Quote

The distinction between private and public undermines the unity of spiritual strength, draining the public of the transcendent energies while trivializing them because the merely private life provides no proper stage for their action.

Allan Bloom

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Allan Bloom
Age: 62 †
Born: 1930
Born: September 14
Died: 1992
Died: October 7
Classical Scholar
Journalist
Philosopher
Political Scientist
Indianapolis
Indiana
Allan David Bloom
Merely
Draining
Strength
Transcendent
Stage
Energies
Public
Provides
Spiritual
Distinction
Energy
Proper
Action
Unity
Life
Private
Undermines

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A serious life means being fully aware of the alternatives, thinking about them with all the intensity one brings to bear on life-and-death questions, in full recognition that every choice is a great risk with necessary consequences that are hard to bear.
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The expectation of substantive unity between natural science and social science has faded.... Gone is the cosmic intention of placing man in the universe.
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These sociologists who talk to facilely about the sacred are like a man who keeps a toothless old circus lion around the house in order to experience the thrills of the jungle.
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There is no real teacher who in practise does not believe in the existence of the soul, or in a magic that acts on it through speech.
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Fathers and mothers have lost the idea that the highest aspiration they might have for their children is for them to be wise... specialized competence and success are all that they can imagine.
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Self-interest is hostile to the common good, but enlightened self-interest is not. And this is the best key to the meaning of enlightenment.
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Education in our times must try to find whatever there is in students that might yearn for completion, and to reconstruct the learning that would enable them autonomously to seek that completion.
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Historicism and cultural relativism actually are a means to avoid testing our own prejudices and asking, for example, whether men are really equal or whether that opinion is merely a democratic prejudice.
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We witness a strange inversion: on the one hand, the endeavor to turn the social contract into a less calculating and more feeling connection among its members on the other hand, the endeavor to turn the erotic relationship into a contractual one.
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Reason transformed into prejudice is the worst form of prejudice, because reason is the only instrument for liberation from prejudice.
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Error is indeed our enemy, but it alone points to the truth and therefore deserves our respectful treatment.
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The most important function of the university in an age of reason is to protect reason from itself.
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To recognize that some of the things our culture believes are not true imposes on us the duty of finding out which are true and which are not.
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Culture as art is the peak expression of man's creativity, his capacity to break out of nature's narrow bounds, and hence out of the degrading interpretation of man in modern natural and political science.
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Classical music is a special taste like Greek language or pre-Columbian archeology, not a common culture of reciprocal communication and psychological shorthand.
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The artist is the most interesting of all phenomena, for he represents creativity, the definition of man.
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[A]ny notion of the serious life of leisure, as well as men's taste and capacity to live it, had disappeared. Leisure became entertainment.
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Social science and humanities ... have a mutual contempt for one another, the former looking down on the latter as unscientific, the latter regarding the former as philistine. ... The difference comes down to the fact that social science really wants to be predictive, meaning that man is predictable, while the humanities say that he is not.
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Commitment is a word invented in our abstract modernity to signify the absence of any real motives in the soul for moral dedication.
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The substance of my being has been informed by the books I learned to care for.
Allan Bloom