Love According To Erich Fromm
To love, for psychologist Erich Fromm, indicates to care for the very best interests of the beloved and to actively work to promote those interests. This means that love is really a faculty, and ability, and not an object.
The noun/verb confusion may be one particular explanation why quite a few are puzzled by the matter of love. Folks conceive of love as an object, a “something” that is to be had, possessed, when in fact love is the active everyday practice of an ability. And like any ability, love – to love – takes practice. It truly is, in fact, the one thing that makes us most fully human.
Reason has been held up as the most uniquely human trait, but actually that distinction more correctly belongs to love (specifically, the ability to love), which is, on the face of it, really illogical – unless one understands the interconnectedness of all humanity; indeed, all life. Man is an animal, to be certain, but one that has self-reflective awareness as well as the capability to reason – and to love.
Love, for Fromm, grows out of man’s rational faculty, and complements it, even superseding it, in a sense. And interestingly, love is both ability and a need to have – human beings are able to love and actually need to love, to express care and concern above and beyond themselves. And insofar as people tend not to allow themselves to love, they do not allow themselves to be happy.
The intimate connection between love and happiness seems obvious enough, but most folks confuse love with desire and desire with pleasure. Actually, desires could be pretty unpleasant and desires most certainly can exist without having love. As Fromm writes, not I love you due to the fact I need you, but I need you simply because I love you. And so it truly is that by practicing love, but (being) loving, we are also happy.
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