Love and Friendship

Love and Friendship #1-3

by Allan Bloom

Written with the erudition and wit that made The Closing of the American Mind a #1 best-seller, Love and Friendship is a searching examination of the basic human connections at the center of the greatest works of literature and philosophy throughout the ages. In a spirited polemic directed at our contemporary culture, Allan Bloom argues that we live in a world where love and friendship are withering away. Science and moralism have reduced eros to sex. Individualism and egalitarianism have turned romantic relationships into contractual matters to be litigated. Survey research has made every variety of sexual behavior seem normal, and thus boring. In sex education classes, children learn how to use condoms, but not how to deal with the hopes and risks of intimacy. We no longer know how to talk and think about the peril and promise of attraction and fidelity. What has been lost is what separates human beings from beasts - the power of the imagination, which can transform sex into eros. Our impoverished feelings are rooted in our impoverished language of love. To recover the danger, the strength, and the beauty of eros, we must study the great literature of love, in the hope of rekindling the imagination of beauty and virtue that fuels eros. We must love to learn, in order to learn to love again. Like The Closing of the American Mind, this is an exhilarating journey of ideas in search of the truths that great writers and philosophers have offered about our most precious and perilous longings. Love and Friendship dissects Rousseau's invention of Romantic love, meant to provide a new basis for human connection, amid the atomism of bourgeois society, and exposes the reasons for its ultimate failure. Bloom tells of the Romantics' idea of the sublime and Freud's theory of sublimation. He takes us into the universe of Shakespeare's plays, where love is a natural phenomenon that gives rise to both the brightest hopes and the bitterest conflicts and disappointments. Finall

Genres: Philosophy, Psychology, Nonfiction, Essays, Love, Cultural, History

590 pages, Hardcover

First published January 1, 1993

About the author

Allan David Bloom was an American philosopher, essayist and academic. Bloom championed the idea of 'Great Books' education, as did his mentor Leo Strauss. Bloom became famous for his criticism of contemporary American higher education, with his views being expressed in his bestselling 1987 book, The Closing of the American Mind.

Reviews

[John Warner · Rating 4 out of 5]

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.

Bloom 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. 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. Essays on Tolstoy and Austen, however, are less helpful.

Love and Friendship is Bloom at his best and his worst. The argumentation is often elliptical, assertoric, tortured, sanctimonious--in short, infuriating. But if Bloom is irritating, he is also indispensable. This book shows why.

[George Jensen]

Based on the lives and writings of the ancient authors who influenced our modern times. You can get it as a used book from half.com.

Page 30: 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."

Page 29
"I suggest that we need a generation or two not of theory but of an attempt to discover the real phenomena of eros."

Page 33
"I have no desire ... to preach a high-minded and merely edifying version of love."

"I simply try to act as an honest broker for greater persons and writers than I am ... I present no theory, nor do I have one ... I have constructed no Schema ... in terms of the struggle between Eros and agape and the futility of the former in the face of the latter. I have no aspirations, hoping only to show you what some great writers thought these things are."

Page 34 On the Romantic movement:
"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..."

"...Rousseau and the Rousseauans play a double role in this book."

Page 34 On the Shakespearean movement:
"Shakespeare is to me the purest voice of nature, and he does no meddle with nature. His plays provide us with the greatest variety of erotic expression, and with Shakespeare eros is the proper term to use."

"He takes lovers with the utmost seriousness and portrays with sympathy love's promise of unity... -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."

[DoctorM · Rating 4 out of 5]

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. The bridging between individual essays doesn't always work, and the essay on Shakespeare could probably have been left out altogether. Nonetheless... Bloom's writing is elegant and gently provocative, and the essays on Austen and Plato's "Symposium" are wonderfully done. Bloom reminds us that Eros is something that includes, but goes beyond, physical desire, and he reminds us that friendship--- in the sense that Plato would've understood ---is a thing to be valued not as a pale shadow of romance but an alliance that responds to the best in each friend. (Bloom is worth reading here in tandem with Alan Bray's "The Friend") We do live in an age when Eros has been devalued, when both and love and friendship are no longer seen as calls to be better than we ordinarily are, and Bloom reminds us that there are other, better ways to love.

[Brian · Rating 4 out of 5]

Bloom sure read a lot, and he sure put a lot of thought into what he read. This book is extremely dense, not with theory but with observation, context, cross-reference, personal interpretation, and projection. He has strong opinions and, maybe a little bit forced, finds support in the great books. I don't mark up my books much anymore, but this one is full of notes, underlines, paraphrase notes and questions, as well as points of reference to my own life and ideas. The long chapters on Rousseau and Plato are very good, especially Plato. Although Bloom was homosexual, and most of what Plato was discussing was related to man-love, many of the observations and ideas relate to any two people in love: beauty, submission of self, virtue, commitment. Also recommend the chapters on Antony and Cleopatra, Romeo and Juliet, and Madame Bovary.

Saul Bellow's Ravelstein is a novelized account of the last days of his friend, Allan Bloom, and a very moving story that contains a lot of the same virtues Love and Friendship extols. I recommend that one, too.

[Bekah · Rating 2 out of 5]

Confession/note: This ended up being another one of those books that I didn't read all the way; in fact, I ended up not reading much of it at all, other than the Introduction ("The Fall of Eros"), which just as fittingly could've been titled "A Reason for Books." Those parts elaborating on the good reasons to read literature I found quite compelling - enough so to send me back to the actual story books themselves, and to leave this hefty tome to other readers more scholarly and ambitious than myself.

(For my own purposes, I just don't have time for this work, though I admire its premise - One last note: I personally also find A. Bloom's writing style laborious to work through.)

[Daniel · Rating 4 out of 5]

A fascinating look at the idea of Eros in the classic writings of Renee Descartes, William Shalespeare, and others. Beautiful book.

[Joseph R. · Rating 2 out of 5]

In a wide-ranging tome, Allan Bloom discusses the loss of the ancient concept of Eros in contemporary culture. The classical Greek concept of Eros is the love of the beautiful, a deceptively compact and enigmatic idea. It is not the love of the good or the true specifically, though it can encompass those indirectly or consequentially. Eros is a joy in the beautiful, especially the beauty of another person. This joy has an element of giving as well as of receiving. And it can be an intellectual or spiritual exchange as well as a physical one.

The book starts with an in-depth reflection on love in Rousseau's Emile, where the concept shifts away from the intellectual basis found in the Greeks. Rousseau emphasizes feelings and emotions. The book inspires the birth of the Romantic movement and Bloom discusses the impact he has on works by Stendahl, Flaubert, Austin, and Tolstoy. Bloom's critique shows how they struggle with Rousseau's concepts with more or less satisfactory results. The whole Romantic project is the beginning of the end in Bloom's understanding, winding up in Freud's and Kinsey's more mechanical and self-focused understanding of love, which is reduced to sexuality.

Bloom then shifts to discussing love as found in Shakespeare, whom Bloom takes as having the greatest insights into human behavior and interactions in all of literature. The main focus is on five of the plays though he draws in references and examples from many of the other plays. His admiration for Shakespeare knows no bounds.

The book concludes with an analysis of Plato's Symposium, a work that describes a party where Socrates and a handful of other characters make speeches in praise of Eros/Love. Bloom dissects each individual speech in detail providing his own opinions on what Plato is presenting and his own insights on how it impacts subsequent thinkers like Nietzsche.

The book is very intellectual and has a lot of insights. Unfortunately, Bloom's wide-ranging discussions of texts requires more than a passing familiarity with the books he discusses. Not having read Flaubert's Madame Bovary or Tolstoy's Anna Karenina, those sections had me at a loss when Bloom references characters without enough detail to follow his arguments. I found myself skipping over large portions of the text because I was getting nothing out of it. I found his discussion of Pride and Prejudice delightful and insightful but I've read it several times. The book depends in large part on the reader's familiarity with a lot of literature and philosophy, more than people typically have. It's as if he is standing on the shoulders of giants but hasn't lent a helping hand to his readers to also be on those shoulders.

Barely recommended--there's a lot of pre-requisite work needed to appreciate this.

[Russel Henderson · Rating 4 out of 5]

I enjoyed much of the book. Bloom's discussion of Rousseau shined, as he distilled from Emile Rousseau's appreciation of love and of eros as a completion of character. Likewise his survey of Stendhal, Flaubert, Austen and Tolstoy and their esteem of love and eros as described by Rousseau was superb, long enough to be insightful but measured enough to avoid tedium. His survey of Shakespeare, however, seemed forced. Certainly his erudition speaks for itself, but outside of Romeo and Juliet and parts of the chapter on Troilus and Cressida it seemed a digression from his wider themes, and he referenced some of the plays little if at all elsewhere in the book. His discussion of the Greeks, particularly Socrates and Aristophanes, shined, though his depiction of Socrates comes across as rather contemptible despite what I assume was his contrary intention. On the whole an enjoyable, challenging book, though not necessarily a coherent whole.

[Max Lewy · Rating 5 out of 5]

Makes erudition into an art form.

[Rob Napolitano · Rating 5 out of 5]

Again, while I may not be the biggest fan of who is saying it, to me, Allan BLOOMS again with worthwhile thinking on the most important of human emotions. Love.

[Rae · Rating 1 out of 5]

Garbage written by a flaming pederast

[Edwina Louise Dorch · Rating 3 out of 5]

Well Researched but long and tiny print but overall convincing.

[Emmanuel Wallart · Rating 5 out of 5]

Le meilleur livre que j'ai jamais lu. Une réflexion sur la place de la culture, de la littérature, de la philosophie,... bref des humanités dans notre société.