Chapter I. Love: essence and manifestation
Erich Fromm’s philosophy of love
I am compelled to single out Erich Fromm, for in the context of philosophy of love he is, possibly, the single most quoted author. This is probably because his conception of love managed to absorb elements of opposing ideologies, different religions and different schools of science. Of most importance, however, is the humanist nature of Fromm himself, who, having hoist high the banner of love, intended to resolve all contradictions of the world. Although he did not escape criticism, that criticism, sparing and benevolent for the most part, was directed at the utopianism of his scheme to save the world through love, not at the conception of love itself. That conception itself was received with admiration by all those who venerate love, including Russian philosophers, especially those of the perestroika and post-perestroika periods.[1] Strangely enough, a critical analysis of Fromm’s ideas about love can be found in a work by his fellow countryman, the American philosopher Harry K. Wells – another humanist, but one capable of using the method of dialectical and historical materialism.[2]
With all respect for the humanist charge of Fromm’s works and his hymn to love, it should be said that his conception of love is incorrect in principle; this conclusion is not only borne out by practice, but proven in theory.
Fromm presented his views on love in the fullest scope in his famous book The Art of Loving. He begins his analysis with the assertion that man stepped out of the animal world still carrying some leftover instincts from that world, in which “we find love, or rather, the equivalent of love.”[3] That is, love, even if in the form of an “equivalent” (in another place he writes directly of animal love), was inherent to human nature from the beginning. This is why love is the ultimate and real need of every human being, “the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.” (122)
However, having stepped out of the animal world, man became separated and alienated from the rest of the world; he discovered his helplessness before the forces of nature and society. Since he possesses reason, i.e. understanding of his alienation, he experiences alarm, shame, guilt. This applies to the individual and to mankind as a whole. Hence the problem emerges of re-connection with the world, with people, with persons of the opposite sex. This problem, in Fromm’s opinion, existed in past times, and it still exists to this day, albeit taking on different forms. He illustrates his theory of alienation with the example of Adam and Eve (the story of the original sin), as well as examples from modern capitalist society. So how is this problem resolved? It is through love, naturally, or through “reunification with the help of love.” So what is this force called love? Fromm writes: “Love is an active power in man; a power which brakes 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.” (19) We would do well to memorize this last statement.
In order for love to possess such titanic power, it must have inherent a number of characteristics which fill it with meaning. First among these is activity, which in turn is manifested in the statement that “Love is primarily giving, not receiving.” (21) Fromm describes in detail “the act of giving”, and along the way he curses capitalism which is based mainly on “the act of taking”. This postulate is equally easily proved in application to sex between man and woman. As a result, love appears as the force that gives birth to love, while powerlessness is the impossibility to give birth to love.
However, in order to possess these characteristics, it is necessary to learn the art of love, which presupposes a certain level of education. It follows from this that an uncultured, uneducated man is incapable of loving, incapable of giving; he is doomed to taking only.
Another premise for love is freedom. This topic is hardly developed at all in Fromm’s text, yet its mention alone earned Fromm right away the love of “democracy and markets” ideologues.
Let us stop here for the time being. On first sight, everything Fromm said about love can only be welcomed. His general pathos is a hymn to love as the all-reconciling principle of connecting man to man and to nature, a principle that squeezes the feeling of loneliness and alienation out of man; it acts inspiring. One feels like repeating after Fromm: “Without love, humanity could not exist for a day.” (17)
But here all kinds of history books come to mind (fortunate are those who don’t read them) - books that describe, in a multitude of examples from the past and the future, the development of the human race that managed to survive without love for millions of years – not just a day or two. To this day wild tribes are discovered in remote places like islands in the Pacific that don’t have a word for love. Fromm himself writes that even under capitalism love does not exist, since capitalism takes more than it gives.
Therefore, the initial premise about love being universal and inherent to man since the moment he stepped out of the animal world is incorrect in principle. It turns out that the concept of love is not only social – it is also historical, as Fromm himself admits. Likewise incorrect is his other premise, or, rather, a whole theory – the theory of man’s original alienation from nature which produces in him the feeling of loneliness and tragedy. On the contrary, man’s rift with nature is a revolutionary leap in his development – his development precisely as man with his consciousness and knowledge - that enables him to rule this nature, to bring it into the service of man. The idealization of the time of Adam and Eve, who supposedly were then in harmony with nature, amounts to a return to the unconscious, that is, animal state of man, or rather pre-man. Thank goodness, the curious Eve disobeyed God and ate of the fruit of knowledge, involving the lazy Adam as well. Precisely from that moment on man rose to the level of God, as the latter was compelled to state Himself in His anger. I stress: a return to nature means in fact a return to the pre-human state, at best – to a society of apes, which actually does exist in a state of harmony with nature. There is no return to that, as Fromm himself admits with regret.
Thus, Fromm’s premises about original love that is inherent to man and about his alienation from nature are simply non-scientific, although precisely they are the foundation of his theory of all-permeating love. It would have been nice if it was so, but it is not.
All these incorrectnesses are reflected in Fromm’s understanding of the different kinds of love. He lists several: brotherly love, motherly love, erotic love, self-love, love for God.
The most fundamental kind of love, according to Fromm, is brotherly love. Its essence is love for all mankind. Like all other kinds of love, it is originally inherent to every individual on the unconscious level. This is Godly, of course; the Bible, too, implores us to love everyone. The problem is, this type of love is not just an evolution of man’s originally inherent potency for loving; it is a product of the historical process that is still not completed. Fromm’s goodly wish shatters against the practice of the struggle between love and enmity, with variable success for either one. However, even motherly love requires the art of love; Fromm himself insists on this. Therefore, a certain education is required, certain skills, etc. Especially since this has to do with a child’s love for its mother or its father. It does not know love when it is born; it learns love in the process of upbringing and education, from examples, from studying the world around it. This applies to all kinds of love, including the erotic one. Fromm himself writes that sexual attraction is not yet love – it is a natural instinct, pure biology. Only in society is this instinct transformed into sexual love, only when will, choice, culture – all mentioned by Fromm – come into their own. Then again, all this is not primordial. I do not examine here that part of Fromm’s work dedicated to the love of God, which got the most attention from Fromm. In this section, he fell into mysticism, into theology, into Zen Buddhism, despite his fragile atheism. The already-mentioned Harry Wells showed very well that this section doesn’t hold water. It is worth noting, though, how Fromm describes self-love (Wells skipped over this “object of love” for some reason). This stance is actively exploited by many ideologues of capitalism in the form of the thesis: first get to love yourself, and then you will be capable of loving others. Its source is the well-known expression from the Bible: “love thy neighbor as thyself.” Fromm himself interprets this expression as follows: this idea “implies that respect for one’s own integrity and uniqueness, love for and understanding of one’s own self, cannot be separated from respect and love and understanding for another individual. The love for my own self is inseparably connected with the love for any other being.” (54-5)
This postulate usually serves to start arguments about egoism, since it is supposedly a call for egoistical treatment of other people. Fromm attempts to prove that it is not so. On the contrary, the more you love yourself, the more you love others, and if you only love others, but you don’t love yourself, then you are incapable of love in principle. In actual fact, this is not about egoism – it is about the principle of the question: can one love oneself?
In everyday life, one really does hear things like: yesterday I hated myself, today I love myself. However, standing behind these words are everyday circumstances. Fromm, on the other hand, wrote a work of philosophy, and there are a number of incongruities in it from the perspective of philosophy. Firstly, if we proceed from man’s innate instinct of love (which is what Fromm asserts), there is no problem in principle: man loves himself innately anyway. Who needs, then, these appeals to love oneself? If such an appeal did sound, it means that Fromm debunks his own theory about innate love. Secondly, if love is not innate, then something must be causing me to love myself. Is it the sexual instinct? Wrong address, apparently.[4] Great social deeds? It would seem that I haven’t done any yet. I see no internal causes inducing me to self-love. According to Fromm’s main thesis, love is an act of “giving.” So what can I give to myself? Nothing except for knowledge, which suggests to me that I have no reasons to love myself yet, since love is a process, including the business of mastering “the art of love.” However, should I suddenly discover in myself all the qualities necessary for me to “love myself,” I will stop in my development. Fromm writes that the achievement of “the art of loving” in practice requires discipline, patience, reflection, etc., which are achieved by a “mature personality.” However, this process is endless, therefore I am a priori unable to start loving myself before I start loving my neighbor – neither from the start nor later.
Fromm goes on to state: “On love the paradox occurs that two beings become one and yet remain two.” (19) He is right about that. But how is this paradox resolved within one personality? The “I” must first split into two and then become reunified in love. Perhaps there were many such cases in Fromm’s own clinical practice, but what about the world? If such cases do happen, they are committed to psychiatric institutions. In philosophical parlance, Fromm expresses this idea as follows: “my own “I” should be the same object of my love as any other man.” That is, the “I”-subject must turn into the “I”-object. The subject is equal to the predicate, and this, if we recall Hegel, is an empty identity: they are equal, i.e. they remained in their previous state. If the subject is the predicate (the transition of the unitary into the universal), then through the predicate the subject becomes part of the universal, but not of itself, the unitary. This means that the subject stays in its previous state. As a result, the idea of “getting to love oneself” is unattainable in principle, not even on the level of philosophical abstraction. This means that it does not reflect the essence of phenomena, turning in practice into an empty appeal that has no real consequences.
Curiously enough, in a later work Fromm writes: “The truth is, there is no such thing as ‘love.’ ‘Love’ is an abstraction, perhaps a goddess or an alien being, although nobody has ever seen this goddess. In reality, there exists only the act of loving. To love is a productive activity.”[5] He goes on to describe in detail the already-familiar to us forms of this activity. Love is indeed an abstraction, but the problem is, it is not yet a concept, since it has not been understood yet which reality is reflected by this abstraction. “Form of productive activity” is not a definition, since this is applicable to almost any class of abstractions.
Fromm, of course, is no philosopher. He failed to justify his conception of love scientifically. He owes his popularity most likely to his criticism of Western society, including criticism through “love”. He stressed tirelessly that love in the forms he mentioned is a relatively rare phenomenon in capitalist society, “and that its place is taken by a number of forms of pseudo-love which are in reality so many forms of the disintegration of love.” (77)
He is also correct when he writes that modern Western society practices “the socially patterned pathology of love,” which has gotten only worse after Fromm wrote his works. In another place he asserts categorically: “The principle underlying capitalist society and the principle of love are incompatible.” (121) He does admit that among “farmers, workers, teachers and many other professions” love may take place, but on the whole the phenomenon is marginal. This comes as a concluding chord: “If it is true …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.” (123)
He did have hope after all that through “love therapy,” with the help of belief in love, it is possible to straighten out capitalism, especially since it is a “constantly changing structure.”
In the history of mankind there were quite a few humanist idealists like Fromm. One such in the 20th century was Albert Schweitzer, who believed that the world can be set right on the basis of the conception of “reverence for life.” This naïve, childish humanism is in actual fact not at all harmless; it stupefies people, fills them with illusions that are no different from Biblical tales. The approach to love described by Fromm in practice gives strength to enmity and hatred.
[1] For example, see: Petrov. The Philosophy of Love and the Philosophy of Sexuality. – Интернет.
[2] Wells. The Failure of Psychoanalysis: From Freud to Fromm.
[3] Fromm. The Art of Loving, 7.
[4] I’m certain, though, that there will be some psychologists who will “delve deep” into the struggle between the female and male principles inside the human organism, with the outcome of the resolution being either love (the woman won) or strife (the man won).
[5] Fromm. To have or to be? 44.
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