The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom – Finished it again, finally. I didn’t get much more out of it this time than I did the last time. He talks a lot about the ideas of different philosophers from the past, and though I tried to follow along with what he was saying, it was difficult to keep track of which ideas were his own and which those of the others he referred to. His critique of these thinkers was deep, or so I assume so because I couldn’t make heads or tails out of it. Now that I think about it though, I fail to see how any such critique would relate to the subject of the book, which is the deplorable state of universities the world over.

His reference to all these thinkers of long ago spurred me to do a little inquiring of the internet. He talks of Hobbes, Rousseau, Locke, Nietchze (I think I got that spelling right) and Marx, as well as some of the ancients from Aristotle’s time. A lot of the work from these people can be found online, so I looked at something that was familiar to me, Leviathan by Hobbes. I was also in the used bookstore the other day, and found some short books by others. I bought one by Kant and a couple by Rousseau. Not sure if I’ll be able to read them, but I figured I couldn’t know for sure unless I tried. Immanuel Kant’s Foundations of the Metaphysics of Morals is short, but very difficult to read. I’m hoping it will become easier as my mind gets used to assimilating this sort of thing, but right now it has a tendency to put me to sleep. Leviathan is even more difficult to read. The version I downloaded is complete with words spelled the way they were back then, and words have slightly different meanings now, so much so that sentences at times become very awkward to deal with.

I have noticed that unless specifically stated by the author that they reject the notion of god or theism, they work god into their work somehow. They either postulate the existence of a god and go from there, or work to justify their belief that there is a god. Hobbes says there are things we call infinite, and these are ideas we can have no conception of and our beyond our faculties to understand. These things are labeled with ‘GOD’, not that we may conceive ‘him’, but that we may honor ‘him’.

I have a problem with this reasoning. For one, I don’t see why it is necessary to contemplate anything that will be incomprehensible to us in the first place, let alone why we should honor such a thing. Here is why I have a problem with it. There are certain qualities that when displayed by people they encourage us to regard them with the notion they possess character flaws. One such flaw displayed would be someone that relishes the thought of others honoring and worshiping them. Of course this can be a pleasant experience for the recipient and in no way be considered bad form by anyone, such as a mother being honored by her children. But in other cases it can definitely turn us off, and obviously points to bad characteristics of one exhibiting such behavior. If we find this so discouraging, why would we attribute such qualities to an all beneficent being? And here we have Hobbes. He spends a lot of time speculating why things are the way they are to come up with reasonable explanations for the same, yet writes off things completely unknowable as belonging to something we should worship. This can be found within the first few pages of Leviathan, but it incites in me the need to be very critical of everything else I will read.