Books of The Times; Further Grim Reflections on the American Mind
By CHRISTOPHER LEHMANN-HAUPT
Published: October 29, 1990
Giants and Dwarfs Essays, 1960-1990 By Allan Bloom 395 pages. Simon & Schuster. $22.95.
In his preface to this collection of essays, Allan Bloom writes that the title, "Giants and Dwarfs," refers to Jonathan Swift, "who converted size of soul into size of body and thus made the spiritual and its various ranks palpable to us." One can take this to mean that Swift knew something about the scale of ideas, the contemporary loss of which Mr. Bloom regretted so electrically in his best-selling critique of American education, "The Closing of the American Mind."
What he also doesn't say but implies clearly enough is that the difference between a giant and a dwarf is the difference between the heroes and villains of his earlier book. As he suggests in this collection's lively lead essay -- which is a response to the critics of "Closing" that he delivered at Harvard University two years ago ("Fellow elitists," it begins) -- the giants are the writers of the great tradition who searched for the truth, while the dwarfs are the sort of contemporary writers who on the one hand preach "that it is arrogant ethnocentrism to judge other cultures according to our standards," and on the other hand rush to denounce as a "blatant attack" on the inviolable principle of free speech the Ayatollah Ruhollah Khomeini's condemnation of Salman Rushdie as having blasphemed Islam in his novel "The Satanic Verses."
Unfortunately, of the dozen and a half pieces in "Giants and Dwarfs," it is this lead one alone that reflects the wit and slashing insight that made "The Closing of the American Mind" such a stimulating revelation. The rest of the pieces here are honest but somewhat pedestrian work. Most of them relate in some way to Mr. Bloom's previous books: the study called "Shakespeare's Politics" that he wrote with Harry V. Jaffa, and his translations of works by Plato and Rousseau. They are the blocks on which "Closing of the American Mind" was built.
They are divided into three sections. The strongest and solidest is the first one, "Books." Here Mr. Bloom tries to show us the enduring relevance of certain dead white males.. He argues that an understanding of the smaller Platonic dialogues, for example " 'Hipparchus' or 'The Profiteer' " and " 'Ion' or 'On the Iliad,' " are essential to reading the bigger ones, which in turn go to the heart of issues that, contrary to what contemporary higher education seems to hold, still vex our times.
He insists that Shakespeare, like all great writers, must still be read for his moral teachings, not just for the structure of his art, and he illustrates the point by relating "The Merchant of Venice" to its author's reflections on the possibility of brotherhood in a political republic, and "Richard II" to Shakespeare's exploration of the legitimacy of kingship.
And in two brilliantly incisive essays on the development of Rousseau's political philosophy, Mr. Bloom shows how widely the French thinker opened the doors on questions that today are thoughtlessly dismissed as all but closed.
The weakest is the third section, "The Fate of Books in Our Time." Here the author repeats and dilates on some of the main points of "The Closing of the American Mind," particularly his despair over the democratization and, in his view, the consequent trivialization of American higher education. But except for a lengthy critique of John Rawls's widely praised interpretation of liberal democracy, "A Theory of Justice," which Mr. Bloom pronounces shallow and sentimental, the writing is mostly dry and repetitive, and lacks the sense of surprise that consistently illuminated the earlier book.
In the middle section, "Teachers," Mr. Bloom pays tribute to three mentors: Leo Strauss, a philosopher who taught at St. John's College in Annapolis, Md.; Raymond Aron, the French intellectual whom the author calls "the last of the liberals"; and Alexandre Kojeve, a brilliant Russian emigre best known for his commentary on Hegel.
What is disappointing is that at the heart of "The Closing of the American Mind," Mr. Bloom, who is now co-director of the John M. Olin Center for Inquiry into the Theory and Practice of Democracy at the University of Chicago, seemed to hold out the promise that he would soon get around to applying the disciplines of classical philosophy to contemporary problems, a task that he so strongly feels American higher education has abdicated.
But all he has done in "Giants and Dwarfs" is reiterate the primacy of the classical tradition without ever acknowledging how various revolutions in scientific thought have affected our outlook on the world. Granted, he keeps hinting that science may have nothing to contribute to the debate over how men should live, what constitutes the good and all those other great questions that Plato's Socrates seems to have posed for the ages. But one wishes he would explain outright why Darwinian evolution really has nothing to do with our perception of the human soul, or why Einstein's discovery of relativity ought not to affect how we perceive time and eternity. (On the other hand, Freud's revolution consistently informs the author's thinking.)
Still, one has to grant Mr. Bloom this much. In his essay on his teacher Leo Strauss, he describes what an ideal intellectual voyage involves. "I recently reread 'Thoughts on Machiavelli' and realized that it is not at all a book as we ordinarily understand a book. If one sits down and reads it as one reads a treatise, its contents are guarded by seven seals; it provides us with a few arid generalizations that look like oases in a sandy desert. But the book is really a way of life, a sort of philosophy kit."
"One must constantly stop, consult another text, try to penetrate another character, and walk around the room and think. One must use a pencil and paper, make lists, and count. It is an unending task, one that continually evokes that wonder at what previously seemed commonplace which Aristotle says is the origin of philosophy. One learns what it means to live with books; one is forced to make them a part of one's experience and life."
In short, Mr. Bloom is saying that it's not up to him to read and think things through, but up to us, who are far too busy not reading and not thinking.
Photo: Allan Bloom (Jim Wright/Simon & Schuster)