Philosopher Erich Fromm on the Art of Loving and What Is Keeping Us from Mastering It
(courtesy of Maria's Brainpickings)
"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 examines in his 1956 masterwork The Art of
Loving (public library)
– a case for love as 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. This miracle of
sudden intimacy is often facilitated if it is combined with, or initiated by,
sexual attraction and consummation. However, this type of love is by its very
nature not lasting. The two persons become well acquainted, their intimacy
loses more and more its miraculous character, until their antagonism, their
disappointments, their mutual boredom kill whatever is left of the initial
excitement. Yet, in the beginning they do not know all this: in fact, they take
the intensity of the infatuation, this being “crazy” about each other, for
proof of the intensity of their love, while it may only prove the degree of
their preceding loneliness.
There is hardly any activity, any
enterprise, which is started with such tremendous hopes and expectations, and
yet, which fails so regularly, as love.
The only way to abate this track record of failure,
Fromm argues, is to examine the underlying reasons for the disconnect between
our beliefs about love and its actual machinery – which must include a
recognition of love as an informed practice rather than an unmerited grace.
Fromm writes:
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? The process of
learning an art can be divided conveniently into two parts: one, the mastery of
the theory; the other, the mastery of the practice. If I want to learn the art
of medicine, I must first know the facts about the human body, and about
various diseases. When I have all this theoretical knowledge, I am by no means
competent in the art of medicine. I shall become a master in this art only
after a great deal of practice, until eventually the results of my theoretical
knowledge and the results of my practice are blended into one – my intuition,
the essence of the mastery of any art.
But, aside from learning the theory
and practice, there is a third factor necessary to becoming a master in any art
– the mastery of the art must be a matter of ultimate concern; there must be
nothing else in the world more important than the art. This holds true for
music, for medicine, for carpentry – and for love. 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.
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