At the start of this year I changed the site’s tagline to be ‘Truth. Beauty. Freedom. Love’ from the Bohemian creed in Baz Luhrmann’s Moulin Rouge! Few people would disagree that these are good things, though many would disagree about what each actually entails.
I thought I would share then some of my recent reading on the most important of the four - love.
Late last year I was feeling down and turned to Irvin Yalom’s Existential Psychotherapy as I often do, this time reading the section on Isolation which I had not done before. In that section he draws heavily on the earlier work of Erich Fromm (who died in 1980, the year EP was published) on the nature of mature loving relationships. I was impressed enough that I went and read the source material, The Art of Loving (1956).
For Fromm the dominant understanding of love was (and I believe remains) romantic love - forever reflected back and reinforced by popular culture - that emphasises being loved as the most important state that a person could be in. To be loved was to be happy, satisfied, successful. To not be loved was to be perpetually failing.
This means that people relate to others with the need to be loved and so others become instruments for satisfying that need. It’s possible for a stable relationship to form where each person needs and instrumentalises the other, but this is not ideal. Yalom compares such a couple to two playing cards leaning against each other.
The solution that Fromm gives is to refocus on loving. For him, loving is the truly desirable state and it is a skill ( an ‘art’ in fact) that needs to be deliberately practiced. When one truly loves another they do so without needing anything in particular from them. Their love is not contingent on support or validation; it is not contingent at all.
This reminds me of (via my very limited understanding) Plato’s theory of love that he presents in the Symposium. The simple story - which is the only one I know - is that true love is an admiration for another’s arete or virtue. In the more modern humanism of Fromm this becomes a desire to see in the person loved the greatest realisation of their human potential.
Fromm acknowledges that we can never relate to anybody in a purely mature way all the time. Our day to day and moment to moment desires will always cloud things but it remains something we should strive for as best we can.
A corollary of this way of thinking, as Fromm sees it, is that once this loving attitude is developed it applies to everyone. You can’t truly love one person and not someone else, since to not love someone implies that there is something about them which prevents your love. But how is this possible if you do not need them to be in any particular way? What if they do or say terrible things? Should we love a mass murderer? Fromm would say a mature, loving person does not need someone to not do or say terrible things, to not be a mass murderer.
This may cause some people some revulsion, but I do not think there is an inconsistency. Say we were standing before Jack and Jill, Jack is holding a gun, preparing to shoot Jill. We happen to have a gun ourselves. Our love for Jack means that we want him to realise, as fully as possible, his human potential, including his potential for compassion, which would prevent him from shooting Jill. Our love for Jill means that we do not want to see her murdered.
If the only way we can save Jill is to shoot Jack dead then our love for both of them compels us to do so.
So these are some of the things I’ve been thinking about in a time that seems increasingly characterised by hate.