Post #84: All-Too Personal, Reconsidered

18 Dec. 2023

“To me, this is not the book of a professor, but that of a thinker who is willing to take risks more frequently taken by writers. It is risky in a book of ideas to speak in one’s own true voice, but it reminds us that the sources of the truest truths are profoundly personal. Academics very seldom offer themselves publicly and frankly as individuals, as persons. Professor Bloom is a front-line fighter in the mental wars of our times, and as such, singularly congenial to me.”

— Saul Bellow, Foreword to The Closing of the American Mind by Allan Bloom (1987)

I argued the case, only a few posts ago (#79), for not taking things too personally, and I meant it as perhaps only someone can mean it who invariably does take them so. But I am also in two minds about the whole business. Bellow paints a very flattering picture of the thinker who puts himself personally on the line; I have made clear enough, I hope, why the matter looks murkier to me; but do what I may, I find that things will take just such a personal turn with me before long, whether I like it or not, be it in my academic life, as a writer, or anywhere else.

I suspect that Bellow is right about the distinction he makes between professors and writers. Not that there is a clear line of demarcation running between the two: plenty of professors are writers (or would like to be), and some writers (though far fewer) manage to become professors on the strength of their work. But there is a difference, and I agree with Bellow that it seems to have something to do with one’s orientation towards the personal. As I’ve found over the years, I very rarely feel, around fellow academics, the sense of congeniality that Bellow describes, no matter how much I may agree with them on the issues (not that I usually do). Either the questions they ask or their manner of answering them usually fail to move me, though there are exceptions of course. More fundamentally still, I don’t believe they even expect, for the most part, to be moved as I do; indeed they might find it unprofessional to draw so weak a line between one’s working and one’s personal life. For me there is not and cannot be such a clear-cut line, or if there were, it would not be to the professor that I owe my fealty, but to the human being.

With serious writers, it is just the converse: it does not seem to matter much how thoroughly I disagree with them or dislike their work—I can always find somewhere to connect, usually on the part of the spectrum where Melancholic is spoken (Post #32). Their ideas may appeal not at all, and their personalities grate; but I know where they are coming from, and that gives us something to talk about, something more profound and meaningful than I can usually find to discuss even with academics studying questions that are nominally very close to mine. We may share the interests, topically as it were (referring not just to subjects but to surfaces), but almost never the way we go about answering them; hence the depth dimension is somehow missing, and we end up having less to say to each other than I do with those on the opposing side who may asking different questions, perhaps, or giving very different answers, but in the same personal style as mine, which few academics share. As a colleague once chastised me (and I was friendlier with him than with most), “We are in the business of knowledge, not of wisdom.” He may have been right, speaking on behalf of the academy; he was quite wrong if he felt he could include me.

Bloom’s persona, I must admit, has never looked especially congenial to me. Whatever Bellow may have seen in him, from a much closer vantage point, Bloom has rubbed me the wrong way for as long as I have known him through his writing.* I disagree with him, quite emphatically, on translation; I disagree with him too on Rousseau (via his introduction to the Letter to d’Alembert on the Theater); and last I read his Closing of the American Mind, half a lifetime ago, I disagreed no less with him there. I smell a rat behind such overly noisy displays of erudition and supposed sophistication, even if I cannot quite place where the disagreeable odor is coming from. Maybe we have more in common that I am willing to admit, and I give the same impression of learning not worn lightly enough. If so, I would feel misunderstood; maybe Bloom would too.

The Rousseauian connection is not one that should inspire trust in anyone, and I would, from my lowly point of view, add Bellow’s Ravelstein to the list of exhibits suggesting unfavorable impressions. Be that as it may, however, I am finding myself another quarter century older and wearier now than when I first made Bloom’s acquaintance via his books (a little after he departed), and the “war of minds” that was already in full swing when he wrote his manifesto has only kept intensifying in the meantime. There is only so much sacred ground one can watch being seized and razed, or eroded by the winds of technological and cultural change, before one becomes glad to see any fellow combatant still holding out in a field nearby, whether or not he is not fighting under quite the same colors. (That even death need not be an impediment to carrying on the good fight reassures me a little about the prospects for our side.) So much about Allan Bloom and me.

What I cannot tell, frankly, is where this combative streak of mine, this ineradicably personal nature of my commitments, leaves me—either as a meditator or as a twenty-first century academic. The reader will understand well enough, by now, why I cannot picture myself on the Path striding nobly along, but only bumbling on my way, and with a very dubious claim to title of Buddhist even. Perhaps it has become clear too why it cannot be much different with my uneasy part in academe. I belong, certainly, and yet I do not, just as surely. Even in saying so, I feel that I am getting far more personal than I should: what a fool would one have to be to express public doubts and discomforts about a profession on which one’s livelihood, so far as one has been able to determine, entirely depends? But there it is again, if not quite a compulsion, then not far off: I evidently cannot help myself from divulging these kinds of things, or at least I am able do so only at the price of feeling that I am betraying something that goes even deeper than livelihood, though I would be the last to scoff at the material prerequisites of our lives. I have seen the abyss open up, as I’ve mentioned before, and I do not wish ever to look into it so deeply again; I’d sooner jump headlong into the other, the even deeper, the bottomless one.

What is this compunction, this inability to keep my big mouth shut? Is it just a kind of mental intemperance, or incontinence—a mere bad habit? If so, should not ten thousand hours on the mat and some other fairly serious and sustained therapeutic excursions from (or supplements to) the Path have at least given me a clearer view of my problem (if such it is), and the means of countering it a bit more effectively? But nothing of the sort: whatever I have studied or practiced these past thirty years, to some tangible effect, I hope, none of it seems to have changed that strange inclination of mine to get so terribly personal. Not only that, but if anything the pull of the over-personal has strengthened with the years, as if I felt its strange grip even more strongly than before. Unless I could get myself to believe that all my efforts have been for naught, or that they have even taken me in the wrong direction, I can only conclude that, for better or for worse, I am somehow meant to be as I am, that is to say, someone who cannot (and also would not) stop himself from getting “too” personal—hence (in Bellow’s terms) more a writer who may or may not be able to keep an academic job, than an academic who writes and has more of a choice, presumably, about how far too open his mouth, let alone his heart.

Very well, I may be exaggerating a little. I have, over the years, learned to pipe up a little less (perhaps quite a bit less) when it would do no one any good to say what I truly think, though I do what I can to stay mum then and to steer clear of dissembling. (Hence my reflections on the Golden Rule (#63), which, until not so very long ago, I could neither have accepted fully at face value nor lived by with any consistency.) In that respect, something important has certainly clicked, thank goodness, and the consequences have been every bit as momentous as the devotees of Carnegie would predict; but that change, however significant, I would still consider largely a matter of technique in life. The more fundamental question of whether I should let on where I stand—especially before students very much my juniors who are looking for a sense of direction in life, and who have some right, I would insist, not to be played for fools and presented with pretenses, phoniness, or even protective facades—is very much what it used to be, of the most urgent concern to me.

Alas, owing to a complicated combination of where life has taken me over the years and where the world has meanwhile gone (the academic world in particular), but also owing to a much-heightened sense of the stakes I am now playing for (my life, in a very real sense, as per the abysses above), it is no longer a challenge that I can meet more or less as a matter of course, the way I once took for granted. I was probably too naïve then, or even plainly wrong—or so it can seem when I look back with a shudder at how much excessive forthrightness at the wrong moment has cost me over the years. Perhaps it never was as straightforward a matter as I thought, and the right thing said at the wrong time becomes simply the wrong thing. Perhaps so; or maybe I am just getting too old for the rigors of uncompromising truthfulness and I have been losing my nerve. I cannot tell.

What I do know, weakened nerves or not, is that there is little hope that I could ever escape from getting too personal in the way that has been giving me so much trouble. It doesn’t matter whether I might think it a good idea, either metaphysically (in terms of no-self perhaps) or prudentially (in terms of practical benefits to be had and costs to be avoided). I might well be wiser, or safer, or better off in any number of ways, if guarding myself came more naturally to me. But it does not. There may be something redeeming in that confessional disposition, or it may be no more than a character flaw; certainly there must be plenty of misery in it, as per the Buddhist diagnosis. But here I am, I can do no other; and I would like to think that in so doing, or rather in so being, I am more a writer than a fool, or at least not entirely the latter.

*Those who have never heard of Allan Bloom (not to be confused with the better-known Harold, also much concerned with the Western Canon, equally combative, but in quite a different style, see my next post) might think of him, roughly, as the conservative American answer to Michel Foucault. Indisputable figureheads that these two have been in the Great War of the Academy, however, they also prove, upon closer scrutiny, rather strange and unlikely champions of the political causes with which they are, respectively, so unambiguously identified. As with all such antitheses, the obviously contrary dimensions tend to hide other, more compatible, even complimentary ones, and Bloom was no more a typical right-winger (if he can really be called one at all) than Foucault was a typical leftist.