THE ART OF LOVING
Copyright © 1956 by Erich Fromm
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WORLD PERSPECTIVES
FOREWORD
I. Is
LOVE AN ART?
II. THE THEORY OF LOVE
1. Love, the Answer to the Problem of
Human Existence
2. Love Between Parent and Child
3. The Objects of Love
a. Brotherly Love
b. Motherly Love
c. Erotic Love
d. Self-Love
e. Love of God
1
7
III. LOVE AND ITS DISINTEGRATION IN CONTEMPORARY WESTERN SOCIETY
IV.
THE PRACTICE OF LOVE
83
107
World Perspectives
WORLD PERSPECTIVES is dedicated to the concept of
man born out of a universe perceived through a fresh vision
of reality. Its aim is to present short books written by the
most conscious and responsible minds of today. Each volume
represents the thought and belief of each author and sets
forth the interrelation of the changing religious, scientific,
artistic, political, economic and social influences upon man's
total experience.
This Series is committed to a re-examination of all those
sides of human endeavor which the specialist was taught to
believe he could safely leave aside. It interprets present and
past events impinging on human life in our growing World
Age and envisages what man may yet attain when summoned by an unbending inner necessity to the quest of what
is most exalted in him. Its purpose is to offer new vistas in
terms of world and human development while refusing to
betray the intimate correlation between universality and individuality, dynamics and form, freedom and destiny. Each
author treats his subject from the broad perspective of the
world community, not from the Judaeo-Christian, Western
or Eastern viewpoint alone.
Certain fundamental questions which have received too
little consideration in the face of the spiritual, moral and
political world crisis of our day, and in the light of technology
ix
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WORLD PERSPECTIVES
which has released the creative energies of peoples, are
treated in these books. Our authors deal with the increasing realization that spirit and nature are not separate and
apart; that intuition and reason must regain their
importance as the means of perceiving and fusing inner being
with outer reality.
World Perspectives endeavors to show that the conception
of wholeness, unity, organism is a higher and more concrete
conception than that of matter and energy. Thus it would
seem that science itself must ultiMately pursue the aim of interpreting the physical world of matter and energy in terms
of the biological conception of organism. An enlarged meaning of life, of biology, not as it is revealed in the test tube of
the laboratory but as it is experienced within the organism
of life itself is attempted in this Series. For the principle of
life consists in the tension which connects spirit with the
realm of matter. The element of life is dominant in the very
texture of nature, thus rendering life, biology, a transempirical science. The laws of life have their origin beyond their
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spiritual source. In fact, the widening of the conceptual
framework has not only`-served to restore order within the
respective branches of knowledge, but has also disclosed
analogies in man's position regarding the analysis and synthesis of experience in apparently separated domains of
knowledge suggesting the possibility of an ever more embracing objective description of the meaning of life.
Knowledge, it is shown in these books, no longer consists
in a manipulation of man and nature as opposite forces, nor
in the reduction of data to mere statistical order, but is a
WORLD PERSPECTIVES
Xi
means of liberating mankind from the destructive power of
fear, pointing the way toward the goal of the rehabilitation
of the human will and the rebirth of faith and confidence in
the human person. The works published also endeavor to
reveal that the cry for patterns, systems and authorities is
growing less insistent as the desire grows stronger in both
East and West for the recovery of a dignity, integrity and
self-realization which are the inalienable rights of man who
may now guide change by means of conscious purpose in the
light of rational experience.
Other vital questions explored relate to problems of international understanding as well as to problems dealing with
prejudice and the resultant tensions and antagonisms. The
growing perception and responsibility of our World Age
point to the new reality that the individual person and the
collective person supplement and integrate each other; that
the thrall of totalitarianism of both right and left has been
shaken in the universal desire to recapture the authority of
truth and of human totality. Mankind can finally place its
trust not in a proletarian authoritarianism, not in a secularized humanism, both of which have betrayed the spiritual
property right of history, but in a sacramental brotherhood
and in the unity of knowledge. This new consciousness has
created a widening of human horizons beyond every parochialism, and a revolution in human thought comparable to
the basic assumption, among the ancient Greeks, of the
sovereignty of reason; corresponding to the great effulgence
of the moral conscience articulated by the Hebrew prophets;
analogous to the fundamental assertions of Christianity; or
to the beginning of a new scientific era, the era of the science
Xii
WORLD PERSPECTIVES
of dynamics, the experimental foundations of which were
laid by Galileo in the Renaissance.
An important effort of this. Series is to re-examine the
contradictory meanings and applications which are given
today to such terms as democracy, freedom, justice, love,
peace, brotherhood and God. The purpose of such inquiries
is to clear the way for the foundation of a genuine world
history not in terms of nation or race or culture but in terms
of man in relation to God, to himself, his fellow man and
the universe that reach beyond immediate self-interest. For
the meaning of the World Age consists in respecting man's
hopes and dreams which lead to a deeper understanding of
the basic values of all peoples.
Today in the East and in the West men are discovering
that they are bound together, beyond any divisiveness, by a
more fundamental unity than any mere agreement in thought
and doctrine. They are beginning to know that all men
possess the same primordial desires and tendencies; that the
domination of man over man can no longer be justified by
any appeal to God or nature; and such consciousness is the
fruit of the spiritual and moral revolution, the great seismic
upheaval, through which humanity is now passing.
World Perspectives is planned to gain insight into the
meaning of man, who not only is determined by history but
who also determines history. History is to be understood as
concerned not only with the life of man on this planet but
as including also such cosmic influences as interpenetrate our
human world.
This generation is discovering that history does not conform to the social optimism of modern civilization and that
WORLD PERSPECTIVES
Xiii
the organization of human communities and the establishment of justice, freedom and peace are not only intellectual
achievements but spiritual and moral achievements as well,
demanding a cherishing of the wholeness of human personality and constituting a never-ending challenge to man,
emerging from the abyss of meaninglessness and suffering, to
be renewed and replenished in the totality of his life. "For
as one's thinking is, such one becomes, and it is because of
this that thinking should be purified and transformed, for
were it centered upon truth as it is now upon things perceptible to the senses, who would not be liberated from his
bondage." *
There is in mankind today a counterforce to the sterility
and danger of a quantitative, anonymous mass culture, a
new, if sometimes imperceptible, spiritual sense of convergence toward world unity on the basis of the sacredness of
each human person and respect for the plurality of cultures.
There is a growing awareness that equality and justice are
not to be evaluated in mere numerical terms but that they
are proportionate and analogical in their reality.
We stand at the brink of the age of the world in which
human life presses forward to actualize new forms. The false
separation of man and nature, of time and space, of freedom and security, is acknowledged and we are faced with a
new vision of man in his organic unity and of history offering a richness and diversity of quality and majesty of scope
hitherto unprecedented. In relating the accumulated wisdom
of man's spirit to the new reality of the World Age, in
articulating its thought and belief, World Perspectives seeks
* Maitri Upanishad 6.34.4. 6.
XiV
WORLD PERSPECTIVES
to encourage a renaissance of hope in society and of pride
in man's decision as to what his destiny will be.
The vast extension of knowledge has led to a diminution
of consciousness as a result of the tendency, due to some
modern interpretations of science, to accept as the total truth
only limited descriptions of truth. The triumphant advance
of science, culminating in new realities concerning the subatomic world and overthrowing traditional assumptions of
causality and uniformity, has almost succeeded in enfeebling
man's faith in his spiritual and moral worth and in his own
significance in the cosmic scheme. The experience of dread,
into which contemporary man has been plunged through his
failure to transcend his existential limits, is the experience of
the problem of whether he shall attain to being through the
knowledge of himself or shall not, whether he shall annihilate
nothingness or whether nothingness shall annihilate him.
For he has been forced back to his origins as a result of the
atrophy of meaning, and his anabasis may begin once more
through his mysterious greatness to re-create his life.
The suffering and hope of this century have their origin
in the interior drama in which the spirit is thrust as a result
of the split within itself, and in the invisible forces which are
born in the heart and mind of man. This suffering and this
hope arise also from material problems, economic, political,
technological. History itself is not a mere mechanical unfolding of events in the center of which man finds himself as a
stranger in a foreign land. The specific modern emphasis on
history as progressive, the specific prophetic emphasis on
God as acting through history, and the specific Christian
emphasis on the historical nature of revelation must now
WORLD PERSPECTIVES
XV
surrender to the new history embracing the new
cosmology—a profound event which is in the process of
birth in the womb of that invisible universe which is the
mind and heart of man. For our World Age is indeed the
most dire and apocalyptic mankind has ever faced in all
history, and the endeavor of World Perspectives is to point
to that ultimate moral power at work in the universe, that
very power upon which all human effort must at last depend.
This is the crisis in consciousness made articulate through
the crisis in science. This is the new awakening after a long
history which had its genesis in. Descartes' denial that theology could exist as a science, on the one hand, and on the
other, in Kant's denial that metaphysics could exist as a
science. Some fossilized forms of such positivistic thinking
still remain, manifesting themselves in a quasi-sociological
mythology which, in the guise of scientific concepts, has generated a new animism resulting in a more primitive religion
than the traditional faiths which it endeavors to replace.
However, it is now conceded, out of the influences of Whitehead, Bergson and some phenomenologists that in addition
to natural science with its tendency to isolate quantitative
values there exists another category of knowledge wherein
philosophy, utilizing its own instruments, is able to grasp
the essence and innermost nature of the Absolute, of reality.
The mysterious universe is now revealing to philosophy and
to science as well an enlarged meaning of nature and of
man which extends beyond mathematical and experimental
analysis of sensory phenomena. This meaning rejects the
XVi
WORLD PERSPECTIVES
of mythology adequate only for the satisfaction of emotional
needs. In other words, the fundamental problems of philosophy, those problems which are central to life, are again
confronting science and philosophy itself. Our problem is to
discover a principle of differentiation and yet relationship
lucid enough to justify and to purify both scientific and
philosophical knowledge by accepting their mutual interdependence.
Justice itself which has been "in a state of pilgrimage and
crucifixion" and now is slowly being liberated from the grip
of social and political demonologies in the East as well as in
the West, begins to question its own premises. Those modern
revolutionary movements which have challenged the sacred
institutions of society by protecting social injustice in the
name of social justice are also being examined and reevaluated in World Perspectives.
When we turn our gaze retrospectively to the early cosmic
condition of man in the third millennium, we observe that
the concept of justice as something to which man has an inalienable right began slowly to take form and, at the time of
Hammurabi in the second millennium, justice as inherently
a part of man's nature and not as a beneficent gift to be
bestowed, became part of the consciousness of society. This
concept of human rights consisted in the demand for justice
in the universe, a demand which exists also in the twentieth
century through a curious analogy. In accordance with the
ancient view, man could himself become a god, could assume
the identity of the great cosmic forces in the universe which
surrounded him. He could influence this universe, not by
supplication, but by action. And now again this consciousness
WORLD PERSPECTIVES
of man's harmonious relationship with the universe, with
society and with his fellow men, can be actualized, and again
not through supplication but through the deed.
Though never so powerful materially and technologically,
Western democracy, with its concern for the sacredness of
the human person gone astray, has never before been so
seriously threatened, morally and spiritually. National security and individual freedom are in ominous conflict. The
possibility of a universal community and the technique of
degradation exist side by side. There is no doubt that evil is
accumulated among men in their passionate desire for unity.
And yet, confronted with this evil which had split, isolated
and killed the living reality, confronted with death, man,
from the very depths of his soul, cries out for "the unmediated whole of feeling and thought" and for the possibility to reassemble the fragments, to restore unity through
justice. Christianity in history could only reply to this protest
against evil by the Annunciation of the Kingdom, by the
promise of Eternal Life—which demanded faith. But the
spiritual and moral suffering of man had exhausted his faith
and his hope. He was left alone. His suffering remained unexplained.
However, man has now reached the last extremity of
denigration. He yearns to consecrate himself. And so, among
the spiritual and moral ruins of the West and of the East a
renaissance is prepared beyond the limits of nihilism, darkness and despair. In the depths of the Western and Eastern
spiritual night, civilization with its many faces turning toward its source may rekindle its light in an imminent new
dawn—even as in the last book of Revelation which speaks
XViii
WORLD PERSPECTIVES
of a Second Coming with a new heaven, a new earth and a
new religious quality of life.
And I saw a new heaven and a new
earth: for the first heaven and the
first earth were passed away. . .
In spite of the infinite obligation of men and in spite of
their finite power, in spite of the intransigence of nationalisms, and in spite of spiritual bereavement and moral amnesia, beneath the apparent turmoil and upheaval of the
present, and out of the transformations of this dynamic
period with the unfolding of a world-consciousness, the purpose of World Perspectives is to help quicken the "unshaken
heart of well-rounded truth" and interpret the significant
elements of the World Age now taking shape out of the core
of that undimmed continuity of the creative process which
restores man to mankind while deepening and enhancing his
communion with the universe.
New York, 1956
* Revelation, 21:1.
RUTH NANDA ANSHEN
Foreword
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. Or—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
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 reader familiar,
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FOREWORD
especially, with Escape from Freedom, Man for Himself,
and The Sane Society, will find in this book many ideas expressed in these 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
naturally even older ones sometimes gain new perspectives
by the fact that they are all centered around one topic,
that of the art of loving.
E. F.
He who knows nothing, loves nothing. He who
can do nothing understands nothing. He who
understands nothing is worthless. But he who
understands also loves, notices, 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 the
strawberries knows nothing about grapes.
PARACELS US
I.
Is Love an Art?
IS LOVE an art? Then it requires knowledge and effort. Or
is love a pleasant sensation, which 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 numbers of films about
happy and unhappy love stories, they listen to hundreds of
trashy songs about love—yet hardly anyone thinks that there
is anything that needs to be learned about love.
This peculiar attitude is based on several premises which
either singly or combined tend to uphold it. 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. In
pursuit of this aim they follow several paths. One, which is
especially used by men, is to be successful, to be as powerful
and rich as the social margin of one's position permits. Another, used especially by women, is to make oneself attractive, by cultivating one's body, dress, etc. Other ways of
2
THE ART OF LOVING
making oneself attractive, used both by men and women, are
to develop pleasant manners, interesting conversation, to be
helpful, 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 mean by
being lovable is essentially a mixture between being popular
and having sex appeal.
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 an object, not the problem of a
faculty. 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." In the Victorian age, as in many traditional cultures, love was mostly not a spontaneous personal
experience which then might lead to marriage. On the contrary, marriage was contracted by convention—either by the
respective families, or by a marriage broker, or without the
help of such intermediaries; it was concluded on the basis of
social considerations, and love was supposed to develop once
the marriage 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 considerations of a conventional nature are not entirely absent, to a
vast extent people are in search of "romantic love," of the
personal experience of love which then should lead to marriage. This new concept of freedom in love must have greatly
IS LOVE AN ART?
3
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 based
on the appetite for buying, on the idea of a mutually favorable exchange. 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. "Attractive" usually means a nice package of qualities which are popular and sought after on the
personality market. What specifically makes a person attractive depends on the fashion of the time, physically as well as
mentally. During the twenties, a drinking and smoking girl,
tough and sexy, was attractive; today the fashion demands
more domesticity and coyness. At the end of the nineteenth
and the beginning of this century, a man had to be aggressive and ambitious—today he has to be social and tolerant—
in order to be an attractive "package." At any rate, the sense
of falling in love develops usually only with regard to such
human commodities as are within reach of one's own possibilities for exchange. I am out for a 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 feel they have found the best object available on the
market, considering the limitations of their own exchange
values. Often, as in buying real estate, the hidden potentialities which can be developed play a considerable role in this
4
THE ART OF LOVING
bargain. In a culture in which the marketing orientation
prevails, and in which material 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 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. 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.
This attitude—that nothing is easier than to love—has
continued to be the prevalent idea about love in spite of the
overwhelming evidence to the contrary. There is hardly any
activity, any enterprise, which is started with such tremen-
5
dous 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 know the reasons for the failure,
and to learn how one could do better—or they would give
up the activity. Since the latter is impossible in the case of
love, there seems to be only one adequate way to overcome
the failure of love—to examine the reasons for this failure,
and to proceed to study the meaning of love.
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
IS LOVE AN ART?
6
THE ART OF LOVING
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.
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" 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
divisions: first I shall discuss the theory of love—and this
will comprise the greater part of the book; and secondly I
shall discuss the practice of love—little as can be said about
practice in this, as in any other field.
II.
The Theory of Love
I. LOVE, THE ANSWER TO THE PROBLEM OF HUMAN
EXISTENCE
ANY THEORY of love must begin with a theory of man,
of human existence. While we find love, or rather, the
equivalent of love, in animals, their attachments are mainly
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 kingdom, from instinctive adaptation, that he has transcended nature—although he never
leaves it; he is a part of it—and yet once torn away from
nature, he cannot return to it; once thrown out of paradise—a state of original oneness with nature—cherubim with
flaming swords block his way, if he should try to return.
Man can only go forward by developing his reason, by finding a new harmony, a human one, instead of the prehuman
harmony which is irretrievably lost.
When man is born, the human race as well as the individual, he is thrown out of a situation which was definite, as
7
8
THE ART OF LOVING
definite as the instincts, into a situation which is indefinite,
uncertain and open. There is certainty only about the past—
and 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 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 the forces of nature and
of society, all this makes his separate, disunited existence an
unbearable prison. He would become insane could he 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 arouses anxiety; it is, indeed, the source of all anxiety. Being separate means being
cut off, without any capacity to use my human powers.
Hence to be separate means to be helpless, unable to grasp
the world—things and people—actively; it means that the
world can invade me without my ability to react. Thus, 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 themselves from the original animal harmony with
nature, i.e., after their birth as human beings—they saw
9
"that they were naked—and they were ashamed." Should
we assume that a myth as old and elementary as this has
the prudish morals of the nineteenth-century outlook, and
that the important point the story wants to convey to us is
the embarrassment that their genitals were visible? This can
hardly be so, and by understanding the story in a Victorian
spirit, we miss the main point, which seems to be the following: after man and woman have become aware of themselves and of each other, they are aware of their separateness,
and of their difference, inasmuch as they belong to different
sexes. But while recognizing their separateness they remain
strangers, because they have not yet learned to love each
other (as is also made very clear by the fact that Adam
defends himself by blaming Eve, rather than by trying to
defend her). The awareness of human separation, without
THE THEORY OF LOVE
reunion by love—is the source of shame. It is at the same
time the source of guilt and anxiety.
The deepest need of man, then, is the need to overcome
his separateness, to leave the prison of his aloneness. The
absolute failure to achieve this aim means insanity, because
the panic of complete isolation can be overcome only by such
a radical withdrawal from the world outside that the feeling
of separation disappears—because the world outside, from
which one is separated, has disappeared.
Man—of all ages and cultures—is confronted with the
solution of one and the same question: the question of how
to overcome separateness, how to achieve union, how to transcend one's own individual life and find at-onement. The
question is the same for primitive man living in caves, for
nomadic man taking care of his flocks, for the peasant in
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THE ART OF LOVING
Egypt, the Phoenician trader, the Roman soldier, the medieval monk, the Japanese samurai, the modern clerk and factory hand. The question is the same, for it springs from
the same ground: the human situation, the conditions of
human existence. The answer varies. The question can be
answered by animal worship, by human sacrifice or military conquest, by indulgence in luxury, by ascetic renunciation, by obsessional work, by artistic creation, by the love of
God, and by the love of Man. While there are many answers
—the record of which is human history—they are nevertheless not innumerable. On the contrary, as soon as one ignores
smaller differences which belong more to the periphery than
to the center, one discovers that there is only a limited number of answers which have been given, and only could have
been given by man in the various cultures in which he has
lived. The history of religion and philosophy is the history of
these answers, of their diversity, as well as of their limitation
in number.
The answers depend, to some extent, on the degree of
individuation which an individual has reached. In the infant
I-ness has developed but little yet; he still feels one with
mother, has no feeling of separateness as long as mother is
present. Its sense of aloneness is cured by the physical presence of the mother, her breasts, her skin. Only to the degree
that the child develops his sense of separateness and individuality is the physical presence of the mother not sufficient
any more, and does the need to overcome separateness in
other ways arise.
Similarly, the human race in its infancy still feels one with
nature. The soil, the animals, the plants are still man's world.
THE THEORY OF LOVE
II
He identifies himself with animals, and this is expressed by
the wearing of animal masks, by the worshiping of a totem
animal or animal gods. But the more the human race emerges
from these primary bonds, the more it separates itself from
the natural world, the more intense becomes the need to find
new ways of escaping separateness.
One way of achieving this aim lies in all kinds of orgiastic
states. These may have the form of an auto-induced trance,
sometimes with the help of drugs. Many rituals of primitive
tribes offer a vivid picture of this type of solution. In a transitory state of exaltation the world outside disappears, and
with it the feeling of separateness from it. Inasmuch as these
rituals are practiced in common, an experience of fusion with
the group is added which makes this solution all the more
effective. Closely related to, and often blended with this
orgiastic solution, is the sexual experience. The sexual orgasm
can produce a state similar to the one produced by a trance,
or to the effects of certain drugs. Rites of communal sexual
orgies were a part of many primitive rituals. It seems that
after the orgiastic experience, man can go on for a time
without suffering too much from his separateness. Slowly the
tension of anxiety mounts, and then is reduced again by the
repeated performance of the ritual.
As long as these orgiastic states are a matter of common
practice in a tribe, they do not produce anxiety or guilt. To
act in this way is right, and even virtuous, because it is a
way shared by all, approved and demanded by the medicine
men or priests; hence there is no reason to feel guilty or
ashamed. It is quite different when the same solution is
chosen by an individual in a culture which has left behind
I2
THE ART OF LOVING
these common practices. Alcoholism and drug addiction are
the forms which the individual chooses in a non-orgiastic
culture. In contrast to those participating in the socially patterned solution, such individuals suffer from guilt feelings
and remorse. 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.
Slightly different from this is the recourse to a sexual orgiastic
solution. To some extent it is a natural and normal form of
overcoming separateness, and a partial answer to the problem
of isolation. But in many individuals in whom separateness is
not relieved in other ways, the search for the sexual orgasm
assumes a function which makes it not very different from
alcoholism and drug addiction. It becomes a desperate attempt to escape the anxiety engendered by separateness, and
it results in an ever-increasing sense of separateness, since the
sexual act without love never bridges the gap between two
human beings, except momentarily.
All forms of orgiastic union have three characteristics:
they are intense, even violent; they occur in the total personality, mind and body; they are transitory and periodical.
Exactly the opposite holds true for that form of union which
is by far the most frequent solution chosen by man in the
past and in the present: the union based on conformity with
the group, its customs, practices and beliefs. Here again we
find a considerable development.
In a primitive society the group is small; it consists of
those with whom one shares blood and soil. With the growing development of culture, the group enlarges; it becomes
THE THEORY OF LOVE
13
citizenry of a polis, the citizenry of a large state, the
members of a church.. Even the poor . Roman felt pride
because he could say "civis romanus sum"; Rome and the
Empire were his family, his home, his world. Also in contemporary Western society the union with the group is the
prevalent way of overcoming separateness. It is a union in
which the individual self disappears to a large extent, and
where the aim is to belong to the herd. If I am like everybody else, if I have no feelings or thoughts which make me
different, if I conform in custom, dress, ideas, to the pattern
of the group, I am saved; saved from the frightening experience of aloneness. The dictatorial systems use threats and
terror to induce this conformity; the democratic countries,
suggestion and propaganda. There is, indeed, one great difference between the two systems. In the democracies nonconformity is possible and, in fact, by no means entirely
absent; in the totalitarian systems, only a few unusual heroes
and martyrs can be expected to refuse obedience. But in
spite of this difference the democratic societies show an
overwhelming degree of conformity. The reason lies in the
fact that there has to be an answer to the quest for union,
and if there is no other or better way, then the union of herd
conformity becomes the predominant one. One can only
understand the power of the fear to be different, the fear to
be only a few steps away from the herd, if one understands
the depths of the need not to be separated. Sometimes this fear
of nonconformity is rationalized as fear of practical dangers
which could threaten the non-conformist. But actually,
people want to conform to a much higher degree than they
are forced to conform, at least in the Western democracies.
the
THE ART OF LOVING
Most people are not even aware of their need to conform.
They live under the illusion that they follow their own ideas
and inclinations, that they are individualists, that they have
arrived at their opinions as the result of their own thinking—
and that it just happens that their ideas are the same as those
of the majority. The consensus of all serves as a proof for the
correctness of "their" ideas. Since there is still a need to feel
some individuality, such need is satisfied with regard to minor
differences; the initials on the handbag or the sweater, the
name plate of the bank teller, the belonging to the Democratic
as against the Republican party, to the Elks instead of to the
Shriners become the expression of individual differences. The
advertising slogan of "it is different" shows up this pathetic
need for difference, when in reality there is hardly any left.
This increasing tendency for the elimination of differences
is closely related to the concept and the experience of equality, as it is developing in the most advanced industrial
societies. Equality had meant, in a religious context, that we
are all God's children, that we all share in the same humandivine substance, that we are all one. It meant also that the
very differences between individuals must be respected, that
while it is true that we are all one, it is also true that each
one of us is a unique entity, is a cosmos by itself. Such conviction of the uniqueness of the individual is expressed for
instance in the Talmudic statement: "Whosoever saves a
single life is as if he had saved the whole world; whosoever
destroys a single life is as if he had destroyed the whole
world." Equality as a condition for the development of individuality was also the meaning of the concept in the
philosophy of the Western Enlightenment. It meant (most
THE THEORY OF LOVE
15
clearly formulated by Kant) that no man must be the means
for the ends of another man. That all men are equal inasmuch as they are ends, and only ends, and never means to
each other. Following the ideas of the Enlightenment, Socialist thinkers of various schools defined equality as abolition of
exploitation, of the use of man by man, regardless of whether
this use were cruel or "human."
In contemporary capitalistic society the meaning of equality has been transformed. By equality one refers to the
equality of automatons; of men who have lost their individuality. Equality today means "sameness," rather than "
oneness." It is the sameness of abstractions, of the men who
work in the same jobs, who have the same amusements, who
read the same newspapers, who have the same feelings and
the same ideas. In this respect one must also look with some
skepticism at some achievements which are usually praised
as signs of our progress, such as the equality of women. Needless to say I am not speaking against the equality of women;
but the positive aspects of this tendency for equality must
not deceive one. It is part of the trend toward the elimination of differences. Equality is bought at this very price:
women are equal because they are not different any more.
The proposition of Enlightenment philosophy, l'ame n'a pas
de sexe, the soul has no sex, has become the general practice.
The polarity of the sexes is disappearing, and with it erotic
love, which is based on this polarity. Men and women become the same, not equals as opposite poles. Contemporary
society preaches this ideal of unindividualized equality because it needs human atoms, each one the same, to make
them function in a mass aggregation, smoothly, without fric-
16
THE ART OF LOVING
tion; all obeying the same commands, yet everybody being
convinced that he is following his own desires. Just as modern mass production requires the standardization of commodities, so the social process requires standardization of
man, and this standardization is called "equality."
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. Furthermore, this solution concerns mainly the mind and not the body, and for
this reason too is lacking in comparison with the orgiastic
solutions. Herd conformity has only one advantage: it is
permanent, and not spasmodic. The individual is introduced
into the conformity pattern at the age of three or four, and
subsequently never loses his contact with the herd. Even his
funeral, which he anticipates as his last great social affair, is
in strict conformance with the pattern.
In addition to conformity as a way to relieve the anxiety
springing from separateness, another factor of contemporary
life must be considered: the role of the work routine and of
the pleasure routine. Man becomes a "nine to fiver" he is
part of the labor force, or the bureaucratic force of clerks
and managers. He has little initiative, his tasks are prescribed
by the organization of the work; there is even little difference between those high up on the ladder and those on the
bottom. They all perform tasks prescribed by the whole
structure of the organization, at a prescribed speed, and in a
prescribed manner. Even the feelings are prescribed: cheer-
THE THEORY OF LOVE
17
Illness, tolerance, reliability, ambition, and an ability to get
long with everybody without friction. Fun is routinized in '
milar, although not quite as drastic ways. Books are selected
y the book clubs, movies by the film and theater owners
nd the advertising slogans paid for by them; the rest is also '
Uniform: the Sunday ride in the car, the television session, ,
the card game, the social parties. From birth to death, from
Monday to Monday, from morning to evening—all activities
are routinized, and prefabricated. How should a man
caught in this net of routine not forget that he is a man, a
unique individual, one who is given only this one chance of
living, with hopes and disappointments, with sorrow and
fear, with the longing for love and the dread of the nothing
and of separateness?
A third way of attaining union lies in creative activity,
be it that of the artist, or of the artisan. In any kind of
creative work the creating person unites himself with his
material, which represents the world outside of himself.
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. This, however, holds true only for
productive work, for work in which I plan, produce, see
the result of my work. In the modern work process of a
clerk, the worker on the endless belt, little is left of this
uniting quality of work. The worker becomes an appendix
to the machine or to the bureaucratic organization. He has
ceased to be he—hence no union takes place beyond that of
conformity.
8
THE ART OF LOVING
The unity achieved in productive work is not interpersonal; the unity achieved in orgiastic fusion is transitory; the
unity achieved by conformity is only pseudo-unity. Hence,
they are only partial answers to the problem of existence. The
full answer lies in the achievement of interpersonal union, of
fusion with another person, in love.
This desire for interpersonal fusion is the most powerful
striving in man. It is the most fundamental passion, it is the
force which keeps the human race together, the clan, the
family, society. The failure to achieve it means insanity or
destruction—self-destruction or destruction of others. Without love, humanity could not exist for a day. Yet, if we call
the achievement of interpersonal union "love," we find ourselves in a serious difficulty. Fusion can be achieved in different ways—and the differences are not less significant than
what is common to the various forms of love. Should they all
be called love? Or should we reserve the word "love" only
for a specific kind of union, one which has been the ideal
virtue in all great humanistic religions and philosophical
systems of the last four thousand years of Western and
Eastern history?
As with all semantic difficulties, the answer can only be
arbitrary. What matters is that we know what kind of union
we are talking about when we speak of love. Do we refer to
love as the mature answer to the problem of existence, or do
we speak of those immature forms of love which may be
called symbiotic union? In the following pages I shall call
love only the former. I shall begin the discussion of "love"
with the latter.
Symbiotic union has its biological pattern in the relation-
THE THEORY OF LOVE
19
ship between the pregnant mother and the foetus. They are
two, and yet one. They live "together," (sym-biosis), they
need each other. The foetus is a part of the mother, it receives everything it needs from her; mother is its world, as
it were; she feeds it, she protects it, but also her own life is
enhanced by it. In the psychic symbiotic union, the two
bodies are independent, but the same kind of attachment
exists psychologically.
The passive form of the symbiotic union is that of submission, or if we use a clinical term, of masochism. The
masochistic person escapes from the unbearable feeling of
isolation and separateness by making himself part and parcel
of another person who directs him, guides him, protects him;
who is his life and his oxygen, as it were. The power of the
one to whom one submits is inflated, may he be a person or a
god; he is everything, I am nothing, except inasmuch as I
am part of him. As a part, I am part of greatness, of power,
of certainty. The masochistic person does not have to make
decisions, does not have to take any risks; he is never alone—
but he is not independent; he has no integrity; he is not yet
fully born. In a religious context the object of worship is
called an idol; in a secular context of a masochistic love relationship the essential mechanism, that of idolatry, is the
same. The masochistic relationship can be blended with
physical, sexual desire; in this case it is not only a submission
in which one's mind participates, but also one's whole body.
There can be masochistic submission to fate, to sickness, to
rhythmic music, to the orgiastic state produced by drugs or
under hypnotic trance—in all these instances the person renounces his integrity, makes himself the instrument of some-
T HE AR T O F LO V ING
body or something outside of himself; he need not solve the
problem of living by productive activity.
The active form of symbiotic fusion is dominatiOn or, to
use the psychological term corresponding to masochism,
sadism. The sadistic person wants to escape from his aloneness and his sense of imprisonment by making another person
part and parcel of himself. He inflates and enhances himself
by incorporating another person, who worships him.
The sadistic person is as dependent on the submissive person as the latter is on the former; neither can live without
the other. The difference is only that the sadistic person
commands, exploits, hurts, humiliates, and that the masochistic person is commanded, exploited, hurt, humiliated.
This is a considerable difference in a realistic sense; in a
deeper emotional sense, the difference is not so great as that
which they both have in common: fusion without integrity.
If one understands this, it is also not surprising to find that
usually a person reacts in both the sadistic and the masochistic manner, usually toward different objects. Hitler reacted primarily in a sadistic fashion toward people, but
masochistically toward fate, history, the "higher power" of
nature. His end—suicide among general destruction—is as
characteristic as was his dream of success—total domination.'
In contrast to symbiotic union, mature love is union under
the condition of preserving one's integrity, one's individuality. Love is an active power in man; a power which breaks
through the walls which separate man from his fellow men,
1 Cf. a more detailed study of sadism and masochism in E. Fromm,
Escape from Freedom, Rinehart & Company, New York, 1941.
THE THEORY OF LOVE
21
which unites him with others; love makes him overcome the
sense of isolation and separateness, yet it permits him to be
himself, to retain his integrity. In love the paradox occurs
that two beings become one and yet remain two.
If we say love is an activity, we face a difficulty which
lies in the ambiguous meaning of the word "activity." By "
activity," in the modern usage of the word, is usually meant
an action which brings about a change in an existing situation by means of an expenditure of energy. Thus a man is
considered active if he does business, studies medicine, works
on an endless belt, builds a table, or is engaged in sports. C
Common to all these activities is that they are directed
toward an outside goal to be achieved. What is not taken into
account is the motivation of activity. Take for instance a man
r driven to incessant work by a sense of deep insecurity and
loneliness; or another one driven by ambition, or greed for
money. In all these cases, the person is the slave of a passion,
and his activity is in reality a "passivity" because he is
driven; he is the sufferer, not the "actor." On the other
hand, a man sitting quiet and contemplating, with no pur' pose or aim except that of experiencing himself and his
oneness with the world, is considered to be "passive," because
he is not "doing" anything. In reality, this attitude of concentrated meditation is the highest activity there is, an activity of the soul, which is possible only under the condition
of inner freedom and independence. One concept of activity,
the modern one, refers to the use of energy for the achievement of external aims; the other concept of activity refers
to the use of man's inherent powers, regardless of whether
any external change is brought about. The latter concept of
t
22
THE ART OF LOVING
activity has been formulated most clearly by Spinoza. He
differentiates among the affects between active and passive
affects, "actions" and "passions." In the exercise of an active
affect, man is free, he is the master of his affect; in the
exercise of a passive affect, man is driven, the object of
motivations of which he himself is not aware, Thus Spinoza
arrives at the statement that virtue and power are one and
the same.' Envy, jealousy, ambition, any kind of greed are
passions; love is an action, the practice of a human power,
which can be practiced only in freedom and never as the
result of a compulsion.
Love is an activity, not a passive affect; it is a "standing
in," not a "falling for." In the most general way, the active
character of love can be described by stating that love is
primarily giving, not receiving.
What is giving? Simple as the answer to this question
seems to be, it is actually full of ambiguities and complexities. The most widespread misunderstanding is that which
assumes that giving is "giving up" something, being deprived
of, sacrificing. The person whose character has not developed
beyond the stage of the receptive, exploitative, or hoarding
orientation, experiences the act of giving in this way. The
marketing character is willing to give, but only in exchange
for receiving; giving without receiving for him is being
cheated.' People whose main orientation is a non-productive
one feel giving as an impoverishment. Most individuals of
Spinoza, Ethics IV, Def. 8.
Cf. a detailed discussion of these character orientations in E.
Fromm, Man for Himself, Rinehart & Company, New York, 1947,
Chap. III, pp. 54-117.
2
3
THE THEORY OF LOVE
23
this type therefore refuse to give. Some make a virtue out of
giving in the sense of a sacrifice. They feel that just because
it is painful to give, one should give; the virtue of giving to
them lies in the very act of acceptance of the sacrifice. For
them, the norm that it is better to give than to receive means
that it is better to suffer deprivation than to experience joy.
For the productive character, giving has an entirely different meaning. 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 overflowing, 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.
It is not difficult to recognize the validity of this principle
by applying it to various specific phenomena. The most eletnentary example lies in the sphere of sex. The culmination
of the male sexual function lies in the act of giving; the man
gives himself, his sexual organ, to the woman. At the moment
of orgasm he gives his semen to her. He cannot help
giving it if he is potent. If he cannot give, he is impotent. For
the woman the process is not different, although somewhat
more complex. She gives herself too; she opens the gates to
her feminine center; in the act of receiving, she gives. If she
is incapable of this act of giving, if she can only receive, she is
frigid. With her the act of giving occurs again, not in her
function as a lover, but in that as a mother. She gives of
herself to the growing child within her, she gives her milk to
4
Compare the definition of joy given by Spinoza.
24
THE ART OF LOVING
the infant, she gives her bodily warmth. Not to give would
be painful.
In the sphere of material things giving means being rich.
Not he who has much is rich, but he who gives much. The
hoarder who is anxiously worried about losing something is,
psychologically speaking, the poor, impoverished man, regardless of how much he has. Whoever is capable of giving
of himself is rich. He experiences himself as one who can
confer of himself to others. Only one who is deprived of all
that goes beyond the barest necessities for subsistence would
be incapable of enjoying the act of giving material things.
But daily experience shows that what a person considers the
minimal necessities depends as much on his character as it
depends on his actual possessions. It is well known that the
poor are more willing to give than the rich. Nevertheless,
poverty beyond a certain point may make it impossible to
give, and is so degrading, not only because of the suffering
it causes directly, but because of the fact that it deprives the
poor of the joy of giving.
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
other's sense of aliveness by enhancing his own sense of alive-
25
ness. He does not give in order to receive; giving is in itself
exquisite joy. But in giving he cannot help bringing something to life in the other person, and this which is brought to
life reflects back to him; in truly giving, he cannot help receiving that which is given back to him. Giving implies to
make the other person a giver also and they both share in
the joy of what they have brought to life. In the act of giving
something is born, and both persons involved are grateful
for the life that is born for both of them. Specifically with
regard to love this means: love is a power which produces
love; impotence is the inability to produce love. This thought
has been beautifully expressed by Marx: "Assume," he says, "
man as man, and his relation to the world as a human one,
and you can exchange love only for love, confidence for confidence, etc. If you wish to enjoy art, you must be an artistically trained person; if you wish to have influence on other
people, you must be a person who has a really stimulating
and furthering influence on other people. Every one of your
relationships to man and to nature must be a definite expression of your real, individual life corresponding to the
object of your will. If you love without calling forth love,
that is, if your love as such does not produce love, if by means
of an expression of life as a loving person you do not make
of yourself a loved person, then your love is impotent, a
misfortune." s But not only in love does giving mean receiving. The teacher is taught by his students, the actor is stimulated by his audience, the psychoanalyst is cured by his
THE THEORY OF LOVE
"Nationalökonomie and Philosophic," 1844, published in Karl
Marx' Die Friihschriften, Alfred Kroner Verlag, Stuttgart, 1953, pp.
300, 301. (My translation, E. F.)
5
26
THE ART OF LOVING
patient—provided they do not treat each other as objects,
but are related to each other genuinely and productively.
It is hardly necessary to stress the fact that the ability to
love as an act of giving depends on the character development of the person. 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.
Beyond the element of giving, the active character of love
becomes evident in the fact that it always implies certain
basic elements, common to all forms of love. These are care,
responsibility, respect and knowledge.
That love implies care is most evident in a mother's love
for her child. No assurance of her love would strike us as
sincere if we saw her lacking in care for the infant, if she
neglected to feed it, to bathe it, to give it physical comfort;
and we are impressed by her love if we see her caring for
the child. It is not different even with the love for animals or
flowers. If a woman told us that she loved flowers, and we
saw that she forgot to water them, we would not believe in
her "love" for flowers. Love is the active concern for the life
and the growth of that which we love. Where this active concern is lacking, there is no love. This element of love has been
beautifully described in the book of Jonah. God has told
Jonah to go to Nineveh to warn its inhabitants that they will
be punished unless they mend their evil ways. Jonah runs
T HE T HE O R Y O F LO V E
7
2
away from his mission because he is afraid that the people of
Nineveh will repent and that God will forgive them. He is a
man with a strong sense of order and law, but without love.
However, in his attempt to escape, he finds himself in the
belly of a whale, symbolizing the state of isolation and imprisonment which his lack of love and solidarity has brought
upon him. God saves him, and Jonah goes to Nineveh. He
preaches to the inhabitants as God had told him, and the
very thing he was afraid of happens. The men of Nineveh
repent their sins, mend their ways, and God forgives them
and decides not to destroy the city. Jonah is intensely angry
and disappointed; he wanted "justice" to be done, not
mercy. At last he finds some comfort in the shade of a tree
which God had made to grow for him to protect him from
the sun. But when God makes the tree wilt, Jonah is depressed and angrily complains to God. God answers: "Thou
hast had pity on the gourd for the which thou hast not
labored neither madest it grow; which came up in a night,
and perished in a night. And should I not spare Nineveh,
that great city, wherein are more than sixscore thousand
people that cannot discern between their right hand and
their left hand; and also much cattle?" God's answer to
Jonah is to be understood symbolically. God explains to
Jonah that the essence of love is to "labor" for something
and "to make something grow," that love and labor are inseparable. One loves that for which one labors, and one
labors for that which one loves.
Care and concern imply another aspect of love; that of
responsibility. Today responsibility is often meant to denote
duty, something imposed upon one from the outside. But re-
28
THE ART OF LOVING
sponsibility, in its true sense, is an entirely voluntary act; it
is my response to the needs, expressed or unexpressed, of
another human being. To be "responsible" means to be able
and ready to "respond." Jonah did not feel responsible to
the inhabitants of Nineveh. He, like Cain, could ask: "
Am I my brother's keeper?" The loving person responds.
The life of his brother is not his brother's business alone, but
his own. He feels responsible for his fellow men, as he feels
responsible for himself. This responsibility, in the case of the
mother and her infant, refers mainly to the care for
physical needs. In the love between adults it refers mainly
to the psychic needs of the other person.
Responsibility could easily deteriorate into domination
and possessiveness, were it not for a third component of love,
respect. Respect is not fear and awe; it denotes, in accordance with the root of the word (respicere = to look at),
the ability to see a person as he is, to be aware of his unique
individuality. Respect means the concern that the other person should grow and unfold as he is. Respect, thus, implies
the absence of exploitation. I want the loved person to grow
and unfold for his own sake, and in his own ways, and not
for the purpose of serving me. If I love the other person, I
feel one with him or her, but with him as he is, not as I need
him to be as an object for my use. It is clear that respect is
possible only if I have achieved independence; if I can stand
and walk without needing crutches, without having to dominate and exploit anyone else. Respect exists only on the basis
of freedom: "l'amour est l'enfant de la liberte" as an old
French song says; love is the child of freedom, never that of
domination.
THE THEORY OF LOVE
29
To respect a person is not possible without knowing him;
care and responsibility would be blind if they were not
guided by knowledge. Knowledge would be empty if it were
not motivated by concern. There are many layers of knowledge; the knowledge which is an aspect of love is one which
does not stay at the periphery, but penetrates to the core.
It is possible only when I can transcend the concern for
myself and see the other person in his own terms. I may
know, for instance, that a person is angry, even if he does
not show it overtly; but I may know him more deeply than
that; then I know that he is anxious, and worried; that he
feels lonely, that he feels guilty. Then I know that his anger
is only the manifestation of something deeper, and I see him
as anxious and embarrassed, that is, as the suffering person,
rather than as the angry one.
Knowledge has one more, and a more fundamental, relation to the problem of love. The basic need to fuse with
another person so as to transcend the prison of one's separateness is closely related to another specifically human desire,
that to know the "secret of man." While life in its merely biological aspects is a miracle and a secret, man in his human
aspects is an unfathomable secret to himself—and to his fellow man. We know ourselves, and yet even with all the efforts
we may make, we do not know ourselves. We know our fellow man, and yet we do not know him, because we are not a
thing, and our fellow man is not a thing. The further we
reach into the depth of our being, or someone else's being,
the more the goal of knowledge eludes us. Yet we cannot
I, help desiring to penetrate into the secret of man's soul, into
the innermost nucleus which is "he."
30
THE ART OF LOVING
There is one way, a desperate one, to know the secret: it
is that of complete power over another person; the power
which makes him do what we want, feel what we want,
think what we want; which transforms him into a thing, our
thing, our possession. The ultimate degree of this attempt to
know lies in the extremes of sadism, the desire and ability to
make a human being suffer; to torture him, to force him to
betray his secret in his suffering. In this craving for penetrating man's secret, his and hence our own, lies an essential
motivation for the depth and intensity of cruelty and destructiveness. In a very succinct way this idea has been expressed
by Isaac Babel. He quotes a fellow officer in the Russian civil
war, who has just stamped his former master to death, as
saying: "With shooting—I'll put it this way—with shooting
you only get rid of a chap. . . . With shooting you'll never
get at the soul, to where it is in a fellow and how it shows
itself. But I don't spare myself, and I've more than once
trampled an enemy for over an hour. You see, I want to get
to know what life really is, what life's like down our way."
In children we often see this path to knowledge quite
overtly. The child takes something apart, breaks it up in
order to know it; or it takes an animal apart; 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 other path to knowing "the secret" is love. 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.
6
I. Babel, The Collected Stories, Criterion Book, New York, 1955.
THE THEORY OF LOVE
31
I know in the only way knowledge of that which is alive
is possible for man—by experience of union—not by any
knowledge our thought can give. Sadism is motivated by the
wish to know the secret, yet I remain as ignorant as I was
before. I have torn the other being apart limb from limb, yet
all I have done is to destroy him. Love is the only way of
knowledge, which in the act of union answers my quest. In
the act of loving, of giving myself, in the act of penetrating
the other person, I find myself, I discover myself, I discover
us both, I discover man.
The longing to know ourselves and to know our fellow
man has been expressed in the Delphic motto "Know thyself." It is the mainspring of all psychology. But inasmuch as
the desire is to know all of man, his innermost secret, the desire can never be fulfilled in knowledge of the ordinary kind,
in knowledge only by thought. Even if we knew a thousand
times more of ourselves, we would never reach bottom. We
would still remain an enigma to ourselves, as our fellow man
would remain an enigma to us. The only way of full knowledge lies in the act of love : this act transcends thought, it
transcends words. It is the daring plunge into the experience
of union. However, knowledge in thought, that is psychological knowledge, is a necessary condition for full
knowledge in the act of love. I have to know the other person
and myself objectively, in order to be able to see his reality, or
rather, to overcome the illusions, the irrationally distorted
picture I have of him. Only if I know a human being
objectively, can I know him in his ultimate essence, in the
act of love.'
7 The above statement has an important implication for the role of
psychology in contemporary Western culture. While the great popu-
32
THE ART OF LOVING
The problem of knowing man is parallel to the religious
problem of knowing God. In conventional Western theology
the attempt is made to know God by thought, to make statements about God. It is assumed that I can know God in my
thought. In mysticism, which is the consequent outcome of
monotheism (as I shall try to show later on), the attempt is
given up to know God by thought, and it is replaced by the
experience of union with God in which there is no more
room—and no need—for knowledge about God.
The experience of union, with man, or religiously speaking, with God, is by no means irrational. On the contrary, it
is as Albert Schweitzer has pointed out, the consequence of
rationalism, its most daring and radical consequence. It is
based on our knowledge of the fundamental, and not accidental, limitations of our knowledge. It is the knowledge that
we shall never "grasp" the secret of man and of the universe,
but that we can know, nevertheless, in the act of love. Psychology as a science has its limitations, and, as the logical
consequence of theology is mysticism, so the ultimate consequence of psychology is love.
Care, responsibility, respect and knowledge are mutually
interdependent. They are a syndrome of attitudes which are
to be found in the mature person; that is, in the person who
develops his own powers productively, who only wants to
have that which he has worked for, who has given up narcissistic dreams of omniscience and omnipotence, who has
larity of psychology certainly indicates an interest in the knowledge of
man, it also betrays the fundamental lack of love in human relations
today. Psychological knowledge thus becomes a substitute for full
knowledge in the act of love, instead of being a step toward it.
THE THEORY OF LOVE
33
acquired humility based on the inner strength which only
genuine productive activity can give.
Thus far I have spoken of love as the overcoming of
human separateness, as the fulfillment of the longing for
union. But above the universal, existential need for union
rises a more specific, biological one: the desire for union
between the masculine and feminine poles. The idea of this
polarization is most strikingly expressed in the myth that
originally man and woman were one, that they were cut in
half, and from then on each male has been seeking for the
lost female part of himself in order to unite again with her. (
The same idea of the original unity of the sexes is also contained in the Biblical story of Eve being made from Adam's
rib, even though in this story, in the spirit of patriarchalism,
woman is considered secondary to man.) The meaning of
the myth is clear enough. Sexual polarization leads man to
seek union in a specific way, that of union with the other sex.
The polarity between the male and female principles exists
also within each man and each woman. Just as physiologically man and woman each have hormones of the opposite
sex, they are bisexual also in the psychological sense. They
carry in themselves the principle of receiving and of penetrating, of matter and of spirit. Man—and woman—finds union
within himself only in the union of his female and his male
polarity. This polarity is the basis for all creativity.
The male-female polarity is also the basis for interpersonal
creativity. This is obvious biologically in the fact that the
union of sperm and ovum is the basis for the birth of a child.
But in the purely psychic realm it is not different; in the
love between man and woman, each of them is reborn. (The
34
THE ART OF LOVING
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.)
The same polarity of the male and female principle exists
in nature; not only, as is obvious in animals and plants, but
in the polarity of the two fundamental functions, that of receiving and that of penetrating. It is the polarity of the earth
and rain, of the river and the ocean, of night and day, of
darkness and light, of matter and spirit. This idea is beautifully expressed by the great Muslim poet and mystic, Rümi:
Never, in sooth, does the lover seek without being
sought by his beloved.
When the lightning of love has shot into this heart,
know that there is love in that heart.
When love of God waxes in thy heart, beyond any
doubt God hath love for thee.
No sound of clapping comes from one hand without the
other hand.
Divine Wisdom is destiny and decree made us lovers of
one another.
Because of that fore-ordainment every part of the world
is paired with its mate.
In the view of the wise, Heaven is man and Earth
woman : Earth fosters what Heaven lets fall.
When Earth lacks heat, Heaven sends it; when she has
lost her freshness and moisture, Heaven restores it.
Heaven goes on his rounds, like a husband foraging for
the wife's sake;
And Earth is busy with housewiferies: she attends to
births and suckling that which she bears.
THE THEORY OF LOVE
35
Regard Earth and Heaven as endowed with intelligence, since they do the work of intelligent beings.
Unless these twain taste pleasure from one another, why
are they creeping together like sweethearts?
Without the Earth, how should flower and tree blossom? What, then, would Heaven's water and heat
produce?
As God put desire in man and woman to the end that
the world should be preserved by their union,
So hath He implanted in every part of existence the
desire for another part.
Day and Night are enemies outwardly; yet both serve
one purpose,
Each in love with the other for the sake of perfecting
their mutual work,
Without Night, the nature of Man would receive no
income, so there would be nothing for Day to spend.'
The problem
of the
male-female
polarity
further
discussion
on the
subject matter
ofleads
love to
andsome
sex. I
have spoken before of Freud's error in seeing in love exclusively the expression—or a sublimation—of the sexual
in- rather than recognizing that the sexual desire is one
, stinct,
manifestation of the need for love and union. But Freud's
error goes deeper. In line with his physiological materialism,
he sees in the sexual instinct the result of a chemically produced tension in the body which is painful and seeks for relief. The aim of the sexual desire is the removal of this painful tension; sexual satisfaction lies in the accomplishment of
this removal. This view has its validity to the extent that the
R. A. Nicholson, Rümi, George Allen and Unwin, Ltd., London,
1950, pp. 122-3.
36
THE ART OF LOVING
sexual desire operates in the same fashion as hunger or thirst
do when the organism is undernourished. Sexual desire, in
this concept, is an itch, sexual satisfaction the removal of the
itch. In fact, as far as this concept of sexuality is concerned,
masturbation would be the ideal sexual satisfaction. What
Freud, paradoxically enough, ignores, is the psycho-biological
aspect of sexuality, the masculine-feminine polarity, and the
desire to bridge this polarity by union. This curious error
was probably facilitated by Freud's extreme patriarchalism,
which led him to the assumption that sexuality per se is
masculine, and thus made him ignore the specific female
sexuality. He expressed this idea in the Three Contributions
to the Theory of Sex, saying that the libido has regularly "a
masculine nature," regardless of whether it is the libido in a
man or in a woman. The same idea is also expressed in a
rationalized form in Freud's theory that the little boy experiences the woman as a castrated man, and that she herself
seeks for various compensations for the loss of the male
genital. But woman is not a castrated man, and her sexuality
is specifically feminine and not of "a masculine nature."
Sexual attraction between the sexes is only partly motivated by the need for removal of tension; it is mainly the
need for union with the other sexual pole. In fact, erotic attraction is by no means only expressed in sexual attraction.
There is masculinity and femininity in character as well as
in sexual function. The masculine character can be defined
as having the qualities of penetration, guidance, activity, discipline and adventurousness; the feminine character by the
qualities of productive receptiveness, protection, realism, endurance, motherliness. (It must always be kept in mind that
37
in each individual both characteristics are blended, but with
the preponderance of those appertaining to "his" or "her"
sex.) Very often if the masculine character traits of a man
are weakened because emotionally he has remained a child,
he will try to compensate for this lack by the exclusive
emphasis on his male role in sex. The result is the Don Juan,
who needs to prove his male prowess in sex because he is unsure of his masculinity in a characterological sense. When the
paralysis of masculinity is more extreme, sadism (the use of
force) becomes the main—a perverted—substitute for masculinity. If the feminine sexuality is weakened or perverted,
it is transformed into masochism, or possessiveness.
Freud has been criticized for his overevaluation of sex.
This criticism was often prompted by the wish to remove an
element from Freud's system which aroused criticism and
hostility among conventionally minded people. Freud keenly
sensed this motivation and for this very reason fought every
attempt to change his theory of sex. Indeed, in his time,
Freud's theory had a challenging and revolutionary character. But what was true around 'goo is not true any more
fifty years later. The sexual mores have changed so much
that Freud's theories are not any longer shocking to the
Western middle classes, and it is a quixotic kind of radicalism when orthodox analysts today still think they are courageous and radical in defending Freud's sexual theory. In
fact, their brand of psychoanalysis is conformist, and does
not try to raise psychological questions which would lead to
a criticism of contemporary society.
My criticism of Freud's theory is not that he overemphasized sex, but his failure to understand sex deeply enough.
THE THEORY OF LOVE
38
THE ART OF LOVING
He took the first step in discovering the significance of interpersonal passions; in accordance with his philosophic
premises he explained them physiologically. In the further
development of psychoanalysis it is necessary to correct and
deepen Freud's concept by translating Freud's insights from
the physiological into the biological and existential dimension.'
2. LOVE BETWEEN PARENT AND CHILD
The infant, at the moment of birth, would feel the fear
of dying, if a gracious fate did not preserve it from any
awareness of the anxiety involved in the separation from
mother, and from intra-uterine existence. Even after being
born, the infant is hardly different from what it was before
birth; it cannot recognize objects, it is not yet aware of
itself, and of the world as being outside of itself. It only
feels the positive stimulation of warmth and food, and it does
not yet differentiate warmth and food from its source:
mother. Mother is warmth, mother is food, mother is the
euphoric state of satisfaction and security. This state is one
of narcissism, to use Freud's term. The outside reality, persons and things, have meaning only in terms of their satisfying or frustrating the inner state of the body. Real is only
what is within; what is outside is real only in terms of my
needs—never in terms of its own qualities or needs.
9 Freud himself made a first step in this direction in his later concept of the life and death instincts. His concept of the former (eros)
as a principle of synthesis and unification is on an entirely different
plane from that of his libido concept. But in spite of the fact that the
theory of life and death instincts was accepted by orthodox analysts,
this acceptance did not lead to a fundamental revision of the libido
concept, especially as far as clinical work is concerned.
THE THEORY OF LOVE
39
When the child grows and develops, he becomes capable
of perceiving things as they are; the satisfaction in being fed
becomes differentiated from the nipple, the breast from the
mother. Eventually the child experiences his thirst, the satisfying milk, the breast and the mother, as different entities.
He learns to perceive many other things as being different, as
having an existence of their own. At this point he learns to
give them names. At the same time he learns to handle them;
learns that fire is hot and painful, that mother's body is
warm and pleasureful, that wood is hard and heavy, that
paper is light and can be torn. He learns how to handle people; that mother will smile when I eat; that she will take
me in her arms when I cry; that she will praise me when I
have a bowel movement. All these experiences become crystallized and integrated in the experience: I am loved. I am
loved because I am mother's child. I am loved because I
am helpless. I am loved because I am beautiful, admirable.
I am loved because mother needs me. To put it in a more
general formula: I am loved for what I am, or perhaps more
accurately, I am loved because I am. This experience of
being loved by mother is a passive one. There is nothing
I have to do in order to be loved—mother's love is unconditional. All I have to do is to be—to be her child. Mother's
love is bliss, is peace, it need not be acquired, it need not be
deserved. But there is a negative side, too, to the unconditional quality of mother's love. Not only does it not need to
be deserved—it also cannot be acquired, produced, controlled. If it is there, it is like a blessing; if it is not there, it
is as if all beauty had gone out of life—and there is nothing
I can do to create it.
40
THE ART OF LOVING
For most children before the age from eight and a half to
ten," the problem is almost exclusively that of being loved—
of being loved for what one is. The child up to this age does
not yet love; he responds gratefully, joyfully to being loved.
At this point of the child's development a new factor enters
into the picture: that of a new feeling of producing love by
one's own activity, For the first time, the child thinks of giving something to mother (or to father), of producing something—a poem, a drawing, or whatever it may be. For the
first time in the child's life the idea of love is transformed
from being loved into loving; into creating love. It takes
many years from this first beginning to the maturing of love.
Eventually the child, who may now be an adolescent, has
overcome his egocentricity; the other person is not any more
primarily a means to the satisfaction of his own needs. The
needs of the other person are as important as his own—in
fact, they have become more important. To give has become
more satisfactory, more joyous, than to receive; to love, more
important even than being loved. By loving, he has left the
prison cell of aloneness and isolation which was constituted
by the state of narcissism and self-centeredness. He feels a
sense of new union, of sharing, of oneness. More than that,
he feels the potency of producing love by loving—rather than
the dependence of receiving by being loved—and for that
reason having to be small, helpless, sick—or "good." Infantile love follows the principle: "I love because I am
loved." Mature love follows the principle: "I am loved be10
Cf. Sullivan's description of this development in The Interpersonal
Theory of Psychiatry, W. W. Norton & Co., New York, 1953.
THE THEORY OF LOVE
cause I love." Immature love says: "I love you because I need
you." Mature love says: "I need you because I love you."
Closely related to the development of the capacity of love
is the development of the object of love. The first months
and years of the child are those where his closest attachment
is to the mother. This attachment begins before the moment
of birth, when mother and child are still one, although they
are two. Birth changes the situation in some respects, but not
as much as it would appear. The child, while now living
outside of the womb, is still completely dependent on mother.
But daily he becomes more independent: he learns to walk,
to talk, to explore the world on his own; the relationship to
mother loses some of its vital significance, and instead the
relationship to father becomes more and more important.
In order to understand this shift from mother to father,
we must consider the essential differences in quality between
motherly and fatherly love. We have already spoken about
motherly love. Motherly love by its very nature is unconditional. Mother loves the newborn infant because it is her
child, not because the child has fulfilled any specific condition, or lived up to any specific expectation. (Of course,
when I speak here of mother's and father's love, I speak of
the "ideal types"—in Max Weber's sense or of an archetype
in Jung's sense—and do not imply that every mother and
father loves in that way. I refer to the fatherly and motherly
principle, which is represented in the motherly and fatherly
person.) Unconditional love corresponds to one of the
deepest longings, not only of the child, but of every human
being; on the other hand, to be loved because of one's
merit, because one deserves it, always leaves doubt; maybe
42
THE ART OF LOVING
I did not please the person whom I want to love me,
maybe this, or that—there is always a fear that love could
disappear. Furthermore, "deserved" love easily leaves a
bitter feeling that one is not loved for oneself, that one is
loved only because one pleases, that one is, in the last analysis, not loved at all but used. No wonder that we all cling
to the longing for motherly love, as children and also as
adults. Most children are lucky enough to receive motherly
love (to what extent will be discussed later). As adults the
same longing is much more difficult to fulfill. In the most
satisfactory development it remains a component of normal
erotic love; often it finds expression in religious forms, more
often in neurotic forms.
The relationship to father is quite different. Mother is the
home we come from, she is nature, soil, the ocean; father
does not represent any such natural home. He has little connection with the child in the first years of its life, and his
importance for the child in this early period cannot be compared with that of mother. But while father does not represent the natural world, he represents the other pole of human
existence; the world of thought, of man-made things, of law
and order, of discipline, of travel and adventure. Father is
the one who teaches the child, who shows him the road into
the world.
Closely related to this function is one which is connected
with socio-economic development. When private property
came into existence, and when private property could be inherited by one of the sons, father began to look for that son
to whom he could leave his property. Naturally, that was the
one whom father thought best fitted to become his successor,
43
the son who was most like him, and consequently whom he
liked the most. Fatherly love is conditional love. Its principle
is "I love you because you fulfill my expectations, because
you do your duty, because you are like me." In conditional
fatherly love we find, as with unconditional motherly love,
a negative and a positive aspect. The negative aspect is the
very fact that fatherly love has to be deserved, that it can be
lost if one does not do what is expected. In the nature of
fatherly love lies the fact that obedience becomes the main
virtue, that disobedience is the main sin—and its punishment
the withdrawal of fatherly love. The positive side is equally
important. Since his love is conditioned, I can do something
to acquire it, I can work for it; his love is not outside of my
control as motherly love is.
The mother's and the father's attitudes toward the child
correspond to the child's own needs. The infant needs
mother's unconditional love and care physiologically as well
as psychically. The child, after six, begins to need father's
love, his authority and guidance. Mother has the function
of making him secure in life, father has the function of
teaching him, guiding him to cope with those problems with
which the particular society the child has been born into
confronts him. In the ideal case, mother's love does not try
to prevent the child from growing up, does not try to put a
premium on helplessness. Mother should have faith in life,
hence not be overanxious, and thus not infect the child with
her anxiety. Part of her life should be the wish that the child
become independent and eventually separate from her.
Father's love should be guided by principles and expectations; it should be patient and tolerant, rather than threatenTHE THEORY OF LOVE
44
THE ART OF LOVING
ing and authoritarian. It should give the growing child an
increasing sense of competence and eventually permit him to
become his own authority and to dispense with that of father.
Eventually, the mature person has come to the point where
he is his own mother and his own father. He has, as it were,
a motherly and a fatherly conscience. Motherly conscience
says: "There is no misdeed, no crime which could deprive
you of my love, of my wish for your life and happiness."
Fatherly conscience says: "You did wrong, you cannot avoid
accepting certain consequences of your wrongdoing, and
most of all you must change your ways if I am to like you."
The mature person has become free from the outside mother
and father figures, and has built them up inside. In contrast
to Freud's concept of the super-ego, however, he has built
them inside not by incorporating mother and father, but by
building a motherly conscience on his own capacity for love,
and a fatherly conscience on his reason and judgment. Furthermore, the mature person loves with both the motherly
and the fatherly conscience, in spite of the fact that they seem
to contradict each other. If he would only retain his fatherly
conscience, he would become harsh and inhuman. If he
would only retain his motherly conscience, he would be apt
to lose judgment and to hinder himself and others in their
development.
In this development from mother-centered to fathercentered attachment, and their eventual synthesis, lies the
basis for mental health and the achievement of maturity.
In the failure of this development lies the basic cause for
neurosis. While it is beyond the scope of this book to develop
THE THEORY OF LOVE
45
this trend of thought more fully, some brief remarks may
)serve to clarify this statement.
One cause for neurotic development can lie in the fact
that a boy has a loving, but overindulgent or domineering
mother, and a weak and uninterested father. In this case he
may remain fixed at an early mother attachment, and develop into a person who is dependent on mother, feels helpr)
ess, has the strivings characteristic of the receptive person,
that is, to receive, to be protected, to be taken care of, and
who has a lack of fatherly qualities—discipline, independLence, an ability to master life by himself. He may try to find "
mothers" in everybody, sometimes in women and sometunes in men in a position of authority and power. If, on the
Other hand, the mother is cold, unresponsive and domineerfrig, he may either transfer the need for motherly protection
o his father, and subsequent father figures—in which case
the end result is similar to the former case—or he will develop into a onesidedly father-oriented person, completely
given to the principles of law, order and authority, and lacking in the ability to expect or to receive unconditional love.
This development is further intensified if the father is
authoritarian and at the same time strongly attached to the
son. What is characteristic of all these neurotic developments
is the fact that one principle, the fatherly or the motherly,
fails to develop or—and this is the case in the more severe
neurotic development—that the roles of mother and father
become confused both with regard to persons outside and
with regard to these roles within the person. Further examination may show that certain types of neurosis, like obsessional neurosis, develop more on the basis of a one-sided
46
THE ART OF LOVING
father attachment, while others, like hysteria, alcoholism, inability to assert oneself and to cope with life realistically, and
depressions, result from mother-centeredness.
3. T H E O B J E C T S O F LOVE
Love is not primarily a relationship to a specific person; it
is an attitude, an orientation of character which determines
the relatedness of a person to the world as a whole, not
toward one "object" of love. If a person loves only one other
person and is indifferent to the rest of his fellow men, his
love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged
egotism. Yet, most people believe that love is constituted by
the object, not by the faculty. In fact, they even believe that
it is a proof of the intensity of their love when they do not
love anybody except the "loved" person. This is the same
fallacy which we have already mentioned above. Because
one does not see that love is an activity, a power of the soul,
one believes that all that is necessary to find is the right
object—and that everything goes by itself afterward. This
attitude can be compared to that of a man who wants to
paint but who, instead of learning the art, claims that he
has just to wait for the right object, and that he will paint
beautifully when he finds it. If I truly love one person I love
all persons, I love the world, I love life. If I can say to somebody else, "I love you," I must be able to say, "I love in
you everybody, I love through you the world, I love in you
also myself."
Saying that love is an orientation which refers to all and
not to one does not imply, however, the idea that there are
THE THEORY OF LOVE
47
no differences between various types of love, which depend
on the kind of object which is loved.
a. Brotherly Love
The most fundamental kind of love, which underlies all
types of love, is brotherly love. By this I mean the sense of
responsibility, care, respect, knowledge of any other human
being, the wish to further his life. This is the kind of love the
Bible speaks of when it says: love thy neighbor as thyself.
Brotherly love is love for all human beings; it is characterized
by its very lack of exclusiveness. If I have developed the
capacity for love, then I cannot help loving my brothers. In
brotherly love there is the experience of union with all men,
of human solidarity, of human at-onement. Brotherly love is
based on the experience that we all are one. The differences
in talents, intelligence, knowledge are negligible in comparison with the identity of the human core common to all men.
In order to experience this identity it is necessary to penetrate from the periphery to the core. If I perceive in another
person mainly the surface, I perceive mainly the differences,
that which separates us. If I penetrate to the core, I perceive
our identity, the fact of our brotherhood. This relatedness
from center to center—instead of that from periphery to
periphery—is "central relatedness." Or as Simone Weil expressed it so beautifully: "The same words [e.g., a man says
to his wife, "I love you"] can be commonplace or extraordinary according to the manner in which they are spoken.
And this manner depends on the depth of the region in a
man's being from which they proceed without the will being
able to do anything. And by a marvelous agreement they
48
THE ART OF LOVING
reach the same region in him who hears them. Thus the
hearer can discern, if he has any power of discernment, what
is the value of the words." "
Brotherly love is love between equals: but, indeed, even as
equals we are not always "equal"; inasmuch as we are
human, we are all in need of help. Today I, tom...
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