Notes on 'The Art of Loving' by Erich Fromm

 Is Love an Art?

• Most people see the problem of love as "being loved" rather than "loving", one's capacity to love; hence the problem to them is "how to be loved", "how to be lovable"
  
  
• In pursuit of this, they follow aims of:
  1. Be successful (powerful/rich)
  2. Be attractive (cultivating body, style, dress, etc.)
  3. Be charming (Pleasant manners, interesting conversation, helpful, modest, etc.)
  
  
• Goal of these pursuits is to win friends and influence people; to be lovable
  
  
• In our culture, being lovable = being popular and having sex appeal
  
  
• Assumption here is that the problem of love is the problem of an object, not the problem of a faculty

• In a culture where marketing orientation prevails, and in which material success is the outstanding value, there is little reason to be surprised that human love relations follow the same pattern of exchange which governs the commodity and labor market.
  
  
• This commodity culture influences how we perceive objects of love.  Happiness is the thrill of looking in shop windows and buying all you can afford.  We begin to commodify individuals and look at people in a similar way; reducing them to objects.  An attractive partner is the prize we are after.
  
  
• Attractive = a combination of qualities that are sought after in the personality market.
  
  
• Falling in love thus develops only with regard to such human commodities as are within reach of one's own possibilities for exchange.  "Out for a bargain".  Object of love should be desirable from the standpoint of it's social value.
  
  
• Two persons thus fall in love when they feel they found the best object available on the market, considering the limitations of their own exchange value.
  
  
• Falling in love does not equal the permanent state of being in love.  Sudden miracle of intimacy is fleeting, wears off.  This type of love is by its very nature not lasting.

• Intensity of this infatuation, mistaken as proof of intensity of their love, may only prove the degree of their preceding loneliness.
  
  
• The prevailing attitude "nothing is easier than love" is incorrect, as evidenced by the regularity of it's failure.
  
  
• The only adequate way to overcome the failure of love is to examine the reasons for this failure, to study the meaning of love, and to learn how one could do better.

• Love is an art.  The process of learning an art can be divided into two parts: the mastery of theory and the mastery of practice.  Mastery of the art must be the ultimate concern.

• In spite of obvious failures and deep-seated craving for love, almost everything else is considered to be more important than love: Success, Prestige, Money, Power, Attractiveness - almost all of our energy is used learning to achieve these aims for the purpose of maximizing commodity value of self, and almost none to learn the art of loving.

The Theory of Love
1. Love, The Answer to the Problem of Human Existence

• Man is gifted with reason; he is life aware of itself.  Thrown out of paradise; a state of original oneness with nature - a state which he cannot return to, he is aware of himself as a separate entity.  Aware of his birth without his will, and against his will - faced with his death and the death of everyone he loves.  Aware of his helplessness and aloneness before the forces of nature, making his separate, disunited existence an unbearable prison.  Must liberate himself from this prison; unite himself in some form with other men or the outside world, lest be driven to insanity.
  
  
• Separateness is the source of all anxiety.  Cut off, without capacity to use human powers; unable to grasp the world - unite with things and people.  *** Ties to Marx's theory of alienation
  
  
• Adam & Eve, betrayal of one another in being cast out of Eden, is the awareness of separation without the reunion of love - the source of shame.  At the same time, the source of guilt and anxiety.
  
  
• Human existence is confronting the question of: How to overcome separateness, how to achieve union, how to transcend one's own individual life and find atonement.
  
  
• As humans develop from infancy and begin to emerge from primary bonds with mother and oneness with nature (pre-consciousness), the more we are separated from the natural world - the more intense becomes the need to find new way of escaping separateness. ***See 'The Origin of the Family, Private Property And The State' by Friedrich Engels for expansion on how the patriarchal nuclear family brought about the degradation of women, and a further break from primary bonds, which was unknown to pre-class society. The first domestic institution in human history was the matriarchal clan; gave women solidarity and power as head of communal households and matrilocal residence under primitive communism.
  
  
• One way of achieving this aim lies in all kinds of orgiastic states. Rituals of primitive tribes, practiced in common, provides experience of fusion with the group. Closely related to, and blended with orgiastic experience, is sexual experience...
  
  
• Sexual orgasm can produce state similar to one produced of trance, or the effects of certain drugs.  Rites of communal sexual orgies were often a part of many primitive rituals, offering brief release from the mounting tension of anxiety stemming from separateness.  As a common tribal practice, it being cultural accepted, there's no accompanying guilt or shame.
  
  
• Quite different in a culture which has left behind these common practices. Refuge in drugs and alcohol to escape separateness produce feelings of guilt and remorse because they feel all the more separate after the experience is over.  Drives recourse to this refuge with increasing frequency and intensity to escape isolation and mounting guilt and shame.
  
  
• Similar to this recourse is the sexual orgiastic solution. Assumes function not very different from alcohol and drugs.  Desperate attempt to escape anxiety engendered by separateness; results in ever-increasing sense of separateness, since the sexual act without love never bridges the gap between two human beings, except momentarily.
  
  
• All forms of orgiastic unions have three characteristics: they are intense, even violent; they occur in the total personality, mind and body (physical and non-physical in conflict?); they are transitory and periodical (short-lived and demands recurrence).  Opposite is true for forms of union based on conformity with the group; it's customs, practices, and beliefs.  Unity through communal acceptance and participation.
  
  
• Western society, through control of suggestion and propaganda rather than threat or outright terror (as a "democracy"), displays an overwhelming degree of conformity.  In the quest for union, with no other answers or examples of a better way, the union of herd conformity becomes the predominant one.  In this aim to overcome separateness, the individual self disappears to a large extent. "If I am like everybody else, if I have no feelings or thoughts which make me different, if I conform in custom, dress, ideas to the pattern of the group, I am saved; saved from the frightening experience of loneliness."
  
  
• This capitalizing off people's desire to conform, rather than forcing conformity, has the benefit of allowing folks to live under the illusion they follow their own ideas and inclinations; that they have arrived at their opinions as the result of their own thinking - and that it just happens that their ideas are the same as the majority (or within the range of acceptable variance, ie republican/democrat, pepsi/coke, etc).  The advertising slogans of "Hope & Change" vs. "Make America Great Again" displays this pathetic need for difference, when in reality there is hardly any left.
  
  
• Closely related to the elimination of difference is the concept and experience of equality. Socialist thinkers define equality as the abolition of exploitation, of the use of man by man (***See Marx on abolition of private property).  In capitalistic society, "equality" has been transformed to refer to the equality of automatons; of people who have lost their individuality.  This definition of equality strives for sameness rather than oneness.  It is the sameness of abstraction.  Men and women who work the same jobs, read the same papers, and have the same feelings and ideas.  
  
  
• These contemporary ideals of individualized "equality" forces human beings to become the same, not equals; for the purpose of making them function in mass aggregation, all obeying the same commands. Just as modern mass production requires the standardization of commodities, so the social process requires standardization of man, and this standardization is called "equality".
  
  
• This union by conformity, calm and dictated by routine, concerning mainly the mind and not the body, lacking the intensity and violence of the orgiastic solutions, is insufficient to pacify the anxiety of separateness.  It's one advantage is it's permanence, whereas the orgiastic solutions are spasmodic.  Rampant alcoholism, drug addiction, hypersexuality, and suicide in Western society are symptoms of this relative failure of herd conformity.
  
  
• Routinized and prefabricate work and pleasure in capitalist society has a deleterious effect on initiative and exploration of individuality.  
  
  
• Union can be attained through creative activity.  Through creative work, the individual is united with the material, representing the world outside of the self.  Worker and object become one, united through the process of creation.
  
  
• This only holds true for productive work for which I plan, produce, and see the result of my work.  Without this unity, the worker becomes and appendix to the machine or the bureaucratic organization.  The worker ceases to be themselves in production, hence there is no union beyond conformity.
  
  
• Love is an activity, not a passive affect.  Envy, jealousy, ambition, any kind of greed are passions; love is an action, the practice of human power, which can be practiced only in freedom and never as the result of a compulsion.  Love is primarily giving. 
  
  
• The person who's character has not developed beyond the stage of the receptive, exploitative, or hoarding orientation, experiences the act of giving as "giving up" something, being deprived of, or sacrificing.  Most individuals of this type feel giving as an impoverishment and therefore refuse to give.  
  
  
• Some make a virtue of giving in the sense of a sacrifice. The virtue of giving to them lies in the very act of the acceptance of the sacrifice; it is better to suffer deprivation than experience joy.
  
  
• For others, giving is more joyous than receiving, not because it is deprivation, but because the act of giving lies in the expression of my aliveness.  I experience my strength, my wealth, my power; this experience of heightened vitality and potency fill me with joy.
  
  
• He who gives much is rich.  The hoarder who is anxiously worried about losing something is, psychologically speaking, the poor, impoverished man, regardless of how much he has.
  
  
• Poverty is so degrading, not only because of the suffering it causes directly, but because it deprives the poor, who it is well established are more willing to give than the rich, of the joy of giving.
  
  
• People also give of themselves; their joy, their interests, their understand, their knowledge, their humor, their sadness... their life.  In thus giving his life, he enriches another person; he enhances the other's sense of aliveness by enhancing his own.
  
  
• Specifically with regard to love this means: love is a power which produces love.  Giving is receiving - provided they do not treat each other as objects, but are related to each other genuinely and productively.
  
  
• Beyond the element of giving, the active character in love becomes evident in the fact that it always implies certain basic elements, common to all forms of love: Care, Responsibility, Respect, and Knowledge
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