Bloom's writing is elegant and gently provocative, and the essays on Austen and Plato's "Symposium" are wonderfully done. The bridging between individual essays doesn't always work, and the essay on Shakespeare could probably have been left out altogether.
Bloom remind A series of essays on the meaning of Love and (to a lesser degree) Friendship, with Bloom arguing in favour of an Eros that leads lovers and friends to aspire to things higher than themselves and outside themselves. This book shows why.moreĪ series of essays on the meaning of Love and (to a lesser degree) Friendship, with Bloom arguing in favour of an Eros that leads lovers and friends to aspire to things higher than themselves and outside themselves. But if Bloom is irritating, he is also indispensable. The argumentation is often elliptical, assertoric, tortured, sanctimonious-in short, infuriating. Love and Friendship is Bloom at his best and his worst. Essays on Tolstoy and Austen, however, are less helpful. Highlights include a lovely comparative treatment of Montaigne and Shakespeare on friendship, a wonderful commentary on Rousseau's Emile, and a splendid essay on Plato's Symposium. The culprits are the familiar Straussian bugaboos: a reductionist and materialistic modern science, a relativistic moral climate, and a repulsive consumer culture combine to narrow contemporary man's erotic horizons, and leave him unable to come to grips with the hopes and fears of true intimacy.īloom seeks to restore his reader to erotic health by returning to philosophy and literature-the true teachers and knowers of love-and, to that end, offers a set of interpretive essays that vary considerably in their substance and quality. Bloom seeks to restore his reader to erotic health by returning to philosophy an Allan Bloom, with his characteristic combination of brilliance and bombast, laments the death of Eros in the modern world. The culprits are the familiar Straussian bugaboos: a reductionist and materialistic modern science, a relativistic moral climate, and a repulsive consumer culture combine to narrow contemporary man's erotic horizons, and leave him unable to come to grips with the hopes and fears of true intimacy. moreĪllan Bloom, with his characteristic combination of brilliance and bombast, laments the death of Eros in the modern world.
and that Christianity is the source not only of repression decried since the Romantics, but of a deepening of women and a new sensitivity of men.". "He takes lovers with the utmost seriousness and portrays with sympathy love's promise of unity. His plays provide us with the greatest variety of erotic expression, and with Shakespeare eros is the proper term to use." "Shakespeare is to me the purest voice of nature, and he does no meddle with nature. ".Rousseau and the Rousseauans play a double role in this book." "It tried to rescue sex from Christian original sin and to recover the union of body and soule of Platonic eros while guaranteeing the reciprocity missing from the Platonic understanding of love and friendship." I have no aspirations, hoping only to show you what some great writers thought these things are." in terms of the struggle between Eros and agape and the futility of the former in the face of the latter. "I simply try to act as an honest broker for greater persons and writers than I am. to preach a high-minded and merely edifying version of love." "I suggest that we need a generation or two not of theory but of an attempt to discover the real phenomena of eros."
"But nowhere is this a more urgent task than in matters of eros, the first and best hope of human connectedness in a world where all connectedness has become problematic." : Bloom sums up his greater need to write on such a theme: : Bloom sums up his greater need to write on such a theme: "But nowhere is this a more urgent task than in matters of eros, the first and best hope of human connectedness in a world where all connectedness has become problematic." "I suggest that we need a generation or two not of theory but of an attempt to discover the real phenomena of eros." " Based on the lives and writings of the ancient authors who influenced our modern times. Based on the lives and writings of the ancient authors who influenced our modern times.