The Art of Loving

Hola Everybody,
A little update on the "home" front. With the help of a politician I've done work with in the past and the non-profit I work for, I have been able to make some headway against the people who stole my property. It seems, according to legal counsel, I may have enough legs to stand on to file claim, I'm not sure yet. Whatever the case, I'm loving the fact that the very same people who initially dismissed me are now running around shitting their panties.

I'm also looking to move into my own room/ apartment by the end of this month.

What galls me is the thought that though I have the financial and networking resources to dig myself out of this mess, I can't help but think of what would've happened if I would've been, say, a single mother, with little or no resources and no political connections.

It's a sad day to come face-to-face with the fact that we have allowed our nation fall to the level of the most ignorant and greedy.

It's Wednesday, the time of the week when I wax philosophical...

* * *

Philosophy and the Art of Loving
Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.
-- Erich Fromm

I had to read Erich Fromm's , The Art of Loving, as part of an early counseling psych class. Looking at the syllabus, I saw that immediately following the Art of Love, we then had to read Peck's The Road Less Traveled, and I briefly considered dropping the class. Self-help books?!! Huh?!!

Fortunately for me, I didn't drop the class because the professor was someone who I respected and who would eventually become a mentor. Both books changed my outlook drastically. It is interesting that both books offered compelling perspectives on love, a topic that is often not addressed by philosophers.

Fromm is not that well known these days. Some writers fall out of fashion for different reasons -- some good, some bad. To be sure, some of Fromm's writing seems a little "wooly" in retrospect, but make no mistake about it: he advanced some powerful ideas. The Art of Loving, though written in 1958, is one of the more interesting books on the subject of love.

Early on, Fromm associated himself with the Frankfort School -- a school of thought that had a huge influence on me (as well as everybody else! LOL!). He developed an interest in Zen Buddhism as well as the work of Freud. His writing focused on humankind's alienation under modern political systems. His work advocated a form of humanistic socialism as an alternative to the extremes of capitalism and communism. His early writings dealt with the ways deal with freedom. His position is that we often fail to deal with the responsibility that comes with freedom and instead we seek escape. He was one of the first to identify the ways in which people seek escape from freedom -- through robot-like conformity, submitting to authority, and losing ourselves by indulging in destructive practices.

He was especially fascinated by the story of Adam and Eve, seeing the shame that they felt upon eating of the fruit of knowledge as the birth of human self-awareness and the loneliness and alienation that can cause. He felt that this led to us trying to deal with our alienation in various ways. We try to utilize our creative energies to transcend society, we try to find groups we can belong to, and we look tirelessly for connection through love -- romantic love in particular.

In The Art of Loving, he looked at various types of love that we can feel, including parental, sibling love, erotic love, self-love, and love for God. He argues (quite successfully) that our focus on romantic love is partly an escape -- a flight -- from our aloneness and alienation from our fellow man. More importantly, he argues that to "fall in love" is to misunderstand the basic nature of love. Real love, he asserts, should contain care, responsibility, respect, and knowledge and the way we pursue romantic love often excludes these characteristics.

Fromm described our existence as though we were all in our own kind of solitary confinement, separated from those around us, and fearful of the responsibility that would come from real freedom. Furthermore, we feel ashamed and afraid to use romantic love to try to address these perceived problems.

He argued for a saner society where this would not be the case. For Fromm love meant "to commit oneself without guarantee, to give oneself completely in the hope that our love will produce love in the loved person." He differentiated between mature and immature love. From wrote, "Immature love says: 'I love you because I need you.' Mature love says: 'I need you because I love you.'"

Whether or not you accept the premise that romantic love is often a dysfunctional flight from aloneness and alienation, this is a book worth reading for its range of reference and thinking.

Love,

Eddie