Closing of the American Mind

by Allan Bloom

  Our desire for conflict reduction accounts for the great popularity of the word “dialectic”—in our sense, the Marxist sense—for, beginning in opposites it ends in synthesis, all charms and temptations united in harmony. In philosophy and morals the hardest and most essential rule is “You can’t eat your cake and have it too,” but dialectic overcomes this rule. Socratic dialectic takes place in speech and, although drawn forward by the search for synthesis, always culminates in doubt. Socrates’ last word was that he knew that he knew nothing. Marx’s dialectic takes place in deed and culminates in the classless society, which also puts an end to theoretical conflicts, now known as ideologies. Historical dialectic provides an absolute ground and happy resolution for our relative life-styles. Marx’s formula that “Mankind never sets problems for itself which it cannot solve” suits one side of our national temper. Roosevelt said much the same thing when he announced, “We have nothing to fear but fear itself.” This optimism is a national strength and is connected with our original project of mastering of nature. But that project itself is not unproblematic and makes sense only when kept within limits. One of these is the sanctity of human nature. It must not be mastered. Roosevelt’s dictum is nonsense when blown up into cosmic proportions. Human nature must not be altered in order to have a problem-free world. Man is not just a problem-solving being, as behaviorists would wish us to believe, but a problem-recognizing and -accepting being.

  Marx’s appeal does, nonetheless, touch us close to home as the fulfillment of what we set out to do—solve problems that God and nature had previously seemed to make insoluble, and earlier men had made a virtue of living with. Man has always had to come to terms with God, love and death. They made it impossible to be perfectly at home on earth. But America is coming to terms with them in new ways. God was slowly executed here; it took two hundred years, but local theologians tell us He is now dead. His place has been taken by the sacred. Love was put to death by psychologists. Its place has been taken by sex and meaningful relationships. That has taken only about seventy-five years. It should not be surprising that a new science, thanatology, or death with dignity, is on the way to putting death to death. Coming to terms with the terror of death, Socrates’ long and arduous education, learning how to die, will no longer be necessary. For death isn’t what it used to be. What will take its place is not yet clear. Engels had a divination of what is needed when he said that the classless society would last, if not forever, a very long time. This reminds us of Dottore Dulcamare in The Elixir of Love, who says that he is known throughout the whole universe—and elsewhere. All one has to do is forget about eternity or blur the distinction between it and temporality; then the most intractable of man’s problems will have been resolved. On Sunday mornings educated men used to be harangued about death and eternity, made to give them a bit of attention. This is not a danger to be run in doing battle with the Sunday New York Times. Forgetting, in a variety of subtle forms, is one of our primary modes of problem-solving. We are learning to “feel comfortable” with God, love and even death.

  The way we digest the European things is well illustrated by the influence of Thomas Mann’s Death in Venice on American consciousness. The story was enormously popular with generations of university students, for it seemed to express the mysteries and sufferings of sophisticated Europeans. It fit in with our preoccupation of Freud and with the artist; its homosexual theme attracted curiosity, and much more than curiosity in some, at a time when imagination had little to feed on so far as forbidden themes were concerned. It was a little like a compendium of the best that was being said around the turn of the century. In Death in Venice, with what I believe to be a rather heavy Freudian hand, Mann analyzes the favorite subject and hero of poets and novelists since the invention of culture—the artist, that is, himself. The setting and the action of the story suggest the decline of the West; and the decay and demise of its hero, Aschenbach, teach the failure of sublimation, the shakiness and hollowness of his cultural superstructure. Underlying it all are hidden drives, primal, untamed, which are the real motives of his higher endeavor. Awareness of this undermines his life work without providing any acceptable alternatives. Much of this is a gloss on Mann’s famous statement in Tonio Kröger that “the artist is a bourgeois with a guilty conscience,” which I take to mean that he was experiencing all the post-romantic doubts about the artist’s ground or his access to the sublime, that he thought the reality is the bourgeois, but that the artist’s troubled conscience leads him somewhere out above, from the point of view of morals, and somewhere down below, from the point of view of motives. Aschenbach is a writer, an heir to the German tradition, but clearly not the spiritual aristocrat Goethe was. His self-possession is based on lack of self-knowledge. In Venice he touches the roots, finds out what he really wants; but there is nothing noble or even tolerable he can do with his awareness. He withers away horribly, finally dying of the plague afflicting that beautiful but decadent city. The Freudian view of sublimation, as opposed to the Nietzschean, is that there is a fixed goal of sexuality, a natural reality toward which it is pointed. Accordingly, civilized behavior rests on that foundation, is a secondary satisfaction and, hence, really not choiceworthy if the primary satisfaction were available. Freud’s account of sexuality cannot help making the careful observer regret civilization and long for direct sexual satisfaction. Nietzsche, on the other hand, thought that writing a poem could be as primary an erotic act as sexual intercourse. There is no fixed nature, just different levels of spirituality. From this point of view, Aschenbach represents both romanticism in its longing for lost nature and scientism in its bleak characterization of nature, with the addition of post-Nietzschean pathos. But Death in Venice does deal with the theme common to Freud and Nietzsche—the relation of sexual sublimation to culture. The coming to awareness of the infrastructure of culture is deadly to culture, and Mann is depicting the crisis of a civilization. Sublimation has lost its creative or molding power, and now there is desiccated culture and besmirched nature.

  But I do not think this was how it was received by Americans. They were titillated and really took it as an early manifesto of the sexual-liberation movement. Even the most distinguished talents, or especially the most distinguished talents, suffer from these obscure longings repressed by society. There is nothing so bad about them; and people should not be intimidated by public opinion, should learn to accept themselves. They have nothing to fear but fear itself. In short, Aschenbach is a man aching to “come out of the closet.” There may have been a bit of this in Mann, the need to be open about repressed desires, which, because of the climate of his time, had to come out in tragic garb, lacerating themselves, weeping and wailing. Surely Gide’s Nietzscheanism was motivated largely by this. In order to be sexually liberated, so Gide seems to think, we must be supermen, beyond good and evil. He latches on to Nietzsche’s immoralism for the sake of leveling bourgeois sexual morals, using a cannon to kill a gnat. Nietzsche would have had nothing but contempt for this. The man who said all greatness requires “semen in the blood” would not have sympathized with men obsessed by sexual repression, who could not make something sublime out of their eroticism, who longed for “natural” satisfaction and public approval to boot. To Nietzsche, Gide would have appeared to be a bourgeois in nihilistic drag. To the extent that such self-expression might have been Mann’s intention, it would have been the sign of his own decadence, his creative impotence and desire to escape responsibility in aimless creature, as opposed to creator, pleasures.

  The sexual interpretations of art and religion so powerfully made by Nietzsche, and less powerfully but more popularly made by Freud, had a corrupting effect on Americans. They noticed the sublime less than the sex in sexual sublimation. What in Nietzsche was intended to lead to the heights was used here to debunk the heights in favor of present desire. Any explanation of the higher in terms of the lower has that tendency, especially in a democracy, where there is envy of what makes special claims
, and the good is supposed to be accessible to all. And this is one of the deep reasons why Freud found such an immediate audience in America. For all of the Continental sturm und drang, he believed in nature, and nature as Locke taught it, animal nature. He just added sex to work to compose his formula for healthy living—“love and work”—for he really could not explain love. This is what we were raised to believe. It accords with science rather than relying, as does Nietzsche, on poetic vapors. There is a solid ground, one that appeals to our native empiricism, in his interpretation of what eros really wants. Moreover, science rather than poetry is our preferred means of talking about the obscene. All this, plus the promise of some kind of satisfaction of our desires and relief from our miseries, made Freud a winner from the outset, the most accessible of all the great Continentals. He provided the license for the centrality of sex in public life, which is so characteristic of our day. He ultimately seemed too moralistic, not open enough. But all one had to do was imagine new social structures that demanded less repression for their functioning. This was where Marx was useful. Or one could simply forget about the problems concerning the relation between eros and culture, or else posit a natural harmony between the two. Freud, riding the crest of a wave of German philosophy, enabled Americans to think the satisfaction of their sexual desires was the most important element of happiness. He provided rationalization for instinct, although this was surely not his intention.

  Sex immigrated to the United States with the special status given those who make scientific and literary contributions to our culture. But when it got here, it behaved just like everything else American. Gone was the plaintive tone, the poetry, the justification based on civilization’s dependence on sublimation. Just as we had cut away the camouflage disguising economic needs—such as the Parthenon and Chartres—in order to concentrate efficiently on those needs themselves, so we demystified sexual desires, seeing them for what they really are, in order to satisfy them more efficiently. This brought into the Lockean world the second focus of human nature, the one concentrated on by Rousseau and those he influenced. The basic rights are “life, liberty, and the pursuit of property and sex.” “Give us your poor, your sexually starved….” Freud made it possible to consider sexual repression a medical complaint, and therefore endowed it with the prestige automatically enjoyed by anything having to do with health in a nation devoted to self-preservation. There is a tendency to neglect Rousseau’s reminder that one does not die from not satisfying this hunger, and that even great seducers’ lusts can be calmed by the certainty of the death penalty. Thus we demystify economy and sexuality, satisfying their primary demands, taking away what our philosophy tells us is their creative impulse, and then we complain we have no culture. We can always go to the opera between office and bed. In the Soviet Union they are dependent on operas from the bad old days, because tyranny prevents artistic expression; we are dependent on the same operas, because the thirsts that produced artistic need have been slaked. I cannot forget the Amherst freshman who asked in naive and good-natured bewilderment, “Should we go back to sublimation?” To the sugar-free diet substitute, as it were. This is what happened in America to the sublime, in all of the subtle meanings given to it from Rousseau and Kant to Nietzsche and Freud. I was charmed by the lad’s candor but could not regard him as a serious candidate for culture. Because we have come to take the unnecessary to be necessary, we have lost all sense of necessity, either natural or cultural.

  The crucial step was taken, however, when sex as life-style came on the scene. Up until then there was a certain rough-and-ready natural set of guidelines for sex. In the old America it was taken for granted that sex had a teleology—reproduction—and was treated as a means to this end. Everything not conducive to this is useless and even dangerous, to be forgotten or controlled by law, disapproval, conscience and, yes, reason. Freud had the effect of shaking sex loose from this definite connection. It is a force without an end, capable of serving many functions; and its wild, diffuse energies must be given some form if a person is to be happy. But Freud’s real naturalism, underlying the explosive indeterminateness that he borrowed from Nietzsche, and the imperatives of health and the integrated personality provided limitations and a structure for legitimate sexual expression. There is no place in Freud for the satisfaction of the kinds of desire to which Mann gives voice in Death in Venice. They are explained and cured by Freud but not accepted on their own terms. In Mann they are somehow premonitory and like cries of the damned plunging into nothingness. Such desires search for significance—perhaps this is the case with everything erotic—but nothing in the world can give it to them. These desires are certainly not satisfied with the transfer of their cases from the tribunal of the judge and the priest to that of the doctor, or with being explained away. People can readily accept reductionism in everything except what most concerns them. Neither bourgeois society nor natural science has a place for the nonreproductive aspect of sex. With the slackening of bourgeois austerity and the concomitant emancipation of the harmless pleasures, a certain tolerance of harmless sex came into fashion. But this was not enough, because nobody really wants his dearest desires to be put in the same category as itching and scratching.

  In America, especially, there is always a need for moral justification. Life-style—an expression that came out of the same school of thought as sublimation and was actually understood to be the product of sublimation, but had never been associated with it in America because of the division of labor that had Freud specializing in sublimation and Weber in life-style—turned out to be a godsend. “Life-style” justifies any way of life, as does “value” any opinion. It does away with the natural structure of the world, which is only raw material for the stylist’s artistic hand. The very expression makes all moralisms and naturalisms stop short at the limit of the sacred ground, aware of their limits and respectful of creativity. Moreover, with our curious mixture of traditions, life-styles are accorded rights, so defense of them is a moral cause, justifying the sweet passions of indignation at the violators of human rights, against whom these tastes, before they became life-styles, were so politically and psychologically defenseless. Now they can call upon all the lovers of human rights throughout the world to join in their defense, for the threat to any group’s rights is a threat to them all. Sadomasochists and Solidarity are bound together in the common cause of human rights, their fates depending on the success of the crusade in their favor. Sex is no longer an activity but a cause. In the past there was a respectable place for marginality, bohemia. But it had to justify its unorthodox practices by its intellectual and artistic achievement. Life-style is so much freer, easier, more authentic and democratic. No attention has to be paid to content.

  Life-style was first popularized here to describe and make acceptable the lives of people who do attractive things that are frowned upon by society. It was identical to counterculture. Two great expressions in the American usage, draped in the authority lent by their philosophic genealogy, provided moral warrant for people to live exactly as they please. Counterculture, of course, enjoyed the dignity attaching to culture, and was intended as a reproach to the bourgeois excuse for a culture we see around us. What actually goes on in a counterculture or a life-style—whether it is ennobling or debasing—makes no difference. No one is forced to think through his practices. It is impossible to do so. Whatever you are, whoever you are, is the good. All this is testimony to the amazing power, about which Tocqueville speaks, of abstractions in a democratic society. The mere words change everything. It is also a commentary on our moralism. What begins in a search if not precisely for selfish pleasure—historians of the future will not look back on us as a race of hedonists who knew how to “enjoy,” in spite of all of our talk about it—then at least for avoidance of and release from suffering or distress, transmogrified into a life-style and a right, becomes the ground of moral superiority. The comfortable, unconstrained life is morality.

  One can see this in so m
any domains across the whole political spectrum. Self-serving is expressed as, and really believed to be, disinterested principle. When one looks at the earnest, middle-class proponents of birth control, abortion and easy divorce—with their social concern, their humorless self-confidence and masses of statistics—one cannot help thinking that all this serves them very well. This is not to deny the reality of the problems presented by too many children for the poor, the terrible consequences of rapes and battered wives. However, none of those problems really belongs to the middle classes, who are not reproducing themselves, are rarely raped or battered, but who are the best-rewarded beneficiaries of what they themselves propose. If one of their proposals entailed a sacrifice of freedom or pleasure for them or their class, they would be more morally plausible. As it is, all their proposals contribute to their own capacity to choose, in the contemporary sense of choice. Motives that could easily be so flawed should not be, but are, the basis for moral smugness. In this case, as in so many others, making sexual relations easy becomes identical to morality. I fear that the most self-righteous of Americans nowadays are precisely those who have most to gain from what they preach. This is made all the more distasteful when their weapons are constructed out of philosophic teachings the intentions of which are the opposite of theirs.