Before his untimely passing earlier this year, political philosopher Peter Augustine Lawler offered up some timely reflections on Allan Bloom’s “souls without longing,” the elite students who comprise the bulk of Bloom’s study in his 1987 bestseller The Closing of the American Mind. As Lawler describes them, these souls are racked with longing and hunger for something they know not how to name. “Not only are love of God and romantic love alien to these young people, it would seem,” writes Lawler, “so is any form of heart-enlarging experience that would threaten one’s independ-ence and personal survival. They are, deep down, social solitaries, and that fact informs every facet of their lives.” They are the victims of a great flattening that has turned the “polymorphous eros once thought to be characteristic of human beings as such” into something entirely one-dimensional.
I don’t know whether to be surprised, reassured, or frightened to find so many echoes of Bloom and Lawler’s diagnosis of the spiritually hollowed-out modern soul in the cloistered world of continental European philosophy, yet the parallels abound in The Agony of Eros, a slender philosophical tract first published in German in 2012 and translated into English this year by MIT Press in its new “Untimely Meditations” series. The author, Byung-Chul Han, is a German academic by way of Seoul billed by the publishers as “one of the most widely read philosophers in Europe today.” I can’t help but wondering who it is who’s reading Han—serious philosophers? University students? Young urban professionals attempting to cultivate an air of erudition?
