The Art of Loving - Erich Fromm Page 0,50

clad, but without any ultimate concern for that which is his peculiarly human quality and function. If man is to be able to love, he must be put in his supreme place. The economic machine must serve him, rather than he serves it. He must be enabled to share experience, to share work, rather than, at best, share in profits. Society must be organized in such a way that man’s social, loving nature is not separated from his social existence, but becomes one with it. If it is true, as I have tried to show, that love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence, then any society which excludes, relatively, the development of love, must in the long run perish of its own contradiction with the basic necessities of human nature. Indeed, to speak of love is not “preaching,” for the simple reason that it means to speak of the ultimate and real need in every human being. That this need has been obscured does not mean that it does not exist. To analyze the nature of love is to discover its general absence today and to criticize the social conditions which are responsible for this absence. To have faith in the possibility of love as a social and not only exceptional-individual phenomenon, is a rational faith based on the insight into the very nature of man.

Notes

[1] Cf. a more detailed study of sadism and masochism in E. Fromm, Escape from Freedom, Rinehart & Company, New York, 1941.

[2] Cf. a detailed discussion of these character orientations in E. Fromm, Man for Himself, Rinehart & Company, New York, 1947, Chap. III, pp. 54-117.

[3] Compare the definition of joy given by Spinoza.

[4] "Nationalökonomie and Philosophie," 1844, published in Karl Marx" Die Frühschriften, Alfred Kröner Verlag, Stuttgart, 1953, pp. 300, 301. (My translation. E. F.)

[5] I. Babel, The Collected Stories, Criterion Book, New York, 1955.

[6] The above statement has an important implication for the role of psychology in contemporary Western culture. While the great popularity of psychology certainly indicates an interest in the knowledge of man, it also betrays the fundamental lack of love in human relations today. Psychological knowledge thus becomes a substitute for full knowledge in the act of love, instead of being a step toward it.

[7] R. A. Nicholson, Rumi, George Allen and Unwin, Ltd., London, 1950, pp. 122-3.

[8] Freud himself made a first step in this direction in his later concept of the life and death instincts. His concept of the former (eros) as a principle of synthesis and unification is on an entirely different plane from that of his libido concept. But in spite of the fact that the theory of life and death instincts was accepted by orthodox analysts, this acceptance did not lead to a fundamental revision of the libido concept, especially as far as clinical work is concerned.

[9] Cf. Sullivan’s description of this development in The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry, W. W. Norton & Co., New York, 1953.

[10] Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, G. P. Putnam’s Sons, New York, 1952, p. 117.

[11] The same idea has been expressed by Hermann Cohen in his Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums, 2nd edition, J. Kaufmann Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1929, p. 168 ff.

[12] Paul Tillich, in a review of The Sane Society, in Pastoral Psychology, September, 1955, has suggested that it would be better to drop the ambiguous term "self-love" and to replace it with "natural self-affirmation" or "paradoxical self-acceptance." Much as I can see the merits of this suggestion, I cannot agree with him in this point. In the term "self-love" the paradoxical element in self-love is contained more clearly. The fact is expressed that love is an attitude which is the same toward all objects, including myself. It must also not be forgotten that the term "self-love," in the sense in which it is used here, has a history. The Bible speaks of self-love when it commands to "love thy neighbor as thyself," and Meister Eckhart speaks of self-love in the very same sense.

[13] John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, translated by J. Albau, Presbyterian Board of Christian Education, Philadelphia, 1928, Chap. 7, par. 4, p. 622.

[14] Meister Eckhart, translated by R. B. Blakney, Harper & Brothers, New York, 1941, p. 204.

[15] This holds true especially for the monotheistic religions of the West. In Indian religions the mother figures retained a good deal of influence, for instance in the Goddess Kali; in Buddhism and Taoism the concept of a God—or a Goddess—was without essential significance, if not altogether eliminated.

[16] Cf. Maimonides" concept of the negative attributes in The Guide for the Perplexed.

[17] Aristotle, Metaphysics, Book Gamma, 1005b. 20. Quoted from Aristotle’s Metaphysics, newly translated by Richard Hope, Columbia University Press, New York, 1952.

[18] Lao-tse, The Tâo The King, The Sacred Books of the East, ed. by F. Max Mueller, Vol. XXXIX, Oxford University Press, London, 1927, p. 120.

[19] W. Capelle, Die Vorsokratiker, Alfred Kroener Verlag, Stuttgart, 1953, p. 134. (My translation. E. F.)

[20] H. R. Zimmer, Philosophies of India, Pantheon Books, New York, 1951.

[21] Meister Eckhart, translated by R. B. Blakney, Harper & Brothers, New York, 1941, p. 114.

[22] lbid., p. 247. Cf. also the negative theology of Maimonides.

[23] Meister Eckhart, op. cit., pp. 181-2.

[24] Cf. a more detailed discussion of the problem of alienation and of the influence of modern society on the character of man in E. Fromm The Sane Society, Rinehart & Company, New York, 1955.

[25] S. Freud Civilization and Its Discontents, translated by J. Riviere, The Hogarth Press, Ltd., London, 1953, p. 69.

[26] S. Freud, Gesammelte Werke, London, 1940-52, Vol. X.

[27] The only pupil of Freud who never separated from the master, and yet who in the last years of his life changed his views on love, was Sándor Ferenczi. For an excellent discussion on this subject see The Leaven of Love by Izette de Forest, Harper & Brothers, New York, 1954.

[28] H. S. Sullivan, The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry, W. W. Norton & Co., New York, 1953, p. 246. It must be noted that although Sullivan gives this definition in connection with the strivings of pre-adolescence, he speaks of them as integrating tendencies, coming out during pre-adolescence, "which when they are completely developed, we call love," and says that this love in pre-adolescence "represents the beginning of something very like full-blown, psychiatrically defined love.”

[29] Ibid., p. 246. Another definition of love by Sullivan, that love begins when a person feels another person’s needs to be as important as his own, is less colored by the marketing aspect than the above formulation.

[30] For a picture of the concentration, discipline, patience and concern necessary for the learning of an art, I want to refer the reader to Zen in the Art of Archery, by E. Herrigel, Pantheon Books, Inc., New York, 1953.

[31] While there is a considerable amount of theory and practice on this point in the Eastern, especially the Indian cultures, similar aims have been followed in recent years also in the West. The most significant, in my opinion, is the school of Gindler, the aim of which is the sensing of one’s body. For the understanding of the Gindler method, cf. also Charlotte Selver’s work, in her lectures and courses at the New School, in New York.

[32] The root of the word education is e-ducere, literally, to lead forth, or to bring out something which is potentially present.

[33] Cf. Herbert Marcuse’s article "The Social Implications of Psychoanalytic Revisionism," Dissent, New York, summer, 1955.

[34] In The Sane Society, Rinehart & Company, New York, 1955, I have tried to deal with this problem in detail.