to treat Marx as a mere intellectual who disseminated with a few changes the thought of the real philosopher, Hegel. Moreover, Kojève faced “the last man” question squarely: Marxists, i.e., rationalists, must live with “the last man.” He is the result of rational history, Kojève agrees with Nietzsche. Only mystifiers of one kind or another, promoting wild, irrational negativity, could, he thought, avoid this conclusion. Merleau-Ponty and Sartre were strongly influenced by him and took his hint.

  OUR IGNORANCE

  In reflecting on the language about which I have just written, the thought behind it and the way it has been received in America, I am reminded of one of my teachers, who wrote a Ten Commandments for Americans that began, “I am the Lord thy God who brought thee out of the house of the European tyrants into my own land, America: Relax!” As we have seen, these words we have half digested are the distillations of great questions that must be faced if one is to live a serious life: reason-revelation, freedom-necessity, democracy-aristocracy, good-evil, body-soul, self-other, city-man, eternity-time, being-nothing. Our condition of doubt makes us aware of alternatives but has not until recently given us the means to resolve our doubt about the primacy of any of the alternatives. A serious life means being fully aware of the alternatives, thinking about them with all the intensity one brings to bear on life-and-death questions, in full recognition that every choice is a great risk with necessary consequences that are hard to bear. That is what tragic literature is about. It articulates all the noble things men want and perhaps need and shows how unbearable it is when it appears that they cannot coexist harmoniously. One need only remember what the choice between believing in God or rejecting Him used to entail for those who faced it. Or, to use a lesser but equally relevant example, think of Tocqueville, one of the rarest flowers of the old French aristocracy, choosing equality over the splendor of aristocracy because he believed it to be juster, even though it would never be salubrious for a Pascal, a man who consumed himself in the contemplation of God’s existence, and even though the absence of such intransigent confrontation with the grounds of all things would impoverish the life of man and diminish his seriousness. These are real choices, possible only for one who faces real questions.

  We, on the other hand, have taken these words, which point toward a rich lode of serious questions, and treated them as though they were answers, in order to avoid confronting them ourselves. They are not Sphinxlike riddles to which we must play the daring Oedipus, but facts behind which we need not go and which structure the world of concern to us. What has existentialism done to being-nothing for us? Or value to good-evil; history to eternity-time; creativity to freedom-necessity; the sacred
to reason-revelation? The old tragic conflicts reappear newly labeled as assurances: “I’m OK, you’re OK.” Choice is all the rage these days, but it does not mean what it used to mean. In a free society where people are free—responsible—who can consistently not be “pro-choice”? However, when the word still had some shape and consistency, a difficult choice meant to accept difficult consequences in the form of suffering, disapproval of others, ostracism, punishment and guilt. Without this, choice was believed to have no significance. Accepting the consequences for affirming what really counts is what gives Antigone her nobility; unwillingness to do so is what makes her sister Ismene less admirable. Now, when we speak of the right to choice, we mean that there are no necessary consequences, that disapproval is only prejudice and guilt only a neurosis. Political activism and psychiatry can handle it. In this optic Hester Prynne and Anna Karenina are not ennobling exemplars of the intractability of human problems and the significance of choice, but victims whose sufferings are no longer necessary in our enlightened age of heightened consciousness. America has no-fault automobile accidents, no-fault divorces, and it is moving with the aid of modern philosophy toward no-fault choices.

  Conflict is the evil we most want to avoid, among nations, among individuals and within ourselves. Nietzsche sought with his value philosophy to restore the harsh conflicts for which men were willing to die, to restore the tragic sense of life, at a moment when nature had been domesticated and men become tame. That value philosophy was used in America for exactly the opposite purpose—to promote conflict-resolution, bargaining, harmony. If it is only a difference of values, then conciliation is possible. We must respect values, but they must not get in the way of peace.7 Thus Nietzsche contributed to what he was trying to cure. Conflict, the condition of creativity for Nietzsche, is for us a cry for therapy. I keep thinking of my Atlanta taxi driver and his Gestalt therapy. Kant argued that men are equal in dignity because of their capacity for moral choice. It is the business of society to provide the conditions for such choice and esteem for those who achieve it. With the intermediary of value relativism, we have been able to simplify the formula to: Men are equal in dignity. Our business is to distribute esteem equally. Rawls’s A Theory of Justice is the instruction manual for such distribution. Kant’s theory of justice makes it possible to understand Anna Karenina as a significant expression of our situation; Rawls’s does the same for Fear of Flying.