I came across this book whilst browsing the book stall in Spitalfields market on an autumn morning.

The first few sentences in the preface hooked me in

THE READING of this book would be a disappointing experience for anyone who expects easy instruction in the art of loving. This book, on the contrary, 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.

Love is a skill.

It is not a feeling that happens to us. It is not something we seek externally, and gain.

It is not dependent on the object (this person, this thing), but on the capacity within oneself to ‘be loving’.

Most people see the problem of love primarily as that of being loved, rather than that of loving, of one’s capacity to love.

If you frame it as seeking love, wanting love (i.e. self-focused), that is an immature form of love. People chase it in different ways.

Men often chase social status, wealth, power. Women chase it by being attractive. Of course both genders do this. I love this phrase he says :

What most people in our culture mean by being lovable is essentially a mixture between being popular and having sex appeal.

If you conceive of it, as “once I find the right person/object/thing, then love will be easy” you are missing the point. It is about your self capacity to be loving.

The former view of love commodifies the experience.

Modern man’s happiness consists in the thrill of looking at the shop windows, and in buying all that he can afford to buy, either for cash or on installments. He (or she) looks at people in a similar way. For the man an attractive girl—and for the woman an attractive man—are the prizes they are after

We see this in modern dating apps and the general sentiment around them. People are swiped on as commodities. Evaluated on whether they fit into my life. Evaluated based on crude metrics and signals (height, attractiveness).

How to learn any art?

The first step to take is to become aware that love is an art, just as living is an art; if we want to learn how to love we must proceed in the same way we have to proceed if we want to learn any other art, say music, painting, carpentry, or the art of medicine or engineering.

What are the necessary steps in learning any art?

Like learning painting, medicine or carpentry, you first start with mastery of the theory and then mastery of the practice.

Using medicine as an example, you can learn your anatomy, but eventually you have to cut into the person. It requires practice.

Importantly, he says that a third factor necessary to becoming a master in any art is “it must be a matter of ultimate concern; there must be nothing else in the world more important than the art”.

And, maybe, here lies the answer to the question of why people in our culture try so rarely to learn this art, in spite of their obvious failures: in spite of the deep-seated craving for love, almost everything else is considered to be more important than love: success, prestige, money, power—almost all our energy is used for the learning of how to achieve these aims, and almost none to learn the art of loving.

Theories of love

Fromm talks about how a fundamental problem that plagues all humans is a sense of inherent separateness. Since man is gifted with reason, he/she is aware - it naturally means that he/she is aware of themselves as a separate entity, of their short life span, of death, impermanence, loss. “Of the fact that without his will he is born and against his will he dies”.

This sense of seperateness and non-union creates a tremendous existence anxiety. He even says that it is the source of all anxiety. “Man would become insane if he could not liberate himself from this prison and reach out, unite himself in some form or other with men, with the world outside”.

the deepest need of man, is the need to overcome his separateness, to leave the prison of his aloneness.

Fromm goes onto talk about the myriad ways that cultures have addressed transcendence of one’s ‘self’ to achieve union, oneness.

A few he lists : animal worship, human sacrifice, military conquest, indulgence in luxury, ascetic renunciation, obsessional work, artistic creation, love of God, love of Man, ritual, drugs, sex.

Drug and alcohol addiction is a way to escape it. All addiction is fundamentally a spiritual problem; of the problem of separateness.

While they try to escape from separateness by taking refuge in alcohol or drugs, they feel all the more separate after the orgiastic experience is over, and thus are driven to take recourse to it with increasing frequency and intensity

Sex is another way, and approached without love, it is a temporary relief.

results in an ever-increasing sense of separateness, since the sexual act without love never bridges the gap between two human beings, except momentarily.

Union by conformity into a group.

Union by conformity is not intense and violent; it is calm, dictated by routine, and for this very reason often is insufficient to pacify the anxiety of separateness. The incidence of alcoholism, drug addiction, compulsive sexualism, and suicide in contemporary Western society are symptoms of this relative failure of herd conformity

Union through creative activity

Whether a carpenter makes a table, or a goldsmith a piece of jewelry, whether the peasant grows his corn or the painter paints a picture, in all types of creative work the worker and his object become one, man unites himself with the world in the process of creation.

Fromm however goes onto to say that in modern work rarely involves this. You hardly see the process of your effort, have little autonomy. You are a ‘cog’ in the machine.

The unity achieved in work, orgiastic fusion, drugs/alcohol, conformity is all only pseudo-unity, transitory, and only “partial answers to the problem of existence”.

He goes onto saying that the “full answer lies in the achievement of interpersonal union, of fusion with another person, in love”.

He describes love as immature or mature.

Immature love

I love you because I need you

It’s based on a fundamental narcissism, loving the other person primarily for what they give or or make you feel. It’s based on possessiveness, wanting to control the other person. It’s conditional ; a love that depends on meeting your expectation. The initial ‘falling in love’ - the intoxication and sense of pseudo-union from letting down your constructed barriers, is powerful but ultimately unsustainable.

Fromm believed that most people never develop the capacity for mature love because it requires overcoming narcissism, developing one’s character, and learning to truly give rather than take

Mature love

Mature love has a few characteristics.

One is active giving. Not a form of sacrifice (I give and therefore I am impoverished, or I ‘must give’ out of an obligation to religion/society/external ), but giving as an expression of one’s aliveness and potency.

Giving is the highest expression of potency. In the very act of giving, I experience my strength, my wealth, my power. This experience of heightened vitality and potency fills me with joy. I experience myself as over flowing, spending, alive, hence as joyous. Giving is more joyous than receiving, not because it is a deprivation, but because in the act of giving lies the expression of my aliveness.

And its not materially giving, but also giving of yourself. I think a giving of attention (love and attention are of course the same thing)

The most important sphere of giving, however, is not that of material things, but lies in the specifically human realm. What does one person give to another? He gives of himself, of the most precious he has, he gives of his life. This does not necessarily mean that he sacrifices his life for the other—but that he gives him of that which is alive in him; he gives him of his joy, of his interest, of his understanding, of his knowledge, of his humor, of his sadness—of all expressions and manifestations of that which is alive in him. In thus giving of his life, he enriches the other person, he enhances the others sense of aliveness by enhancing his own sense of aliveness. He does not give in order to receive; giving is in itself exquisite joy

This ability of love as an act of giving depends on the character development of that person. i.e. love is a skill - a process - a way of acting and being

It presupposes the attainment of a predominantly productive orientation; in this orientation the person has overcome dependency, narcissistic omnipotence, the wish to exploit others, or to hoard, and has acquired faith in his own human powers, courage to rely on his powers in the attainment of his goals. To the degree that these qualities are lacking, he is afraid of giving himself—hence of loving.

Other characteristics of mature love that Fromm talks about include : care, responsibility, respect and knowledge.

1. Care

I prefer the word attention, but Fromm means the same thing. Care is active concern. It’s demonstrated through action, not just feeling. He gives the example of a woman who says that she loves flowers but forgets to water them - her actions reveal that she doesn’t truly care.

2. Responsibility

Not duty, or obligation imposed from the outside, but a true voluntary act of responding to the needs (both expressed and unexpressed) of another human being. ‘response’-‘ability’ : the ability to respond to another

3. Respect

Respect comes from the Latin “respicere” : meaning to “look at”. It is the ability to see a person as they are, to be aware of their unique individuality.

It means wanting them to grow and unfold as themselves, not as how we would like them to be. It therefore requires an overcoming of narcissism.

4. Knowledge

Knowledge is almost an outcome of having a caring, respectful and responsible attitude towards another. Fromm argues that we can only know someone through love - through the act of caring, being responsible and respecting them.

Knowledge comes from a deep need to ‘understand the other’. One way we do this, and an explanation of human cruelty, is to break people. To attempt to control them, torture, force them to “betray his secret in his suffering”. He says that children often see this as a path to knowledge, breaking things apart in order to know it. He “cruelly tears off the wings of a butterfly in order to know it, to force its secret. The cruelty itself is motivated by something deeper: the wish to know the secret of things and of life.”

The path of love, is different.

Love is active penetration of the other person, in which my desire to know is stilled by union. In the act of fusion I know you, I know myself, I know everybody—and I “know” nothing.

In knowing the self, one knows the other. He stresses that this doesn’t involve thought. Love is not thought. It lies in the act of love : “this act transcends thought, it transcends words”.

He parallels this with the problem of knowing God. As many spiritual and mystical traditions have said : one cannot know God through thought. Through statements made about God. But through the experience of union.

Fromm goes onto to talk about the different types of love : brotherly love (love for your fellow human beings), motherly love, erotic love, self-love, love of God etc. I won’t go into these.

He also talks about the importance of male-female polarity (with a controversial statement : “homosexual deviation is a failure to attain this polarized union, and thus the homosexual suffers from the pain of never-resolved separateness, a failure, however, which he shares with the average heterosexual who cannot love”).

He then has a chapter on the disintegration of love in contemporary Western society. He argues that modern capitalist societies undermine the capacity for genuine love.

These are useful chapters to read, but I want to talk about the practice of love.

The practice of love

Fromm doesn’t really give any prescriptions on how to practice it. “To love is a personal experience which everyone can only have by and for himself”.

Instead he discusses how to approach it with general principles. He lists a few pre-requisites for practicing any art

• Discipline : a regular practice and commitment. It must be integral to all areas of your life.
• Concentration : the ability to focus and be present with what you are doing. Even back when this was written, Fromm says that people struggle with this, constantly seeking distraction and entertainment rather than being alone with themselves. I can only imagine his response now…
• Patience : that mastery takes time and cannot be rushed.
• ‘Supreme concern’ : that the mastery of your art, is your ultimate concern, more than fame, money or success.

Specifically for love, he says that it involves

• The overcoming of narcissism. The ability to see people as they are, not through projections of your wants and desires. It requires humility and letting go of projections
• Faith : not a religious faith, but a faith in oneself, others and human possibilities
• Genuine inner activity : using your attention creatively. This means actively engaging rather than passively receiving (see my post yesterday!). Examples : passively scrolling social media, versus actively having a genuine conversation where you’re truly listening and responding thoughtfully. It’s an inner aliveness. You can see it in some people just through their presence.

He highlights that it is a practice one totally integrates. Not based on object, but on one’s attitude and view of the world. Learning to be sensitive, to listen, to become present and overcome vanity and the desire to exploit.

Reading this book, I was certain that Fromm was influenced by Buddhist ideas, and lo-and-behold, he was deeply influenced by Zen, and co-authored a book with DT Suzuki.

I will add to this idea of practice, that one can practice love through systematic training. Through meditation.

Meditation as a way to practice love

I hope to write a comprehensive theory of meditation later on in this November blogathon (influenced by Shamil Chanderia and the neuroscience of predictive processing).

But meditation is a way to systematically train certain faculties.

Mindfulness is one way of bringing care and attention to daily life. Care being one of those qualities identified in mature love.

Buddhist ‘metta’ meditation is a way to train ’loving’ faculties of the mind. To reconstruct the ways in which you see the world.

However meditation is also a way to see through the sense of separateness. Going back to the ‘fundamental problem of human existence’ that Fromm talked about : “the inherit separateness”. Meditation leads to awakening experiences. Awakening from what? From a sense of separateness - the sense of a separate and independent self.

This is not something to ’think’ about, but it is something one experiences.

Scientifically, we know the self model is generated. It’s illusory. There is no ‘fixed’ solid self that one can point to; it is constructed (predictive processing theory).

But experiencing that - is recognising that unity, transcendence, wholeness, is right here. It’s truly life changing - a deep sense of oneness, okayness.

Meditation is training the faculty to notice this, and it is by far the most important skill I’ve learned in my life so far. I’ll reserve a deeper exploration of this topic for another post.

Conclusion

Erich Fromm’s The Art of Loving is a fantastic book. It’s a small book - you can easily read it in one sitting, but it’s one of those books that you have to chew on and digest.

Love is truly a skill, and one that we don’t emphasise enough.

It was written in 1956, in a radically different social structure. And yet, love is a perennial human struggle - we seek unity, transcendence, peace (perhaps all synonymous with love). The culture now feels like its promoting the opposite. Modern dating culture commodifies relationships, personal development focuses on creating the ‘perfect life’ and social media is narcissus’s wet dream.

It seems like the faculties that Fromm talks about : care, responsibility, respect are much harder today.

So working on love as a skill, a capacity to develop in oneself, to transcend egocentric tendencies, seems radical, even countercultural. But it’s needed, personally and societally.

If you need some motivation, look at yourself and ask if one feels whole? Really sit with it, without distraction. And maybe that will be the start of an interesting journey - one that begins and ends in love.