Reading & the Good Life
Join the conversation; every Friday at Noon EST (Register here), Perennial Meditations readers are welcome to gather for casual conversations on the art of living. This Friday, we continue our exploration of selected passages from The Art of Loving by the psychoanalyst and social philosopher Erich Fromm (1900-1980).
Reading & the Good Life is a space for connection, contemplation, and conversations on the art of living.
Selected Passages:
Love is not primarily a relationship to a specific person; it is an attitude, an orientation of character which determines the relatedness of a person to the world as a whole, not toward one “object” of love. If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to the rest of his fellow men, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism. […]
— Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving
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The most fundamental kind of love, which underlies all types of love, is brotherly love. By this I mean the sense of responsibility, care, respect, knowledge of any other human being, the wish to further his life. This is the kind of love the Bible speaks of when it says: love thy neighbor as thyself. Brotherly love is love for all human beings; it is characterized by its very lack of exclusiveness. […]
— Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving
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Before we start the discussion of the psychological aspect of selfishness and self-love, the logical fallacy in the notion that love for others and love for oneself are mutually exclusive should be stressed. If it is a virtue to love my neighbor as a human being, it must be a virtue—and not a vice—to love myself, since I am a human being too. There is no concept of man in which I myself am not included. … The love for my own self is inseparably connected with the love for any other being. […]
— Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving
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These ideas on self-love cannot be summarized better than by quoting Meister Eckhart on this topic: “If you love yourself, you love everybody else as you do yourself. As long as you love another person less than you love yourself, you will not really succeed in loving yourself, but if you love all alike, including yourself, you will love them as one person and that person is both God and man. Thus he is a great and righteous person who, loving himself, loves all others equally.” […]
— Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving
Who is Erich Fromm?
Erich Fromm (1900 — 1980) was a German-born American psychoanalyst and social philosopher who explored the interaction between psychology and society. By applying psychoanalytic principles to remedy cultural ills, Fromm believed humanity could develop a psychologically balanced “sane society.”
After receiving his Ph.D. from the University of Heidelberg in 1922, Fromm trained in psychoanalysis at the University of Munich and the Berlin Psychoanalytic Institute. He began practicing psychoanalysis as a disciple of Sigmund Freud but soon took issue with Freud’s preoccupation with unconscious drives and consequent neglect of the role of societal factors in human psychology. For Fromm, an individual’s personality was the product of culture as well as biology. …
In several books and essays, Fromm presented the view that understanding basic human needs is essential to understanding society and humanity itself. Fromm argued that social systems make it difficult or impossible to satisfy different needs at one time, thus creating both individual psychological and wider societal conflicts. […]
Source: Brittanica Encyclopedia
If you are available on a Friday (at Noon EST), feel free to drop into one of our Reading & the Good Life meetups (Register here). It’s a highly casual space for connection and conversations on the art of living.
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Thank you for reading; I hope you found something useful.
Until next time, be wise and be well,
P.S. As always, feel free to comment, ask questions, or suggest future reads!
I am so happy to have stumbled upon this post. I love love, and its powerful embodiment of activations serving this experience of existence. Thank you so much for sharing:)