Closing of the American Mind (21 page)

Yet only from such dangerous heights can our situation be seen in proper perspective. The fact that this perspective is no longer credible is the measure of our crisis. When we recognize the
Phaedrus
and the
Symposium
as interpreting our experiences, we can be sure that we are having those experiences in their fullness, and that we have the minimum of education. Rousseau, the founder of the most potent of reductionist teachings about eros, said that the
Symposium
is always the book of lovers. Are we lovers anymore? This is my way of putting the educational question of our times.

In all species other than man, when an animal reaches puberty, it is all that it will ever be. This stage is the clear end toward which all of its growth and learning is directed. The animal's activity is reproduction. It lives on this plateau until it starts downhill. Only in man is puberty just the beginning. The greater and more interesting part of his learning, moral and intellectual, comes afterward, and in civilized man is incorporated into his erotic desire. His taste and hence his choices are determined during this “sentimental education.” It is as though his learning were for the sake of his sexuality. Reciprocally, much of the energy for that learning obviously comes from his sexuality. Nobody takes human children who
have reached puberty to be adults. We properly sense that there is a long road to adulthood, the condition in which they are able to govern themselves and be true mothers and fathers. This road is the serious part of education, where animal sexuality becomes human sexuality, where instinct gives way in man to choice with regard to the true, the good and the beautiful. Puberty does not provide man, as it does other animals, with all that he needs to leave behind others of his kind. This means that the animal part of his sexuality is intertwined in the most complex way with the higher reaches of his soul, which must inform the desires with its insight, and that the most delicate part of education is to keep the two in harmony.

I cannot pretend that I understand very much of this mystery, but knowing that I do not know keeps me attentive to, and far from the current simplifications of, the phenomena of this aspect of our nature that links the highest and the lowest in us. I believe that the most interesting students are those who have not settled the sexual problem, who are still young, even look young for their age, who think there is much to look forward to and much they must yet grow up to, fresh and naive, excited by the mysteries to which they have not yet been fully initiated. There are some who are men and women at the age of sixteen, who have nothing more to learn about the erotic. They are adult in the sense that they will no longer change very much. They may become competent specialists, but they are flat-souled. The world is for them what it presents itself to the senses to be; it is unadorned by imagination and devoid of ideals. This flat soul is what the sexual wisdom of our time conspires to make universal.

The easy sex of teen-agers snips the golden thread linking eros to education. And popularized Freud finishes it for good by putting the seal of science on an unerotic understanding of sex. A youngster whose sexual longings consciously or unconsciously inform his studies has a very different set of experiences from one in whom such motives are not active. A trip to Florence or to Athens is one thing for a young man who hopes to meet his Beatrice on the Ponte Santa Trinità or his Socrates in the Agora, and quite another for one who goes without such aching need. The latter is only a tourist, the former is looking for completion. Flaubert, a great expert on the fate of longing in the modern world, sends his awestruck Emma Bovary to a ball at the estate of decadent aristocrats where she sees:

 

… at the head of the table, alone among all of these men and women, bent over, his full plate with his napkin knotted around his neck like a child, an old man ate, letting drops of gravy trickle from his mouth. He had bloodshot eyes and wore a little pigtail fastened with a black ribbon. It was the Marquis' father-in-law, the old Duc de Laverdière, the former favorite of the Comte d'Artois at the time of the hunts at the Vaudreuil home of the Marquis de Conflans, and who had been, it was said, the lover of Queen Marie-Antoinette between M. de Coigny and M. de Lauzun. He had led a wild life of debauch, full of duels, wagers, abducted women, had devoured his fortune and terrified his whole family. A domestic, behind his chair, speaking loudly into his ear, named the dishes for him to which he pointed while stuttering. And constantly Emma's eyes, of their own accord, returned to this old man with drooping lips as to something extraordinary and august. He had lived at court and slept in the bed of queens.

 

Others see only a repulsive old man, but Emma sees the
ancien régime
. Her vision is truer, for there once really was an
ancien régime
, and in it there were great lovers. The constricted present cannot teach it to us without the longing that makes us dissatisfied with the present. Such longing is what students most need, because the great remains of the tradition have grown senile in our care. Imagination is required to restore their youth, beauty and vitality, and then experience their inspiration.

The student who made fun of playing the guitar under a girl's window will never read or write poetry under her influence. His defective eros cannot provide his soul with images of the beautiful, and it will remain coarse and slack. It is not that he will fail to adorn or idealize the world; it is that he will not see what is there.

A significant number of students used to arrive at the university physically and spiritually virginal, expecting to lose their innocence there. Their lust was mixed into everything they thought and did. They were painfully aware that they wanted something but were not quite sure exactly what it was, what form it would take and what it all meant The range of satisfactions intimated by their desire moved from prostitutes to Plato, and back, from the criminal to the sublime. Above all they looked for instruction. Practically everything they read in the humanities and social sciences might be a source of learning about their pain, and a path to its healing. This powerful tension, this literal lust for knowledge, was what a teacher could see in the eyes of those who flattered him by giving
such evidence of their need for him. His own satisfaction was promised by having something with which to feed their hunger, an overflow to bestow on their emptiness. His joy was in hearing the ecstatic “Oh, yes!” as he dished up Shakespeare and Hegel to minister to their need. Pimp and midwife really described him well. The itch for what appeared to be only sexual intercourse was the material manifestation of the Delphic oracle's command, which is but a reminder of the most fundamental human desire, to “know thyself.”

Sated with easy, clinical and sterile satisfactions of body and soul, the students arriving at the university today hardly walk on the enchanted ground they once did. They pass by the ruins without imagining what was once there. Spiritually detumescent, they do not seek wholeness in the university. These most productive years of learning, the time when Alcibiades was growing his first beard, are wasted because of artificial precociousness and a sophistic wisdom acquired in high school. The real moment for sexual education goes by, and hardly anybody has an idea of what it would be.

Reciprocally, the university does not see itself as ministering to such needs and does not believe the mummies on display in its museum can speak to the visitors or, honors, go home to live with them. The humanists are old maid librarians. As I reflect on it, the last fertile moment when student and university made a match was the fling with Freud during the forties and fifties. He advertised a real psychology, a version of the age-old investigation of the soul's phenomena adjusted to the palate of modern man. Today one can hardly imagine the excitement. What a thrill it was when my first college girlfriend told me that the university's bell tower was a phallic symbol. This was a real mix of my secret obsessions and the high seriousness I expected to get from the university. High school was never like this. It was hard to tell whether the meaning of it all was that I was about to lose my virginity or to penetrate the mysteries of being. An admirable confusion. At last everything was out on the table. The dirty things had disappeared from the philosophy of the
mind
, and Freud promised to restore the
soul
and take seriously what happened in it. He fancied himself a new and truer Plato and allowed us to praise Plato again as Freud's precursor.

But it turned out to be psychology without the
psyche
, i.e., without the soul. Freud just did not give a satisfying account of all the things we
experience. Everything higher had to be a repression of something lower, and a symbol of something else rather than itself. The best a Freudian vision could do for man's real intellectual longings was
Death in Venice
, clearly not a very rich row to hoe for the finer spirits. Aristotle said that man has two peaks, each accompanied by intense pleasure: sexual intercourse and thinking. The human soul is a kind of ellipse or hyperbola, and its phenomena are spread between its two foci, displaying their tropical variety and ambiguity. Freud saw only one focus in the soul, the same one as the brutes have, and had to explain all psychology's higher phenomena by society's repression or other such versions of the Indian rope trick. He really did not believe in the soul, but in the body, along with its passive instrument of consciousness, the mind. This blunted his vision of the higher phenomena, as is apparent from his crude observations about art and philosophy. It was not merely sexual satisfaction students were seeking, whether they were aware of it or not, but knowledge of themselves, and Freud did not provide it. People found that Freud's “know thyself” led them to the couch, where they emptied their tank of the compressed fuel, which was intended to power them on their flight from opinion to knowledge. “Know thyself” did not mean to Freud knowing man's place within the order of the whole of things. It is long since that academic psychology has had any appeal for students who have a philosophic urge. Freudian psychology has become a big business and entered into the mainstream of public life with a status equal to that of engineering and banking. But it has no more intellectual appeal than do they. We must look elsewhere for ourselves.

¹
It remains to be seen what effect AIDS will have. The wave of publicity about herpes a couple of years ago had almost no discernible psychological fallout.

NIHILISM,
AMERICAN
STYLE

When President Ronald Reagan called the Soviet Union “the evil empire,” right-thinking persons joined in an angry chorus of protest against such provocative rhetoric. At other times Mr. Reagan has said that the United States and the Soviet Union “have different
values
” (italics added), an assertion that those same persons greet at worst with silence and frequently with approval. I believe he thought he was saying the same thing in both instances, and the different reaction to his different words introduces us to
the
most important and most astonishing phenomenon of our time, all the more astonishing in being almost unnoticed: there is now an entirely new language of good and evil, originating in an attempt to get “beyond good and evil” and preventing us from talking with any conviction about good and evil anymore. Even those who deplore our current moral condition do so in the very language that exemplifies that condition.

The new language is that of
value
relativism, and it constitutes a change in our view of things moral and political as great as the one that took place when Christianity replaced Greek and Roman paganism. A new language always reflects a new point of view, and the gradual, unconscious popularization of new words, or of old words used in new ways, is a sure sign of a profound change in people's articulation of the world. When bishops, a generation after Hobbes's death, almost naturally spoke the language of the state of nature, contract and rights, it was clear that he had defeated the ecclesiastical authorities, who were no longer able to
understand themselves as they once had. It was henceforward inevitable that the modern archbishops of Canterbury would have no more in common with the ancient ones than does the second Elizabeth with the first.

What was offensive to contemporary ears in President Reagan's use of the word “evil” was its cultural arrogance, the presumption that he, and America, know what is good; its closedness to the dignity of other ways of life; its implicit contempt for those who do not share our ways. The political corollary is that he is not open to negotiation. The opposition between good and evil is not negotiable and is a cause of war. Those who are interested in “conflict resolution” find it much easier to reduce the tension between values than the tension between good and evil. Values are insubstantial stuff, existing primarily in the imagination, while death is real. The term “value,” meaning the radical subjectivity of all belief about good and evil, serves the easygoing quest for comfortable self-preservation.