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1、THE ART OF LOVINGErich FrommLOVE IN ALL ITS ASPECTS“Love,” says dr. Fromm, “is the only satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.”Yet most of us are unable to develop our capacities for love on the only level that really countsa love that is compounded of maturity, self-knowledge and co
2、urage.Learning to love, like other arts, demands practice and concentration. Even more than any other art it demands genuine insight and understanding.In this startling book, Dr. Fromm discusses love in all its aspects, not only romantic love, so surrounded by false conception, but also love of pare
3、nts for children, brotherly love, erotic love, self-love and love of God.CONTENTSForward1I. Is Love an Art?2II.The Theory of Love51.LOVE, THE ANSWER TO THE PROBLEM OF HUMAN EXISTENCE52. LOVE BETWEEN PARENT AND CHILD243. THE OBJECTS OF LOVE29a.Brotherly Love29b.Motherly Love31c.Erotic Love33d.Self-Lo
4、ve1336e.Love of God40III.Love and its Disintegration in Contemporary Western Society52IV.The Practice of Love66EPILOGUE WORLD PERSPECTI VES83ForwardTHE READING of this book would be a disappointing experience of anyone who expects easy instruction in the art of loving. This book, on the contrary, wa
5、nts 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
6、productive orientation; that, satisfaction in individual love cannot be attained without the capacity to love ones 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. Or
7、anyone can ask himself how many truly loving persons he has known.Yet, the difficulty of the task must not be a reason to abstain from trying to know the difficulties as well as the conditions for its achievement. To avoid unnecessary complications I have tried to deal with the problem in a language
8、 which is non-technical as far as this is possible. For the same reason I have also kept to a minimum references to the literature on love.For another problem I did not find a completely satisfactory solution; that, namely, of avoiding repetition of ideas expressed in previous books of mine. The rea
9、der familiar, especially, with Escape from Freedom, Man for Himself, and The Sane Society, will find in this book many ideas expressed in there previous works. However, The Art of Loving is by no means mainly a recapitulation. It presents many ideas beyond the previously expressed ones, and quite na
10、turally even older ones sometimes gain new perspectives by the fact tat they aer all centered around one topic, that of the are of loving.E.F.“He who knows nothing, loves nothing. He who an do nothing understands nothing. He who understands nothing is worthless. But he who understands also loves, no
11、tices, sees the more knowledge is inherent in a thing, the greater the love Anyone who imagines that all fruits ripen at the same time as then strawberries knows nothing about grapes.”ParcelsusI. Is Love an Art?IS LOVE an art? Then it requires knowledge and effort. Or is love a pleasant sensation, w
12、hich to experience is a matter of chance, something one “falls into” if one is lucky? This little book is based on the former premise, while undoubtedly the majority of people today believe in the latter.Not that people think that love is not important. They are starved for it; they watch endless nu
13、mbers of films about happy and unhappy love stories, they listen to hundreds of trashy songs about loveyet hardly anyone thinks that there is anything that needs to be learned about love.This peculiar attitude is base on several premises which either singly or combined tend to uphold it. Most people
14、 see the problem of love primarily as that of being loved, rather than that of loving, of ones capacity to love. Hence the problem to them is how to be loved, how to lovable. In pursuit of this aim they follow several paths. One, which is especially used by men, is to be successful, to be as powerfu
15、l and rich as the social margin of ones position permits. Another, used especially by women, is to make oneself attractive, by cultivating ones body, dress, etc. other ways of making oneself attractive, used both by men and women, are to develop pleasant manners, interesting conversation, to be help
16、ful, modest, inoffensive. Many of the ways to make oneself lovable are the same as those used to make oneself successful, “to win friends and influence people.” As a matter of fact, what most people in our culture means by being lovable is essentially a mixture between being popular and having sex a
17、ppeal.A second premise behind the attitude that there is nothing to be learned about love is the assumption that the problem of love is the problem of object, not the problem of a faculty. People think that to love is simple, but that to find the right object to loveor to be loved byis difficult. Th
18、is 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.” In the Victorian age, as in many traditional cultures, love was mostly not a spontaneous personal experie
19、nce which then might lead to marriage. On the contrary, marriage was contracted by conventioneither by the respective families, or by a marriage broker, or without the help of such intermediaries; it was concluded one the basis of social consideration, and love was supposed to be develop once the ma
20、rriage had been concluded. In the last few generations the concept of romantic love has become almost universal in the Western world. In the United States, while consideration of a conventional nature are not entirely absent, to a vast extent people are search of “romantic love,” of the personal exp
21、erience of love which then should lead to marriage. This new concept of freedom in love must have greatly enhanced the importance of the object as against the importance of the function.Closely related to this factor is another feature characteristic of contemporary culture. Our whole culture is bas
22、ed on the appetite for buying, on the idea of a mutually favorable exchange. Modern mans 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 attr
23、active girland for the woman an attractive manare the prizes they are after. “Attractive” usually means a nice package of qualities which are popular and sought after on the personality market. During the twenties, a drinking and smoking, tough and sexy, was attractive; today the fashion demands mor
24、e domesticity and coyness. At the end nineteenth and the beginning of this century, a man had to be aggressive and ambitioustoday he has to be social and tolerantin order to be an attractive “package.” At any rate, the sense of falling in love develops usually only with regard to such human commodit
25、ies as are within reach of ones own possibilities for exchange. I am out bargain; the object should be desirable from the standpoint of its social value, and at the same time should want me, considering my overt and hidden assets and potentialities. Two persons thus fall in love when they have found
26、 the best object available on the market, considering the limitation of their own exchange values. Often, as in buying real estate, the hidden potentialities which can be developed play a considerable role in this bargain. In a culture in which the marketing orientation prevails, and in which materi
27、al success is the outstanding value, there is little reason to be surprised that human love relations follow the same pattern of exchange which governs the commodity and the labor market.The third error leading to the assumption that there is nothing to be learned about love lies in the confusion be
28、tween 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. 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 if o
29、ne of the most exhilarating, most exciting experience 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. How
30、ever, 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 t
31、hey 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.This attitudethat nothing is easier than to lovehas continued to be the preva
32、lent idea about love in spite of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. There is hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started with such tremendous hopes and expectations, and yet, which fails so regularly, as love. If this were the case with any other activity, people would be eager to
33、know the reasons for the failure, and to learn how one could do betteror they would give up the activity. Since the altter is impossible in the case of love, there seams to be only one adequate way to overcome the failure of loveto examine the reasons for this failure, and to proceed to study the me
34、aning of love.The first set pot 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
35、the necessary steps in learning any art?The process of learning an art can be divided conveniently into two part; one, the mastery of the theory; the other, the mastery of the practice. If I want ot learn the art of medicine, I must first know the facts about he human body, and about various disease
36、s. 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 onemy intuition, the ess
37、ence 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 artthe 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 mus
38、ic, for medicine, for carpentryand 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 carving for love, almost everything else is considered to be more important than
39、 love: success, prestige, money poweralmost all our energy is used for the learning of how to achieve these aims, and almost none to learn the art of loving.Could it be that only those things are considered worthy of being learned with which one can earn money or prestige, and that love, which “only
40、” profits the soul, but is profitless in the modern sense, is a luxury we have no right to spend much energy on? However this may be, the following discussion will treat the art of loving in the sense of the foregoing division: first I shall discuss the theory of loveand this will comprise the great
41、er part of the book; and secondly I shall discuss the practice of lovelittle as can be said about practice in this, as in any other field.II.The Theory of Love1.LOVE, THE ANSWER TO THE PROBLEM OF HUMAN EXISTENCEANY THEORY of love must begin with a theory of man, of human existence. While we find lov
42、e, or rather, the equivalent of love, in animals, their attachments are manly a part of their instinctual equipment; only remnants of this instinctual equipment can be seen operating in man. What is essential in the existence of man is the fact that he has emerged from the animal Kingdome, from inst
43、inctive adaptation, that he has transcended naturealthough he never leaves it; he is a part of itand yet once torn away from nature, he cannot return to it; once thrown out of paradisea state of original oneness with naturecherubim with flaming swords block his way, if he should try to return. Man c
44、an only go forward by developing his reason, by finding a new harmony, a human one, instead of the pre-human harmony which is irretrievably lost. When man is born, the human race as was the individual, he is thrown out of a situation which was definite, as definite as the instincts, into a situation
45、 which is indefinite, uncertain and open. There is certainty only about the pastand about the future only as far as that it is death.Man is gifted with reason; he is life being aware of itself; he has awareness of himself, of his fellow man, of his past, and of the possibilities of his future. This
46、awareness of himself as a separate entity, the awareness of his own short life span, of the fact that without his will he is born and against his will he dies, that he will die before those whom he loves, or they before him, the awareness of his aloneness and separateness, of his helplessness before
47、 the forces of nature and of society, all this makes his separate, disunited existence an unbearable prison. He would become insane could be not liberate himself from this prison and reach out, unite himself in some form or other with men, with the world outside.The experience of separateness arouse
48、s anxiety; it is, indeed, the source of all anxiety. Being separate means being cut off, without any capacity to use my human power. Hence to be separate means to be helpless, unable to grasp the worldthings and peopleactively; it means that the world can invade me without my ability to react. Thus,
49、 separateness is the source of intense anxiety. Beyond that, it arouses shame and the feeling of guilt. This experience of guilt and shame in separateness is expressed in the Biblical story of Adam and Eve. After Adam and Eve have eaten of the “tree of knowledge of good and evil,” after they have disobeyed (there is no good and evil unless there is freedom to disobey), after they have become human by having emancipated t
