Giants and Dwarfs: Essays, 1960-1990
by Allan David Bloom

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Book Reviews of Giants and Dwarfs: Essays, 1960-1990

Book Review: Like experiencing imaginary superiority
Summary: 5 Stars

COMRADE: The profiteer, Socrates, thinks he ought to make a profit from everything.
SOCRATES: Don't answer me so aimlessly, as though you had suffered some injustice from someone, but pay attention to me and answer as though I asked you again from the beginning: don't you agree that the profiteer knows about the worth of this thing from which he considers it worthwhile to make a profit? (p. 95)

The comments of Allan Bloom, in searching for "profound possibilities of human life" (p. 105) in the origins of political philosophy, also caution us to learn "of the capital importance of the virtue of moderation in the political thought of the ancient authors." (p. 105). Keeping everything political is the surest way of convincing American readers that we are not really talking about saintly characters, so we might easily agree with Socrates "that the one making the reproach is himself of the same sort." (p. 104). Bloom has been leading up to this view in his discussion of Shakespeare's "Richard II." "Knowledge of political things brings with it the awareness that in order for the sacred to become sacred terrible deeds must be done. Because God does not evidently rule, the founder of justice cannot himself be just." (p. 93).

The Preface attempts to explain where Bloom has been coming from, and I appreciate the mention of Nietzsche on the last page of the Preface as a guide to understanding the nature of the intellectual contrasts which this book expects from Lemuel Gulliver, Xenophon, Socrates, Rousseau, Plato, and Leo Strauss. The Address delivered at Harvard University on December 7, 1988, is a prime example of the complex and fascinating psychology of democracy. (p. 13). After Bloom's book, THE CLOSING OF THE AMERICAN MIND, was a big hit, Allan Bloom became a professor identified with "American anti-intellectualism" for trying to preserve thought about our heritage from the political antielitists seeking a uniform view in the humanities.

At the time of THE CLOSING OF THE AMERICAN MIND, I was most interested in seeing that book as a failure to consider the intellectual power of rock 'n' roll. GIANTS AND DWARFS contains a translation of Plato's dialogue "Ion or On the Iliad" translated by Allan Bloom, with his discussion of it. The cultural significance of a contest of rhapsodes dedicated to a god was not despised by Socrates, who "often envied you rhapsodes, Ion, for your art. For that it befits your art for the body to be always adorned and for you to appear as beautiful as possible, and that, at the same time, it is necessary to be busy with many good poets and above all with Homer, the best and most divine of poets, and to learn his thought thoroughly, not just his words, is enviable." (pp. 124). Ion is the prize-winning expert at reciting Homer dramatically, but Socrates shows how little this matters by mentioning the other major poets, Hesiod and Archilochus, the former a master of cataloguing the Greek gods in his "Theogony," and the latter, a 7th century BC general ("They'll say I was a mercenary,") who died in battle, who won more fame for the battle about which he wrote a poem in which he dropped his shield and ran away. Bloom found Ion's devotion to Homer shallow. "For Ion, Homer is sufficient, for the sole reason that it is for reciting Homer's poetry that golden crowns are awarded." (p. 141).
The longest explanation by Socrates is about how poems are created "not by art but by divine dispensation, each is able to do finely only that to which the Muse has impelled him." (pp. 129-130). What is most common in a society which has produced a number of poems that exceeds everyone's fantasies is that a single poet will be commonly known for one work, as Socrates says of "Tynnichus, the Chaldean, who never composed any poem worth remembering other than the poem which everybody sings and which is very nearly the finest of all songs, being simply, as he himself says, `a discovery of the Muses.' " (p. 130). Socrates asks about the great dramatic moments, "are you in your right mind? Or do you become beside yourself, and does your soul think it is at the scene of the deeds of which you speak in your inspiration, either at Ithaca, or Troy, or wherever the epic takes place?" (p. 130). Bloom is most aware of the politics of winning approval. "Ion has no satisfactions which are not dependent on the approval of his spectators. He needs the cities as they need him. For political men the accident of where they are born is decisive in limiting their possibilities of fulfillment." (p. 161). Bloom wrote that in 1970, when he still pictured thinking as being the opposite of rock 'n' roll. Rock's answer might be the song, "Analyse" by The Cranberries. See both video versions, plus a live version at Vicar Street, in which she calls the song, "Don't Analyse," on the DVD "Stars."

Summary of Giants and Dwarfs: Essays, 1960-1990

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