《爱的设计》的读后感大全
《爱的设计》是一本由[美] 阿兰·布鲁姆（Allan Bloom）著作，华夏出版社出版的精装图书，本书定价：59.00元，页数：2017-3-1，特精心从网络上整理的一些读者的读后感，希望对大家能有帮助。
●在同样顽固且专横的人们中间，我倾向于友谊。蒙田人文主义式地欲让爱和友谊和解实在是太难了。卢梭的设计需要读过文本再回答。
●大概分为“爱欲的堕落”、“卢梭”、“或浪漫主义的其他作家及其代表作品”三个部分，以一、二最为详细。第一部分包括爱欲的现实情况与附加条件，引用包括金赛与弗洛伊德等性学家观点，提到“回溯爱欲”的必要性。第二部分大多是是对《爱弥儿》的引用与阐释，提到教育如何转化性能量并创造出渴望、想象力如何使爱欲自足等等。阿兰·布鲁姆对照着浪漫主义时期与其他时期关于爱欲的表述，他不是悲观的挽留者，而是某种在多层体验与认识自我层面的推动者。
●love and friendship
●帮我温习了早年读过的一些经典小说，唤醒了一些细节，但好像并未增加什么新的东西。
●布魯姆喜歡註釋經典，沒有讀過原典真不好理解，暫時擱下。至此，施派布魯姆的書算是勉強都讀過了。
《爱的设计》读后感(一)：翻译70分吧
先说个小问题。
译者用 的 之多，到了恶心的地步。翻译形容词，就一定要用 的？
一译者缺乏最基本翻译常识。全书翻译一看就是磕磕绊绊、乱译一气！
举个例子。
感觉，感受，感受力，感官，感情……这么多词出现在一页，能分的清么？
布鲁姆行云流水之大才子，被翻译成逻辑不通的大傻逼了。本书翻译之愚蠢，其实从书名就可以看出来。
《爱的设计》读后感(二)：有一说一那个网友，你批量打一星不累吗？
有个网友叫有一说一，据朋友指出，他今年家中遭遇不幸，母亲过世，这两年多次化疗和放疗，拿药物扛着，很难受了，家庭也非常困难，这种精神状态难免会偏激。但你不能豆瓣上刷一星，骂人侮辱人吧。这几天好多人指责他，他修改了一些帖子，但还是满口垃圾垃圾。
他其实就是想翻译这些书，但都被别人译完了，他自己又没有能力和渠道。其实他哀求过很多老师，也想译，但水平真的捉急啊。所以你就给人家所有施派书打一星。但你自己又自称施派粉，难道别人翻译不行吗？
这种人生活中得是什么样子，你需要帮助，就跟那些老师和同学们说嘛，你自己觉得译得好，就拿出来给大家看看嘛。你翻译完，人家拿着放大镜，挑你几个错误，骂你垃圾，你会高兴吗？
期待你的译著也能够在豆瓣上看见，当然，你是不会暴露自己身份的，不过有人知道，我这就去问。
《爱的设计》读后感(三)：爱欲——浪漫派的信仰
导语即开宗明义，哀悼爱欲的堕落（the fall of eros）。根本原因被看作是布尔乔亚社会民主的拉平化（leveling）、祛魅（demystifying）和算计倾向，扬波啜醴的还有弗洛伊德的性还原论与金赛性学报告的唯物论。以及，作者明里暗里批评的女权主义，认为她们将两性的和谐反转成了两性的战争，但对这一点我持保留态度。特别同意作者的一句话：
阅读弗洛伊德是一个人可以想象得到的最无爱欲的体验。看来不喜欢弗洛伊德并不是我的过错。
是想象活动让性变成了爱欲。而弗洛伊德恰好剔除了这一精华，仅留下对生理机能的分析。佛教的白骨观、不净观，或许也旨在给爱欲祛魅，破除一切想象的玫瑰色彩，直面惨淡的生理过程。
面对可悲的公民社会的现状：
霍布斯说人生来就处在一场所有人反对所有人的战争之中，尽管卢梭对这一原则保有异议，他却认可公民社会建立在那一假设之上。公民社会以及公民社会中的人的关系都只不过是那一采用和平手段的战争的延伸，用各种各样的竞争与剥削——主要是经济上的——代替了生死搏斗。最主要的关系是通过契约，也就是两个个体之间的契约建立的。这两个个体在签订契约之后依然保持他们的个体状态，并且只有当契约对两个个体都有益时，契约才有效。他们之间的联系是人为的、算计的，最重要的是，这种联系是试探性的。在这种情况下，人的防御系统总是处在戒备状态。这种永不停歇的戒备的心理学效应是灾难性的。一个只关心自己的存在者不得不把时间花在琢磨别人的意图和试图不向别人暴露真我上，不得不把时间花在恐吓、奉承和撒谎上。在他的自私之中，他忘却了自己。当他变得虚伪、忌妒、虚荣、盲从，变得要按他人的成功或失败来丈量他自己时，他的灵魂早已漫步到了九霄云外那没有人的世界，并且再也无法回来。这就是那种异化的情况，那种被萨特称为“他人即地狱”的情况。卢梭提出的方案就是通过教育而达成爱欲的重建，作为
沟通自然人与社会人、关心自己与关心他人之间无此便不可逾越的鸿沟的桥梁。一直以为成长小说是歌德的首创，到此才了解应追溯至卢梭的《爱弥儿》。在亚里士多德那里，婚姻只关乎生育与教化公民，是一项纯粹的政治行为。而卢梭则将爱欲引入婚姻，后世讨论爱情、婚姻议题的小说，也大都受益于卢梭，典型代表即书中接下来讨论的《红与黑》、《傲慢与偏见》、《包法利夫人》、《安娜·卡列尼娜》。将《傲慢与偏见》也纳入受卢梭影响的浪漫主义创作，倒是之前没有想到过的。就个人的阅读体验而言，奥斯汀除了理性还是理性。在本书中，作者指出：奥斯汀笔下的女主人公多少都有些自然天成，不受不明智的父母意见左右，可谓是自然战胜习俗，并且将爱欲引入了婚姻，这些都是浪漫派的信号。最为叹赏的是他对《包法利夫人》的解读。
《包法利夫人》由两种互相关联的情绪所主导：无聊与爱欲。爱玛是这两者的聚焦点，是它们将她和其他所有角色区分开来——其他人不管从哪方面看都已得到了满足或满意。爱玛所有的言谈举止多少都和一种伟大、忘我的爱情观有关。她的着装、她的步态、她房子的装饰、她上菜吃饭的方式，所有的一切都充斥着爱欲的意味。没有什么东西是中立（neutral）的，她对找不到这样一种爱而绝望，这种绝望就反映在她对其周围的东西都不感兴趣上。她无法走进布尔乔亚生活的世界，而这个世界的居民也对将要发生在她身上的事一无所知。他们都是无爱欲的。这个世界，这个爱玛生活的世界，就是这样被那盘踞在她脑海里的、几乎是空洞的欲求抽干了所有的魅力与意义。百无聊赖（enmui）是她遭受的东西。她闷闷不乐地思考着人生的无意义，唯有被突如其来的忘我和无目的的活动所打断。就像我已经说过的，帕斯卡尔描述这种情况最为有力。对他而言，产生这种情况的原因是上帝的缺席以及对自身完满的上帝之爱的缺席，而对爱玛来说，原因只是她缺少一个男人。帕斯卡尔与福楼拜的这种差别揭示了某种浪漫派的神学，而这种神学，福楼拜已不再信仰。人们无法从这种浪漫派的神学出发，到达被爱欲之神所装点的宇宙。第一次对爱玛的遭遇有了深切的体会与感同身受的同情。什么样的人生才是值得过的？什么样的人才是值得爱的？若是找不到缺失的那一半，如何学会带着残缺感享受人生？若是选择成为独身者、不育者，则会面临来自社会的更大敌意：
不育的妇女和独身主义者总是处在生命的真实意义之外。像列文的同胞兄弟柯兹尼雪夫这样的理性主义者是不会去爱的。托尔斯泰对《战争与和平》中的不育妇女索尼娅和《安娜·卡列尼娜》只不过未婚的华伦加是非常残酷无情的。她们是完全正派得体的人，但却不身具幸福的资源。多丽遇到的唯一问题是她的丈夫不忠，这让她多少显得有些可怜，尽管她对家庭的奉献已让她显得格外高贵。作为自然人，我们天生倾向于自己选择朋友、自己选择爱人，爱欲激情那匹黑马经常是不受控制的。而作为社会人，政治立法需要我们建立稳定的家庭、养育后代，很可能是以牺牲爱欲激情为代价。
大多数人拥有婚姻，亦即人类关系，仅遵从法律和公共意见而存在。只有极少数人才拥有实质性的爱恋（substantial attachments），这种爱恋由对方的陪伴而产生的持久不衰的喜悦组成。而这里的“持久不衰”也是可以打上大大的问号的。卢梭寄希望于以教育和转化性能量调和自然属性与社会属性，效果如何很难得知。读这本书时，偶尔也会想到自己当下的处境，有时回答了一些自己的疑惑，有时反而又让自己更疑惑了，似乎是近年来比较少有的阅读体验。
不过，另一个值得关注的不同声音是，Edward Shorter在The Making of the Modern Family中指出：爱情婚姻最先在工人阶级中产生，其中最经典的主题沿用至今：一个坠入爱河的女孩子不惜违抗父亲的意志，只为选择自己所爱的伴侣和想要的婚姻。
作者果然是少年天才，妙语隽言散落书中各处。
肉体是不朽的，而灵魂则惨遭启蒙运动和法国大革命的屠戮。…司汤达的分析只在一点上和马克思不同，那就是他对大众毫不指望。《爱的设计》读后感(四)：对阿兰·布鲁姆"爱欲论"（Eros）的梳理
关于阿兰·布鲁姆“爱的三部曲”（《爱的设计》《爱的戏剧》《爱的阶梯》）的笔记梳理。
1、何为“爱欲”？
对美好事物的爱，从偏好（preference）开始的，建立在两眼所见的东西上，建立在体现了肉体之美的理型（ideal）上。爱欲是对现实的美好之爱，自然而然包括了性欲。男女之间的爱欲关系是一种互惠性关系，并自然地缔结出社会关系。（这个关系可能为婚姻关系，也可能是短暂的，但它始终是一种鲜活关系。
2、性
性爱是爱欲探讨的始发站。布鲁姆对两性关系思考甚多。首先应对“性”与“爱”作出区分，也许男性与女性于此也有差别。布鲁姆追问了性欲对男性灵魂深度是否有影响。
在完全自然的性行为中，伴侣们根本不关心另一方的所思所感，也不关心另一方之前做过什么，今后会做什么。 （《爱的设计》p45）
在自然状态下，任何一个女人都足以满足男人的欲望，并且她被欲望的原因总是千篇一律，但想象使文明人开始挑剔他的对象，并使他萌生出了关于他想和她们如何相处的各种复杂的方法。 （《爱的设计》p45）
3、性与爱欲
他们真正是爱欲关系，是潜在的相契带来的相互吸引。这是人类之间联系的一种可能性，这绝不是被称为肉体欲望衍生而来的升华或其他称呼。这一联系向我们确保了，有那么一个人类群体，他们以对真理的共同见解为基础。 （《爱的戏剧》p170）
其实，身体的欲望永远不只是身体的欲望，而是充满了精神性，至少对于人类灵魂来说如此，对知识的渴望由人的个别性和必朽性所决定。 （《爱的阶梯》）
4、性与想象
爱欲是诗的兄弟，当诗人教导人们爱欲时，他们自身的写作也正处于爱欲激情的掌控之中。没有想象，你永远无法拥有性，但另一方面，就算没有想象的任何帮助，你仍能感受到饥饿，仍能进食。因为饥饿纯粹是身体性的。 （《爱的设计》p15）
5、身体之爱与灵魂之爱
爱欲产生渴望，是对美、永恒以及整全的自然渴望。
渴望永恒的体验，例如当一个人在臂弯中拥着他美丽的爱人时的感受，构成了爱欲之不同于性的地方。 （《爱的阶梯》p119）
身体的爱欲总是倾向于，并且希望把精神渴求吸纳进来，灵魂的爱欲从身体的爱欲中获得它的力量和广阔的热望，或者说视野。 （《爱的阶梯》p162）
灵魂的最大特征是渴求，对贯通与一致的需求。因此，人们的言辞正是他心理学的核心。渴求最活跃的形式是爱欲，而爱欲是灵魂的支柱。即使对最简单的性行为和性器官的最轻微活动，人们都有意见要表达。一旦他被诱使说话，或者对自己或别人陈述这些意见，他就超出了身体的行为。 （《爱的阶梯》p165）
我们的爱是与我们自身最亲密的形式。放荡的行为仅仅属于性的领域，与行为者本人并不兼容，而那些真正属于他们自己的东西，会让他们变得极为严肃。 （《爱的阶梯》）
爱跻身于政治的严肃性与性的轻浮这一高一低之间。爱似乎成了人的高与低之间的一个连接，而莎士比亚耗费了极大的才情致力于细察这一点。 （《爱的戏剧》p5）
爱是一种让人自知的忘我，是一种使理性地审视自我成为可能的无理性。它产生痛苦，也产生那些最令人感到狂喜的快乐。它提供关于美好之物和生活之甜美的原初体验。它包含着强有力的幻觉。它也许会被当做幻觉，但它所产生的影响却不是幻觉。爱人最清楚地表现了人与生俱来的不完美以及他对完美的寻求。 （《爱的设计》p318）
爱在很大程度上意味着注视被爱者。（《爱的设计》p318）
6、爱与德性
7、爱与友谊不尽相同
8、宗教与自然宗教
9、基督教原罪观
10、何为浪漫主义的爱？（现代人的爱情观）
浪漫主义者认为，自然与社会是一种断裂关系。而社会人失去了自然状态，经历着道德、责任与义务、律法、各种社会关系的压抑。如何恢复自由，人需要爱与自爱。爱欲在人类文明的重重包围之下，已然消解黯淡，那么重拾爱欲必然是针对理性文明的创造行为。真爱与自爱的概念出现，性在文明视域下同样被扭曲着。两性生活是所谓“自然主义者”的卢梭追求自我知识的一部分。并在一个世纪后弗洛伊德那里发展为文化原动力。其间脉络布鲁姆拎得清晰而挺括。
《忏悔录》里的卢梭是一个异常敏感的现代人，拥有文明在激情生活中制造的所有扭曲（扭曲，布鲁姆很多时候为了呈现出对比强烈的效果，会极化一些描写，比如妖魔化“文明”的成果）。从这个点出发，向着两个方向前进：向自然状态下的野蛮人的性回归和向一种有可能实现的爱——这种爱将各种自然欲望的结合与所有能力都已得到发展的文明人的深刻的自我意识结合在了一起——的理想生活前进。（《爱的设计》p34）
这里爱欲被泾渭分明地分割为“性”与“爱”，并认同“性”中存在着堕落成分，而爱分感官的与情感的、激情的与家庭的，还有仅仅存在于幻想之中的完美而理想的爱（《爱的设计》p34）。这些爱都充满对抗性。而“性”是短暂的，并不导向婚姻与家庭。它是自然提供给男人与女人保持暂时联系的欲望。性欲与责任同样是冲突性的。
良好的教育就是让人自爱，摆脱短暂的性，寻求真爱。这几乎是一个自我意识强化后的人的寻爱之旅。并且似乎卢梭对人的设定很单一，近乎白板，以突出教育者的角色。
卢梭称这种排他的自我关切为自爱。他指出，真正的对立不在自我中心主义和利他主义之间，而是在好的自爱和坏的自爱之间。（《爱的设计》p45）
一旦自爱之心发作，一个男人很有可能只想征服一个女人的意志，而不想让自己沦陷。
人的自爱之心使人寻求匹配的真爱。寻求最高的性愉悦，同样会使性欲文明化。性不会上升，而爱亦是理性算计后的。
一个有文化的人，性欲已经转化，以至于它渴望唯一固定伴侣身上的真、善、美，以及作为这种渴望的完成和奖赏的性高潮。这是对原初状态的一次回归，因为在原初状态下，履行自然责任——生育——也有这种最大的快乐作为奖赏。 （《爱的设计》p51）
自爱使人与人之间的关系弱化，社会契约关系日益显著。同情概念出现，而且同情增加了平等诉求（《爱的设计》p68）。
既然自爱必定会在社会人身上产生，那么是否会存在一种对他人的骄傲而慷慨的关系，或者是否会存在一种建立在你死我活的竞争之上的虚伪的伙伴关系，一切都取决于这一发展。 （《爱的设计》p67）
爱的脆弱与道德
对自尊的渴望源于自爱而自爱以寻求配得上的伴侣的爱的欲望为中介。这种建构起来的灵魂和对另一人的依附展示了其自身的极端脆弱性，它们是升华了的，但它们更依赖于那个导师的操控而非自然。（《爱的设计》p148）
一个男人或女人如何能够在意识到不存在永恒，心上人随时可能失去的情况下，全身心地爱他或她那有朽的心上人，这是一个谜。这种对一个人的爱恋讨好了我们的欲望，因为我们当中很少有人能像爱另一个人那样去爱上帝或理念。（《爱的设计》p148）
卢梭对于爱的呼求是极为严肃与认真的。他关于爱的想象与设计从理念到实践的全过程都是完备的，无论是求爱还是婚姻，无论是对男性还是女性的塑造。卢梭的理论体系之完整，思想程度之高，设计之合乎情理，情感之狂热真挚对后世影响颇深。尽管布鲁姆处处挑刺，但他对卢梭思想的深层矛盾充满同情，既然他的爱欲观积重难返，那它就永远有着指示性。所谓浪漫主义的爱正是现代社会的情爱现象，它不是过去时，而是当下的普遍性。也许卢梭爱欲构建是一个痼疾的感染源，但它仍滋养着现代文化。
说实话，在布鲁姆笔下，浪漫主义的爱比古希腊的爱欲更饱满。因为柏拉图式的爱欲更倾向于升华，哲学味浓，人情味淡。而卢梭的浪漫主义基本上成就了一部爱情法典，即使不爱卢梭，现在也跃跃欲试了。那么究竟是谁的洞察更贴近人性呢？而这种人性状态又跟哪位哲人的理念塑造更有渊源呢？谈论爱欲除了恢复一些较为客观的爱的知识与视野外，是否能让我们建立新的内在秩序？毕竟，如果爱欲是人的灵魂支柱的话。
现在的情形通常是人渴望爱，却不是爱渴望。没有任何一种期待是不完满的。人都是倾向于满足自己，自我完成或者停滞不前。那么爱欲本身的呈现态是否更多的是急于满足或者半压抑的呢？个人的觉醒如果都是半心半意的话，那它的爱欲觉醒呢？爱欲如果仅仅作为性的满足欲，它是有所回应的，那如果是深层次的追逐呢？也许爱欲本身就能引领人抵达一种臻至的境界，但爱欲共同体不是政治共同体，爱欲的人仍是孤立的人。布鲁姆给予爱欲以期许，但并不是定心丸。在这个意义上，阿兰·布鲁姆的“爱欲”与西蒙娜·薇依的放弃第一人称的爱是一致的。如果仅仅作为理解的话，爱欲，对他者的欲求，难道不是对自我生命的欲求？爱欲与繁殖，难道不是说爱欲是种创造活动？爱欲是种敞开，它消耗最大的生命能量，追求快乐，投入西绪弗斯式的劳作，让人完成他的认知程度范围内的创造，也许是他的最大创造。而这创造又等同于最足值的碌碌无为。
《爱的设计》读后感(五)：摘录Introduction: The Fall of Eros
阿兰·布鲁姆的英文很好（当然他的法文、古希腊文也很好），推荐读英文原文。下面是Introduction的摘录，行文令人感动，心驰神往。为了主要体现布鲁姆的主张，这里的摘录没包括他对弗洛伊德、金赛、福柯、德里达等思潮的批评。要了解这些批评需要读全文。
东亚文明中的爱情与西方文明中的爱情不太一样，目前我只读到一篇文章：刘东老师的《另一种爱情》，收录于文集《自由与传统》。如果有其它好书、好文章讲出了东亚的爱情的可贵之处，欢迎推荐！
The Fall of Eros, 这意象令人印象深刻。
This book is an attempt to recover the power, the danger, and the beauty of eros under the tutelage of its proper teachers and knowers, the poetic writers. Against my will I have to use the term "eros,'' in spite of its alien and somewhat pretentious Greekness as well as its status as a buzzword since Freud and Marcuse. There is an impoverishment today in our language about what used to be understood as life's most interesting experience, and this almost necessarily bespeaks an impoverishment of feeling. This is why we need the words of old writers who took eros so seriously and knew how to speak about it.
The sexual talk of our times is about how to get greater bodily satisfaction (although decreasingly so) or increasingly how to protect ourselves from one another. The old view was that delicacy of language was part of the nature, the sacred nature, of eros, and that to speak about it in any other way would be to misunderstand it. What has disappeared is the risk and the hope of human connectedness embedded in eros. Ours is a language that reduces the longing for an other to the need for individual, private satisfaction and safety.
Isolation, a sense of lack of profound contact with other human beings, seems to be the disease of our time. There are great industries of psychotherapy that address our difficulties in "relationships"— that pallid, pseudoscientific word the very timidity of which makes substantial attachments impossible. This way of describing human connection begins from the tentativeness of our attachments, the alleged fact that we are naturally atoms wanting to belong to clusters without the wherewithal to do so, a situation that would, at best, make contractual relations possible. This abstract term puts citizenship, family, love, and friendship under the same makeshift tent and abstracts from their very different foundations and demands. Yet one has to have a tin ear to describe one's great love as a relationship. Did Romeo and Juliet have a relationship？ The term is suitable only for expressions like "they had a relationship." It betokens a chaste egalitarianism leveling different ranks and degrees of attachment. "Relationships" are based on "commitments," as in "I’m not ready to make a commitment." It is a term empty of content, implying that human connectedness can arise only out of a motiveless act of freedom. It reeks of Sartre's No Exit—"Hell is other people." It is this contemporary condition that led me once to describe us as social solitaries. I meant by this not that we have attained the condition of solitary self-sufficiency that Rousseau so vividly characterized and Kant, looking to Rousseau, calls the very model of the sublime, but that we are lonely while living in society, with all the social needs for others yet unable to satisfy them.
Ancient views of politics taught that man's nature has an impulse toward society and that society is not necessarily a maiming or division of man but potentially his perfection. Similarly, the ancients believed that eros is a natural longing for the beautiful, which, given the complexity of man and of things, can be damaged and misled but is in itself a perfection of human sociability by way of the passions.
Yet simply put, human sex is inseparable from the activity of the imagination. Everybody knows this. The body's secret movements are ignited by some images and turned off by others. Ideas of beauty and merit, as well as longings for eternity, are first expressed in the base coin of bodily movements. A biologist can describe male erection and female readiness and tell us what bodily processes make them possible, but he cannot tell us when and by whom they will be set off. The truth of erotic arousal defies materialism. One sees action at a distance. And it is imaginative activity that converts sex into eros. Eros is the brother of poetry, and the poets write in the grip of erotic passion while instructing men about eros. You can never have sex without imagination, whereas you can be hungry and eat without any contribution of imagination. Hunger is purely a bodily phenomenon and can safely be left to the scientists, and now to the dieticians. But our sexual dieticians are absurd. The best you can do by neglecting or denigrating imagination is to debauch and impoverish imagination.
In a better world, sexual education would be concerned with the development of taste. All the great lovers in literature were also lovers of tales and had their heads full of sublime rivals in their divine quest. The progress of civilization is intimately connected with the elaboration of erotic sensibility and a real examination of the delicate interplay of human attractions. But everything today conspires to suffocate imagination. There have been hardly any great novelists of love for almost a century. Scientific sex claims to tell us about the real thing. Reading classic books has become less and less of a taste among the educated, although cheap romantic novels, the kind that are sometimes stuck into boxes of household detergent, apparently flourish among housewives who haven't heard that Eros is dead. There is practically nothing within our horizon that can come to the aid of ideal longing. Sure, you can be a romantic today if you so choose, but it is a little like being a virgin in a whorehouse. It just doesn't fit with the temper of the times and gets no support in the current atmosphere.
Talking about love has suffered the most. Eros requires speech, and beautiful speech, to communicate to its partner what it feels and wants. Now there is plenty of talk about relationships and how people are intruding on one another, and there is talk akin to discussions on the management of water resources. But the awestruck vision of the thing-in-itself has disappeared. It is almost impossible to get students to talk about the meaning of their erotic choices, except for a few artificial clichés that square them with contemporary right thinking. Out of self-protectiveness, no one wants to risk making arguments, as Plato's characters did, for the dignity of his or her choice and its elevated place within the whole of things. What one cannot talk about, what one does not have words for, hardly exists. Richness of vocabulary is part of richness of experience. Just as there is a disastrous decline in political rhetoric, rhetoric necessary to explain the cause of justice and form a community around it, so there is an even more disastrous decline in the rhetoric of love. Yet to make love humanly, the partners have to talk to each other.
tudents, like many other Americans, have a tendency to leave their reflections on eroticism at "You've got a right to do anything in the privacy of your own bedroom." This is a decent liberal opinion adopted to protect people from the prying eye of the law or the disapproval of public opinion. It is indifferent to what is actually being practiced, whether it is vice or virtue. It is self-protective and makes sex boring, a harmless pursuit of taste, like choosing among Baskin-Robbins' 31 flavors. One wishes that we Americans could develop formulas for tolerance that did not at the same time destroy private discrimination of good and bad, noble and base. Does tolerance necessarily require a relativism that goes to the depths of men's and women's souls, depriving them of their natural right to prefer and to learn about the beautiful？ As always is the case with contemporary moralistic formulas, this one nourishes our easygoingness, our unwillingness to judge ourselves. Yet however uncomfortable such an activity is, those who are not willing to undertake it are depriving themselves of the transcendent pleasures of eros. It is difficult for me to understand how people can accept the trivializing formula that their sexual tastes don't do any harm, when they are talking about what is, or what should be, a thing so central to their hearts and so close to the very meaning of life that it could confer the greatest benefit.
I can think of no better way of beginning our journey than by reading classic writers, poets or poet-philosophers, who cared about love. As I have said, speech about love by lovers is essential to the being of love; therefore, turning to the writers is not like turning to the encyclopedia for information but is to share in the experience of love. I ask for what might in our jargon be called a phenomenology, a detailed and comprehensive deｓｃｒｉｐｔion of what it is we are trying to explain as we experience it before we enter into explanation. Such endeavors are surely also needed in politics and religion after two hundred years of abstractions from which they have emerged unrecognizable. 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. The best books not only help us to describe the phenomena, but help us to experience them. They are living expressions of profound experiences, and without such knowledgeable advocates of those experiences we would find it very difficult to gain access to matters that depend so much on educated feeling and for which merely external observation is not sufficient. Books may provide a voice for whatever remains of nature in us.
This book is intended for the use of those who can still be charmed by books and who have an irreducible interest in the depiction of love. Such persons use books for pleasure and instruction. Books about love inform and elevate the fantasy life of their readers and actually become part of their eros while teaching them about it. Their appearance has to be taken for their primary reality, and they tell stories that can be naively apprehended and naively thought about. This does not mean that study of such texts with persons who know them well and have reflected on them for a long time is not useful and even necessary. Moreover, it is hard for someone to read Stendhal, for example, without knowing who Napoleon is. But Stendhal can help us to begin our reacquaintance with him. Such writers can begin the enrichment of lives, feelings, and experiences that have become impoverished. The popular power that Victor Hugo's or Dickens' novels exercised for more than a century required no sophistication, and people have understood them pretty well and with a fair degree of agreement concerning what they were about. This does not preclude greater intelligence or finer taste from seeing more in those novels, but persons possessing them must begin where less sophisticated readers begin.
art of my intention in this book is to restore our awareness of the ambiguities and the conflicts in nature as it presents itself to us. True intellectual openness consists in trying to understand the writers as they understood themselves, which is possible if one is not arrogant about one's own understanding of things. One begins by picking up a story and reading it with the same wonder that one had as a child. The combination of innocent experience and cultivated intelligence is what we seek. I am sure that many of my particular statements about the books in the following chapters will raise objections in the minds of my readers, and I hope that this will encourage them to make better interpretations on their own—but without turning away from the writers and their books to seek ill-fitting keys in Freud or Derrida. You may disagree with my explanation of something that Darcy says to Elizabeth in Pride and Prejudice, or one of Julien's strategies for the seduction of Mathilde, but the means for correcting me should be your careful observation and your good common sense. I am, of course, mindful of the contemporary preｓｃｒｉｐｔions for what can and cannot be said about the relations between the sexes. I try not to pay too much attention to them and let the writers speak for themselves.
Always before my mind's eye while writing this book was a passage from Xenophon where Socrates in the simplest and most accessible way tells a hostile critic what he does and what counts for him: “Antiphon, as another man gets pleasure from a good horse, or a dog, or a bird, I get even more pleasure from good friends. And if I have something good, I teach it to them, and I introduce them to others who will be useful to them with respect to virtue. And together with my friends I go through the treasures of the wise men of old which they left behind written in books, and we peruse them. If we see something good, we pick it out and hold it to be a great profit, if we are able to prove useful to one another.”
Xenophon comments, ''When I heard this I held Socrates to be really happy . . ." Here there is none of the grand, mysterious rhetoric about the Delphic oracle, the daimonion, and the divine mission, which are the stuff of Socratic mythology. This, in contrast, we can understand immediately. What is more, such Socratic philosophizing is possible almost everywhere and at all times—"good-natured" persons sitting around reading the books of wise men and seeing together what they can get out of them for the guidance of their lives. "Friend," "good," "profit," and "pleasure" are the powerful words that cluster around the reading of books in Socrates' life. At the origins of philosophy and right up to our day this has been the life-perfecting activity, and the preservation of this naive but ever so mysterious and vulnerable pursuit will, I am certain, prove decisive for access to the reality represented by those wonderful words.
I wrote this book while recovering from a serious illness, and strangely this activity turned that period into one of the most wondrous times of my life. Every day I could consort with Rousseau or Stendhal or Austen and learn such wonderful things about loving and hating, benefaction and doing harm. When I went to bed at night I looked forward to getting up in the morning and resuming this living relationship to the books, and I was lifted above my petty concerns by them. I have attempted to communicate some of that experience here. How much more delight there is in learning about the virtues and the vices from Jane Austen than in emptily trying to teach them to her. Friendship and love may very well consist in sharing such experiences with another. In itself and immediately this transports us out of our dreary times. I hope that by this book I may touch at least a few potential friends who can love literature in spite of the false doctors who try to cure them of it.
I have no desire, and the facts do not permit me, to preach a high-minded and merely edifying version of love. If you still have the heart to proceed with reading this book, you will see that, as there is light here, there is also darkness, much hope and much disappointment, possible adornment of life and real ugliness and terror. I simply try to act as an honest broker for greater persons and writers than I am. As I have said, I present no theory, nor do I have one, although my observations cannot help but call into question other theories. I have constructed no schema to act as a clothesline on which to hang all the books of the tradition, as the estimable and enduring Denis de Rougemont does in his Love in the Western World. He wanted to judge it all, as a good Catholic, in terms of the struggle between Eros and agape and the futility of the former in the face of the latter. I have no such high aspirations, hoping only to show you what some great writers thought these things are.
A word about the plan of this book. I do not try to give a total historical account of love or a survey of all the opinions that have been held about it. Instead I try to take the most eminent examples of rich deｓｃｒｉｐｔions of love to which we can have immediate access. I begin with Rousseau and four novelists—Stendhal, Austen, Flaubert, and Tolstoy—who were strongly influenced by him. Rousseau was both a philosopher and a literary man, with the two sides interrelated. He taught that philosophy had to have both the insight and the form that poetry lends. He was the greatest modern describer and proponent of love, and he initiated a movement of love. Romanticism. This great movement aspired to the establishment of a new basis for human connection amongst the isolation of bourgeois society. Its conception of love attempted to combine the purest longing with the fullest bodily satisfaction. It tried to rescue sex from Christian original sin and to recover the union of body and soul of Platonic eros while guaranteeing the reciprocity missing from the Platonic understanding of love and friendship. It did so through an ideal of love between radically different and hence totally complementary men and women, an ideal constructed out of newly legitimated sexual energy and an imagination emancipated from nature.
The Romantic movement is the precursor to some extent of the later movements that tried to manipulate rather than discover eros, and to dissolve it into its crudest elements shorn of the illusions of the imagination. But Rousseau's project still bows toward nature, eschews reductionism, and possesses an infinite awareness and delicacy, which inspired very great independent artists after him. Rousseau and the Rousseauans play a double role in this book. They are great witnesses to love, but the failure of their movement also was connected with the collapse of love as a theme of literature toward the end of the nineteenth century. Rousseau is closest to whatever reminiscences we have of love. His attempt to save love by fostering belief in an illusion of our own creation was in the long run, I believe, necessarily a failure. But from that failure we can learn about ourselves and also be motivated to look elsewhere. I do not wish to use Rousseau as a straw man for my preferences, but he and the novelists who followed him clearly display a set of common themes that still affect us and are the alternatives against which our sexual thinking rebelled.
The novelists of love whose works I interpret were both fascinated and repelled by Rousseau's charm. They explored all the alternatives he opened up: from a romantic love with a core of friendship between intelligent and virtuous though imperfect partners culminating in marriage, to a radical opposition between romantic love and the legal sanctity of the family. Romantic love became a standpoint from which to judge a bourgeois world in which there were no longer men worthy of love, marriage had become contemptible, and art for art's sake seemed to be all that was left.
After Romanticism, I turn to Shakespeare, who tries not to create love out of illusions but to present its reality. Shakespeare is to me the purest voice of nature, and he does not meddle with nature. His plays provide us with the greatest variety of erotic expression, and with Shakespeare eros is the proper term to use. All kinds of men and women, in all kinds of situations, are given us by Shakespeare to appreciate and understand, not to transform according to our will or our apparent needs. He takes lovers with the utmost seriousness and portrays with sympathy love's promise of unity, its mysterious attraction to beauty, and its hope to overcome even the ugliness of death. Yet he also shows its folly and disappointment. He helps us marvel at love's transcendence of political loyalty and ambition, and still reminds us of its need for legal limitation. Finally, he lets us see that love has a history from pagan antiquity to modernity—and that Christianity is the source not only of the repression decried since the Romantics, but of a deepening of women and a new sensitivity of men.
Lastly, I turn, with the help of Montaigne, that great mediator between Ancients and Moderns, to Plato, the classical philosopher of love, who, while sharing Shakespeare's fidelity to nature, treats of eros's expressions across a wider spectrum than could be suitable for the theater and with a more explicit rational account of their meaning. Plato's works, in addition to their philosophical content, are arguably works of art comparable to the greatest. He presents eros not only as a painful and needy sign of our incompleteness, but as giving and productive. He explores the tensions between love of one's own and love of the good, and between the politically necessary subordination of eros to the family and the liberation suggested by such questionable erotic phenomena as incest, pederasty, and promiscuity. He sees in eros the possibility of both individual happiness and true human community.
Almost half this work is devoted to Rousseau and Plato, enriched by the personages depicted by the other artists treated in the book. This book bears witness to a confrontation between the two greatest philosophical teachings about eros, another chapter in the quarrel between the Ancients and the Moderns.