Eros and Intellect
I realize that most of my blog posts consist of a quotation–sometimes lengthy–from an authority of some type, and a summary of my response to that word. I believe, especially for a student like me, this is appropriate practice. Who would expect a twenty-year old student whose reason is not yet fully developed to write anything worth reading? If you wish to read things I’ve written, please click the “writing” tab above, but for the blog I make no apologies for my practice of liberal quotation.
Today I read significant portions of Allan Bloom’s book The Closing of the American Mind (Touchstone, 1988). Bloom shows how the American mind is in the process of devaluing itself. I found the way Bloom related the changes in American sexuality to the decline of American intellect, worthy of notice.
The eroticism of our students is lame. It is not the divine madness Socrates praised; or the enticing awareness of incompleteness and the quest to overcome it; or natures grace, which permits a partial being to recover his wholeness in the embrace of another; or a temporal being to long for eternity in the perpetuity of his seed; or the hope that all men will remember his deeds; or his contemplation of perfection. Eroticism is a discomfort, but one that in itself promises relief and affirms the goodness of things. It is the proof, subjective but incontrovertible, of mans relatedness, imperfect though it may be, to others and to the whole of nature. Wonder, the source of both poetry and philosophy, is its characteristic expression. Eros demands daring from its votaries and provides a good reason for it. This longing for completeness is the longing for education, and the study of it is education. 132-33
When sex is “free,” it is valued less; the sense of wonder that it ought to create is diminished; it does not provoke the kind of soul-searching and development that ought to accompany a young person’s rise to adulthood. A young person ought to struggle until love, reason, sex, faith, and virtue are brought together in an understanding of what it truly means to be human. Humanity means not only being the greatest of the animals, but being as far superior to them as they are to the inanimate things.
In all species other than man, when an animal reaches puberty, it is all that it will ever be. This stage is the clear end toward which all of its growth and learning is directed. The animal’s activity is reproduction. It lives on this plateau until it starts downhill. Only in man is puberty just the beginning. The greater and more interesting part of his learning, moral and intellectual, comes afterward, and in civilized man is incorporated into his erotic desire. His taste and hence his choices are determined during this “sentimental education.” It is as though his learning were for the sake of his sexuality. Reciprocally, though, much of the energy for that learning obviously comes from his sexuality. Nobody takes human children who have reached puberty to be adults. We properly sense that there is a long road to adulthood, the condition in which they are able to govern themselves and be true mothers and fathers. This road is the serious part of education, where animal sexuality becomes human sexuality, where instinct gives way in man to choice with regard to the true, the good, and the beautiful. Puberty does not provide man, as it does other animals, with all that he needs to leave behind others of his kind. This means that the animal part of his sexuality is intertwined in the most complex way with the higher reaches of his soul, which must inform the desires with its insight . . . 133-34
Needless to say, the culture of today encourages the very opposite of this. It would seek to reduce all things to matters of the physical; of instinct; of those things that can be discovered by the microscope or the statistical chart. Today’s ideal is, as Bloom calls it, a “flat soul.”
There are some who are men and women at the age of sixteen, who have nothing more to learn about the erotic. They are adult in the sense that they will no longer change very much. They may become competant specialists, but they are flat-souled. The world is to them what it presents itself to the senses to be; it is unadorned by imagination and devoid of ideals. This flat soul is what the sexual wisdom of our time conspires to make universal. 134
I don’t think I’ve ever talked about sex on this blog before, and I don’t plan to make such discussion a regular occurence. But perhaps even my slightly prudish attitude toward sex stems from a remnant of the idea that it is a merely physical thing that ought to be hidden or restricted or kept out of the way because it is inconvenient–without a vision of it as it should be, an animating human principle which gives energy to the development of the soul. In this sense, Christians have more to do with sexuality than their debauched, atheistic, materialistic friends, who engage in sexual activities Christians would rightly shun, but do so without any understanding of the purpose of their sexuality. These teleologically impoverished sinners place little value upon their sexuality, and throw it away because they do not understand that it, and they, have a God-ordained, and special purpose appropriate to the way they were created.
