The purpose of this research is to examine The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom. The plan of the research will be to set forth Bloom's treatment of one theme, notably the emergence of relativism as a significant philosophical style of the mid and late twentieth century thought, and then to discuss critiques of Bloom's ideas about relativism, with a view toward showing how they fit in with his principal thesis, that higher education has failed democracy and impoverished the souls of todays college students.
Bloom sets the stage for his examination of the decline in the quality and content of American higher education by means of a discussion of what he describes as moral, ethical, and philosophical relativism of student bodies and of society as a whole. In order to see how he develops his argument, it is useful to note the content of that description, which is defined by his assertion that relativism is deemed as the primary virtue from which a whole range of subsidiary modes of belief has emerged. As he puts it,
Relativism is necessary to openness; and this is the virtue,
the only virtue, which all primary education for more than
fifty years has dedicated itself to inculcating. Openness
and the relativism that makes it the only plausible stance
in the face of various claims to truth and various ways of
life and kinds of human beings is the great insight of our
times. The true believer is the real danger. . . . The point
is not to correct the mistakes and really be right; rather
it is not to think you are right at all (Bloom, 1987, pp. 25 6).
The moral basis for the emergence of relativism, as against absolutism, is that the history of absolutism has been its equation with intolerance. Thus it follows that a fundamental notion of tolerance as a positive virtue leads ineluctably to the notion that truth itself is relative. I...