Bloom’s Closing sought to make clear that while Nietzsche’s antifoundationalism paved the way for modern nihilism, he was also a theorist who—unlike his American progeny—understood its consequences for the human spirit. At the core, the outrage generated over the “Nietzscheanization” of the liberal arts was not just that the academy no longer trained students to adjudicate moral claims, but that it was undermining moral claims altogether, cultivating new generations of Americans with no belief in—or capacity for—intellectual and moral perfectionism.
