The Closing of the American Heart : LOVE & FRIENDSHIP, <i> By Allan Bloom (Simon & Schuster: $25; 551 pp.)</i>

Eroticism in 1993 is passionless and approximate. So says Allan Bloom in “Love and Friendship.” The most vulgar four-letter word has become an overused comma. Worse yet, contemporary sexual “interfacing” cannot empower art. (“Did Romeo and Juliet have a relationship?” Bloom asks.) Adultery, for Jane Austen, held terrific human resonance. Adultery today is . . . oh, self-expression. Political correctness and the dull relativism implicit in it have produced “an unwillingness to think about one’s experience and its relationship to the whole of life and the moral order.”

“This book is an attempt to recover the power, the danger and the beauty of eros,” Bloom explains, “under the tutelage of its proper teachers and knowers, the poetic writers.” Before long, though, he will propose a more radical conceit: the “improbable assertion” that thinking, in itself, is erotic.

Readers should note, however, that we are to consider only thought and eroticism of the most exquisite, advanced strains here. There is, let it be known, a certain moral snobbism in Allan Bloom.

As you might expect from someone who wrote “The Closing of the American Mind”--that provocative, long-shot best-seller about cowardice, ineptitude and special-interest flackery in academia--Bloom doesn’t much admire our modern permissive and democratic eroticism. This is just behavior (as in animal behavior ), not emotion and yearning structured by some great tradition, cultural or artistic. “Liberal society,” he laments, “guarantees the right to privacy, even when nobody wants to keep anything private.”

Bloom, who died last year, does his thinking on eroticism in “Love and Friendship” through the second-hand discipline of literary criticism--never an exact tool. Now and again this academic perspective (and all the elitist prejudice that it can entail) leads Bloom to make unnatural and even melodramatic demands on human love. For instance: “Eros requires speech, and beautiful speech, to communicate to its partner” (Bloom must’ve been a difficult date).

On the other hand, he doesn’t underestimate primal erotic need. “As Alexander Kojeve put it, an artist has sex in order to write about it, whereas Freud thought that the writer writes in order to get sex.” Speaking as novelist, not a reviewer, here--I can assure you that motive A does not preclude motive B. Yet, for all his vehemence and tough-mindedness, Bloom is polite, rather shy, and even disingenuous: “I present no theory, nor do I have one, although my observations cannot help but call into question other theories.” Bloom is distancing himself, I think; because, at base, “Love and Friendship” masks great pain and a kind of intellectual brokenheartedness.

To help us imagine elegant, high-spirited eroticism, Bloom will adduce Jean-Jacques Rousseau. “The miracle of sex according to Rousseau is that although it is purely material, it becomes in civilized man utterly dependent on imagination, which is purely immaterial. Imagination most palpably moves the flesh.” Eroticism is about storytelling. The romantic movement, Rousseau’s legitimate child, elevated eros to a potent mix of tension--moral, emotional and literary. Men and women in love knew the animal urge, but they had to refine it with long self-denial. Eros, through sublimation, became art and thought. “How to perform this delicate operation of uniting desire and sublime imagination,” Bloom offers, “is demonstrated in Books IV and V of Rousseau’s ‘Emile.’ ”

Emile was taught love. I italicize that verb because teaching, in Bloom’s subtext, can be seen as the quintessential and best erotic enterprise. Serious teaching, that is: what one might call philosophic intercourse . “Rousseau presents the movement from sensibility or sensuality to abstract thought as a kind of miracle,” Bloom continues. “It would seem that he attributes this movement to the miraculous seminal power that puberty provides.”

True eroticism for Rousseau requires a long novitiate. The fictional Emile is instructed by his wise tutor, the real Jean-Jacques. Emile remains a virgin until 24 (self-abuse is not an acceptable surrogate activity). Sophie, his wife, has been pre-selected. Soon after consummation bride and groom separate for years at Jean-Jacques’ sage insistence. Now this is a love worth writing fiction or philosophy about. “When . . . the loss of belief in the dignity of sublimation overcame Rousseau’s influence, love was no longer the theme of the novel, and it is difficult to discern what has replaced it.”

Up until this point Bloom and his idiosyncratic thesis have been reasonably engaging. They engage again when Bloom subjects the “Symposium” to close analysis. Between Rousseau and Plato, however, there is a lot of impertinent literary criticism--Bloom on Austen, Stendhal, Tolstoy, Flaubert, much Shakespeare and Montaigne. What advances the discussion of eroticism is merely tangential now, a sentence here or there, like this suggested by Stendhal: “Sadomasochism is a peculiarly modern form of lovemaking. The elaborate and absurd rituals that often accompany sadomasochistic relations . . . indicate that this is where we now find the free play of imagination in erotic encounters.” Insightful that, probably even correct. But more than half of “Love and Friendship” is plot recapitulation and old classroom notes--the sort that shatter if dropped from a lectern.

Eroticism and philosophy, of course, begin their oxymoronic dance together in Plato’s “Symposium.” Here Bloom is rapt, and can transmit that enthusiasm to his readership. “If eros, put more generally, is longing, then the philosopher who pursues the knowledge he does not have could be considered erotic.” In fact, Socrates (as wisest philosopher) will become Eros himself. Eros is the force that counters death through art and progeny. It can represent human yearning for completion. Eros is a better guarantee of virtue than civil law; but you cannot ascribe to it either beauty or goodness. And, furthermore, “The teacher-pupil relationship (that nexus of thought) is as mysterious as the lover-beloved relationship.”

For a cultural conservative like Allan Bloom, though, this philosophic courtship is both indispensable and dangerous. After all, those in attendance at Plato’s great “Symposium” were men who would sympathize with (indeed would often celebrate) the practice of pederasty. Sex and wisdom were bartered back then: a complex transaction and one that could threaten the roles of father and family. (For this reason, in large degree, Socrates was thought a corrupter, and executed.) “It is not because he is sexually attracted that he wishes to teach, he is sexually attracted because he needs to teach.”

If you have even the slightest aptitude for empathy, this can be moving stuff. By page 500 Bloom has become his own protagonist. I recall a story about the poetess HD and Freud. After much coaxing HD persuaded Freud, old and cancerous, to psychoanalyze her--as you might get Arthur Rubinstein to tune your piano. For several sessions HD rattled on about herself, and Freud said virtually nothing. One afternoon, in mid-monologue, HD felt a pounding fist on the couch back. It was Freud, furious. “I know what’s wrong with this analysis,” he snarled, “you think I’m too old and unattractive to fall in love with.”

For Allan Bloom, teacher, the closing of the American mind was a closing of the American heart as well. Universities had betrayed their franchise, sure. But, more than that, there no longer was a mating dance--intellectual and, yes, erotic--between teacher and student. Some part of Bloom, one can imagine, took it personally, as did Freud that afternoon. The love and friendship in this difficult but significant book was too often unrequited.

“Love & Friendship” is also available on cassette from Simon & Schuster Audio (3 hours: 2 cassettes, $17).