Ravelstein at 25

Thoughts About the Real Thing and a plug for my new essay at The Hedgehog Review

I find other people’s nostalgia annoying. There is life to be lived—your life—so don’t waste your time tramping through an imagined past. You miss what’s actually there if everything is overlaid with what was, or what you think there was. I suppose my affection for Saul Bellow’s Ravelstein is nostalgic. I don’t care so much about “when men were men,” or whatever, but I do really like the idea of “scholars being scholars,” and of “artists being artists.” I like the idea of there being respect for ideas and books; and I like the idea of people with taste and discernment occupying the elite. Isn’t that awful? I do take some solace in knowing that other left-ish intellectuals my age, even ones with fewer ties to Bloom or to the Straussians, basically feel the same. If I am being totally honest, I also really really like the idea of a professor writing his way out of being terminally broke. But my attraction to the book isn’t only because it dramatizes some of my intellectual ancestors—some of my undergraduate teachers and mentors were students of Bloom’s at Toronto—but because I think it gets at something about the entire Straussian “thing” that has not been fully appreciated, not even by the Straussians themselves.

For most of its reception history, it has been taken as a straightforward roman à clef: Bloom is Ravelstein, Bellow is Chick. Bloom’s friends understandably protested the way he was seemingly represented; his enemies did not want him to be represented at all. This left very few people to see what the novel was actually about. There was a very interesting panel at the American Political Science Association meeting in 2002 chaired by one of my grad school professors, David Nichols, which was subsequently published in the late Peter Lawler’s journal Perspectives on Political Science. All of the papers are good, and the panelists—all, I believe, former colleagues and students of Bloom—are right to point out the ways Ravelstein is not their teacher. Michael Zuckert’s paper includes an email correspondence from Tom Pangle, perhaps the most accomplished scholar of that generation, who considered it to make the case for “Jerusalem” over “Athens,” because of Ravelstein’s seeming capitulation to some of Chick’s characteristic concerns at the end of his life. For my money, the best of these papers was Michael Davis, which pointed out a surprising turn in the “argument of the action” of the book: its enigmatic divisions actually follow the precise set of topics that Aristotle treats in his Nicomachean Ethics in the same order in which Aristotle addresses them. Davis argues that Ravelstein, a literary creation, used some of Bloom’s qualities to display a “flaw as big as humanity.” That flaw was the way a desire for greatness can become tragically self-forgetting by exaggerating self-sufficiency.

I think Davis is right, but as is the often the case, a lesser writer and thinker like me can stand on the shoulder of relative giants and push some insights a bit further. Just as Ravelstein isn’t exactly Bloom, but a tragic rendering of Bloom, so is Chick a comically diminished Bellow. The novel, indeed, does not straightforwardly “endorse” either one of the friends, and so I don’t think it simply defends the “Bellow” sides of the Straussian Perennial Questions; rather, it takes seriously the major intellectual contribution that Bloom, it seems to me, takes from Strauss: the need for a recovery of a kind of “simple” “prescientific knowledge existing prior to and at the basis of all demonstration, the knowledge of common sense.”

This is not the “common sense” of regular people in our day, who are already under the sway of what we might call various ideologies; much less are they the considered perceptions of the scientifically (or philosophically) sophisticated. Instead, they are the basic tensions of human life that arise from a naive encounter with the world as it is given to us, before it is interpreted. Such a “natural” position is not immediate, but itself has to be recovered. “The given” is not given directly, but is hidden. Kierkegaard makes a similar point about life in the “reflective age;” in such an age, where everyone already knows what, for instance, Christianity is, it is basically impossible to really see the offensive paradox of the proposition that God became human. We know what has happened, and we know, more or less, what we are: the “earthquakes of existence” shook others, but not us.

In the same way, entering late into the history of Western thought and culture, can we truly understand what is at stake in a Platonic dialogue if “everybody knows” that there is a school of thought known a “Platonism” that emerges from these dialogues? The Straussian project, it seems to me, emerges from the same sorts of post-Hegelian (neo-Kantian) problems that also gave rise to phenomenology—what’s the grounding for philosophy itself? For Strauss it is this “natural position,” which is not immediately available, but must be interpolated back from our cultural givens. We begin in a cave beneath the cave—we need to dig our way up, before we can even start to think of squinting our way out.

Bellow’s novel, I think, wants to show that concern for a return to the phenomena is not only the work of philosophers, but of artists, too. In complex ways, these are among the principal insights of both Plato’s Republic and Rousseau’s Emile, two books famously translated by Bloom. Bellow’s characters—Ravelstein and Chick—look enough like the author and Bloom that we can fail to see what is really there. In other words, the book’s literary conceit reflects the “hidden” character of the natural position. We need to set aside the imaginary, abstract account of what is there in order to truly see what is in front of our eyes. When we start looking, we can then see that the book in effect controls for its own misreading as a simple roman à clef.

The book that Ravelstein writes is called Souls Without Longing. If souls lack longing it is because actual reality, the things themselves, are what can inspire that passion in us. It’s never really gone. But passion isn’t simply passionate; it has an intellectual element, too. In the same way, of course, in order to know something you have to want to know. Our world makes this passion hard to access because our intellectual beliefs have the tendency to stultify rather than to inspire. And so Ravelstein, who is a sort of connoisseur of love and friendship, and Chick, a late-in-life lover, are exemplars of how trying to find the real thing makes you somehow more vividly real. Well, if trying to show us how we might get that back doesn’t make Ravelstein a pretty good—great?—book, then I suppose I’m in the wrong line of work.

At any rate, I’d be delighted if you read and shared my new long essay on Ravelstein in The Hedgehog Review, now unpaywalled. Click here!