Volume 40, Number 16 · October 7, 1993
In Love with Love
By Jasper Griffin
Love and Friendship
by Allan Bloom
Simon and Schuster, 590 pp., $25.00
No style of writing is more seductive than that which combines argument with myth, detailed exposition with stories, and images that make the same points in an imaginative form. Plato was a supreme master of that heady combination; Freud also excelled in it. Nowadays we see ambitious examples, for instance in the work of many feminists, who combine chapters of argumentation with such 'mythical' assertions as that there was a time, once upon a time, when we all worshiped the Great Goddess; or that there are really no differences between men and women except their respective roles in procreation, all else being the effect of society and capable of being the effect of society and capable of being changed. Plato, of course, believed that too, making a case for it in the fifth book of the Republic.
Review, 5150 words
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