Episode #150 - Transcript

Hello, everyone. I’m Stephen West. This is Philosophize This!

Promise we’ll get back to the media series as soon as I can. It’s taken me a bit longer on this next episode, but I want to release more frequent episodes. So I wanted to start a second series on the Frankfurt School—the other thinkers of the Frankfurt School. Their work and so many of the problems they were facing during their time is so relevant in today’s world. And if you haven’t heard the first series, people seem to like it. So go back and check it out. But today marks the beginning of the second series of the Frankfurt School, and today we begin by discussing the work of Erich Fromm and his thoughts on love. I hope you love the show today.

So, Erich Fromm in his 1956 book The Art of Loving famously wrote this about love: “Love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence.” But what did he mean by that? See, that’s how I do it on this show. I ask you a question. I interview you. You can’t answer, and then I answer the question. See, I’m going for a level of narcissism and self-importance here that is truly legendary. But seriously, what did he mean by that? Well, I think the best entry point into understanding what he meant would be to look at the two most philosophically loaded concepts in that statement, and that would be: one, love—what did he mean when he said “love?”—and two, what does he mean when he says “the fundamental problem of human existence?”

To put it very simply, what Fromm is referencing when he says “the fundamental problem of human existence” is separateness. Human beings are conscious beings. And that consciousness allows us to be aware of what he calls a type of existential loneliness. We are aware that we are ultimately separate from every other human being that’s out there. We are aware that no matter how much of a support system we have, if the right confluence of events came to pass, we ultimately only have ourselves. And that self, by the way, is consciously aware that it feels separate from the entire rest of the universe. We’re aware that we are one tiny pixel in a universe that’s so large it’s difficult for our brains to even fathom. We are blips on a timescale so large it seems impossible to even comprehend.

This reality of the human condition, for Fromm, is a big reason why people often want to find a way to connect to something greater than themselves, to alleviate this separateness. By the way, it should be said that for Fromm as well as many other members of the Frankfurt School, this is also going to come along with a pretty big critique of the way modern society alienates us from each other. The example we gave on the last Frankfurt School series was about boxes. We live in this thing that looks like a box, away from everyone else. We drive to work in a box. We sometimes work in a cubicle, root word “cube,” which actually is just a box. How about the social boxes we exist in? Many more examples, but the point is, we are alone. And the worst part to Fromm is that we realize it.

So, again, to combat this separateness from everything, there are tons of strategies people have used all throughout history to try to connect to something greater than themselves. Religion, philosophy—sure. But really our desire to connect to a tribe in general is connected to this existential loneliness. The desire to become a great painter or write a legendary novel or even make a mediocre philosophy podcast—all of this is just a desperate attempt by me to quell this feeling of separateness. But Fromm says, in our modern societies, how practical is it really for the average person to try to become a painter that’s so good they live beyond their lifetime? No, they got to work. It’s impossible. And the people realize that as well.

So, one of the most common strategies people use is to try to harness various different instantiations of love. A very common one is for people to try to find romantic love or a partner they don’t have to feel so separate from all the time. Finding romantic love becomes one of the most important things in the plans people make when starting out their lives. People want love so bad they watch movies and TV shows about it. They listen to songs about it. They read stories about it. To Erich Fromm, it’s as though the people were starved of love. And who in their right mind could blame anybody for putting in so much effort trying to find it? I mean, who wants to die alone? No wonder we work so hard constantly honing our strategy to find love.

Or do we really? Fromm would probably want to preface this next section by saying, consider how many of these relationships fail, and not for reasons where you’re forced by circumstance to go your separate ways. Like, if you’re listening to this, and you’re not currently in love, then barring certain exceptions, for most of us every single attempt you’ve made at love has failed. Why should this be the case if we’re supposedly putting in so much effort to have enduring love in our lives? The answer for Fromm is that most of us are using a horrible strategy. And the slogan for that strategy if there was one is that to find love if you’re not currently in love, become more lovable. Go to the gym. Advance your career. Buy some cool clothes. Learn to play the ukulele. That always seems to work.

But are these really things that are going to increase your odds of finding love? Fromm thinks all you’ve really done here is turn yourself into a product to be consumed on what he calls the personality market. And how fitting, to Fromm, that in our modern capitalist societies we’d be so inclined to turn our love lives and the love lives of other people into commodities to be marketed, bought, sold, and traded. You improve something about yourself; you increase your value within the market. You look around at all the options, pick the best one you can get with your current stock price, and then you enter into a mutually beneficial transaction with this other person where you receive in return a rush of emotions and endorphins and feels. And all of a sudden in a fleeting moment, you just realize it has happened. I am in love now.

In other words, love is something that happens to you. We say things like, “I fell in love.” Strategy is: you become as lovable as you possibly can, and then love finds you. You don’t find it. Haven’t found it yet? Well, wait around for a while and hopefully it will find you. Finding love is a passive process for most people.

But Erich Fromm would say this is a perfect example of something he would call a type of immature love, which is to say a type of narcissistic love, a transactional love where two ultimately needy people decide they’re going to set up an arrangement where each one of them appease the insecurities and weaknesses of the other. Let’s team up our egos. In other words, the type of person that I would fall in love with would have gone to the gym, would have advanced their career, would have played the ukulele like Kermit the freaking Frog. Finally, I’ve found somebody who makes me feel this way. Love is a feeling. Love is a noun.

Wait, I just realized Kermit the Frog played the banjo. But it doesn’t matter. The point is, how many of you out there have ever felt like somebody has only loved the idea of you rather than you? Well, Erich Fromm thinks in these kinds of transactional relationships, the intensity of the infatuation with each other is often correlated to just the intensity of the loneliness people had experienced before that. But this isn’t love. This is what can you do for me, and what can I do for you in return? In other words, you have essentially turned the person you “love” into a product to be consumed that provides your ego with some tangible benefit. And in turn you have turned yourself into a product that has a similar exchange value.

So, when we consider the rate at which relationships fail, when we consider how often things run their course or people get bored of someone, Fromm would say, well, if the two of you are essentially just consumable products of similar value on the personality market, of course you’re going to get bored of them when you see them in this way. Let me explain. Say you got into board games one day. And you go down to the store, and you buy Monopoly. You go home; you play it. You love it. You play it again the next day. You do this week after week, and you play it so much that the little shoe thing erodes down because of the oils in your fingers. How long can this go on? How long until you get bored of Monopoly and want to go out and buy another game to play? How long until what you initially got out of Monopoly is no longer something you need anymore, or what you initially got from it you now get better from something else, like paddleboarding or something?

This is a reality of our modern consumer lives. We buy things. We enjoy them for a while. And then we get bored of them and either donate them to someone else or throw them in the trash. When we commodify our love lives and choose to love people in relation to what benefit they can provide for us, we essentially turn our partners into that game of Monopoly. This is why Fromm would say, no wonder so many relationships forged by this strategy fail. When you structure your love life around the ethos of “you scratch my back, and I scratch yours”—well, have you ever had someone scratching your back and then they scratch for too long? What at first was a very welcome service they were providing for you can become very annoying in a short period of time. What’s interesting though is that there’s going to be strong parallels here between the way Fromm sees this strategy of treating the people we love and his views on authoritarianism and how it flourishes within a society, which we’re actually talking about next episode.

For example, consider this quote from one of his other works: “Domination springs from impotence and in turn reinforces it, for if an individual can force somebody else to serve him, his own need to be productive is increasingly paralyzed.” Notice how this same idea could be applied to our strategies for love. See, remember, all these strategies to have love in our life came out of the need to get rid of this existential loneliness. So, if we can get someone else to serve us, if we can get somebody to make us feel less alone and less anxious, to silence some of these insecurities about which weaknesses of ours our partner should be compensating for, then we can effectively not have to feel any of the negative feelings that might have otherwise got us to take action and do the work to improve ourselves.

Fromm thinks the solution to all this is actually kind of ironic. We engage in this mutually beneficial transaction with another person to try to escape the feeling of being alone, when the solution to be able to actually love someone in a real capacity is to learn to be alone. See, whenever we fail, whenever a relationship ends, we often adjust our strategy for the future by saying, “Oh, well, this time I’m going to search even harder for the perfect person. This time I’m going to work even harder to become more lovable.” We spend so much time doing this and so little time questioning the very foundations of how we see love in the first place. Like, where’d you get your ideas about what love is and how to find it anyway? Was it a YouTube video or something? Where’d we get these deeply rooted ideas about it? And if it is something that’s so important to us, why do we spend so little time really trying to understand it?

Fromm says that one of the big mistaken ideas people have about love is that it’s a thing. But he says, love is not an object; it’s a faculty. Which put another way is to say that love is not a noun; love is a verb. Most people think their problem is not being loved enough. Their real problem is their ability to love. So, knowing all this, here’s how Fromm describes how he sees the faculty of love: “Love is a relatively rare phenomenon, and its place is taken by a number of forms of pseudo-love…” Later he writes this in reference to this idea that love is something that happens to you or it’s an emotion or it’s a noun in any sense: “Love is a passionate affirmation of an ‘object’; it is not an ‘affect’ but an active striving and inter relatedness, the aim of which is the happiness, growth, and freedom of its object. It is a readiness which, in principle, can turn to any person and object including ourselves.”

So, hearing this definition and understanding love as this active striving that Fromm’s talking about, the question becomes, why do so many of us have such a hard time developing this ability? Well, notice a key difference between the transactional model of love and Fromm’s conception of love. Fromm’s idea says nothing about even considering what the other person can do for me. And this leads him to one of the most important ideas in the entire book The Art of Loving—that you will never be able to love any one person until you can love everyone, because you will always be picking and choosing the people you love in terms of what benefits they can provide to you. Fromm says this kind of love more resembles symbiotic attachment or enlarged egotism than anything that really has to do with love. This also explains his point of why he says it’s not until you can be alone that you can truly love, because it’s only from that place of not having some needs checklist you’re constantly trying to complete that you can see people and things for who and what they are and not what they can do for you.

Love is not something that happens to you. There doesn’t need to be some external cue that causes you to have love for someone. They don’t need to look a certain way. They don’t need to do something nice for you or compliment your shoes the right way or admire your career at the level you approve of. Love is a choice you make. It is an active choice to shine love outward to everything and everyone. Again, he says, if you truly love someone, you love them for who they are, not who you want them to be. Otherwise, you’re just making them an extension of your own ego. You’re projecting your own desires and expectations onto them. This is why love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to this feeling of separateness from everything and everyone. This is a connection that isn’t reliant on any external factors. It’s a connection to give to others that you choose for yourself. And that’s the thing, if you choose not to give love to others, then you probably won’t be seeing it anytime soon yourself.

You know, he has this really great line in The Art of Loving where he essentially says that if you’re somebody that goes around in your life, and you’re never interested in anything, then you’re never going to find anything interesting. Well, in the same way, if you go around your life never projecting this love outward into the world, you’re probably going to be living a pretty loveless existence. But Fromm would say, as easy as it is to understand this shift in theory that needs to happen for finding love, putting it into practice is much easier said than done. Love is a relatively rare phenomenon, remember. And it’s because it’s very difficult to master and even more difficult to sustain. This is not a part-time job.

In fact, if Fromm had to give love a category to be a part of, he’d have to say that love can best be described as an art. He says, “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…” We’ll talk in a minute about the specifics he gives for how to proceed from here, but it’s important to understand why Fromm is going in this direction at all. Why of all things would he refer to love as an art?

Here’s what he’s getting at. Think of any person that dedicates themselves to an art—true masters of what they do. These are people that have given themselves over to this artistic process, people who have dedicated their lives so much to their craft that they actually perceive the world in a different way than other people. An illustrator sees a park bench differently than someone that’s just walking their dog in the park. A musician hears the noise on the subway different from someone sitting there on their way to work at a bank. To become a true master of an art requires an immersion that is with you 24/7, not just when you feel like doing it. It is so much a part of the fabric of who you are that it’s become inseparable.

Now, think of those people, for example, that tell other people, “Yeah, I’m a writer, actually,” and they’ve written like three things in the last six months. Fromm would probably ask, is that person really a writer just because they can write letters down on a piece of paper when it’s convenient or at moments when they feel particularly inspired? Who isn’t a writer at that point as long as they know the alphabet? Applied more generally, to call yourself an artist in any capacity has to run deeper for Fromm, down to the very way you live your life. Art is a part of you, and you of it. It’s not something you just pull out of the closet when you have a little extra time here and there. Well, so too with the art of love. Once again, love is a full-time job. In many ways, love is a promise, Fromm says. Otherwise, how could you possibly vow to love someone forever? Love is not about searching harder and finding the right person; love is about improving a skill.

So how do we achieve mastery of that skill? Well, one interesting thing Fromm asks us to consider in this pursuit is that, just like many other forms of art like we talked about before, modern society also works against people pursuing a mastery of love or loving at all. Why is this? Well, remember his definition of love. Love is an active striving for the growth and happiness of the loved person, rooted in one’s capacity to love. We’re supposed to immerse our lives in this act of striving. But what does modern society tell us to actively strive for? Fromm says: success, prestige, money, and power—all of which run contrary to this whole love process. So, in a way, if you’re ever going to love in a truly artistic fashion, you are necessarily going to have to be counterculture as well. So, if the amount of effort and concentration and patience required to love well wasn’t enough of a barrier for you, well, here’s a cultural barrier we can tack on there as well.

Nonetheless, let’s say you’re not deterred by any of this. You’re not deterred by how difficult it’s going to be, and you still want to pursue love as an art to alleviate this separateness. Fromm thinks the process of improving at loving is very similar to the process of improving at other forms of art. He talks about four main things you can focus on: humility, courage, faith, and discipline.

So, the first one is humility. One of the main things he’s referencing here is that we need to try to avoid these siren songs of the ego. To become a truly great artist you need to approach the process of growth with humility. Because if you sit there as though you already know exactly how to do things and project your own expectations or desires onto the craft, you’re always going to improve less quickly than you otherwise could because you’re not going to be open to all the lessons making themselves available to you. Well, so too with love. We need to try to have objectivity about loving people. Because if you only choose to love people that you already think are worthy of receiving it, then you’re already sabotaging yourself.

The second one is courage. Getting better at anything is an uncomfortable process. You’re faced with roadblocks, puzzles, hostility from others. But a necessary part of improving is to keep going through this discomfort with a bit of courage. Fromm says you’re going to run into similar problems when trying to cultivate this capacity to love, and you’re going to need a similar level of courage.

The third one is faith. So, to master a really difficult piece of music, you may have to sit down at the piano a thousand times, making mistake after mistake, no doubt frustrated at times because it may seem impossible. But the people that stick with it and end up mastering the song are the people that had a sort of rational faith in the process. They didn’t try to play it five times, run a few experiments, and just assume it was impossible. They accepted their failures with faith that it was going to be possible in the end. So too with the art of love. You are not always going to be great at nurturing the growth and happiness of every single person. But the ones who eventually get there, Fromm thinks, will be the ones who had a level of rational faith.

The last one is discipline. This one should be obvious by now. Love is not a passive process or something that just happens to you. Love is something you do. And you do it every single day with discipline the same way you’d practice any other art every single day. Fromm says, “The capacity to love demands a state of intensity, awareness, enhanced vitality, which can only be the result of a productive and active orientation in many other spheres of life.” What is he talking about here? There I go interviewing myself again. What he’s getting at is that love is ultimately about giving. And the thing you are giving to the other person is ultimately yourself. And no matter how much time you spend trying to develop yourself as an artist, the quality of that art can only be guaranteed if you take care of yourself in many other areas of life.

To give a simplistic example, just imagine a musician who practices 16 hours a day, but they never take a shower. And they get some flesh-eating bacteria that eats both their hands. You can’t play the saxophone with your feet, people. Let that be a metaphor for the fact that in order to be the best you can be as a practitioner of love as an art, you need to love yourself first, because part of loving your fellow humans and part of loving that special someone is loving yourself enough to be healthy enough to show up and put this theory into practice.

Now, I could drone on here about airplanes and oxygen masks and all kinds of stuff, but I’d much rather leave you here today with it being written beautifully by somebody ten times smarter than I will ever be. Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving: “Love of others and love of ourselves are not alternatives. On the contrary, an attitude of love towards themselves will be found in all those who are capable of loving others. Love in principle is indivisible as far as the connection between objects and one’s own self are concerned.”

Thank you for listening. I'll talk to you next time.