Allan Bloom (1930-1992)

When Mercury Turns Back: How the Mind Rebels to Defend Truth

“Openness used to be the virtue of the man who knew he might be wrong; now it is the virtue of the man who doesn’t believe anything.”

— Allan Bloom, The Closing of the American Mind

The Jupiter in Cancer series continues with a chart defined by intellectual rebellion — a mind that refused the easy comfort of modern liberalism. In this nativity, Mercury in Libra retrograde rejects the polite relativism of its sign and becomes the conscience of thought itself: language turning inward, reversing course, and interrogating the foundations of belief. What begins as dialogue transforms into critique. The result is a philosopher who sees culture not as a mirror of freedom but as the test of it — and who wages his life’s work in defense of the mind’s integrity.

For Allan Bloom, author of The Closing of the American Mind (1987), this Mercurial reversal was no academic posture but a moral calling. His chart reveals a Jupiter in Cancer placed in the 9th house of philosophy and higher education — the teacher’s planet, devoted to nurturing civilization through knowledge. Yet Jupiter’s placement in the bound of Mercury ensures that his moral vision was born from dissent: care expressed through correction, empathy refined through judgment. The Great Books became his instrument of restoration, each work a vessel of enduring truth retrieved from the ruins of modern culture.

In this synthesis of Mercury and Jupiter we see not harmony but productive tension — intellect made protective, wisdom made combative. Bloom’s philosophy is not reconciliation but restoration: a call to reopen the American mind through the rediscovery of truth.

This quest for absolute truth, revealed through the literature and philosophy of the West, echoes the same Jupiter in Cancer that first appeared in this series with Hannah Arendt: for Arendt, moral philosophy in response to totalitarian regimes; for Bloom, moral philosophy in response to cultural indifference. Both sought to defend the dignity of thought in an age that had forgotten how to think.

Universitätsarchiv St.Gallen | Regina Kühne | HSGN 028/00796 | CC-BY-SA 4.0

Allan David Bloom was born on September 14, 1930, in Indianapolis, Indiana, the son of two social workers. His intellectual awakening came early, when as a teenager he encountered the Great Books program at the University of Chicago — a bold experiment in liberal education shaped by Robert Maynard Hutchins and Mortimer Adler. Chicago’s rigorous humanities curriculum, steeped in the classics, gave Bloom the lifelong conviction that philosophy was not an academic discipline but a way of life. He earned his B.A., M.A., and Ph.D. there, completing his doctorate in 1955.

Between 1953 and 1955, Bloom lived in Paris, a formative period that exposed him to European intellectual culture and the postwar crisis of meaning. It was there that he absorbed the legacy of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, whose struggle between authenticity and civilization would later form one of the central threads in his thought. In the cafés of the Left Bank, Bloom saw both the vitality and the decadence of a civilization unmoored from metaphysics — a vision that would later haunt The Closing of the American Mind.

Returning to the United States, Bloom taught at Cornell University, the University of Toronto, and later returned to Chicago as a professor in the Committee on Social Thought, where he joined a line of philosophical classicists descending from Leo Strauss. Like Strauss, Bloom believed that the crisis of modernity was born from the Enlightenment’s betrayal of ancient wisdom: the replacement of Plato’s eros for truth with modern self-consciousness and relativism.

Throughout his career, Bloom sought to revive philosophy’s original vocation as the pursuit of the good life. His translations and commentaries — notably of Plato’s Republic and Rousseau’s Émile — became landmarks for students of political philosophy. Shakespeare, too, occupied a central place in Bloom’s pedagogy. He read the plays as moral laboratories, dramatizing the tension between nature and convention, passion and reason — the very tensions that modern liberalism had tried to dissolve. For Bloom, the chain of great minds from Plato to Shakespeare to Rousseau formed the living core of Western civilization; to study them was to converse with the soul of the West itself.

That chain culminated in 1987 with the publication of The Closing of the American Mind, his impassioned critique of higher education and the relativist ethos of late liberal democracy. To the surprise of almost everyone — including Bloom — the book became a publishing phenomenon, spending months atop the New York Times bestseller list. It sold more than a million copies and ignited public debate over the future of the American university. Conservatives hailed it as a defense of Western civilization and moral seriousness; liberals derided it as elitist, nostalgic, or out of touch with social realities. For several years, Bloom found himself at the center of a national argument about whether America’s intellectual inheritance could still be revived.

Bloom died in 1992, leaving behind a generation of students and admirers who saw in him one of the last representatives of the Platonic ideal — the philosopher as midwife to the soul.

In recent years, The Closing of the American Mind has undergone a partial re-assessment. Once dismissed as a relic of 1980s conservatism, it is now reread as a prescient warning about the fragmentation of higher education, the collapse of common culture, and the politicization of identity. Critics who once found Bloom’s tone austere now concede that his diagnosis — that openness without conviction leads to nihilism — anticipated the malaise of the digital age. His call for a return to the philosophic life, grounded in the permanent questions of Plato, Rousseau, and Shakespeare, remains one of the most passionate defenses of the human intellect in modern American letters.

In an era that prizes comfort over contemplation, Bloom stands as a reminder that the life of the mind is a kind of resistance — a refusal to let democracy’s noise drown out philosophy’s quiet voice.

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Proposed Rectification: 11:06:36 AM, ASC 27SC16’13”

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Victor Model Factors favoring Jupiter in Cancer

• Sign ruler of Lot of Spirit and Prenatal Syzygy

• Bound ruler of Moon, Lot of Spirit, Prenatal Syzygy

• Diurnal planet on same horizon as Sun

• Solar phase: waxing sextile to square

• Sign of exaltation

• Received by bound lord Mercury

Physiognomy factors favoring Gemini

Rising decan = Cancer; Rising decan ruler = Moon in Gemini

Contemporary accounts of Allan Bloom consistently describe a lively, animated manner of speaking — quick, expressive, and intellectually charged — accompanied by vigorous hand gestures and shifting facial expression. His lectures were remembered as performances of the mind made visible, a perfect embodiment of the Gemini Moon’s mercurial restlessness and need to communicate through movement. The constant interplay of voice, gesture, and argument gave him a distinctly mobile and articulate presence, conveying thought through the body as much as through words. This expressive agility contrasts with the solidity of his build, revealing the Moon in Gemini’s signature: lightness and verbal animation emerging through a heavier frame.

Moon’s Configuration

• Moon Gemini Ingress

• Moon separates from the trine of Mercury/Libra-retrograde

• Moon is void of course

• (birth moment)

• Moon applies to the Sun

• Moon Cancer Ingress

Phase I – Moon Separating from Mercury (Libra retrograde, 11th House)

Delineation. The Moon’s separation from Mercury in Libra, retrograde shows the mind turning against the age’s easy balance of opinions. Mercury in Libra seeks measure among arguments; retrograde, it reverses that habit and exposes false equivalence. Speech that reconciles becomes speech that judges. The Moon in Gemini gathers the reversal into quick reasoning and dispute—the tongue as instrument of measure rather than ornament.

Venus in Scorpio, ruler of Mercury yet in detriment and aversion, corrupts the cultural field. Venus here signifies distortion of taste—delight without discipline, music without form. Bloom’s well-known attacks on rock and roll exemplify this signification: art as appetite, not beauty. Venus fallen provokes Mercury’s revolt; reason restores rule where pleasure has usurped it.

Biographical Match. At the University of Chicago, Bloom was formed by the Great Books discipline—educated in a hierarchy of texts and the pursuit of permanent things. The distrust of relativism did not arise there; rather, it arose as he met the wider mid-century academy and, especially in Paris (1953–55), observed a dazzling intellectual scene that preferred rhetoric to truth. He attended Kojève’s lectures, read Rousseau, and saw philosophy reduced to commentary and fashion. Returning to America, he resolved to treat philosophy as a rule of truth and education as the recovery of form. This is the Moon’s separation from Mercury: the scholar turning upon the consensus of his time, not upon his schooling.

Phase II – Moon Void-of-Course (14°32′ from Sun; beyond Lilly’s 13°30′ moiety)

Delineation. With the Moon at 6° Gemini and the Sun at 21° Virgo, the distance of 14°32′ exceeds Lilly’s 13°30′ moiety for a lunar–solar contact. The Moon is briefly void-of-course before it begins to move towards the Sun. Work proceeds; recognition does not.

Biographical Match. From 1955 to 1986 Bloom labored in this condition: teaching at Cornell, Toronto, and Chicago; translating Plato’s Republic and Rousseau’s Émile; shaping students more than headlines. His doctrine was complete; the age had not yet received it. The near-void describes exactly such a span—preparation held taut until the aspect perfects.

Phase III – Moon Applying to the Sun (Virgo, 10th House; Sun in bound of Mars)

Delineation. As the Moon approaches the Sun in Virgo, the long-prepared work is brought to light. Virgo signifies clarity and correction; the Mars-bound assigns defense. The application joins understanding with office—doctrine becomes declaration, philosophy becomes guardianship.

Biographical Match. In 1987, The Closing of the American Mind perfects the figure. Fame comes through exposition and critique (Virgo), sharpened by the Mars-bound’s duty to contend. Bloom did not court applause; he rebuked the times. The Moon’s light reaches the Sun: the argument stands in full day.

Influence of the Moon’s Configuration on Jupiter in Cancer as Victor

The Moon’s configuration governs planets in Cancer, her domicile. Here Jupiter in Cancer in the 9th receives the Moon’s full motion from Mercury to Sun. Because Jupiter lies in the bound of Mercury, its authority proceeds from that same Mercury retrograde: the rejection of false harmony becomes the law of teaching. What Mercury rejects, Jupiter preserves.

The Moon carries Mercury’s discrimination into Jupiter’s domain of learning, joining intellect with nurture and judgment with care. Thus Bloom’s Jupiter shows the philosopher-teacher who reforms civilization by forming students. The bound of Mercury keeps the doctrine argumentative, not sentimental—the classroom as tribunal, education as correction. In this way Jupiter becomes the guardian of meaning, sustaining wisdom by continual measure.

Interpretive Summary

Bloom’s figure is the philosopher as reformer of measure. The Moon separates from Mercury retrograde—turning against the age’s balance of opinions and restoring judgment over fashion. A void follows: decades of labor held in reserve, doctrine ready before the world was ready. The application to the Sun then perfects the work—clarity in the service of truth, controversy as the cost of defense. Throughout, Jupiter in Cancer—placed in the bound of Mercury and ruled by the Moon—keeps the office of teacher: to preserve meaning by discriminating it.

Influence of Sect on the Moon’s Configuration

While the Moon is not the sect light, it does rule victor Jupiter who is the in-sect benefic. This bonifies Jupiter, via the Moon’s configuration, making Jupiter’s argument for moral truth in synch with the ruling party, e.g., Republican Party of the 1980s.

Early/Late Bloomer Thesis

Allan Bloom was born after a Full Moon (14 Sep 1930), making his chart preventional, or waning in light. The midpoint of his lifespan falls around 25 Sep 1961, well before the publication of The Closing of the American Mind in 1987, the work that defined his legacy. Prior to that date, his life was one of preparation—teaching, translating, and refining his philosophical convictions without public recognition. His major achievement thus appeared long after the midpoint of life, perfectly illustrating the Late Bloomer Thesis: those born after a Full Moon realize their enduring work in the second half of life.