Abstract

"Souls Without Longing" was Allan Bloom's own title for his Closing of the American Mind. "Souls Without Eros," eros of any kind, he might have titled it, for in it Bloom described vividly the unerotic students typical of the elite schools to which his teaching was limited, their equally unerotic mentors whose specialized activity and general indifference set American Academe adrift, and the more spirited than erotic Nietzsche, whose thoughts, first inevitably degraded by lesser men and now abused by celebrity nihilists, have contributed to both unerotic students and unerotic teachers. The current book is the positive to that negative. It could have been entitled Souls With Longing. And it could have been subtitled: Me Too.