Book Review: The Art of Loving
Apr. 18th, 2016 01:21 pm![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
osprey_archerIn People of the Lie, M. Scott Peck quotes from Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving, and I thought - more fool me - “I should read that. That sounds like a respite from all these books about the nature of evil.”
Dude, was I ever wrong. The Art of Loving is many things, but restful is not one of them. “If we speak about love in contemporary Western culture, we mean to ask whether the social structure of Western civilization and the spirit resulting from it are conducive to the development of love. To raise the question is to answer it in the negative. No objective observer of our Western life can doubt that love...is a relatively rare phenomenon, and that its place is taken by a number of forms of pseudo-love which are in reality so many forms of the disintegration of love.”
BAM! And Fromm goes on: he argues that we can only love insofar as we are capable of loving all of humankind, that “to love means to have a loving attitude toward everybody,” so if you think you love your spouse but aren’t concerned about nuclear war (or, to update the threat of global catastrophe, climate change) then you are shit out of luck.
The market economy has so insidiously undermined our capacity to love that even radicals find themselves crippled in the face of its depredations. “Both the ‘radical thinkers’ [who argue that “only a martyr or a mad person can love in the world of today, hence that all discussion of love itself is nothing but preaching”] and the average person are unloving automatons and the only difference between them is that the latter is not aware of it, while the former knows it and recognizes the ‘historical necessity’ of this fact.”
As the quotes around “radical thinkers” and “historical necessity” indicate, Fromm doesn’t actually agree with this position. The (clearly quite small) minority of human beings who are still capable of love can carve out spaces to do so. In fact they can’t help doing so, because the “capacity to love demands a state of intensity, awakeness, enhanced vitality, which can only be the result of a productive and active orientation in many other spheres of life. If one is not productive in other spheres, one is not productive in love either.”
In fairness to Fromm, he doesn't mean "productivity" in the capitalist sense of making stuff: as far as he's concerned, meditation is one of the most productive activities you can partake in, even though from the outside it just looks like sitting there doing nothing. Nonetheless, just copying down that quote makes me want to take a nap. Love may be all we need and the only thing that can save us, but it sounds completely exhausting.
Dude, was I ever wrong. The Art of Loving is many things, but restful is not one of them. “If we speak about love in contemporary Western culture, we mean to ask whether the social structure of Western civilization and the spirit resulting from it are conducive to the development of love. To raise the question is to answer it in the negative. No objective observer of our Western life can doubt that love...is a relatively rare phenomenon, and that its place is taken by a number of forms of pseudo-love which are in reality so many forms of the disintegration of love.”
BAM! And Fromm goes on: he argues that we can only love insofar as we are capable of loving all of humankind, that “to love means to have a loving attitude toward everybody,” so if you think you love your spouse but aren’t concerned about nuclear war (or, to update the threat of global catastrophe, climate change) then you are shit out of luck.
The market economy has so insidiously undermined our capacity to love that even radicals find themselves crippled in the face of its depredations. “Both the ‘radical thinkers’ [who argue that “only a martyr or a mad person can love in the world of today, hence that all discussion of love itself is nothing but preaching”] and the average person are unloving automatons and the only difference between them is that the latter is not aware of it, while the former knows it and recognizes the ‘historical necessity’ of this fact.”
As the quotes around “radical thinkers” and “historical necessity” indicate, Fromm doesn’t actually agree with this position. The (clearly quite small) minority of human beings who are still capable of love can carve out spaces to do so. In fact they can’t help doing so, because the “capacity to love demands a state of intensity, awakeness, enhanced vitality, which can only be the result of a productive and active orientation in many other spheres of life. If one is not productive in other spheres, one is not productive in love either.”
In fairness to Fromm, he doesn't mean "productivity" in the capitalist sense of making stuff: as far as he's concerned, meditation is one of the most productive activities you can partake in, even though from the outside it just looks like sitting there doing nothing. Nonetheless, just copying down that quote makes me want to take a nap. Love may be all we need and the only thing that can save us, but it sounds completely exhausting.
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no subject
Date: 2016-04-18 07:16 pm (UTC)(sorry, you mentioned Bronson Alcott the other day and it reminded me that I'm still not over that flake blizzard and never will be)
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Date: 2016-04-18 08:26 pm (UTC)Did he invent a blizzard? Did Bronson Alcott make up a fake blizzard and I forgot about it?
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Date: 2016-04-18 08:33 pm (UTC)What I'm not over is just the general awfulness of Alcott as a parent + his high ideals giving him cause to be even more awful.
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Date: 2016-04-18 08:40 pm (UTC)Bronson Alcott was so flaky that even the other Transcendentalists noticed it. That has to be an all-time flakiness high.
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Date: 2016-04-19 06:04 am (UTC)no subject
Date: 2016-04-19 12:43 pm (UTC)I'm not sure dour is the right word. In some ways it's a very pessimistic book - Fromm has a fairly low opinion of most people - but it causes him grief rather than a sense of superiority.
no subject
Date: 2016-04-19 06:30 pm (UTC)