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Saul Bellow, Allan Bloom, and Mr. Strauss
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22037 |
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Section : |
EDITORIAL
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| Issue
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8 / 2000 |
1,578 Words |
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Morton A. Kaplan
Editor and Publisher |
The excerpt in Book World this month is from Nobel laureate Saul Bellow's Ravelstein. With the very first page of the excerpt we get a diagnosis of the plight of education today and a prescription for its cure that closes minds.
But first a word on the characters. Ravelstein is based on Allan Bloom, a professor, along with Saul Bellow, in the Committee on Social Thought at the University of Chicago and, until his death, a close friend of Bellow's. Felix Davarr is based on Leo Strauss, a professor of political science at the University of Chicago. Strauss, a mentor to Bloom, was an émigré scholar who became famous when he published a book on Hobbes. However, his study of Hobbes was designed to show the weakness of the early modern position, whereas real wisdom was to be found in the writings of the classical Greek philosophers. He argued that the writings of these and other philosophers required a type of exegesis that surpassed what current interpretations offered.
Strauss held that the wisdom of the Greeks was lost in early modernity when philosophy resorted to the methods of physical theory. By promising students that through his techniques they could reacquire lost wisdom, Strauss acquired a large and devoted coterie of followers, who were known as Straussians. I got a glimpse of how much they had invested emotionally in learning Strauss' hermetic message when I was on a Ph.D. examining committee for one of Strauss' students. For the first time in my experience on such a committee at Chicago, there was an audience, indeed a large one. When they thought the student gave a good answer, they looked at each other, produced wide smiles, and nodded up and down. When I demolished his answer, they all looked down with gloomy expressions on
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