Erich Fromm's The Art of Loving

The Art of Loving begins with an attempt to determine what  is our  most basic  need  in  life.Many great thinkers have tried to answer this question and they have come up with many different answers.  Erich Fromm  feels that man’s greatest necessity  is to find union, or togetherness,  in order to escape  from the prison of  his loneliness.The experience of separateness, Fromm feels, is the fundamental cause of anxiety and despair.People  have  tried  many  different  ways  to  satisfy  this  need  for  togetherness.However, the only way that has ever been completely  successful  is through the  act of love.It is the  most fundamental passion; it  is the force which keeps the human race together.Without love  humanity could  not exist  for a  day..These  are strong words, but  if we think seriously about  it, most of us will agree  that  this  is true.   We sometimes tend to dwell on those  things with separate us such as war, hate, selfishness and greed, without realizing the underlying power of relationships.  The very fact that humanity continues to exist on this planet, in spite of all the destructive forces which divide it, is proof of the unifying power of love.
In order to determine why this  is true and how  it works, we  must examine some of the practical  aspects of  love.The  first of these  is the  fact that love demands something of us.Loving  is a  skill which  must be  learned and practiced  in  an active  fashion.Many of us  have grown up with the  idea that  it is our right to be  loved.  We therefore have a tendency to wait, passively, for someone to love us, and then we feel unjustly  treated  when  nobody  seems  to  care.However,  in  order  for  love  to  exist, someone  must act; someone  must do  the  loving.And that brings us to the second practical aspect of  love which  is that, since  love is active rather than passive,  it is also basically  giving.   This  is a point which  is often  misunderstood.Many people  interpret  this as  meaning that  love  is  “giving up,” that  it means  sacrificing,  or  being  deprived  of  something.First, love is not limited to giving in a material sense. The most important aspect of giving  is that we give of ourselves, of that which  is alive  in us, of our  joy and our sorrow,  our interest and our knowledge, our understanding  and our concern.Then, secondly, giving ourselves  in  love does not, as some people  fear,  mean sacrificing our freedom  as  an  individual.
               In addition to these basic aspects of love, Fromm also discusses other elements of love which are care, responsibility, respect and knowledge.  After talking about  these aspects of  love—giving, care,  responsibility, respect, knowledge and  faith—Fromm goes on to discuss the different  types of  love which are: brotherly love, motherly love, fatherly love, self love and erotic love. As he begins to discuss brotherly love, Fromm makes a rather startling statement.He says that unless we  love everybody, we don’t really  love  anybody.   This  is of course part of what is behind the difficult commandment that we must not only  love those who love us, but we must also love our enemies.  Real love  is based on an attitude, a way of thinking or  feeling, which  is directed toward the entire world and everything  in  it.  If I have developed the capacity  for  love, then I can’t help  loving  my  brother.  If a person says that he loves just one other person, or one group of persons, and is indifferent to the rest of his fellow men, this is not real love. Speaking of  motherly  and  fatherly  love  from the point of  view of the child,
He says that  in the  beginning the child  loves primarily  in response to being  loved.  He senses that he  is the object of unconditional  mother love. Another important  type  of love is self-love.It  may seem strange  to  talk  about self-love, since it appears to contradict much of what has been said about love being open and all  inclusive.Fromm  has  more to say about love, but  last point that  I want  to mention  here  is the importance of love in present-day society.

Existence precedes essence---Jean-Paul Sartre

Existentialism, a nineteenth- and twentieth-century philosophical movement that stresses the radical extent of human freedom and attempts to deal seriously with its consequences for people's day-to- day lives, is the tradition most frequently associated with Jean-Paul Sartre. Born in Paris, Sartre pursued university studies in literature and philosophy. He was teaching in Paris when World War II began. Sent to the front, he was captured by the Germans and imprisoned for nine months. When he was returned to France in 1941, he served in the Resistance.As Sartre developed his version of existentialism, which he took to be optimistic even though many of its critics did not, there were accents on freedom, the difficulties it brings to human existence, and the chances we have to overcome them.
"Existence," proclaimed Sartre, "precedes essence." This formula is basic for understanding his view of human existence and freedom. By emphasizing the negating power of consciousness in relation to being-in-itself, Sartre interpreted consciousness as a form of being that always seeks to transcend itself but never fully finishes its task. It seemed to Sartre that we humans move to leave behind what we have been and to become what we are not. We are always headed somewhere; we are never fixed, complete, and static. Short of death, there is a perpetual process of negation and a continuous movement into a future of possibility and uncertainty.What one will become is indefinite until consciousness determines it. We are what we become more than we become what we are. In that sense, our existence precedes the formation of our essence. Sartre identified the negating power of consciousness with human freedom. The fact that we can move beyond what we are toward that which we are not, he argued, signifies freedom. Whenever we act freely, there is a sense in which we leave something behind. We negate what we have been to try to become what we are not. Hence, not only does existence precede essence but, Sartre claimed, "freedom is existence." According to Sartre, a person's life is characterized by freedom, by choosing what one will be and how one will see the world one inhabits. The determination of what one is results from our individual choices and not from a series of determined causes outside of or even within oneself. Did Sartre go too far in describing the degree of freedom that men and women possess? Far from having lives permeated by freedom, most persons feel restricted on every side. Many cannot find enough food, shelter, or work to make a decent living. Sartre was aware of such difficulties. His account emphasizes that human existence is always situated in particular times and places, and it is specified further by the relationships we establish with other persons. Many of these situations are full of pain and tragedy. Yet Sartre contended that the structure of human freedom remains, because we keep seeking to make something of ourselves. We may be prevented from achieving what we want, but, in Sartre's view, any kind of human seeking fundamentally involves the freedom he has in mind.

Ultimately, Sartre argued, our seeking leads us to try to achieve a complete self-identity in which we comprehend ourselves totally and are no longer constantly at a distance from ourselves. To accomplish this task, he contended, would be to become God but no person can succeed in this undertaking. In fact, Sartre claimed, the idea of God is contradictory (an outcome that makes his existentialism atheistic), for consciousness excludes self-identity, and self- identity also excludes consciousness. Consciousness always has the quality of being stretched out ahead of itself. If you became completely self-identical and unchanging, you would not be conscious any more. Where our drive to become self-identical is concerned, then, we are forever doomed to frustration. It is in this sense that human freedom makes our existence "a useless passion."