Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom

Author:Allan Bloom
Language: eng
Format: azw3, epub, mobi
Tags: lit_guide, Commentary & Opinion, Social Science, Popular Culture, General, Political Science, Education, Higher
ISBN: 9781439126264
Publisher: Simon and Schuster
Published: 2008-06-30T04:03:57.193886+00:00

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5 Note how space—used to mean one’s apartment, workshop, office or whatever—has become a trendy word.

THE NIETZSCHEANIZATION OF

THE LEFT OR VICE VERSA

I have spoken little of Marx and referred to few of his terms so far, although the whole world is divided into two parts, one of which traces its intellectual lineage back to Locke and the other to Marx, and the latter is much readier to acknowledge its parent than is the former. But this relative neglect is inevitable when one begins with the souls of young Americans, for Marx does not speak to them, and the so-called Marxist teachers who attempt to influence them do not use Marxist language. To put it crudely, Marx has become boring—and not only to American youngsters. In some backwaters, grim autodidacts may still thrill to the rhetoric of “Workers of the world …” while Third World presidents of one-party states focus their resentments by invoking the authority of Marx. But in the centers where people keep up-to-date and ideologies are made, Marx has been dead for a long time. The Manifesto seems naive. Capital just does not persuade its readers that it is the truth about economics or about the inevitable future of man, and therefore worth the hard work it demands to be digested. A few brilliant essays still charm but are not enough on which to found a worldview. The intellectual death of their eponymous hero has not stopped much of the Left from continuing to call itself Marxist, for he represents the poor in their perennial struggle against the rich, and their demand for more equality than liberal societies provide. But beyond that, the Left’s nourishment comes from elsewhere. Nothing in Marx resonates in souls furnished by Sartre, Camus, Kafka, Dostoyevski, Nietzsche and Heidegger. Rousseau can still overpower where Marx falls flat.

As an illustration of what has happened to Marx’s influence, consider ideology, one of the few terms of his that has anything like the popular currency of Weber’s terms. (I will discuss the American use of dialectic later.)

In Marx, ideology meant the false system of thought elaborated by the ruling class to justify its rule in the eyes of the ruled, while hiding its real selfish motives. Ideology was sharply distinguished in Marx from science, which is what Marx’s system is—i.e., the truth based on disinterested awareness of historical necessity. In Communist society there will be no ideology. “The pure mind,” to use Nietzsche’s formulation, still exists in Marx’s thought, as it had in all philosophy—the possibility of knowing the ways things are, an intellectual capacity irreducible to anything else. Ideology is a term of contempt; it must be seen through in order to be seen for what it is. Its meaning is not in itself but requires translation back into the underlying reality of which it is a misleading representation. The man without ideology, the one possessing science, can look to the economic infrastructure and see that Plato’s political philosophy, which teaches that the wise

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