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On Fromm's The Art of Loving (1956).
A Valentine's Day special topic! What is love, really? This psychoanalyst of the Frankfurt school thinks that real love is not something one "falls" into, but is an art, an activity, and doing it well requires a disciplined openness and psychological health. Love is the answer to the deep human need to rid ourself of isolation, but a mere sexual union won't provide real intimacy. To connect the center of your being with the center of another's being, you need to really know yourself and know the other, and this knowing requires an overall openness that amounts to a love of humanity, a feeling of oneness with nature, and an overall orientation toward the good, which is what he considers a mature take on "love of God," which doesn't imply, e.g., a belief in a judging deity, which would be a mature imposition into nature of insecurities about the conditional love of one's father.
So yes, this is replete with psychoanalytic weirdness (and without any clinical basis presented), and very much reflects its time (prurient, sexist, homophobic), but Fromm also puts forward a Marxist social commentary that's very much in line with our New Work and Hannah Arendt episodes, i.e., we need to remake society into the kind of place where loving can be the rule and not the exception, as our current society steers us to treat others and ourselves like commodities to be used, and romantic love as likewise trying to score the best deal, find the best love object and make yourself the most desirable (attractive, successful), none of which adds up to intimacy. Oh, and also, stop watching so much TV!
This recording features the core four: Mark, Seth, Wes, and Dylan.
Recommended prerequisites: Ep. 26 on Freud's Civilization and its Discontents, Ep. 100 on Plato's Symposium. We've also discussed this issue of others' recognition of you on many episodes starting with Ep. 36 on Hegel, but perhaps the clearest statement, most relevant to this episode is Ep. 71 on Martin Buber.
Buy the book
End songs: "Kimmy" (recorded 1995), from Mark Lint's Black Jelly Beans & Smokes. Listen to the album free. Also its sequel, "Kimmy 2002 (Mommy)."
Have you checked out Mark's new podcast Nakedly Examined Music yet?
Thank for this conversation.
You people may or may not know (Wes says that his mother has or had the book) that this book was THE book to read for “alternative” people in the pre-hippie era, in the early 60’s, before the 60’s became the 60’s.
I read it, but I was too immature to appreciate it, but when the dust had settled from the 60’s, at the end of the 70’s, I went back to it; and in some sense, Fromm became my rabbi, a far wiser man than any rabbi I had run into in organized judaism.
Fromm’s earlier book, Escape from Freedom, is worth reading. After Art of Loving, Fromm writes a series of books which more or less say what Art of Loving says. He did publish a decent anthology of the early Marx, one of the first in English as far as I know, although there may be better editions of the early Marx in English by now.
Hey guys, I listen to your podcasts while I’m working, and this one actually made me stop and take a break, I was laughing so hard! It’s pretty much impossible to do accurate data entry when a bunch of philosophers start singing the Righteous Brothers.
Thanks for all the laughs and learning!
Kathy
Should discuss his “The Sane Society”, an extremely important book even today. Alienation is the biggest issue still facing people around the world.
Emphatically agree; The Sane Society is an utterly brilliant work that is unduly overlooked. Fromm’s first book, Escape From Freedom, is rightly regarded as a classic that set in motion the tradition of radical sociology exploring the authoritarian personality that would ultimately culminate in Adorno and co.s’ book of that title, but Fromm merely intended it as a preliminary report of empirical research he was doing in the 30’s on the political persuasions of the German people. He only published it as a political intervention. The book has rightly come under criticism due to Fromm incorrectly believing fascism to be a predominantly upper-middle-class phenomenon, where we now know it was a lower-middle-class one, but Fromm himself was made aware of this as archival evidence was made available to him after the war. He continued to work on the subject and refine his thesis, ultimately resulting in the masterful Anatomy of Human Destructiveness. Fromm is unjustly dismissed as a mere popularizer, with even sympathetic figures like Noam Chomsky characterizing Fromm’s work as “superficial,” but nothing could be further from the truth. Books like The Sane Society and the aforementioned Anatomy of Human Destructiveness deserve to be revisited.
Apologies, I rambled. I adore Fromm’s work and am distressed by how much he’s been forgotten! I get excited when I see a fellow admirer “in the wild.”