The Honorable Allan Bloom

In spite of all her objections to various things I've said, or been alleged to have said or implied, our friend and fellow llama devotée Ms. Cokesbury suggested I say some things about my dealings with Allan Bloom, famous for his book The Closing of the American Mind. So today's entry is about that. This may also satisfy another reader (who also never leaves comments), an old high school friend we can call "Frodo," who has all sorts of half-baked ideas about the deeper meanings of these entries.

At least he knows good barbecue.

Anyway, an entry that fails to meet my exacting once a week schedule. I'll be in Detroit next Tuesday, so this will have to do. Have a nice Thanksgiving.

When I was a graduate student at the University of Chicago, I was only certain about a couple of things: Chicago was a hell of a lot colder than Dallas, and I was ignorant and approaching stupid. The philosophy department was a scary place, so while most of my classes were taken there, I looked around for other things, including the Committee on Social Thought, the Committee on Ideas and Methods, and even took a couple of courses in Greek, thinking I might try a degree in Classics. (The whole scam I attempted, to transfer to UT Austin for a year to do lots of Greek, and then come back to Chicago for the PhD, is a whole 'nother story.) In any case, this landed me in Bloom's class on "Literature and Political Philosophy." To be perfectly honest, at this point in my intellectual career I was at least as interested in sex, baseball, drinking beer, and playing basketball, as I was in understanding either the new theory of reference or Aristotle's theory of the mind. But I really like Jonathan Swift, and Bloom was reading Gulliver's Travels, so I signed up. (The cool thing at Chicago was that it was easy to take all sorts of classes outside of one's degree, which is how I ended up in a course on Kant's Critique of Judgement taught by the incandescently brilliant Charles Wegener, and in a couple of courses of Paul Ricoeur's on narratology, and even one on Greek taught by James Redfield.)

I thought this was a class that would be full of insight; I'd sort of heard about Bloom, and the reading list was great. I even attended regularly.

Here's how it would go. Bloom would walk in, sputter and stutter and say some stuff that wasn't either terribly articulate or coherent, and which seemed to have very little to do with the text or its issues, regardless of how broadly one wishes to construe the word "interpret." There were cynics like me, who thought this was kind of a waste of time, and then there were the Bloom acolytes, who just ate this shit up with a spoon. They were convinced they were in the presence of genius, and somehow thought it might rub off on them (cognitive osmosis, as it were.)

I talked to one of these "geniuses" later, who found out I was taking a course on Rawls' A Theory of Justice with Christine Korsgaard (who is cool, by the way). His entire comment, full of erudition and wisdom, was to dismiss this text as "a big green book, not worth reading or even wondering about." This guy is probably pulling down 6 figures telling Richard Mellon Scaife that he is just huge.

Anyway, so this doesn't go on too long, I'd just about had it with this poseur, who didn't seem to understand his own lectures, and didn't seem to have much to say in any case. Then one day, just as I was about ready to drop the course, Bloom pointed out that "no interesting political literature is being published in the Western Hemisphere today." (This would have been around 1982.) While I'm pretty timid in such settings, this little bit of ludicrous foolishness forced me to raise my hand and ask about Borges and Neruda (and one--if one weren't big Al--could immediately name 500 authors in the Western Hemisphere writing interesting political (black, Hispanic, feminist, Asian-American, magical realism, queer, etc. etc.) literature). Bloom--the great intellect, the mind with an unquenchable thirst for wisdom, etc.--said he'd never read Neruda, and that the very point of Borges was to be apolitical. Now one can argue about the latter, even though later I learned that this was simply a classic Straussian bit of logical legerdemain (and is wholly question begging, anyway); the former was something he should have been embarrassed to admit in public. That was when I realized I was wasting my time listening to this overrated pompous ass, and took off for good. He also had informed us that we weren't going to have time to get to the Swift text anyway.

I took one more course with him, in a weird sort of way. He and Saul Bellow were teaching a very secret course on Proust's A La Recherche du Temps Perdu, only for those who were let in on the secret (a friend in the Divinity School hipped me to it). There were about eight of us in there, and Bellow would read a passage--en Français, sans doute--and then Bloom would comment. Bellow seemed to spend most of his time making fun of what Bloom said, which I (again) found to be mere sound, signifying nothing. This went on for a few weeks; then one day after class I was talking to one of the more erudite members of the class, who told me the only reason he was there was to see if they were going to discuss the passage where Marcel discovers his mentor Baron de Charlus enjoying a bit of the ol' S & M, being tied up to a bed and beaten by a servant.

I thought that while this might be a sufficient reason for that guy, it wasn't for me. So I never went back to that class.

Anyway, this is going on far too long for something that no one reads. Suffice it to say that I was never impressed by Bloom's intellect (and found Bellow's Ravelstein almost unreadable; while I have my issues with Bellow, that particular one was unique with this text), I thought his translation of Émile was okay (especially given the competition), but all his notes were in the Pléiade edition, and his edition made it seem to me that he was passing them off as his own.

Ryle has a nice review of Bloom's translation of The Republic in The New York Review of Books. You have to pay $3.00 for it, but here's a link to Bloom's response, and if you want to go the original, this will also work:

http://www.nybooks.com/articles/10998

You don't have to be a particularly good reader to see Bloom's typical strategy in this piece; a couple of droll witticisms (that are mostly beside the point), a few ad hominem attacks on Gilbert Ryle, and a couple of remarks of substance that are really quite minor but which clearly offended the saintly Professor Bloom, who seems almost to soil himself at the possibility that his humble offering to the Temple of Wisdom may itself not be perfect. If I were to respond following Bloom's strategy, I might say something a bit smarmy and small-minded, such as

Perhaps Professor Bloom is offended by the possiblity that everyone knows Ryle's characterization of Cartesian res cogitans as the "ghost in the machine," and is simply envious of the fact that when no one remembers Bloom, they will remember Ryle. To draw a distinction--something always near and dear to the analytic philosopher's heart--perhaps Bloom should recognize the salient difference between being smart and affecting the trappings (club tie, nervous tic, polyglot but jejune erudition) of being smart. In a philosophical pissing match between Bloom and Ryle, Ryle wins before Bloom gets unzipped.

But it is the intellectual support he provided to some folks I find pretty obnoxious that is both politically unappetizing and somewhat peculiar, given Bloom's sexual orientation and his political supporters' views of what Mr. Smithers calls his "alternate lifestyle." In short, many of those on the right seem to hate queers, and Bloom was a queer; so why is he offering them cover? And if you've gotten this far, you deserve to know this little story: I used to work at the faculty club at the University of Chicago--lots of stories there--and one of my best friends (a gay deadhead lawyer now in Los Angeles) also worked there, on the 11 p.m. to 8 a.m. shift. One night Bloom came in with a young (and my friend said young) man, and they proceeded upstairs. Shortly thereafter, the young man came sprinting down the stairs, hair ruffled, shirt unbuttoned, and seeming to be in a general disarray physically and psychologically. Bloom came puffing down a bit later, also in a hurry, and headed out the doors, evidently after him. Neither was seen the rest of the night. Perhaps the young man objected to Bloom's views on Machievelli's Discorsi?

If you want to read something about how politics makes strange bedfellows, as well as a bit of an overview of Bellow's Doktorvater Leo Strauss, try this:

http://www.boston.com/news/globe/ideas/articles/2003/05/11/the_philosopher/

If you can track down Robert Paul Wolff's review of The Closing of the American Mind (published in Academe, and republished in some anthologies), that is also highly recommended. I couldn't find a link to it.

In short, there is a reason an old girlfriend of mine referred to him as "Swamp Thing."