The Art of Loving

by Erich Fromm

rational faith is rooted in an independent conviction based upon one’s own productive observing and thinking, in spite of the majority’s opinion.

Education is identical with helping the child realize his potentialities.

The opposite of education is manipulation, which is based on the absence of faith in the growth of potentialities, and on the conviction that a child will be right only if the adults put into him what is desirable and suppress what seems to be undesirable.

The basis of rational faith is productiveness; to live by our faith means to live productively.

Akin to my Useful IFS part

the belief in power (in the sense of domination) and the use of power are the reverse of faith. To believe in power that exists is identical with disbelief in the growth of potentialities which are as yet unrealized. It is a prediction of the future based solely on the manifest present; but it turns out to be a grave miscalculation, profoundly irrational in its oversight of the human potentialities and human growth. There is no rational faith in power.

To have faith requires courage, the ability to take a risk, the readiness even to accept pain and disappointment.

Whoever insists on safety and security as primary conditions of life cannot have faith; whoever shuts himself off in a system of defense, where distance and possession are his means of security, makes himself a prisoner.

This courage is very different from the courage of which that famous braggart Mussolini spoke when he used the slogan “to live dangerously.” His kind of courage is the courage of nihilism. It is rooted in a destructive attitude toward life, in the willingness to throw away life because one is incapable of loving it. The courage of despair is the opposite of the courage of love, just as the faith in power is the opposite of the faith in life.

activity. I have said before that by activity is not meant “doing something,”

but an inner activity, the productive use of one’s powers. Love is an activity; if I love, I am in a constant state of active concern with the loved person, but not only with him or her.

Jewish-Christian norm of brotherly love is entirely different from fairness ethics.

It means to love your neighbor, that is, to feel responsible for and one with him,

while fairness ethics means not to feel responsible, and one, but distant and separate; it means to respect the rights of ...

the Golden Rule has become the most popular religious maxim today; because it can be interpreted in terms of fairness ethics it is the one religious maxim which everybody understands and is willing to practice. But the practice of love must ...

Actually it is shared implicitly by the average person who feels “I would like to be a good Christian—but I would have to starve if I meant it seriously.” This “radicalism” results in moral nihilism.

love is by necessity a marginal phenomenon in present-day Western society.