Book Review: Love & Friendship by Allan Bloom

Love & Friendship by Allan Bloom

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.