The Closing of the American Mind: How Higher Education Has Failed Democracy and Impoverished the Souls of Today’s Students

In these chapters, Bloom returns to the essential question of what happens when values take the place of good and evil. The rationalist dream that the scientific orientation of life can provide human happiness, modernity’s powerful myth that inspired the creation of liberal democracies, was forever destroyed by Nietzsche, who saw that only religion and culture, not reason, can generate values answerable to human desire. Nietzsche recognized that the loss of belief in God was tragic and meant that man had lost the ability to value—the essence of his humanity. The value-creating function of man, embodied in culture and religion, is irrational; reason cannot substitute for it, and the liberal regimes of the West grounded on rational principles face the profound crisis that their foundation is illusory.

The realization that God is dead—that the spirit of scientific rationalism has killed him—precipitates nihilism, which can be destructive or creative. Brought to the existential abyss by the meaninglessness of life, the truly creative individual can struggle with the irreducible oppositions of life in to create new values out of the fertile tension of the spirit. The alternative is despair or spiritual suicide. Few, in Nietzsche’s estimation, have the honesty, stamina, and moral fortitude for such a daunting task.