I initially read The Art of Loving by Erich Fromm in July 2022, in the hope of reflecting and learning systematically about the theory, science, and best practices of love. The more I learn, the stronger I felt that the education of love is long overdue and missing from our conversations today. I love how Fromm explains the evolution of love as a concept in the context of our biological needs as humans and the Western capitalist society in which we live. In retrospect, many common misconceptions of love could have been avoided have I encountered this book earlier. I noted a few key themes that I deeply resonate with as I go through the book:
Fromm argues Love is Giving
1. Common misconception: Most people see the problem of love primarily as that of being loved, rather than that of loving, of one’s capacity to love. People think that to love is simple, but that to find the right object to love—or to be loved by—is difficult. Fromm argues love is the activity of giving, which lies the highest expression of vitality and productiveness.
2. In capitalist society, love becomes package and commodities of exchange, as being lovable and attractive usually means a package of qualities which are popular and sought after on the personality market for most people. Falling in love becomes a bargain; “the object should be desirable from the the standpoint of its social value, and at the same time should want me, considering my overt and hidden assets and potentialities.”
3. The education of love, and of mature, loving qualities, is missing. As in learning any other art (e.g. music, medicine, engineering), one must both learn the theory and the practice. However, “in spite of the deep-seated craving for love, almost everything else is considered to be more important than love: success, prestige, money, power—almost all our energy is used for the learning of how to achieve these aims and almost none to learn the art of loving.”
Photo by Jerry Zhang on Unsplash
How might we develop the ability to love?
4. The ability to love as an act of giving depends on the character development of the person. It assumes the person has overcome dependency, narcissistic omnipotence, the wish to exploit others, or to hoard, and has acquired faith in his own human powers, courage to rely on his powers in the attainment of his goals.
5. The ability to love requires care, respect, responsibility, and knowledge. Respect (the root of the word respicere = to look at) is the ability to see a person as he is, to be aware of his unique individuality. Respect means the concern that the other person should grow and unfold as he is. Respect, thus, implies the absence of exploitation.
6. To respect a person is not possible without knowing him; care and responsibility would be blind if they were not guided by knowledge. I personally love this somewhat brutal analogy: “the child takes something apart, breaks it up in order to know it; or it takes an animal apart; cruelly tears off the wings of a butterfly in order to know it, to force its secret. The cruelty itself is motivated by something deeper: the wish to know the secret of things and of life.”
7. Common misconception: For most people, their own person, as well as others, is soon explored and soon exhausted. It’s easy to assume we already know our partner when we become familiar with each other. But there were more depth in the experience of the other person—if one can experience the infiniteness of his personality—the other person would never be so familiar. Then the experience of overcoming the barriers and separateness might occur everyday anew.
8. In modern society, man overcomes his unconscious despair by the routine of amusement, the passive consumption of sounds and sights offered by the amusement industry; furthermore by the satisfaction of buying ever new things, and soon exchanging them for others. Automatons cannot love; they can exchange their “personality packages” and hope for a fair bargain.
9. Love is possible only if two persons communicate with each other from the center of their existence. Real conflicts between two people, those which do not serve to cover up or to project, but which are experienced on the deep level of inner reality to which they belong, are not destructive. They lead to clarification, they produce a catharsis from which both persons emerge with more knowledge and more strength. There is only one proof for the presence of love: the depth of the relationship, and the aliveness and strength in each person concerned.
10. To master any art, anyone must begin by practicing disciplines, concentration and patience throughout every phase of his life. Concentration is a necessary condition for the mastery of an art. This lack of concentration is clearly shown in our difficulty in being alone with ourselves. To be able to concentrate means to be able to be alone with oneself—and paradoxically, this ability is precisely a condition for the ability to love. To learn concentration requires avoiding, as far as possible, trivial conversation, that is, conversation which is not genuine.
11. Love also requires rational faith. Just as the purpose of education is to help the child realize their full potentialities. The opposite of education is manipulation, which is based on the absence of faith in the growth of potentialities, and on the conviction that a child will be right only if the adults put into them what is desirable and suppress what seems to be undesirable. Having faith in another person means to be certain of the reliability and unchangeability of his fundamental attitudes, of the core of his personality, of his love. To have faith requires courage, the ability to take a risk, the readiness even to accept pain and disappointment.