Book review: MARIA POPOVA - Erich Fromm on the Art of Loving and What Is Keeping Us from Mastering It
“There is hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started with such tremendous hopes and expectations, and yet, which fails so regularly, as love.”
see also
“To love without
knowing how to love wounds the person we love,” the great Zen teacher Thich Nhat Hahn
admonished in his terrific
treatise on how to love - a sentiment profoundly discomfiting in the
context of our cultural mythology, which continually casts love as something
that happens to us passively and by chance, something we fall into, something
that strikes us arrow-like, rather than a skill attained through the same deliberate
practice as any other pursuit of human excellence.
Our failure to
recognize this skillfulness aspect is perhaps the primary reason why
love is so intertwined with frustration. That’s what the great
German social psychologist, psychoanalyst, and philosopher Erich Fromm (March
23, 1900–March 18, 1980) examines in his 1956 masterwork The Art of Loving (public library) — a case for love as a skill to be
honed the way artists apprentice themselves to the work on the way to mastery,
demanding of its practitioner both knowledge and effort. Fromm writes:
This book … wants to
show that love is not a sentiment which can be easily indulged in by anyone,
regardless of the level of maturity reached by him. It wants to convince the
reader that all his attempts for love are bound to fail, unless he tries most
actively to develop his total personality, so as to achieve a productive
orientation; that satisfaction in individual love cannot be attained without
the capacity to love one’s neighbor, without true humility, courage, faith and
discipline. In a culture in which these qualities are rare, the attainment of
the capacity to love must remain a rare achievement.
Fromm considers our
warped perception of love’s necessary yin-yang:
Most people see the
problem of love primarily as that of being loved, rather than that
of loving, of one’s capacity to love. Hence the problem to them is
how to be loved, how to be lovable. […]
People think that to love is
simple, but that to find the right object to love — or to be loved by — is
difficult. This attitude has several reasons rooted in the development of
modern society. One reason is the great change which occurred in the twentieth
century with respect to the choice of a “love object.”
Our fixation on the
choice of “love object,” Fromm argues, has seeded a kind of “confusion between
the initial experience of ‘falling’ in love, and the permanent state of being
in love, or as we might better say, of ‘standing’ in love” — something Stendhal
addressed more than a century earlier in his
theory of love’s “crystallization.” Fromm considers the peril of
mistaking the spark for the substance:
If two people who have
been strangers, as all of us are, suddenly let the wall between them break
down, and feel close, feel one, this moment of oneness is one of the most
exhilarating, most exciting experiences in life. It is all the more wonderful
and miraculous for persons who have been shut off, isolated, without love.... read more:
https://www.brainpickings.org/2015/10/29/the-art-of-loving-erich-fromm/see also
