Love Lessons with Erich Fromm

Love. One of humanity’s greatest mysteries: that which Homer described in the Iliad as ‘magic to make the sanest man go mad’, which Thomas Mann dubbed ‘stronger than death’, which Evelyn Waugh termed ‘the root of all wisdom’ and that Justin Bieber guesses he is a sucker for. Equipped with Erich Fromm’s ‘The Art of Loving’, I aim to uncover some mysteries about it.

Erich Fromm is a member of the Frankfurt School of Critical Theory which started in the 1930s, a school to which Horkheimer, Adorno and Marcuse also belonged. Their aim was emancipation: they reconditioned and incorporated Marxist philosophy into the works of Freud, Weber and Nietzsche. With emphasis on ‘social reality’ – aiming to unite theory and practice – they were perturbed by society’s rapidly enlarging bureaucratisation and people’s alienation and loss of meaning.

Despite being published in 1956, Fromm’s ‘The Art of Loving’ can speak to us, now, just as aptly as it could then. When Fromm defines love as ‘the active concern for the life and the growth of that which we love’, he figures it as the sharing of your life force. Brecht felt the same: ‘What I possess I cannot treasure/ Without a mind to pass it on’. Wordsworth agreed; in ‘Surprised By Joy’, it is because he ‘turn[s] to share’ a nugget of information with his deceased daughter that he is hit by the gut-wrenching remembrance of her death. Sharing is, quite literally, caring. Fromm’s lines are binate: you do not love anything if you do not want to spread knowledge and passion for it – share your music recommendations/ teach your favourite subject/ spread love for a sport – but equally, you do not really love people if you don’t want to share these things with them. Love withstands your own integrity; it does not demand change or loss, but is about addition and advancement – whether emotional, intellectual or material. 

This brings me to Fromm’s second teaching: that love of one person ‘implies love of man as such’. Love of one person to the point of exclusion is not love but evidence of an ‘enlarged egotism’, merely ‘symbiotic attachment’. People wrongly believe that loving one person exclusively and being indifferent to others is proof of the intensity of their love. Part of the point of love demands having a love for humanity more generally. If you trammel your love into just one object, it is solipsistic, ungiving and self-indulgent. And as we have just seen, to Fromm, love is just as much something to be given as to be received. 

Fromm has some interesting things to say on union. Love is our panacea for the alienated, disenchanted human condition – the conditions of angst, regret, longing and loneliness which distinguish us from animals. We seek to overcome this condition through various sublimatory techniques – seeking union, wholeness, through productivity. We attempt to sublimate, to overcome this deep sense of separation, through four basic poles: work, creativity, ‘orgiastic states’ (which include casual sex, and drug and alcohol usage), and – the only successful form – actual love. Fromm’s criteria for human success at thwarting such disenchantment are interpersonality, permanence and creativity. 

I sorted Fromm’s argument into a table for clarification. 

Type of Union	Interpersonal	Permanent	Creative (unity with the world)	Notes
Conformity (work, leisure patterns, abiding social conventions)	Sometimes	Yes	No In most modern work, ‘the worker becomes an appendix to the machine or to the bureaucratic organisation’.	It is ‘only pseudo-unity’.
‘Orgiastic states’ This is the opposite of union via conformity, because it is intense, even violent; occurs in the mind and body; and is transitory.	Sometimes	No ‘It becomes a desperate attempt to escape the anxiety engendered by separateness, since the sexual act without love never bridges the gap between two human beings, except momentarily).	[Sometimes?]	In a ‘transitory state of exaltation the world outside disappears, and with it the feeling of separateness from it’.  It creates ‘the illusion of union’, even shame and hate, because when the union is over, their estrangement is felt even more markedly than before.
Creative work	No	Yes	Yes Cuts us out of the 9-5 cycle of routine, prescription and obedience: worker and object become one – human and world are united in the act of creation.	‘The person unites [the]mself with the material, which represents the world outside of [the]mself’.
Love	Yes	Yes	Yes	Love is ‘giving, not receiving’. Mature love is ‘union under the condition of preserving one’s integrity’.

To Fromm, the full answer, the only means of achieving full, organic, wholeness and unity, is through ‘interpersonal union, fusion with another person, love’. 

If the key ingredients of love are care, responsibility, respect and knowledge, infatuation is care, responsibility and respect without knowledge. Obsession is ignorant, blind attachment: a love without true knowledge of the object. No real, flawed human being could ever deserve the intense, quixotic and unchecked love that infatuation engenders - the placing of the love object on an empyrean pedestal. Fromm is doing the philosophical classic, re-articulating wisdom we already know (whether or not that wisdom is conscious). Here, he is rehashing the old adage: never meet your heroes. Those who are worshipped from afar can never stand up, in reality, to the image of them concocted by the worshipper. Lacking knowledge, the remaining three ingredients of love are incomplete, perpetually trumped by reality.

Fromm has far more to say; my next article will analyse his thinking on freedom, choice and obligation in relation to love.