Conventional Iconoclasm: The Cultural Work of the Nietzsche Image in Twentieth-Century America

Abstract

In his 1987 best seller, The Closing of the American Mind, Allan Bloom argued that late twentieth-century American intellectual and cultural life was in moral disrepair. In universities and colleges, where professors had once instructed students in the serious contemplation of the good life, they now taught young minds that “reason cannot establish values, and [the] belief that it can is the stupidest and most pernicious illusion.” Instead of participating in rational discourse, students were learning that values are descriptions with no correspondence to eternal truths, that language is an inadequate medium for communication, and that all knowledge and beliefs are culturally contingent. Bloom added that this wholesale “value relativism” had made its “passage from the academy to the marketplace.” Americans celebrated free choice unburdened by the responsibilities of the group. He asserted that “America has no-fault automobile accidents, no-fault divorces, and it is moving with the aid of modern philosophy toward no-fault choices.” Unable to accept limitations on individual striving, contemporary Americans had adopted an unwholesome, lighthearted, and softheaded “nihilism, American style.” According to Bloom, this cynical quality of late twentieth-century American thought stemmed from the nineteenth-century German philosopher Friedrich Wilhelm Nietzsche. “This is our scene,” lamented Bloom, “the spectacle consists in how [Nietzsche's] views have been trivialized by democratic man desirous of tricking himself out in borrowed finery.”1