Erich Fromm Responds to Freud: The Art of Loving

by Henry Piper (all rights reserved)

            As Rousseau offers an eloquent and spirited response to Hobbes, so Erich Fromm (1900-1980) does to Freud.  And whereas Hobbes and Rousseau were concerned primarily with political institutions and economic inequality and thus focused on the physical development of human nature and society, Freud and Fromm are primarily psychologists and thus concerned with the human psyche and how the psyche forms and adapts itself to society.  Finally, whereas Hobbes and Freud are materialists who explicitly deny the actual reality of any spiritual, non-material or religious dimension to human existence (notwithstanding our various “delusions”), Rousseau and Fromm both assert that human beings have a “spiritual” nature in addition to their purely material, animal natures.    
            Thus Rousseau insists on the reality of a kind of human freedom, utterly distinct from the limited “negative” freedom-from-restraint to which Hobbes must limit himself, consisting of a positive power to deviate from purely material, instinctual forces to enable us to determine our own characters and destinies.  And Fromm, taking his point of departure from Freud, insists on a positive power of love, utterly distinct from the limited material pleasure of Freudian “love” and closely akin to the positive human freedom of Rousseau, which represents, as freedom does for Rousseau, the ultimate meaning, value and fulfillment of human being.
            As a general matter, love represents to Fromm the ultimate fulfillment of human nature, so that it is essentially proper to say, I believe, that for Fromm, to live as a human being is to love, thus “the art of loving” is essentially another way of saying “the art of living.”  Further, love for Fromm, like freedom for Rousseau, is a positive power, indeed it represents for Fromm the fullest realization of human action; indeed, we can say that, for Fromm, love is freedom, since, for human beings, authentic human existence is precisely the existence of a free being acting freely.
             Art must be distinguished from mere mechanical function.  An “art,” strictly speaking, is something that human beings, and only human beings, engage in, thus the products of human production are artificial, results of human artifice, as distinguished from products of nature which of course we refer to as natural.  More narrowly, as Fromm uses the term and as I believe best captures its essential and proper meaning, an art is something that only free beings can engage in; it is a matter of creative expression, it is something that is neither natural nor necessary but comes to be only because one does it: it is a matter not merely of discovery but of invention.  Therefore, in practicing the art of loving, on Fromm’s terms, one lives, in freedom, as a human being, one creates one’s existence, one defines and becomes responsible for oneself.

Love is an “Art”
            Fromm opens the first chapter of The Art of Loving with a response to those who do not see love as an art, those to whom love is like an instinctual function that requires no practice and no learning because we are simply programmed to do it; a central thesis of Fromm’s book, from beginning to end, is that this degraded interpretation of love is the rule in modern society, for reasons having to do with the very institutions and structure of modern society.  For Fromm, evidently, this would be true for animals, for which love represents nothing more than nature’s call to procreate and multiply; thus, this is the version of love to which Hobbes and Freud limit themselves, love that at root represents nothing more than an instinctual function for the achievement of physical pleasure and reproduction.  But Fromm, like Rousseau, views human beings as genuinely free and thus as fundamentally different from animals in this crucial respect, and Fromm’s analysis of love is his way of exploring and articulating this uniquely human nature. 
            In Chapter 1, Fromm briefly explains why “hardly anyone thinks that there is anything that needs to be learned about love,” why, that is, love is treated as a mechanical or instinctual endowment rather than as an art; this modern attitude, says Fromm, is based on three premises about love which it will be the business of Fromm’s ensuing chapters to refute.  I suggest that we can view these three premises, which for Fromm are of course mistaken premises, as all essentially alike in their tendency to objectify love.  According to the first premise, people today tend to view love as a matter of making themselves lovable, thus objectifying themselves; according to the second, people view love as a matter of obtaining the right object to love, thus objectifying the beloved; and according to the third, love itself is treated as a discrete entity unto itself, thus objectifying love itself.  Specifically, the first premise would have us seek love by making ourselves attractive, in terms of physical appearance or money or worldly power, while the second treats the object of love as a “personality package,” according to which, consistent with our market-based consumer culture, “love” becomes a marketplace where we seek “a mutually favorable exchange” as if we were shopping for the best deal on a car.  The third premise emphasizes the romantic notion of falling in love, ignoring what Fromm refers to as “the permanent state of being in love, or… ‘standing’ in love”; to objectify love in this way is like, we might say, mistaking the wedding for the marriage.   
            We may well observe precisely this objectifying, consumer approach to love on internet dating sites or in social networking, where our own profiles are painstakingly crafted to package ourselves in the most marketable of terms, and where we go to view the “personality packages” of our “friends,” or potential dates, who have done the same for themselves.  Indeed we might wonder, if we are spending a lot of time, alone before our monitors, on these “virtual personalities,” whether we might not ultimately be putting more care into creating our online “identities” than we do actually learning how to live; and the ultimate danger may be that we come to mistake our own profiles for ourselves, thus becoming our own, delusional victims of the reductive habit of treating ourselves and others as virtual personalities rather than as real people.  We may, in other words, be unwittingly slipping into “the matrix” (see my chapter on Descartes Meditations I and II), leaving behind the reality of our bodies and existing more and more as passive receptors of electronic input, as mere data processors; though, presumably, machines can never raise themselves to the level of being human, that does not prevent us from effectively lowering ourselves to the level of machines.

The Fundamental Existential Condition of Separateness
            Love, says Fromm, properly understood, is “the answer to the problem of human existence.”  That problem is, in a word, “separateness”; that is, it is the nature of human consciousness to be aware of itself as a separate entity, separate, that is, from other objects and, more especially, from other people, and finally from ourselves, in self-consciousness, where we effectively step back from ourselves mentally to witness our own being in the world.  Our awareness of our individual separateness is of course so natural and familiar to us that we can easily overlook how wondrous and mysterious it really is, but we should note that we can be fairly confident that no other beings we know of experience themselves as separate in this way.  It is fair to say that self-consciousness, and the freedom of will which we also tend to take for granted and which depends on and is the primary function of that self-consciousness, is not only a uniquely human characteristic, but also is precisely the characteristic that we most cherish as the defining feature of human nature itself.  In Freud we see it develop as the ego, Rousseau acknowledges it as that spiritual power that permits us to deviate from instinct, in Descartes it is manifest as “thinking thing”; but this power of consciousness, this being aware of ourselves as selves, this sense of responsibility for ourselves, this reflection upon ourselves, is an extraordinary and mysterious thing.
            But a person’s separateness, says Fromm, this “awareness of himself as a separate entity, the awareness of his own short lifespan, of the fact that without his will he is born and against his will he dies, that he will die before those whom he loves, or they before him, the awareness of his aloneness and separateness, of his helplessness before the forces of nature and of society, all this makes his separate, disunited existence an unbearable prison.”  A rock, a plant or even your cat experience none of this, and they are arguably the more content for it, while, for us human beings, this “experience of separateness arouses anxiety; it is, indeed, the source of all anxiety….  Beyond that it arouses shame and the feeling of guilt.” 
            The Biblical story of Adam and Eve eating the apple from the Tree of the Knowledge of Good and Evil is typically interpreted in sexual terms, as if their shame were a matter of their genitals, but that, argues Fromm, is a prudish, Victorian interpretation, and the truth goes much deeper.  We should recall that before they ate the apple, Adam and Eve were prisoners of the Garden, if content prisoners, because they were not free: they could make no choices because they did not know the difference between good and evil and thus had no standard for judgment; they had no freedom because they were totally bound within the perfect goodness of the Garden.  They experienced no separation from God or good and were thus incapable of doing evil because they did not even know that evil existed.  But with the knowledge of good and evil, they become free and thus cast out of the Garden to be on their own, blocked by flaming swords from any hope of a return to the perfect comfort of God, like being ripped from the perfect comfort of the womb, and aware now too of their mortality.  This primordial experience of separation amounts at once, in short, to the most glorious liberation and to an unbearable burden of personal responsibility.  Asserts Fromm, it is this awareness of perfect separateness, not yet resolved in love, that occasions the shame of Adam and Eve: “The awareness of human separation, without reunion by love, is the source of shame.  It is at the same time the source of anxiety and guilt.” 

Mature Love Distinguished from the “Symbiotic Relationship”
            So the unity of the love relation is the answer to the problem of separateness, but it does not come easily to us.  To begin with, what Fromm refers to as “mature love,” which is the genuine love of human freedom, is easily replaced with some extension of the “symbiotic relationship” we enjoyed in the womb (or the Garden), with reference to which we would today use the term “co-dependency.”  The problem with mature love is that in its essence it involves a paradox.  Thus, on the one hand, to love is essentially to seek unity and connection and indeed fusion with one’s beloved, with the object of one’s love; on the other hand, however, literally to achieve such fusion is the end of love, since now the beloved becomes merely a possession of or a part of the lover and there is nothing left to love, as in the symbiosis of the child in the mother’s womb.  This is why, of course, it is facile and false to speak of “loving” a meal, which is soon consumed, or a pair of shoes, which becomes part of our feet and then discarded: we don’t mean love in any serious sense there.  When it comes to a relationship of two, however, it is just as clear that literal fusion with our beloved cannot be the meaning of real, mature love, for in that case the individuality of both lover and beloved would be destroyed leaving a single, narcissistic unit of two, like the two new lovers who can’t be apart from one another and who shut out the world and so lose themselves in love.  Apart from the fact that such infatuation (for it is not love) does not last, it is clear that this love is based on the (mistaken) premise, noted previously, that love is about a discrete, momentary event or object, like the wedding, rather than a process of growth and evolution, like the marriage.
            Thus, in the case when the two lovers become literally a fusion of one, the space for love, which is that space between the two individuals, is lost, and so too are the individuals and love itself.  So the paradox of mature love is that we do seek to become one with our beloved, while remaining two:
In contrast to symbiotic union, mature love is union under the condition of preserving one’s integrity, one’s individuality.  Love is an active power in man; a power which breaks through the walls which separate man from his fellow men, which unites him with others; love makes him overcome the sense of isolation and separateness, yet it permits him to be himself, to retain his integrity.  In love the paradox occurs that two beings become one yet remain two.
Love is power, it is freedom, thus love is an activity, indeed the highest activity of humanity, the activity through which we define our selves as individuals.  Love is essentially a giving, for it is in our power to give that we realize power itself.  If our only “activity” is taking from others, then we are in fact not truly active but passive because we are thereby dependent on others for our being and thus, by definition, not independent and free and powerful.  Thus it is quite literally true that the more of ourselves we give, the more of ourselves we have, because the giving of ourselves is the establishment and assertion of our selves, of our power, of our freedom: “love is an action, the practice of a human power, which can be practiced only in freedom.”
            It should be noted, by the way, that much of Fromm’s analysis may seem most directly applicable to the erotic love of couples; in fact, however, love for Fromm encompasses much more than that, indeed it concerns every aspect of human existence, from our animal desire for sex and the drive to reproduce to the love of God.  Thus Fromm devotes considerable time, which, however, I shall not review here, to the whole range of modes of human existence as reflected in the varieties of love, including the love of fathers and mothers for their children, the brotherly love of friends, and the love of self, in addition to love’s important erotic and spiritual dimensions.  In truth, all these varieties of love are simply so many varieties of the uniquely human way of being, and stem from what for Fromm, and most philosophers from Socrates to Sartre, is unique, in all existence, about human existence.

Four Characteristics of Mature Love: Care, Responsibility, Respect, Knowledge
            Fromm identifies four essential characteristics of love, which together indicate its nature as definitive of the free power of individual human being; these four characteristics are care, responsibility, respect and knowledge. 
            Clearly we care for the objects of our love, and what we don’t care for we do not (actively) love: “love is the active concern for the life and growth of that which we love.”  Thus care designates the active, giving quality of love.   Responsibility designates the free voluntariness of love.  Responsibility “means to be able and ready to ‘respond’” and thus must not be confused with mere “reaction,” which is a function of the thoughtless mechanism of animal instinct.  But love is not a matter of possession, domination or control: “love is the child of freedom, never that of domination,” thus the mature love Fromm speaks of as the highest fulfillment of human possibility is not limited to the one-sided care and responsibility that a parent might have for an infant, totally dependent child; so in addition to care and responsibility love requires respect, which derives, Fromm reminds us, from “respicere = to look at.”  Thus love demands “the ability to see the person as he is, to be aware of his unique individuality.”  In other words, love requires the maintenance of a distinction and distance between lover and beloved, the space in which love is and grows, the space that maintains the individual integrity of each of the lovers even as they seek unity; to be able “to look at” the beloved, after all, means that the beloved must remain separate from oneself and must be respected as the individual that one is in love with. 
            Finally, love requires the knowing of the beloved, which is already implied in respect, since genuine respect can only be a function of such knowing, since one cannot respect something if one does not know what one is looking at.  The problem is, however, that, in short, human beings cannot fully be known, I cannot even know myself: even in the examination of the purely biological mechanisms of our bodies we observe that “life in its merely biological aspects is a miracle and a secret,” but “man in his human aspects is an unfathomable secret to himself—and to his fellow man,” because, says Fromm, “we are not a thing, and our fellow man is not a thing.”  The body, viewed simply as a mechanical “thing,” is at least in principle capable of being pulled apart and understood; but human consciousness and freedom and the human capacity to love render us “unfathomable” even, and at times most of all, to ourselves.
            Here Fromm notes that “above the universal, existential need for union,” which is the essential response to the human condition of separateness, there is “a more specific, biological” need for union, namely that between “the masculine and feminine poles.”  Quite apart from and surely more fundamental, in existential terms, than the common attraction between men and women, Fromm points out that “the polarity between the male and female principles exists also within each man and woman”; thus “there is masculinity and femininity in character as well as in sexual function.”  Thus we are speaking here not of heterosexual relations as such but of a far more profound union that begins within each one of us, and only on the basis of one’s achievement of the personal integrity that consists in the individual resolution of this polarity within oneself, that is self-love, can any other love become possible (this sentiment is surely clearly expressed when Jesus commands, “love your neighbor as yourself,” since the plain meaning of this is that we must first have achieved the love of ourselves if we are even to know how to love our neighbors, and lacking even the power to love ourselves clearly we could hardly have the power to love others).  The lack of such resolution within oneself results in an unbalanced personality that seeks to compensate for or mask its lack of one or the other polarity.  Thus,
if the masculine character traits of a man are weakened, because emotionally he has remained a child, he will try to compensate for this lack by the exclusive emphasis on his male role in sex.  The result is the Don Juan, who needs to prove his male prowess in sex because he is unsure of his masculinity in a characterological sense.  When the paralysis of masculinity is more extreme, sadism (the use of force) becomes the main—perverted—substitute for masculinity.  If the feminine sexuality is weakened or perverted, it is transformed into masochism, or possessiveness.
Again, such examples of the failure to balance both poles of our characters can occur in both men and women, involving either pole, thus, as we would put it today, what
Fromm refers to as the “masculine” or “feminine” character traits are functions of social conditioning as much as of nature and are thus present in both men and women, and both men and women can fail to resolve the two poles of their characters in either direction.
            Finally, Fromm remarks that Freud’s view of love is a function of his “physiological materialism,” according to which, as we have seen, human beings are simply pleasure-seeking machines.  Thus Freud cannot even see the interaction of male and female except in sexual terms, which “sees in the sexual instinct the result of a chemically produced tension in the body which is painful and seeks for relief.”  Thus, for Freud love is reduced to nothing more than the removal of this pain in sexual union, which, suggests Fromm, would seem to suggest the conclusion that “masturbation would be the ideal sexual satisfaction” since that would presumably be the most efficient and least risky means to relieve such bodily “tension.”  In any event, Fromm’s “criticism of Freud’s theory is not that he overemphasized sex, but his failure to understand sex deeply enough.”  For Fromm, sex is indeed a profoundly important dimension of one important kind of human love, but, like the comparison between the wedding and the marriage, it is only the beginning of the story and not the end.
            Freud’s views of love and sex have been profoundly influential, in part because clearly there is substantial truth in the importance of sexuality in human development, behavior and society; however, Fromm argues that Freud’s views merely reflect the economic, political and spiritual conditions of a society in which love, and thus human freedom and fulfillment, have lost their place.  It is thus that we observe, in this society, the resort to various alternatives to love to compensate for our lack of love or inability to love; these alternatives to love are shortcuts or quick fixes to which our technological, consumer society programs us to respond.

Alternatives to Love
            So human existence constitutes the effort to overcome our fundamental existential condition of separateness, to achieve, as Fromm says, “at-onement.”  As an “art” representing this ultimate fulfillment of human possibility, the practice of love is achieved only with time and effort, and requires, says Fromm, discipline, concentration, patience and “supreme concern.”  Under the frantic, competitive and commercial conditions of modern society, however, such requirements prove too daunting for most of us, therefore we are apt to try various short-cut alternatives, the first of which Fromm identifies as orgiastic states, by which we escape our sense of separateness by losing ourselves in a communal experience. As my own example of this I suggest the communal experience of the passionate football fan who loses herself in the mass hysteria of the crowd, thus gaining a sense of overall unity; another extreme example would be one who feels so alone, and has so little sense of personal integrity, that he gives his entire personality over to a religious cult, thus gaining the identity of the cult, but of course losing his own.  As examples of orgiastic states Fromm mentions ritual communal sexual orgies and alcoholism and drug addiction, and sexual orgasm generally.  All these have in common that they offer escape from ourselves and thus escape from our separateness; however, they are clearly not genuine solutions, as they do not serve to establish our individuality and enhance our personal integrity and responsibility, rather they tend to accomplish precisely the opposite, ultimately making our individuality at least temporarily disappear.
            The most common modern alternative to separateness is conformity.  We live in a society that claims to champion individuality, the opposite of conformity, as our ultimate value, as recorded for example in the various freedoms of personal expression in the First Amendment to the U.S. Constitution, and Fromm points out that in the Western democracies, like the U.S., non-conformity is possible.  But in fact, suggests Fromm, we have a great fear of being different and we are consequently strongly inclined to go along with “the herd”: in Western democracies, says Fromm, “people want to conform to a much greater degree than they are forced to conform.  Most people,” says Fromm, “are not even aware of their need to conform.  They live under the illusion that they follow their own ideas and inclinations, that they are individuals, that they have arrived at their opinions as a result of their own thinking….”  In fact, says Fromm, we are deeply conditioned to want what everyone else wants, and in substantial part because they want it, and to the extent that we feel the need to maintain some degree of individuality, “such need is satisfied with regard to minor differences.”  Think of how intent we are to get the latest electronic gadget, or shoes, or handbag or car or movie—along with the rest of “the herd,” and think of how we satisfy our “pathetic need for difference” by personalizing these mass-produced gadgets with special colors or designs, or whatever trivial options might make us feel somehow different, when our true effort is in fact to be like everyone else, to fit in.  We think we’re being individuals, and that it is by buying Nike or Luis Vuitton that we are so, when effectively we, along with everyone else, are wearing what the corporations want us to wear, eating what they want us to eat, believing what they want us to believe, even adjusting our brain chemistry according to the latest and most profitable products of the pharmaceutical industry.

The Alienation of Consumerism
            Our unwitting and unquestioned devotion to materialist, consumer values and the market system that promotes them leads to a market approach to love and to all of life.  Such a market system, known commonly as “capitalism,” “needs men who cooperate smoothly and in large numbers; who want to consume more and more; and whose tastes can be standardized and can be easily influenced and anticipated.  It needs men who feel free and independent… yet willing to be commanded… who can be guided without force.”  We feel that our spending choices are our own, yet we have become overwhelmed from birth with profoundly effective media techniques of suggestion and manipulation, most of which we remain completely unconscious of.  The result is, “Modern man has become alienated from himself, from his fellow men and from nature.”  That is, our desire to escape separateness has been transformed into a drive to forget ourselves altogether, to become alienated, that is, separated, from ourselves, so that we might take our orders from a consumer society that both creates and dictates the products we are to consume.  We think we are connecting with people, but instead of genuine relationships and intimacy we resort to “social networking” and media, such as facebook and text messaging, the effect of which is to avoid intimacy rather than to enable it.  And we are so dependent on the tools and institutions of this consumer society as to have lost any sense of nature itself—who today could survive a day in the woods, and, lacking GPS, who would know even how to find his way out, who knows how to follow the stars, indeed, who can even find a friend’s house anymore without computer directions? 
            We have become, says Fromm, “alienated automatons,” locked in “the strict routine of bureaucratized, mechanical work” and “the routine of amusement, the passive consumption of sounds and sights offered by the amusement industry.”  Since Fromm’s time, of course, such amusement has become our constant companion, in the form of our smartphones and computer tablets (not to speak of satellite television and pharmaceutical pills), which not only keep us constantly mesmerized and narcotized and thus apart from nature, others and ourselves, but also they create in us such a zombie-like state as to make us ideal victims of the real reason for most of the content on the internet and television, which of course is advertising.  These technologies combine to capture our attention and numb our minds, making us perfect, unwitting receptors of advertising’s psychological manipulation, as we voluntarily spend more and more of our time and money focused intently on precisely those advertising delivery systems, which binds us ever more firmly into a commercial loop of conformist isolation and enslavement. 

Modern Perversions of Love: Love as “Teamwork” or “Mutual Sexual Satisfaction”
            It should therefore be no surprise that, under such conditions, the common practice of love, in our market-driven society, is but a shadow of its true self.  Specifically, Fromm argues that there are two modern versions of love, both of which are beholden to a narrow, materialist conception of human existence. 
            We noted previously that it is typically assumed that love is not an art but a sort of commodity, according to which lover, beloved and love itself are reduced to objects of exchange on the personality market.  Consistent with this view, love is frequently thought of today as a matter of “teamwork”:
The situation as far as love is concerned corresponds, as it has to by necessity, to this social character of modern man.  Automatons cannot love; they can exchange their “personality packages” on the open market and hope for a fair bargain.  One of the most significant expressions of love, and especially of marriage within this alienated structure, is the idea of the “team.”…  All this kind of relationship amounts to is the well-oiled relationship between two persons who remain strangers all their lives, who never arrive at a “central relationship,” but who treat each other with courtesy and attempt to make each other feel better.
So the teamwork conception of love would have us shop for the best “partner” on the market, one whose “assets” best compliment one’s own, one with whom tax advantages can be maximized.  The commercial character of such a relationship is reflected in the proliferation of prenuptial agreements, which specifically treat the marriage as a business relationship, a matter of asset management.
            The other materialist version of love is that of Freud, for whom love, as we have already observed, is a matter of nothing more than “mutual sexual satisfaction.”  Fromm’s argument in explanation of Freud’s view recalls Rousseau’s argument explaining Hobbes.  Recall that Rousseau, in criticizing Hobbes’s view of human nature, argued that Hobbes claims to “return to nature” to justify his view of human nature as materialistic, selfish, greedy, domineering, violent and anti-social, but that what Hobbes was really doing, according to Rousseau, was describing human behavior in society; moreover, it is Rousseau’s argument that the greedy, selfish, domineering and violent qualities one observes in human behavior today are not so much the result of nature (though of course we are, biologically, animals with instincts for material survival and pleasure) as they are the result of social conditioning, that, indeed, “nothing is so gentle as man in his natural state.” 
            Similarly, Fromm readily concedes that people today do in general follow Freud in treating love as a matter merely of sexual satisfaction; Fromm argues, however, that this view is not a matter of nature but of the development of society and modern social institutions.  First, suggests Fromm, Freud’s view of love, and its widespread acceptance, constitutes a reaction against the overweening repression of sexual desire during the Victorian age, and second, and more to the point, Freud’s view of love constitutes an attempt to understand it in light of the prevailing capitalist market system, which has tended to view all social relations, and human beings themselves, in materialist, commercial terms.  The inheritors of the Hobbesian ethos were intent to justify capitalism, and the profiteering it enables, just as Hobbes himself was intent to justify the Divine Right of Kings.  Just so,
to prove that capitalism corresponded to the natural seeds of man, one had to show that man was by nature competitive and full of mutual hostility.  While economists “proved” this in terms of the insatiable desire for economic gain, and the Darwinists in terms of the biological law of survival of the fittest, Freud came to the same result by the assumption that man is driven by a limitless desire for the sexual conquest of all women, and that only the pressure of society prevented man from acting on his desires.
Freud’s view of love, in other words, is no more natural than Hobbes’s view of human nature; both alike, according to Fromm, rather reflect social conditioning and prevailing economic conditions and institutions, thus both of them are blind to the deeper human reality of freedom and love, which contemporary society too devalues to the point of total omission. 

The Reduction of Ethical Freedom to “Fairness”
            In Hobbes and Freud we have observed the metaphysical, political and psychological manifestations of the materialist standpoint; this standpoint, as we have seen, reduces human nature to the status of a mechanical machine, human character to that of greedy, domineering and violent pleasure seeking.  Under such materialist conditions, the term “freedom” designates nothing more than the law of the jungle, where we all have the right to everything, the right, that is, to pursue “love,” understood simply as physical pleasure, without constraint; thus it is an inconvenient luxury which we voluntarily surrender in favor of some measure of physical security.  By contrast, for Rousseau, freedom, and for Fromm, love, reflect what is uniquely human about human nature, the very existence of which is precisely what Hobbes and Freud deny, namely a uniquely human, spiritual dimension of humanity which cannot be reduced to purely biological or economic terms. 
            It is because of the materialism of Hobbes and Freud that, for them, “ethics” can have no real meaning, because for Hobbes and Freud, there is no real meaning to the idea of “good” apart from individual, physical pleasure.  Thus for Hobbes and Freud, “ethics” and “goodness” have no intrinsic value and can refer to nothing other than basic social order and stability.  This is why Hobbes argues for a rigid political order maintained by the absolute authority of the king, since the only real value for him is physical security, and without the absolute power of the king, enforced by the instruments of physical force and fear, society will inevitably revert to a war of all against all.  As for Freud, he ridicules society’s “ideal demand” to love your neighbor as yourself because it flies in the face of the intrinsically materialist, selfish nature of human beings, which he, following Hobbes, assumes.
            However, for Rousseau, as we have seen, human freedom is not at all merely a matter of pursuing pleasure in the absence of physical restraint; rather, freedom is the unalienable birthright of human beings as human, a spiritual power that enables us to escape the physical determination of natural forces to assume responsibility for our own destiny and character.  Analogously, for Fromm love is not at all merely a matter of the physical pleasure of sex, possession, domination or control; rather, love is the uniquely human power of giving of oneself, of establishing the meaningfulness of one’s existence within oneself and in relationship with others.  Thus for Fromm, the “Golden Rule” to do unto others as you would have them do unto you, which is derived directly from the command to love your neighbor as yourself,  is not at all an empty ideal, but represents the authentic fulfillment of human nature.
            As Fromm recounts, however, this Golden Rule has been adapted, indeed perverted, to suit our modern commercial, materialist, consumer culture.  Fromm refers to this adaptation of the ethics of the Golden Rule as “fairness ethics,” which is essentially analogous to the ethics of Hobbes’s social contract, which requires us only not to do to others what we would not want them to do to us.  In short, the “fairness ethics” of Hobbes and of contemporary society is an ethics not of love, understood as a matter of personal responsibility for oneself and others, but requires us only “to be fair in our exchange with others.”  The “Jewish-Christian norm of brotherly love is entirely different from fairness ethics,” says Fromm.  “It means to love your neighbor, that is, to feel responsible for and one with him, while fairness ethics means not to feel responsible, and one, but distant and separate; it means to respect the rights of your neighbor, but not to love him.”
            So for Fromm, this modern view of ethics, which obliterates love and freedom to reduce human relations to “fairness,” simply reflects the conditions and institutions of modern society. 
Our society is run by a managerial bureaucracy, by professional politicians; people are motivated by mass suggestion, their aim is producing more and consuming more, as purposes in themselves.  All activities are subordinated to economic goals, means have become ends; man is an automaton—well fed, well clad, but without any ultimate concern for that which is his peculiarly human quality and function. 
Under such conditions, Fromm wonders, can one, as a practical matter, exist as a human being, can one practice love under such conditions?  “If our whole economic and social organization is based on each one seeking his own advantage, if it is governed by the principle of egotism tempered only by the ethical principle of fairness, how can one do business, how can one act within the framework of existing society and at the same time practice love?”  How under these conditions, in other words, can one develop, cherish and pursue some “ultimate concern” for existence, some purpose, something that might give life meaning, something worth living (and dying) for? 
           
Conclusion: Is Love Possible Today?
            In truth, says Fromm, our opportunities, under such conditions, for authentic human fulfillment are severely constrained.  Indeed, Fromm asserts that “the principle underlying capitalistic society and the principle underlying love are incompatible.”  In other words, as long as we treat ourselves as market commodities to be valued according to the size of our bank accounts and the car we drive, and as long as we treat each other merely as customers or partners to be used or manipulated according to our own economic advantage, then we have condemned ourselves to the status of “alienated automatons” for whom human freedom and love are not even considerations, much less realities.  Thus the “salesman of a useless commodity, for instance, cannot function economically without lying”; in other words, if one is engaged in advertising or marketing in such a way as to manipulate people into wanting and buying things they don’t need, don’t really want, can’t afford and that may even be harmful to them, one must effectively lie in order to succeed, and to lie is clearly not a loving, or genuinely ethical, activity, even if it is legal. 
            However, says Fromm, “one must admit that ‘capitalism’ is in itself a complex and constantly changing structure which still permits of a good deal of non-conformity and of personal latitude.”  Thus, says Fromm, “a skilled worker, a chemist, or a physician…, a farmer,… a teacher and many a type of businessman can try to practice love without ceasing to function economically.”  The crux of the matter is,    
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 serve it.  He must be able to share experience, to share work, rather than, at best, to share in profits.   
In short, argues Fromm, “Those who are seriously concerned with love as the only rational answer to the problem of human existence must, then, arrive at the conclusion that important and radical changes in our social structure are necessary, if love is to become a social and not a highly individualistic, marginal phenomenon.”  And because Fromm insists, as we have seen, that love designates the very essence of human nature as such, and thus “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.”

1 comment:

  1. I enjoyed your essay, for my Master's Thesis I wrote "A Comparison of Freud's and From's Concept of Love in the Therpaeutic Setting".
    Thank you for sharing,
    Madeleine Maya

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