|
630526c
|
The real community of man, in the midst of all the self-contradictory simulacra of community, is the community of those who seek the truth, of the potential knowers...of all men to the extent they desire to know. But in fact, this includes only a few, the true friends, as Plato was to Aristotle at the very moment they were disagreeing about the nature of the good...They were absolutely one soul as they looked at the problem. This, according..
|
|
friendship
philosophy
|
Allan Bloom |
|
726a70b
|
These sociologists who talk to facilely about the sacred are like a man who keeps a toothless old circus lion around the house in order to experience the thrills of the jungle.
|
|
|
Allan Bloom |
|
e031991
|
Although the natural rights inherent in our( Constitutional) regime are adequate to the solution of this ( minority) problem...the equal protection of the law did not protect a man from contempt and hatred as a Jew, an Italian or a Black"..." 'Openness' was designed to provide a respectable place for those groups or minorities--to wrest respect from those who were disposed to give it--This breaks the delicate balance between majority and mi..
|
|
|
Allan Bloom |
|
3ec894e
|
The inflamed sensitivity induced by radicalized democratic theory finally experiences any limit as arbitrary and tyrannical. There are no absolutes; freedom is absolute. Of course the result is that, on the one hand, the argument justifying freedom disappears and, on the other, all beliefs begin to have the attenuated character that was initially supposed to be limited to religious belief.
|
|
|
Allan Bloom |
|
8a42c99
|
We are like ignorant shepherds living on a site where great civilizations once flourished. The shepherds play with the fragments that pop up to the surface, having no notion of the beautiful structures of which they were once a part.
|
|
|
Allan Bloom |
|
3d4484f
|
I suggest that we need a generation or two not of theory but of an attempt to discover the real phenomena of eros.
|
|
friendship
love
|
Allan Bloom |
|
4ac47d4
|
I have no desire ... to preach a high-minded and merely edifying version of love
|
|
|
Allan Bloom |
|
2b5d175
|
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.
|
|
shakespeare
love
|
Allan Bloom |
|
5a5cea0
|
The most striking fact about contemporary university students is that there is no longer any canon of books which forms their taste and imagination...This state of affairs itself reflects the deeper fact of the decay of the common understanding of - and agreement on - first principles that is characteristic of our times.
|
|
|
Allan Bloom |
|
d383fe5
|
Here's a real man!" I said. "It's been pretty transparent all along that other people's opinions about these things wouldn't be enough for you."
|
|
|
Allan Bloom |
|
9ae05c5
|
It's not easy to go through, you happy man," I said. "Even more than what we went through before, it admits of many doubts. For, it could be doubted that the things said are possible; and, even if, in the best possible conditions, they could come into being, that they would be what is best will also be doubted. So that is why there's a certain hestitation about getting involved in it, for fear that the argument might seem to be a prayer, my..
|
|
|
Allan Bloom |
|
8614b1b
|
Utopianism is, as Plato taught us at the outset, the fire with which we must play because it is the only way we can find out what we are. We need to criticize false understandings of Utopia, but the easy way out provided by realism is deadly.
|
|
|
Allan Bloom |
|
8aab48b
|
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
|
|
friendship
love
|
Allan Bloom |
|
1c1768c
|
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..
|
|
|
Allan Bloom |
|
47cb623
|
There is no real education that does not respond to felt need; anything else acquired is trifling display.
|
|
|
Allan Bloom |
|
6da2f21
|
One has to have the experience of really believing before one can have the thrill of liberation.
|
|
|
Allan Bloom |
|
99f0b43
|
It's not easy to go through, you happy man," I said. "Even more than what we went through before, it admits of many doubts. For, it could be doubted that the things said are possible; and, even if, in the best possible conditions, they could come into being, that they would be what is best will also be doubted. So that is why there's a certain hestitation about getting involved in it, for fear that the argument might seem to be a prayer, my..
|
|
|
Allan Bloom |
|
563062b
|
There is a quest, but ever more hopeless, for arrangements and ways of putting the broken pieces back together. The task is equivalent to squaring the circle, because everyone loves himself most but wants others to love him more than they love themselves. Such is particularly the demand of children, against which parents are now rebelling.
|
|
|
Allan Bloom |
|
360b168
|
The very fact of their fury shows how much Plato threatens what is dear and intimate to them. They are little able to defend their experience, which had seemed unquestionable until questioned, and it is most resistant to cool analysis. Yet if a student can- and this is most difficult and unusual- draw back, get acritical distance on what he clings to, come to doubt the ultimate value of what he loves, he has taken the first and most difficu..
|
|
|
Allan Bloom |
|
106f037
|
Openness used to be the virtue that permitted us to seek the good by using reason.
|
|
|
Allan Bloom |
|
74b08c6
|
The faith in God and the belief in miracles are closer to the truth than any scientific explanation,
|
|
|
Allan Bloom |
|
926cd52
|
Music, as everyone experiences, provides an unquestionable justification and a fulfilling pleasure for the activities it accompanies: the soldier who hears the marching band is enthralled and reassured; the religious man is exalted in his prayer by the sound of the organ in the church; and the lover is carried away and his conscience stilled by the romantic guitar. Armed with music, man can damn rational doubt.
|
|
|
Allan Bloom |
|
d8c8b6e
|
It may well be that a society's greatest madness seems normal to itself.
|
|
|
Allan Bloom |
|
89c5a0b
|
Only Socrates knew, after a lifetime of unceasing labor, that he was ignorant. Now every high-school student knows that.
|
|
|
Allan Bloom |