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- The Art of Loving
Today we’re talking about Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving. Fromm was a German Jewish social psychologist who fled Nazi Germany to live in the US. He wrote The Art of Loving in the 1950s, and besides some very typical-1950s gender nonsense, it’s a fascinating book.
From the introduction by Peter D. Kramer:
“For Fromm, love is rebellion against a commercial ideal. He has a particular contempt for glossy magazine articles in which happy marriage looks like corporate middle management. The ‘smoothly functioning team,’ he writes, ‘is the well-oiled relationship between two persons who remain strangers all their lives’”.
Fromm is extremely critical of love under capitalism, which he believes simply encourages an insular “egotism à deux” in which people “exchange their ‘personality packages’” on the dating market.
Instead, Fromm’s vision of real love is “to be engaged with humankind, with eyes open…If someone would want to reserve his objectivity for the beloved person, and think he can dispense with it in his relationship to the rest of the world, he will soon discover that he fails both here and there”. In order to love one person, you must love all humankind.
And he ends his book with an absolute banger:
“Those who are seriously concerned with love as the only rational answer to the problem of human existence must, then, arrive at the conclusion that important and radical changes in our social structure are necessary, if love is to become a social and not a highly individualistic, marginal phenomenon.”
But for all his critiquing of how capitalism structures our relationships, his vision of love doesn’t seem structurally distinguished.
He continues to place an exclusive, erotic love at the center of his loving universe, and surrounds that love with other connections: “erotic love is exclusive, but it loves in the other person all of mankind, all that is alive…Erotic love excludes the love for others only in the sense of erotic fusion, full commitment in all aspects of life- but not in the sense of deep brotherly love.”
His issue with contemporary love doesn’t have much to do with how people who do not fit into a couple form end up with a lack of care. It doesn’t have much to do with the material conditions of families and how we structure our care and support. It’s more about, for couples, how the condition of loving under capitalism is just generally less fun and less meaningful. It’s a shadow of real, deep love.
I do appreciate how his critique of modern love conditions animates the loneliness at the heart of the couple form. It shows us how even those who are supposedly most privileged- who have “won the game” of contemporary love- are still suffering under social structures that squeeze the love out of loving. I love the idea that learning how to love outside of capitalism is worth devoting yourself to.
But I think this vision of the couple who is “erotically fused” but involved enough with the rest of the world to love and care beyond themselves is still lacking. It treats this singular erotic fusion as something that everyone must aim for. It still places the couple at the center of the social fabric. And I believe it limits the potentials of erotic love.
There’s no real reason he gives for erotic love to be exclusive beyond that “I can fuse myself fully and intensely with one person only”. Sounds like a skill issue to me. But I think we can question even the idea that fusion should be the goal of erotic encounter.
For Fromm, the existential problem of humanity is separation, and erotic love, at least temporarily, dissolves that sense of separation through fusion. I tend to agree more with Conner Habib, that we touch others not to merge with them, but to be separate, together. Or to merge briefly, and then to re-experience our separateness.
With this in mind, a vision of erotic love becomes possible that includes the sexual but is not exclusive to it. If eroticism is about full presence (more on Fromm’s ideas about presence in a future newsletter, probably), about experiencing the paradox and play of separation and togetherness, eroticism becomes possible in so many more (maybe all?) areas of life. It’s a touching of the current of aliveness that I believe we can find in our connection with, and separation from, all things. And also, it’s kind of a lot, and we might not want it all the time.
The social structures that might emerge from that sense of loving potential go far beyond the couple form.
Fromm spends the second half of his book on the “art” part of the art of loving; on the skill he believes it takes to love all of humankind. I think this idea is interesting–how do we develop the skills to change how we love– so we’ll likely pick up there soon!
I’d love to hear if you have any thoughts on this- agree, disagree, addition, fascination, disgust, etc.
Thanks for being here!