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THE ART OF LOVING Copyright

Printed in the United States of America All rights in this book are reserved,

—

No part of the book may be used or reproduced any manner whatsoever without written permission except in the case of/ brief quotations embodied in critical articles/ and reviews. For in

information address Harper & Row, 10 East 53d Street

New York, N.Y. 10022 79 80^32 31 30

Library of Congress catalog card number: 56-8750

Contents

World Perspectives Foreword Is ii.

xix

Love an Art?

The Theory of Love

7 >

Love, the Answer to the Problem of

Love Between Parent and Child The Objects of Love a. Brotherly Love b. Motherly Love Erotic Love c.

Human Existence 3.

hi.

Self-Love

Love of God

Love and Its Disintegration in Contemporary Western Society

The Practice of Love

107

World Perspectives

WORLD PERSPECTIVES

dedicated to the concept of

man born out of a universe perceived through a fresh vision 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 of reality. Its

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

WORLD PERSPECTIVES

which has released the creative energies of peoples, are treated in these books.

Our authors deal with the increas-

ing 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

For the principle of which connects spirit with the

of life itself is attempted in this Series. life

consists in the tension

realm of matted. The element of life is dominant in the very texture q£ nature, thus rendering

life,

biology, a transem-

pirical science. The laws of life have their origin beyond their mere physical manifestations and compel us to consider their

spiritual source.

fact,

the widening of the conceptual

framework has not only^served to restore order within the respective branches

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 mstn and nature as opposite forces, nor in the reduction of data to

mere statistical order, but is a

WORLD PERSPECTIVES

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

man who may now guide change by means of conscious purpose in the

self-realization which are the inalienable rights of

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

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 growing perception and

responsibility

of our

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 secular-

ized

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

WORLD PERSPECTIVES

Xll

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

today to such terms as democracy, freedom,

are given

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 con-

form to the social optimism of modern civilization and that

WORLD PERSPECTIVES

Xlll

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

the organization of

bondage.

There is in mankind today a counterforce to the sterility and danger of a quantitative, anonymous mass culture, a new,

sometimes imperceptible,

spiritual sense of conver-

gence 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 free-

dom 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 World Perspectives seeks

articulating its thought and belief, * Mditri 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 some modern interpretations of science, to accept as the total truth

of consciousness as a result of the tendency, due to

only limited descriptions of truth. The triumphant advance of science, culminating in new realities concerning the sub-

atomic 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 unfold-

ing of events in the center of which man finds himself as a stranger in a foreign land. The specific modern emphasis on

on and specific Christian God the emphasis on the historical nature of revelation must now history as progressive, the specific prophetic emphasis

as acting through history,

WORLD PERSPECTIVES

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 man. For our World Age is indeed the most dire and 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.

apocalyptic mankind has ever faced in

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 theol-

ogy could exist as a science, on the one hand, and on the other, in Kant's denial that metaphysics could exist as a science. still

Some fossilized forms of such positivistic thinking

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

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 reiects tht>

WORLD PERSPECTIVES

XVI

of mythology adequate only for the satisfaction of emotional needs. In other words, the fundamental problems of philos-

ophy, those problems which are central to

life,

are again

confronting science and philosophy itself. Our problem is to

and yet relationship enough to justify and to purify both scientific and philosophical knowledge by accepting their mutual interdiscover a principle of differentiation

lucid

dependence. 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

name

by protecting social injustice in the

of social justice

are also being examined

and

re-

evaluated 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

XV11

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.

curity and individual freedom are in possibility of

National

se-

ominous conflict. The

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

by the Annunciation of the Kingdom, by the 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 unagainst evil

promise of Eternal Life

—

explained.

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 to-

ward its source may rekindle its light in an imminent new

dawn

—even

as in the last book of Revelation which speaks

WORLD PERSPECTIVES

XV1U

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: first

for the

first

heaven and the

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 national-

and in spite of spiritual bereavement and moral ambeneath the apparent turmoil and upheaval of the present, and out of the transformations of this dynamic

isms,

nesia,

period with the unfolding of a world-consciousness, the pur-

pose 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

man to mankind while deepening and enhancing his communion with the universe.

restores

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 orienta-

tion; 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.

—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 com-

plications 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,

FOREWORD

XX 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

and quite naturally even older ones sometimes gain new perspectives by the fact that they are all centered around one topic, that

ideas beyond the previously expressed ones,

of the art of loving.

E. F.

He who knows nothing, loves nothing. He who can do nothing understands nothing. He who understands nothing

worthless.

understands also loves, notices,

more knowledge greater

the

that

fruits ripen

all

love.

sees.

inherent in

is .

But he who .

The

a thing, the

Anyone who imagines

at the

same time

as the

strawberries knows nothing about grapes.

Paracelsus

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

little

if one is lucky? This book is based on the former premise, while undoubtedly

of chance, something one "falls into'

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 is

—

yet hardly anyone thinks that there

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

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.

oneself lovable are the

same

Many of the ways to make as those used to

make one-

and influence people." As a matter of fact, what most people in our culture mean by

self successful,

"to win friends

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

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?

enhanced the importance of the object as against the importance of the function. Closely related to this factor teristic of

another feature charac-

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 pack-

age of qualities which are popular and sought after on the personality market.

What specifically makes a person attrac-

tive 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

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 "stand-

ing" in love. If two people who have been strangers, as all

them break down, and feel close, feel one, this moment of oneness is one of the

of us are, suddenly let the wall between

most exhilarating, most exciting experiences in life. It is all

more wonderful and miraculous for persons who have

the

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 disap-

pointments, their mutual boredom kill whatever is left of the initial

excitement. Yet, in the beginning they do not know

all this:

this

in fact, they take the intensity of the infatuation,

being "crazy" about each other, for proof of the in-

tensity of their love, while

may only prove the degree of

their preceding loneliness.

—that nothing

This attitude

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-

LOVE AN ART?

dous hopes and expectations, and yet, which fails so regu-

were the case with any other activity,

larly, as love. If this

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 wr ay 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 two parts: one, the mastery of the theory; the other, 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 mediinto

the mastery of the practice. If

cine. 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

—my

one

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 car-

pentry—and for love. And, maybe, here lies the answer to

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

considered to be more important than love

—almost

money, power

all

success, prestige,

our energy is used for the learn-

ing 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, 55

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: will

first

I shall discuss the theory of love

—and

this

comprise the greater part of the book; and secondly I

shall discuss the practice of love

—

little

practice in this, as in any other field.

as can be said about

II.

The Theory of Love

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 is

equipment can be seen operating in man. What

essential in the existence of

man is the fact that he has

emerged from the animal kingdom, from instinctive adaptation,

leaves

it;

—and

he is a part of it

nature, he cannot return to

—a

dise

—although he never

that he has transcended nature

it;

yet once torn away from

once thrown out of para-

state of original oneness with nature

flaming swords block his way,

—cherubim with

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

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 things and people actively; it means that the

the world

—

world can invade me without my ability to react. Thus, separateness

the source of intense anxiety. Beyond that,

arouses shame

and the feeling of guilt. This experience of 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 guilt

—

THE THEORY OF LOVE "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 follow-

ing:

after

man and woman have become aware of them-

selves and of each other, they are aware of their separateness,

and of their difference, inasmuch as they belong to different 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

sexes.

defend her). The awareness of human separation, without reunion by love

—

the source of shame. It

at the

same

time the source of guilt and anxiety.

The deepest need of man, then, is the need to overcome The

his separateness, to leave the prison of his aloneness.

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

—

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 tranof separation disappears

—

scend one's

—

own individual life and find at-onement. The

is the same for primitive man living in caves, for nomadic man taking care of his flocks, for the peasant in

question

THE ART OF LOVING

Egypt, the Phoenician trader, the Roman soldier, the medieval monk, the Japanese samurai, the modern clerk and fac-

The question is the same, for it springs from same ground: the human situation, the conditions of

tory hand.

the

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 neverthe-

—

less 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 num-

ber 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;

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 pres-

ence of the mother, her breasts, her skin. Only to the degree that the child develops his sense of separateness and individuality

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

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 transi-

tory 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

added which makes this solution all the more

the group

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

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 act in this

chosen by an individual in a culture which has left behind

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 pat-

terned 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

by far the most frequent solution chosen by man in the the union based on conformity with the group, its customs, practices and beliefs. Here again we is

past and in the present

find a considerable development.

In a primitive society the group

small;

consists of

those with whom one shares blood and soil. With the grow-

ing development of culture, the group enlarges; it becomes

THE THEORY OF LOVE

;

the citizenry of a polls3 the citizenry of a large state, the j

members

of a

church. Even the poor

Roman felt pride

(because he could say "clvls romanus sum"; Rome and the j

fimpire were his family, his home, his world. Also in con-

temporary 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 every-

body 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 dif-

ference between the

conformity

two systems. In the democracies nonby no means entirely

possible and, in fact,

absent; in the totalitarian systems, only a few unusual heroes

| and martyrs can be expected to refuse obedience. But in spite 1 of this difference the democratic societies show an over-

whelming degree of conformity. The reason lies in the fact that there has to be an answer to the quest for union, and if I [(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 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 equal-

ity,

societies.

developing in the most advanced industrial

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

instance in the

expressed for

Talmudic statement: "Whosoever saves a

single life is as if he had saved the whole world;

destroys a single

life

whosoever

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

clearly formulated by Kant) that no man must be the means

for the ends of another man. That all men are equal inas-

much 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 viduality.

men who have lost their indi-

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

bought at this very price:

women are equal because they are not different any more. The proposition of Enlightenment philosophy, Vame 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 be-

come the same, not equals as opposite poles. Contemporary society preaches this ideal of unindividualized equality be-

cause it needs human atoms, each one the same, to make

them function in a mass aggregation, smoothly, without fric-

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 5

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 sui-

cide in contemporary Western society are symptoms of this relative failure of

herd conformity. Furthermore, this solu-

tion concerns mainly the this reason

mind and not the body, and for

too is lacking in comparison with the orgiastic

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

solutions.

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 pleasure routine.

the role of the work routine and of

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 fulness, tolerance, reliability,

ambition, and an ability to get

tlong with everybody without friction.

Fun is routinized in

imilar, although not quite as drastic ways. Books are selected »y

the book clubs, movies by the film and theater owners

id the advertising slogans paid for by them; the rest is also

Itiniform: 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 iare routinized, and prefabricated.

—

all activities

How should a man caught

in this net of routine not forget that he is a man,

a unique

I 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

I 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 pro-

ductive work, for result of

work in which / plan, produce, see the

my work. In the modern work process of a clerk,

the worker on the endless belt, quality of work.

little

is left

of this uniting

The worker becomes an appendix to the

machine or to the bureaucratic organization. He has ceased to be he formity.

—hence no union

takes place beyond that of con-

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

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

—self-destruction or destruction of others. With-

destruction-

out 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.

—and

ferent ways

Fusion can be achieved in dif-

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 What matters is that we know what kind of union

arbitrary.

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-

—9 ;

THE THEORY OF LOVE

ship between the pregnant mother and the foetus. They are

They live "together," (sym-biosis) they need each other. The foetus is a part of the mother, it retwo, and yet one.

ceives everything it

needs from her; mother is its world, as

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,

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

called an idol; in a secular context of a masochistic love re-

lationship the essential mechanism, that of idolatry,

same.

The

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 re-

nounces his integrity, makes himself the instrument of some-

THE ART OF LOVING 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 the

use

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,

commanded,

chistic

person

This

a considerable difference in a

and that the maso-

exploited, hurt, humiliated. realistic sense; in

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 chistic

and the maso-

manner, usually toward different objects. Hitler re-

acted primarily in a sadistic fashion toward people, but masochistically toward fate, history, the "higher power" of

nature. His end characteristic as tion.

—

suicide

was

his

among general destruction dream

—

of success

total

—

domina-

In contrast to symbiotic union, mature love is union under the condition of preserving one's integrity, one's individual-

Love is an active power in man; a power which breaks through the walls which separate man from his fellow men, ity.

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 jityirhich

unites him with others; love makes him overcome the

Isfense of isolation Ijihimself,

and separateness, yet it permits him to be

to retain his integrity. In love the paradox occurs

that two beings become one and yet remain two.

we say love is an activity, we face a difficulty which lies in the ambiguous meaning of the word "activity." By If

Inactivity," in the modern usage of the word, is usually meant |UV action which brings about a change in an existing situa-

| tion

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. I 1

Common to all these activities is that they are directed

I toward an outside goal to be achieved.

What is not taken into

| Recount is the motivation of activity. Take for instance a man

| driven to incessant work by a sense of deep insecurity and joneliness; or another one driven by ambition, or greed for ii

money* In all these cases the person is the slave of a passion,

and

his

activity

driven; he

in reality a

"passivity" because he

the sufferer, not the "actor."

On the other

hand, a man sitting quiet and contemplating, with no purl

[

;

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 tivity of the soul,

the highest activity there is, an ac-

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 achieve-

ment 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

THE ART OF LOVING

22 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

man is free, he is the master of his affect; in the exercise of a passive affect, man is driven, the object of

affect,

motivations of which he himself is not aware. Thus Spinoza arrives at the statement that virtue

the same.

and power are one and

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

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;

cheated.

giving without receiving for

him

being

People whose main orientation is a non-productive

one feel giving as an impoverishment. Most individuals of 2 Spinoza,

Ethics IV, Def. 8. a detailed discussion of these character orientations in E. Fromm, Man for Himself, Rinehart & Company, New York, 1947, Chap. Ill, pp. 54-117. 3 Cf.

THE THEORY OF LOVE Ithis 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 dif| ferent

meaning. Giving is the highest expression of potency.

I experience my strength, my my power. This experience of heightened vitality and potency fills me with joy. I experience myself as over-

In the very act of giving,

-''Wealth,

flowing, 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 aliver

ness. It is not difficult to recognize the validity of this principle

^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

| pf 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 * Compare the definition of joy given by Spinoza.

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,

re-

gardless of how much he has. Whoever is capable of giving of himself

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, it

and is so degrading, not only because of the suffering

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 knowl-

edge, 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-

THE THEORY OF LOVE

He does not give in order to receive; giving is in itself

ness.

But in giving he cannot help bringing some-

exquisite joy.

thing to life in the other person, and this which is brought to life reflects

back to him; in truly giving, he cannot help re-

ceiving that which

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

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 ex-

pression 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

impotent, a

But not only in love does giving mean receivThe teacher is taught by his students, the actor is stimu-

misfortune." ing.

lated

his

audience, the psychoanalyst

cured by

his

5 "Nationalokonomie und Philosophic," 1844, published in Karl Marx' Die Friihschriften, Alfred Kroner Verlag, Stuttgart, 1953, pp.

300, 301.

(My translation, E. F.)

THE ART OF LOVING

—provided they do not

patient

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 develop-

ment 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. qualities are lacking,

To the degree that these

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

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 No assurance of her love would strike us as sincere if we saw her lacking in care for the infant, if she for her child.

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

THE THEORY OF LOVE

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 im-

prisonment 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:

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

"Am my brother's keeper?" The loving person responds. The life

the inhabitants of Nineveh. He, like Cain, could ask: I

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 / 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 liberty" as an old

French song says; love is the child of freedom, never that of domination.

THE THEORY OF LOVE

To respect a person is not possible without knowing him;

Care and responsibility would be blind

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.

when I can transcend the cencern for myself and see the other person in his own terms. I may It is possible

only

know, for instance, that a person is angry, even if he does show it overtly; but I may know him more deeply than

piiibt ;

that; then

Iknow that he is anxious, and worried; that he

.'feels lonely, I' is I

;

that he feels guilty. Then I know that his anger

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

closely related to

another specifically human desire,

that to know the "secret of man." While life in its merely bio-

and a secret, man in his human 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 logical aspects is a miracle

aspects is an unfathomable secret to himself

,.. (

r i;

—

help desiring to penetrate into the secret of man's soul, into the innermost nucleus which is "he."

THE ART OF LOVING

There is one way, a desperate one, to know the secret it 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 penetrat-

ing 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

you only get rid of a chap.

put it this way .

—with shooting

With shooting you'll never

get at the soul, to where it is in a fellow and how it shows

more than once trampled an enemy for over an hour. You see, I want to get 6 to know what life really is, what life's like down our way."

itself.

But

don't spare myself, and I've

we often see this path to knowledge quite 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 In children

overtly.

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

know in the only way knowledge of that which is alive

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 I

all

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.

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,

transcends words. It is the daring plunge into the experience of union.

However, knowledge in thought, that is psycho-

logical 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

7 The above statement has an important implication for the role of psychology in contemporary Western culture. While the great popu-

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 state-

ments 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

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 experience of union with

—

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 conse-

quence 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

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. larity of

THE THEORY OF LOVE

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

a more

rises

specific,

biological

one

the desire for union

between the masculine and feminine poles. The idea of this

most strikingly expressed in the myth that and woman were one, that they were cut in half, and from then on each male has been seeking for the

polarization

originally man

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

THE ART OF LOVING

homosexual deviation

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 re-

ceiving 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, Rumi:

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

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. 8

The problem of the male-female polarity leads to some further discussion

on the subject matter of love and sex. I

have spoken before of Freud's error in seeing in love exclusively the expression stinct,

—

or a sublimation

—

of the sexual in-

rather than recognizing that the sexual desire is one

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 pro-

duced tension in the body which is painful and seeks for relief.

The aim of the sexual desire is the removal of this pain-

ful tension; sexual satisfaction lies in the accomplishment of this removal.

This view has its validity to the extent that the

8 R. A. Nicholson, Rural, George Allen and Unwin, Ltd., London, 1950, pp. 122-3.

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

He expressed this idea in the Three Contributions Theory of Sex, saying that the libido has regularly "a

sexuality. to the

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 experi-

ences the

woman as a castrated man, and that she herself

seeks for various compensations for the loss of the genital. But is

male

woman is not a castrated man, and her sexuality

specifically

feminine and not of "a masculine nature."

Sexual attraction between the sexes is only partly motivated by the need for removal of tension;

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 junction. 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, en-

durance, motherliness. (It must always be kept in mind that

THE THEORY OF LOVE

in each individual both characteristics are blended, but with

the preponderance of those appertaining to "his" or "her"

Very often if the masculine character traits of a man

sex.)

are weakened because emotionally he has remained a child,

will

try to

compensate for

lack by the exclusive

this

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 mas-

culinity. If the it is

feminine sexuality is weakened or perverted,

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 charac-

But what was true around 1900 is not true any more fifty years later. The sexual mores have changed so much ter.

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 ART OF LOVING

He took the first step in discovering the significance of interpersonal

passions;

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.

LOVE BETWEEN PARENT AND CHILD

The infant, at the moment of birth, would feel the fear of dying,

a gracious fate did not preserve

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

cannot recognize objects,

birth;

itself,

and

not yet aware of

of the world as being outside of

itself.

only

feels the positive stimulation of warmth and food, and it does

not yet

differentiate

warmth and food from

mother. Mother is warmth, mother

food,

its

source:

mother is the

euphoric state of satisfaction and security. This state is one of narcissism, to use Freud's term.

The outside reality, per-

sons and things, have meaning only in terms of their satisfy-

ing 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

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

hot and painful, that mother's body

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

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: / am loved. I am

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: / am loved for what I am, or perhaps more accurately, J am loved because I am. This experience of

loved because

being loved by mother is a passive one. There I

nothing

—mother's love unconbe — Mother's be her

have to do in order to be loved

ditional. All I have to do is to

child.

love is bliss, is peace, it need not be acquired, it need not be

deserved. But there

a negative side, too, to the uncondi-

tional quality of mother's love.

be deserved

—

also

trolled. If it is there, is

Not only does it not need to

cannot be acquired, produced, conit is

a blessing; if it is not there, it

as if all beauty had gone out of life

I can do to create it.

—and

there is nothing

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 giv-

ing something to mother (or to father), of producing some-

thing first

—a poem, a drawing, or whatever

may be. For the

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 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,

—rather than receiving by being loved—and that —or "good." Inbe

he feels the potency of producing love by loving the dependence of

reason having to

for

small, helpless, sick

fantile love follows the principle:

"I love because I

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 condi-

up to any specific expectation. (Of course, when I speak here of mother's and father's love, I speak of

tion,

or lived

— Max Weber's or an archetype —and do not imply that every mother and

the "ideal types" in Jung's sense

sense

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

THE ART OF LOVING

42 I

did not please the person

maybe this, or that disappear.

—

there

Furthermore,

bitter feeling that

whom I want to love me, always a fear that love could

"deserved"

love

easily

leaves

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

and also as 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 to the longing for motherly love, as children adults.

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 con-

and his importance for the child in this early period cannot be compared with that of mother. But while father does not reprenection with the child in the

first

years of its life,

sent 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,

THE THEORY OF LOVE

I 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

fyou 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

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 threaten-

THE ART OF LOVING

ing and authoritarian.

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.

this

development from mother-centered to father-

centered attachment, and their eventual synthesis, basis for

lies

the

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

phis trend of thought more fully, some brief remarks may

perve to clarify this statement.

One cause for neurotic development can lie in the fact ithat a boy has a loving, but overindulgent or domineering

phother, and a weak and uninterested father. In this case he

remain fixed at an early mother attachment, and de-

Ityfiay

fcivelop into

a person who is dependent on mother, feels help-

Mtess,

has the strivings characteristic of the receptive person,

ptliat

is,

to receive, to be protected, to be taken care of, and

—

pvho has a lack of fatherly qualities

independ-

discipline,

ence, an ability to master life by himself. He may try to find in everybody, sometimes in women and somefeimes in men in a position of authority and power. If, on the fether hand, the mother is cold, unresponsive and domineerIjf /mothers"

||ng, he may either transfer the need for motherly protection

— —

and subsequent father figures end result is similar to the former case

|:|o his father, Jjthe

|!fVelop

which case

or he will de-

into a onesidedly father-oriented person, completely

^glven to the principles of law, order and authority, and Jackie

ing in the ability to expect or to receive unconditional love.

| This

development

further

intensified

the

father

authoritarian and at the same time strongly attached to the

B/$Oil 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

—

development that the roles of mother and father become confused both with regard to persons outside and

I, neurotic

with regard to these roles within the person. Further exami-

nation

| Sional

may show that certain types of neurosis, like obsesneurosis, develop

more on the basis of a one-sided

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.

THE OBJECTS OF LOVE

Love is not primarily a relationship to a specific person is

;

an attitude, an orientation of character which determines

the relate dness 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 object

—and

all

that

necessary to find

that everything goes by

attitude can be

itself

the right

afterward. This

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

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

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

knowledge are negligible in compari-

in talents, intelligence,

son 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

—instead

from center to center

—

of that

from periphery to

Or as Simone Weil exso beautifully: pressed it "The same words [e.g., a man says

periphery

"central relatedness."

to his wife, "I love you"]

can be commonplace or extra-

ordinary 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

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

we are not always "equal"; inasmuch as we are human, we are all in need of help. Today I, tomorrow you. But this need of help does not mean that the one is helpless, equals

the other powerful. Helplessness

the ability to stand

a transitory condition;

and walk on one's own feet is the per-

manent and common one. Yet, love of the helpless one, love of the poor stranger, are the beginning of brotherly love.

and the

To love one's

and blood is no achievement. The animal loves its young and cares for them. The helpless one loves his master, since his life depends on him; the child loves his parents, since he needs them. Only in the love of those who do not flesh

serve a purpose, love begins to unfold. Significantly, in the

Old Testament, the central object of man's love is the poor, the stranger, the widow and the orphan, and eventually the

national enemy, the Egyptian

and the Edomite. By having

compassion for the helpless one, man begins to develop love for his brother;

and in his love for himself he also loves the

one who is in need of help, the frail, insecure human being.

Compassion implies the element of knowledge and of identification.

"You know the heart of the stranger," says the Old

Testament, "for you were strangers in the land of Egypt; .

therefore love the stranger!"

11 Simone Weil, Gravity and Grace, G. P. Putnam's Sons, New York, 1952, p. 117. 12 The same idea has been expressed by Hermann Cohen in his Religion der Vernunft aus den Quellen des Judentums, 2nd edition, J. Kaufmann Verlag, Frankfurt am Main, 1929, p. 168 ff.

THE THEORY OF LOVE

b. Motherly Love

We have already dealt with the nature of motherly love in a previous chapter which discussed the difference between

motherly and fatherly love. Motherly love, as I said there, is unconditional affirmation of the child's life and his needs.

But one important addition to this description must be made here. Affirmation of the child's life has

two aspects; one is

the care and responsibility absolutely necessary for the preser-

vation of the child's life and his growth.

The other aspect

goes further than mere preservation. It is the attitude which instills

feeling: girl,

in the child a love for living, it is

which gives him the

good to be alive, it is good to be a little boy or

good to be on this earth! These two aspects of

motherly love are expressed very succinctly in the Biblical story of creation.

God creates the world, and man. This cor-

responds to the simple care and affirmation of existence. But

God goes beyond this minimum requirement. On each day and man is created, God says: "It is good."

after nature

—

Motherly love, in this second step, makes the child feel

it is

good to have been born; it instills in the child the love for life, and not only the wish to remain alive. The same idea

may be taken to be expressed in another Biblical symbolism. The promised land

(land

always a mother symbol)

described as "flowing with milk and honey." Milk

the

symbol of the first aspect of love, that of care and affirma-

Honey symbolizes the sweetness of life, the love for it and the happiness in being alive. Most mothers are capable tion.

of giving "milk," but only a minority of giving "honey" too.

In order to be able to give honey, a mother must not only

be a "good mother," but a happy person

— and

this

aim is

THE ART OF LOVING

not achieved by many. The effect on the child can hardly be exaggerated. Mother's love for

life

as infectious as her

anxiety is. Both attitudes have a deep effect on the child's

whole personality; one can distinguish indeed, among children

—and

adults

—

those

who got only "milk" and those

who got "milk and honey." In contrast to brotherly love and erotic love which are love between equals, the relationship of mother and child is

by its very nature one of inequality, where one needs all the help, and the other gives it. It is for this altruistic, unselfish

character that motherly love has been considered the highest

kind of love, and the most sacred of all emotional bonds. It seems, however, that the real achievement of motherly love lies

not in the mother's love for the small infant, but in her

love for the growing child. Actually, the vast majority of

mothers are loving mothers as long as the infant is small and still

completely dependent on them. Most women want chil-

dren, are happy with the new-born child, and eager in their

care for it. This is so in spite of the fact that they do not

"get" anything in return from the child, except a smile or the expression of satisfaction in his face. It seems that this atti-

tude of love is partly rooted in an instinctive equipment to

be found in animals as well as in the human female. But, whatever the weight of this instinctive factor may be, there are also specifically human psychological factors which are responsible for this type of motherly love. One may be found

in the narcissistic element in motherly love. Inasmuch as the infant

is still

felt

be a part of herself, her love and in-

may be a satisfaction of her narcissism. Another motivation may be found in a mother's wish for power, or

fatuation

THE THEORY OF LOVE possession.

The child, being helpless and completely subject

to her will, is a natural object of satisfaction for a domineer-

ing and possessive woman.

Frequent as these motivations are, they are probably less important and less universal than one which can be called the need for transcendence. This need for transcendence is

one of the most basic needs of man, rooted in the fact of his self-awareness, in the fact that

he is not satisfied with the

role of the creature, that he cannot accept himself as dice

thrown out of the cup. He needs to feel as the creator, as one transcending the passive role of being created. There are

many ways of achieving this satisfaction of creation; the most natural and also the

easiest

one to achieve

the

mother's care and love for her creation. She transcends herself in

the infant, her love for it gives her life meaning and

significance. (In the very inability of the male to satisfy his

need for transcendence by bearing children lies his urge to transcend himself by the creation of man-made things and of ideas.

But the child must grow. It must emerge from mother's

womb, from mother's breast; it must eventually become a completely separate human being. The very essence of is to care for the child's growth, and that means to want the child's separation from herself. Here lies the basic difference to erotic love. In erotic love, two people who were separate become one. In motherly love, two people who were one become separate. The mother must not only tolerate, she must wish and support the child's separation. It

motherly love

only at this stage that motherly love becomes such a dif-

ficult task, that it requires unselfishness,

the ability to give

THE ART OF LOVING

everything and to want nothing but the happiness of the

loved one. It is also at this stage that many mothers fail in their task of motherly love. ing, the possessive

The narcissistic, the domineer-

woman can succeed in being a "loving"

mother as long as the child is small. Only the really loving

woman, the woman who is happier in giving than in taking, who is firmly rooted in her own existence, can be a loving mother when the child is in the process of separation. which wants nothing for oneself, is perhaps the most difficult form of love to be achieved, and all the more deceptive because of the ease with which a mother can love her small infant. But just because of this difficulty, a woman can be a truly loving Motherly love for the growing

child, love

mother only if she can love; if she is able to love her husall human beings. The woman who is not capable of love in this sense can be an

band, other children, strangers,

affectionate

mother as long as the child is small, but she

cannot be a loving mother, the test of which is the willingness to bear separation— and even after the separation to go

on loving. c. Erotic

Love

Brotherly love is love among equals; motherly love is love for the helpless. Different as they are from each other, they

have in common that they are by their very nature not restricted to

brothers;

one person. If I love my brother, I love all my if

I love

my child, I love all my children; no,

beyond that, I love all children, all that are in need of my help. In contrast to both types of love is erotic love; it is the

craving for complete fusion, for union with one other per-

THE THEORY OF LOVE |>n.

It is by its very nature exclusive and not universal; it is

so perhaps the most deceptive form of love there is. First of all, it is often confused with the explosive experiliice of "falling" in love, jtyhich existed until that tS

the sudden collapse of the barriers

moment between two strangers. But,

was pointed out before, this experience of sudden intimacy

by its very nature short-lived. After the stranger has bepme an intimately known person there are no more barriers be overcome, there is no more sudden closeness to be chieved. The "loved" person becomes as well known as |neself. Or, perhaps I should better say as little known. If ere were more depth in the experience of the other person, |f one could experience the infiniteness of his personality, the

—and the miracle

|ther person would never be so familiar

||)vercoming the barriers might occur every day anew. But for lost

people their own person, as well as others, is soon ex-

plored and soon exhausted. For them intimacy is established

l^imarily through sexual contact. Since they experience the gseparateness of the other person primarily as physical sepaJp'ateness, physical union means overcoming separateness.

Beyond that, there are other factors which to many people jftenote the overcoming of separateness. To speak of one's p^wn personal life, one's hopes and anxieties, to show oneself

|with one's childlike or childish aspects, to establish a com-

mon interest vis-a-vis the world

—

all this is

taken as over-

Itoming separateness. Even to show one's anger, one's hate, one's complete lack of inhibition is taken for intimacy, and I

this

may explain the perverted attraction married couples

|| dften have for each other, who seem intimate only when they

are in bed or when they give vent to their mutual hate and

THE ART OF LOVING

rage. But all these types of closeness tend to become reduced

more and more as time goes on. The consequence is one seeks love with a new person, with a new stranger. Again the

stranger is transformed into an "intimate" person, again the

experience of falling in love is exhilarating and intense, and

again it slowly becomes less and less intense, and ends in the

wish for a new conquest, a new love

—always with the

illu-

sion that the new love will be different from the earlier ones.

These illusions are greatly helped by the deceptive character of sexual desire.

Sexual desire aims at fusion

—and

by no means only a

physical appetite, the relief of a painful tension. But sexual desire

can be stimulated by the anxiety of aloneness, by the

wish to conquer or be conquered, by vanity, by the wish to hurt and even to destroy, as much as it can be stimulated

by love. It seems that sexual desire can easily blend with and be stimulated by any strong emotion, of which love is only one. Because sexual desire

in the

minds of most people

coupled with the idea of love, they are easily misled to conclude that they love each other when they want each other physically.

Love can inspire the wish for sexual union;

this case the physical relationship

lacking in greediness, in

a wish to conquer or to be conquered, but is blended with tenderness. If the desire for physical union is not stimulated

by love, if erotic love is not also brotherly love, it never leads to union in

more than an orgiastic, transitory sense. Sexual

attraction creates, for the moment, the illusion of union, yet

without love

this

—

sometimes it makes them ashamed of each makes them hate each other, because when

they were before other, or even

"union" leaves strangers as far apart as

THE THEORY OF LOVE

the illusion has gone they feel their estrangement even more

markedly than before. Tenderness is by no means, as Freud believed, a sublimation of the sexual instinct; it is the direct

outcome of brotherly love, and exists in physical as well as in non-physical forms of love.

In erotic love there is an exclusiveness which is lacking in brotherly love and motherly love. This exclusive character of erotic love warrants some further discussion.

Frequently the

exclusiveness of erotic love is misinterpreted as meaning possessive

attachment. One can often find two people "in love"

with each other

who feel no love for anybody else. Their

love is, in fact, an egotism a deux; they are two people who identify themselves with each other, and who solve the problem of separateness by enlarging the single individual into

two. They have the experience of overcoming aloneness, yet, since they are separated from the rest of mankind, they re-

main separated from each other and alienated from themselves; their experience of union is

an illusion. Erotic love is

exclusive, but it loves in the other person all of mankind, all

that is alive. It is exclusive only in the sense that I can fuse

myself fully and intensely with one person only. Erotic love excludes the love for others only in the sense of erotic fusion, full

commitment in all aspects of life

—but not

in the sense

of deep brotherly love.

Erotic love, if it is love, has one premise. That I love from

—and experience the other person

the essence of my being

in the essence of his or her being.

ings are identical.

In essence, all human be-

We are all part of One; we are One. This

being so, it should not make any difference whom we love.

Love should be essentially an act of will, of decision to com-

THE ART OF LOVING

mit my life completely to that of one other person. This is, indeed, the rationale behind- the idea of the insolubility of

marriage, as it is behind the many forms of traditional mar-

which the two partners never choose each other, and yet are expected to love each other. In contemporary Western culture this idea appears altogether false. Love is supposed to be the outcome of riage in

—

but are chosen for each other

a spontaneous, emotional reaction, of suddenly being gripped

by an

irresistible

feeling.

this view,

one

sees only the

—

two individuals involved and not the and all women part of Eve. One neglects to see an important factor in erotic love, it that of will. To love somebody is not just a strong feeling is a decision, it is a judgment, it is a promise. If love were peculiarities of the

fact that all men are part of Adam,

—

only a feeling, there would be no basis for the promise to love each other forever.

A feeling comes and

may go. How

can I judge that it will stay forever, when my act does not involve judgment and decision?

Taking these views into account one may arrive at the position that love

mitment,

and

that

exclusively

therefore

an act of will and com-

fundamentally

does

not

matter who the two persons are. Whether the marriage was

arranged by others, or the result of individual choice, once the marriage is concluded, the act of will should guarantee

the continuation of love. This view seems to neglect the paradoxical character of human nature

are all One entity.

—

and of erotic love. We

yet every one of us is a unique, unduplicable

In our relationships to others the same paradox

repeated. Inasmuch as we are all one, we can love everybody in the same way in the sense of brotherly love. But inasmuch

THE THEORY OF LOVE

as we are all also different, erotic love requires certain specific,

highly individual elements which exist between some people

but not between all.

Both views then, that of erotic love

as completely indi-

vidual attraction, unique between two specific persons, as well as the other view that erotic love is nothing but an act of will, are true is

—

or, as it

neither this nor that.

may be put more aptly, the truth Hence the idea of a relationship

which can be easily dissolved if one is not successful with it is

as erroneous as the idea that under no circumstances must

the relationship be dissolved. d.

Self-Love

While it raises no objection to apply the concept of love to various objects,

it is

virtuous to love others,

a widespread belief that, while it is it

sinful to love oneself. It

as-

sumed that to the degree to which I love myself I do not love others, that self-love is the same as selfishness. This view goes far back in Western thought. Calvin speaks of self-love as

"a pest." 14 Freud speaks of self-love in psychiatric terms 13 Paul

Tillich, in a review of The Sane Society, in Pastoral PsySeptember, 1955, has suggested that it would be better to drop the ambiguous term "self-love" and to replace it with "natural self-affirmation" or "paradoxical self-acceptance." Much as I can see the merits of this suggestion, I cannot agree with him in this point. In the term "self-love" the paradoxical element in self-love is contained more clearly. The fact is expressed that love is an attitude which is the same toward all objects, including myself. It must also not be forgotten that the term "self-love," in the sense in which it is used here, has a history. The Bible speaks of self-love when it commands to "love thy neighbor as thyself/' and Meister Eckhart speaks of self-love in the very same sense. 14 John Calvin, Institutes of the Christian Religion, translated by J. Albau, Presbyterian Board of Christian Education, Philadelphia, 1928,

chology,

Chap. 7, par. 4, p. 622.

THE ART OF LOVING

judgment is the same as that of is the same as narcissism, the

but, nevertheless, his value

Calvin.

For him

self-love

turning of the libido toward oneself. Narcissism is the earliest stage in life

human development, and the person who in later

has returned to this narcissistic stage is incapable of love;

Freud assumes that love is and that the libido is either

in the extreme case he is insane.

the manifestation of libido,

turned toward others

—

self-love. love; or toward oneself Love and self-love are thus mutually exclusive in the sense that the more there is of one, the less there is of the other. If self-love is bad, it follows that unselfishness is virtuous.

These

questions

Does psychological observation

arise:

support the thesis that there is a basic contradiction between love for oneself and love for others? Is love for oneself the same phenomenon as selfishness, or are they opposites? Furthermore, is the selfishness of modern man really a concern for himself as an individual, with all his intellectual, emotional and sensual potentialities? Has "he" not become an appendage of his socio-economic role? Is his selfishness identical

with self-love or is it not caused by the very lack of it?

Before we start the discussion of the psychological aspect of selfishness

and self-love, the logical fallacy in the notion

that love for others and love for oneself are mutually exclusive should be stressed. If it

a virtue to love my neighbor

as a human being, it must be a virtue

—and not a

vice

—

love myself, since I am a human being too. There is no con-

cept of man in which I myself am not included.

A doctrine

which proclaims such an exclusion proves itself to be intrinsically contradictory.

The idea expressed in the Biblical

"Love thy neighbor as thyself!" implies that respect for one's

THE THEORY OF LOVE

own integrity and uniqueness, love for and understanding of own self, cannot be separated from respect and love and understanding for another individual. The love for my own self is inseparably connected with the love for any other

one's

being.

We have come now to the basic psychological premises on which the conclusions of our argument are built. Generally, these premises are as follows: not only others, but we ourselves

are the "object" of our feelings

and

attitudes; the

attitudes toward others and toward ourselves, far from being

With regard to the love of others and love

contradictory, are basically conjunctive.

problem under discussion this means

of ourselves are not alternatives. On the contrary, an attitude of love toward themselves will be found in all those who are

capable of loving others. Love, in principle, is indivisible as far as the connection is

between "objects" and one's own self

concerned. Genuine love

an expression of productive-

ness and implies care, respect, responsibility and knowledge. It is

not an "affect" in the sense of being affected by some-

body, but an active striving for the growth and happiness of the loved person, rooted in one's own capacity to love.

To love somebody is the actualization and concentration of the power to love. The basic affirmation contained in love is

an incarnation of Love of one person implies love

directed toward the beloved person as

essentially human qualities.

of man as such. The kind of "division of labor," as William

James calls it, by which one loves one's family but is without feeling for the "stranger,"

a sign of a basic inability to

Love of man is not, as is frequently supposed, an abstraction coming after the love for a specific person, but it love.

THE ART OF LOVING

60 is

premise, although genetically it

its

acquired in loving

specific individuals.

From this it follows that my own self must be as much an object of my love as another person. The affirmation of one's

own

life,

happiness,

capacity to love,

i.e.,

growth, freedom

rooted in one's

in care, respect, responsibility,

and

knowledge. If an individual is able to love productively, he loves himself too; if he can love only others, he cannot love at all.

Granted that love for oneself and for others in principle is conjunctive,

how do we explain selfishness, which obviously

excludes any genuine concern for others? The selfish person is

interested only in himself,

feels

wants everything for himself,

no pleasure in giving, but only in taking. The world

outside is looked at only from the standpoint of what he can get out of

it;

he lacks interest in the needs of others, and

and integrity. He can see nothing he judges everyone and everything from its

respect for their dignity

but himself;

usefulness to him; he this

basically unable to love.

Does not

prove that concern for others and concern for oneself

are unavoidable alternatives? This would be so if selfishness

and self-love were identical. But that assumption is the very fallacy which has led to so many mistaken conclusions con-

cerning our problem. Selfishness and self-love, far from be-

ing identic aly are actually op posit es. The selfish person does not love himself too much but too himself. This lack of fondness is

little;

in fact he hates

and care for himself, which

only one expression of his lack of productiveness, leaves

him empty and frustrated. He is necessarily unhappy and anxiously concerned to snatch from

life

the satisfactions

THE THEORY OF LOVE

which he blocks himself from attaining. He seems to care too

much for himself, but actually he only makes an unsuccessful

attempt to cover up and compensate for his failure to care for his real | cissistic,

self. if

Freud holds that the selfish person is nar-

he had withdrawn his love from others and

turned it toward his own person. // is true that selfish perI

sons are incapable of loving others, but they are not capable of loving themselves either. It is easier to understand selfishness

by comparing it with

greedy concern for others, as we find it, for instance, in an oversolicitous mother. While she consciously believes that she

| is

particularly fond of her child, she has actually a deeply

"repressed hostility toward the object of her concern. She

overconcerned not because she loves the child too much, but '/because she has to compensate for her lack of capacity to I'

love him at all.

This theory of the nature of selfishness is borne out by psychoanalytic experience with neurotic "unselfishness/ |

symptom

of neurosis observed in not a

who

few people

usually are troubled not by this symptom but by others con-

Jnected with it,

like depression, tiredness, inability to

work,

failure in love relationships, and so on. Not only is unselfish-

ness not felt as a "symptom

55 ;

it is

often the one redeeming

character trait on which such people pride themselves. The "unselfish

person "does not want anything for himself

"lives only for others,

55 ;

proud that he does not consider

himself important. He is puzzled to find that in spite of his unselfishness he

unhappy, and that

his relationships to

those closest to him are unsatisfactory. Analytic work shows that his unselfishness is not something apart

from his other

THE ART OF LOVING

symptoms but one of them, in fact often the most important one; that he is paralyzed in his capacity to love or to enjoy anything; that he

pervaded by hostility toward life and

that behind the fagade of unselfishness a subtle but not less intense self-centeredness is hidden. This person can be cured

only if his unselfishness too is interpreted as a symptom along

with the others, so that his lack of productiveness, which is at the root of both his unselfishness

and his other troubles,

can be corrected.

The nature of unselfishness becomes particularly apparent in its effect

on others, and most frequently in our culture in

the effect the "unselfish"

mother has on her children. She

believes that by her unselfishness her children will experience

what it means to be loved and to learn, in turn, what it means to love. The effect of her unselfishness, however, does not at all correspond to her expectations. The children do not show the happiness of persons who are convinced that they are loved disapproval

;

they are anxious, tense, afraid of the mother's

and anxious

to live

to her expectations.

Usually, they are affected by their mother's hidden hostility

toward life, which they sense rather than recognize clearly,

and eventually they become imbued with it themselves. Altogether, the effect of the "unselfish"

mother is not too dif-

ferent from that of the selfish one; indeed, it is often worse,

because the mother's unselfishness prevents the children from criticizing her. They are put under the obligation not to dis-

appoint her; they are taught, under the mask of virtue, dislike for life. If one has a chance to study the effect of a mother with genuine self-love, one can see that there is

nothing more conducive to giving a child the experience of

THE THEORY OF LOVE j|hat love, joy

and happiness

are than being loved by a

who loves herself. These ideas on self-love cannot be summarized better than

fjother

quoting Meister Eckhart on this topic: "If you love your-

you love everybody

jfclf,

else as

you do yourself. As long

you love another person less than you love yourself, you fill-

not really succeed in loving yourself, but if you love all

like,

including yourself, you will love them as one person

|ftd that

person is both God and man. Thus he is a great

id righteous person lually."

who, loving himself, loves all others

fiLbve of God It has been stated above that the basis for our need to love lies

in the experience of separateness and the resulting need

pQ overcome the anxiety of separateness by the experience of anion. The religious form of love, that which is called the Rove of God, is, psychologically speaking, not different. It Bprings from the need

overcome separateness and to

Iftchieve union. In fact, the love of God has as many different

feualities and aspects as the love of man has f{

—and

to a large

Extent we find the same differences.

all theistic religions,

whether they are polytheistic or

pinonotheistic, God stands for the highest value, the most dell,

sirable good. Hence, the specific meaning of God depends on

fcwhat is the most desirable good for a person. The under-

standing of the concept of God must, therefore, start with an ;kftalysis of

the character structure of the person

who wor-

ships God. |f

15 Meister

Eckhart, translated by R, B. Blakney, Harper & Brothers,

New York, 1941, p. 204.

THE ART OF LOVING

The development of the human race as far as we have any knowledge of it can be characterized as the emergence of man from nature, from mother, from the bonds of blood

and soil. In the beginning of human history man, though thrown out of the original unity with nature, still clings to these primary bonds. He finds his security by going back, or

holding on to these primary bonds.

He still feels identified

with the world of animals and trees, and tries to find unity

by remaining one with the natural world.

Many primitive An animal

religions bear witness to this stage of development. is

transformed into a totem; one wears animal masks in the

most solemn religious acts, or in war; one worships an animal as God.

At a later stage of development, when human skill

has developed to the point of artisan and arti$tic skill, when

man is not dependent any more exclusively on the gifts of the fruit he finds and the animal he kills man

nature

—

transforms the product of his own hand into a god. This is the stage of the worship of idols made of clay, silver or gold.

Man projects his own powers and skills into the things he makes, and thus in an alienated fashion worships his prowess,

At a still later stage man gives his gods the form of human beings. It seems that this can happen only when he has become still more aware of himself, and when he has discovered man as the highest and most dignified "thing" in the world. In this phase of anthropomorphic god his possessions.

worship we find a development in two dimensions. The one refers to the female or male nature of the gods, the other to

the degree of maturity which man has achieved, and which

determines the nature of his gods and the nature of his love of them.

THE THEORY OF LOVE

Let us first speak of the development from mother-centered to father-centered religions. cisive discoveries of

According to the great and de-

Bachofen and Morgan in the middle of

the nineteenth century, and in spite of the rejection their

have found in most academic circles, there can be little doubt that there was a matriarchal phase of religion

findings

preceding the patriarchal one, at least in many cultures. In the matriarchal phase, the highest being is the mother. She is the goddess, she is also the authority in family and society.

In order to understand the essence of matriarchal religion,

we have only to remember what has been said about the essence of motherly love. Mother's love

unconditional,

is unconditional

all-protective, all-enveloping; because

can also not be controlled or acquired. Its presence gives

the loved person a sense of bliss

;

its

absence produces a sense

of lostness and utter despair. Since mother loves her children

because they are her children, and not because they are

"good,"

obedient,

fulfill

her

wishes

and commands,

mother's love is based on equality. All men are equal, because they all are children of a mother, because they all are children of Mother Earth.

The next stage of human evolution, the only one of which we have thorough knowledge and do not need to rely on inferences and reconstruction, is the patriarchal phase. In this

phase the mother is dethroned from her supreme position,

and the father becomes the Supreme Being, in religion as well as in society. The nature of fatherly love is that he makes demands, establishes principles and laws, and that his love for the son depends on the obedience of the latter to these demands. He likes best the son who is most like him, who is

THE ART OF LOVING

most obedient and who is best fitted to become his successor, as

the inheritor of his possessions.

(The development

patriarchal society goes together with the development of

As a consequence, patriarchal society is hierarchical; the equality of the brothers gives way to competition and mutual strife. Whether we think of the Indian, Egyptian or Greek cultures, or of the Jewish- Christian, or

private property.)

Islamic religions, we are in the middle of a patriarchal world,

with its male gods, over whom one chief god reigns, or where all gods

have been eliminated with the exception of the One,

the God.

However, since the wish for mother's love cannot

be eradicated from the hearts of man,

not surprising

mother could never be fully

that the figure of the loving

driven out from the pantheon. In the Jewish religion, the

mother aspects various

currents

God are reintroduced especially in the

mysticism.

In the

Catholic

religion,

Mother is symbolized by the Church, and by the Virgin. Even in Protestantism, the figure of Mother has not been entirely eradicated, although she remains hidden.

tablished as his

Luther es-

main principle that nothing that man does

can procure God's love. God's love is Grace, the religious attitude

small

have faith in this grace, and to make oneself

and helpless; no good works can influence God

—or

make God love us, as Catholic doctrines postulated. We can recognize here that the Catholic doctrine of good works is part of the patriarchal picture

;

I can procure father's love by

obedience and by fulfilling his demands. The Lutheran doctrine,

on the other hand, in spite of its manifest patriarchal

character carries within

a hidden matriarchal element.

Mother's love cannot be acquired;

there, or

not

I \

THE THEORY OF LOVE

do is to have faith (as the Psalmist says, "Thou hadst let me have faith into my mother's breasts. ie ) and to transform myself into the helpless, powerless child. But it is the peculiarity of Luther's faith that the figure of the mother has been eliminated from the manifest picture, and replaced by that of the father; instead of the certainty there; all I can

3 '

]

by mother, intense doubt, hoping against hope for unconditional love by father, has become the paraof being loved

mount feature. I had to discuss this difference between the matriarchal and the patriarchal elements in religion in order to show that the character of the love of God depends on the respective

weight of the matriarchal and the patriarchal aspects of religion.

The patriarchal aspect makes me love God like a assume he is just and strict, that he punishes and

father; I

rewards; and eventually that he will elect me as his favorite son; as God elected Abraham-Israel, as Isaac elected Jacob, as

God elects his favorite nation. In the matriarchal aspect God as an all-embracing mother. I have

of religion, I love

faith in her love, that

powerless,

me, she

no matter whether I am poor and

no matter whether I have sinned, she will love any other of her children to me;

will not prefer

whatever happens to me, she will rescue me, will save me, will forgive me. Needless to say,

my love for God and God's

love for me cannot be separated. If God is a father, he loves

me like a son and I love him like a father. If God is mother, her and my love are determined by this fact. This difference between the motherly and the fatherly aspects of the love of 16 Psalm 22:9.

God is, however, only one factor in

THE ART OF LOVING

determining the nature of this love; the other factor is the degree of maturity reached by the individual, hence in his

concept of God and in his love for God. Since the evolution of the

human race shifted from a

mother-centered to a father-centered structure of society, as well as of religion, we can trace the development of a matur-

ing love mainly in the development of patriarchal religion.

this development we find a despotic, who God, considers man, whom he created, as his

In the beginning of jealous

property, and is entitled to do with him whatever he pleases.

This is the phase of religion in which God drives man out of paradise,

lest

he eat from the tree of knowledge and thus

could become God himself; this is the phase in which God decides to destroy the human race by the flood, because none of them pleases him, with the exception of the favorite son, Noah; this is the phase in which God demands from Abra-

ham that he kill his only, his beloved son, Isaac, to prove his

love

for

God by the

act of ultimate obedience.

But

God makes a covenant with Noah, in which he promises never to destroy the human

simultaneously a new phase begins;

race again, a covenant by which he is bound himself.

Not

only is he bound by his promises, he is also bound by his

own principle, that of justice, and on this basis God must yield to Abraham's demand to spare Sodom if there are at least ten just

men. But the development goes further than

transforming God from the figure of a despotic tribal chief 17 This holds true especially for the monotheistic religions of the West. In Indian religions the mother figures retained a good deal of influence, for instance in the Goddess Kali; in Buddhism and Taoism the concept of a God or a Goddess was without essential significance, if not altogether eliminated.

—

THE THEORY OF LOVE

into a loving father, into a father who himself is bound by

the principles which he has postulated; it goes in the direction of transforming God from the figure of a father into a

symbol of

his principles, those of justice, truth

and

love.

God is truth, God is justice. In this development God ceases to be a person, a man, a father;

he becomes the symbol of

the principle of unity behind the manifoldness of phenomena,

which will grow from the spirman. God cannot have a name. A name

of the vision of the flower itual seed within

always denotes a thing, or a person, something finite. How

can God have a name, if he is not a person, not a thing?

The most striking incident of this change lies in the Biblical story of

God's revelation to Moses.

When Moses tells

him that the Hebrews will not believe that God has sent him, unless he can tell them God's name (how could idol worshipers comprehend a nameless God, since the very essence of an idol is to have a name?), God makes a concession. He tells Moses that his name is "I am becoming that which I am becoming." "I-am-becoming is my name."

The "I-am-becoming" means that God is not finite, not a person, not a "being." The most adequate translation of the tell them that "my name is nameless." The prohibition to make any image of God, to pronounce his name in vain, eventually to pronounce his name at all,

sentence would be:

aims at the same goal, that of freeing man from the idea that

God is a father, that he is a person. Iri the subsequent theological development, the idea is carried further in the principle that one must not even give God any positive attribute.

To say of God that he is wise, strong, good implies again that he is a person; the most I can do is to say what God is

THE ART OF LOVING

not, to state negative attributes, to postulate that

he is not

limited, not unkind, not unjust. The more I know what God is

not, the more knowledge I have of God.

Following the maturing idea of monotheism in its further consequences can lead only to one conclusion: not to mention God's name at all, not to speak about God.

becomes what he potentially

Then God

monotheistic theology,

the nameless One, an inexpressible stammer, referring to the

unity underlying the phenomenal universe, the ground of all

God becomes truth, love, justice. God is I, inasmuch as I am human.

existence;

Quite evidently this evolution from the anthropomorphic to the pure monotheistic principle makes all the difference to

the nature of the love of God. The God of Abraham can be loved, or feared, as a father, sometimes his forgiveness, some-

times his anger being the dominant aspect. Inasmuch as God is

the father, I am the child. I have not emerged fully from

the autistic wish for omniscience

and omnipotence. I have

not yet acquired the objectivity to realize my limitations as

a human being, my ignorance, my helplessness. I still claim, a child, that there must be a father who rescues me, who watches me, who punishes me, a father who likes me when I am obedient, who is flattered by my praise and

angry because of

my disobedience.

Quite obviously, the

majority of people have, in their personal development, not

overcome this infantile stage, and hence the belief in God to

—a

most people is the belief in a helping father sion.

In spite of the fact that

this

childish illu-

concept of religion has

been overcome by some of the great teachers of the human 18 Cf.

Maimonides' concept of the negative attributes in The Guide

for the Perplexed.

THE THEORY OF LOVE

race, and by a minority of men, it is still the dominant form

bi religion.

Inasmuch as this is so, the criticism of the idea of God, as was expressed by Freud, is quite correct. The error, how-

ever, ;

was in the fact that he ignored the other aspect of

monotheistic religion, and its true kernel, the logic of which

The truly religious person, if he follows the essence of the mono-

leads exactly to the negation of this concept of God.

theistic idea,

does not pray for anything, does not expect

anything from God; he does not love God as a child loves his father or his

mother; he has acquired the humility of

sensing his limitations, to the degree of

knowing that he

knows nothing about God. God becomes to him a symbol in which man, at an earlier stage of his evolution, has expressed the totality of that which man

striving for, the

the spiritual world, of love, truth and justice.

realm of

He has faith

which "God" represents; he thinks truth, and justice, and considers all of his life only valuable inasmuch as it gives him the chance to arrive at an ever

in the principles lives love

fuller

— the only he does not speak about God—nor even mention

unfolding of his

human powers

reality

that matters, as the only object of "ultimate concern"; and, |

eventually, his

name, To love God, if he were going to use this word,

would mean, then, to long for the attainment of the full capacity to love, for the realization of that which "God" stands for in oneself.

From

this

point

view,

the

logical

consequence of

monotheistic thought is the negation of all "theo-logy," of all

"knowledge about God." Yet, there remains a difference

between such a radical non-theological view and a non-

THE ART OF LOVING

theistic system, as

we find it, for instance in early Buddhism

or in Taoism.

all

theistic systems,

one, there

even a non-theological, mystical

the assumption of the reality of the spiritual

realm, as one transcending man, giving meaning and validity to

man's spiritual powers and his striving for salvation and

inner birth. In a non-theistic system, there exists no spiritual

realm outside of love, reason

man or transcending him. The realm of

and justice exists as a reality only because, and

inasmuch as, man has been able to develop these powers in himself throughout the process of his evolution. In this view there is no meaning to life, except the meaning man himself gives to it; man is utterly alone except inasmuch as he helps

another.

Having spoken of the love of God, I want to make it clear that I myself do not think in terms of a theistic concept, and that to me the concept of God

only a historically condi-

tioned one, in which man has expressed his experience of his

higher powers, his longing for truth and for unity at a given historical period. strict

But I believe also that the consequences of

monotheism and a non-theistic ultimate concern with

the spiritual reality are two views which, though different,

need not fight each other.

At this point, however, another dimension of the problem of the love of God arises, which must be discussed in order to fathom the complexity of the problem. I refer to a fundamental difference in the religious attitude between the East

(China and India) and the West; this difference can be expressed in terms of logical concepts.

Since Aristotle, the

Western world has followed the logical principles of Aris-

THE THEORY OF LOVE

totelian philosophy. This logic is based on the law of identity

which states that A is A, the law of contradiction (A is not non-A) and the law of the excluded middle (A cannot be

A and non-A, neither A nor non-A). Aristotle explains his position very clearly in the following sentence: "It is im-

possible for the same thing at the same time to belong and

not to belong to the same thing and in the same respect; and

whatever other distinctions we might add to meet dialectical objections, let them be added. This, then, is the most certain of all principles.

." 19

This axiom of Aristotelian logic has so deeply imbued our habits of thought that

felt

to be "natural"

and self-

evident, while on the other hand the statement that

and not A seems to be nonsensical. (Of course, the statement refers to the subject later,

X at a given time, not to X now and X X as against another aspect.)

or one aspect of

In opposition to Aristotelian logic is what one might call paradoxical logic, which assumes that A and non-A do not exclude each other as predicates of X. Paradoxical logic was

predominant

Chinese and Indian thinking, in the phi-

losophy of Heraclitus, and then again, under the name of dialectics,

became the philosophy of Hegel, and of Marx.

The general principle of paradoxical logic has been clearly described by Lao-tse. "Words that are strictly true seem to be paradoxical" 20 And by Chuang-tzu

"That which is one is

Gamma, 1005b. 20. Quoted from newly translated by Richard Hope, Columbia University Press, New York, 1952. 20 Lao-tse, The Tdo Teh King, The Sacred Books of the East, ed. by F. Max Mueller, Vol. XXXIX, Oxford University Press, London, 19 Aristotle,

Metaphysics, Book

Aristotle*s Metaphysics,

1927, p. 120.

THE ART OF LOVING

one. That which. is not-one, is also one." These formulations

and it is not. Another

of paradoxical logic are positive

formulation

neither this nor that.

negative:

it is

The

former expression of thought we find in Taoistic thought, in Heraclitus and again in Hegelian dialectics; the latter formulation is frequent in Indian philosophy.

Although it would transcend the scope of this book to give a more detailed description of the difference between Aristotelian and paradoxical logic, I shall mention a few illustrations in order to

make the principle more understandable.

Paradoxical logic in Western thought has its earliest philosophical expression in Heraclitus

the conflict between opposites

philosophy.

He assumes

the basis of

all existence.

"They do not understand," he says, "that the all-One, conflicting in itself, is identical with itself: conflicting harmony 21 as in the bow and in the lyre." Or still more clearly: "We go into the same river, and yet not in the same; it is we and 22 it is not we" Or "One and the same manifests itself in things as living and dead, waking and sleeping, young and old."

In Lao-tse's philosophy the same idea is expressed in a more poetic form. A characteristic example of Taoist paradoxical thinking is the following statement

"Gravity is the

root of lightness; stillness the ruler of movement." 24 Or "The

Tao in its regular course does nothing and so there is noth21

W. Capelle, Die Vorsokratiker, Alfred Kroener Verlag, Stuttgart, (My translation. E. F.)

1953, p. 134. 22 Ibid.,

p. 132.

™ Ibid., p. 133. 24 Mueller, op. cit., p. 69.

THE THEORY OF LOVE ing which he does not do."

Or "My words are very easy

know, and very easy to practice; but there is no one in

the world who is able to know and able to practice them.'

In Taoist thinking, just as in Indian and Socratic thinking, the highest step to which thought can lead is to know that

we do not know. "To know and yet [think] we do not know is the highest [attainment] not to know [and yet think] we 27 do know is a disease. It is only a consequence of this philosophy that the highest God cannot be named. The ultimate reality, the ultimate One cannot be caught in words or in thoughts. As Lao-tse puts it, "The Tao that can be trodden is not the enduring and unchanging Tao. The name that can be named is not the enduring and unchanging ;

name.

Or, in a different formulation, "We look at it, and

we do not see it, and we name it the 'Equable. We listen to it, and we do not hear it, and we name it the 'Inaudible.' We try to grasp it, and do not get hold of it, and we name it 'the Subtle. With these three qualities, it can not be made the subject of description and hence we blend them together and obtain The One. 29 And still another formulation of the same idea: "He who knows [the Tao] does not [care 3

;

to]

speak [about

it] ;

he who is [however ready to] speak

about it does not know it.

Brahmanic philosophy was concerned with the relationship

between

25 Ibid.,

p. 79. 26 ibid., p. 112.

27 ibid., p. 113. 28 Ibid., p. 47. 29 Ibid., p. 57. so Ibid., p. 100.

manifoldness

( of

phenomena )

and unity

THE ART OF LOVING

(Brahman). But paradoxical philosophy is neither in India nor in China to be confused with a dualistic standpoint. The

harmony

(unity)

consists in the conflicting position

from

which it is made up. "Brahmanical thinking was centered from the beginning around the paradox of the simultaneous

— —

antagonisms

yet

identity of the manifest forces and forms

phenomenal world.

of the

." 31

The ultimate power in

man transcends both the con-

the Universe as well as in

and the sensual sphere. It is therefore "neither this

ceptual

nor thus." But, as Zimmer remarks, "there is no antagonism

between tion."

real and unreal' in this strictly non-dualistic realiza-

In their search for unity behind manifoldness, the

Brahman thinkers came to the conclusion that the perceived pair of opposites reflects the nature not of things but of the

perceiving mind. itself if it is

The perceiving thought must transcend

to attain true reality. Opposition is a category

of man's mind, not in itself

an element of reality. In the

Rig- Veda the principle is expressed in this form: "I am the two, the life force and the life material, the two at once."

The ultimate consequence of the idea that thought can only perceive in contradictions has found an even

more drastic

sequence in Vedantic thinking, which postulates that thought

—with

—was "only a more

all its fine distinction

subtle hori-

zon of ignorance, in fact the most subtle of all the deluding devices of maya."

Paradoxical logic has a significant bearing on the concept 31 H.

R. Zimmer, Philosophies of India, Pantheon Books, New York,

195L 3 2 Ibid,

33 Ibid., p. 424.

THE THEORY OF LOVE ;

God. Inasmuch

God represents the ultimate reality,

and inasmuch as the human mind perceives reality in con| tradictions, no positive statement can be made of God. In the Vedantas the idea of an omniscient and omnipotent God ;

considered the ultimate form of ignorance. 34 We see here

the connection with the namelessness of the Tao, the name'

less

name of the God who reveals himself to Moses, of the of Meister Eckhart. Man can only know

"absolute Nothing

the negation, never the position of ultimate reality.

"Mean-

while man can not know what God is, even though he be ever so well aware of what God is not.

Thus contented

with nothing, the mind clamors for the highest good of all."

For Meister Eckhart, "The Divine One is a negation

of negations,

and a denial of denials.

Every creature

contains a negation: one denies that it is the other."

It is

only a further consequence that God becomes for Meister

Eckhart "The absolute Nothing," just as the ultimate reality is

the "En Sof," the Endless One, for the Kabalah. I

have discussed the difference between Aristotelian and

paradoxical logic in order to prepare the ground for an important difference in the concept of the love of God. teachers reality

of paradoxical logic say that

The

man can perceive

only in contradictions, and can never perceive in

thought the ultimate reality-unity, the

One itself. This led

to the consequence that one did not seek as the ultimate aim to find the answer in thought. Thought can only lead us to 84 Cf.

Zimmer, ibid., p. 424.

35 Meister

Eckhart, translated by R. B. Blakney, Harper & Brothers,

New York, 1941, p. 114. 36 Ibid.,

p. 247. Cf. also the

negative theology of Maimonides.

THE ART OF LOVING

the knowledge that

cannot give us the ultimate answer.

The world of thought remains caught in the paradox. The only way in which the world can be grasped ultimately lies, not in thought, but in the act, in the experience of oneness.

Thus paradoxical logic leads to the conclusion that the love of God is neither the knowledge of God in thought, nor the

thought of one's love of God, but the act of experiencing the oneness with God.

This leads to the emphasis on the right way of living. All of life, every little and every important action, is devoted to

the knowledge of God, but a knowledge not in right thought,

but in right action. This can be clearly seen in Oriental religions.

In Brahmanism as well as in Buddhism and Taoism,

the ultimate aim of religion is not the right belief, but the

We find the same emphasis in the Jewish reThere was hardly ever a schism over belief in the

right action. ligion.

Jewish tradition (the one great exception, the difference be-

tween Pharisees and Sadducees, was essentially one of two opposite social classes). The emphasis of the Jewish religion

was

from the beginning of our era on) on the right way of living, the Halacha (this word actually having the same meaning as the Tao) (especially

In modern history, the same principle is expressed in the

thought of Spinoza, Marx and Freud. In Spinoza's philoso-

phy the emphasis is shifted from the right belief to the right conduct of life. Marx stated the same principle when he said, "The philosophers have interpreted the world in different ways the task is to transform it." Freud's paradoxical logic leads him to the process of psychoanalytic therapy, the

—

ever deepening experience of oneself.

THE THEORY OF LOVE

From the standpoint of paradoxical logic the emphasis is not on thought, but on the

This attitude had several

act.

other consequences. First of all, it led to the tolerance which

we find in Indian and Chinese religious development. If the right thought is not the ultimate truth, and not the way to salvation, there

no reason to fight others, whose thinking

has arrived at different formulations. This tolerance is beauexpressed in the story of several men who were asked

tifully

to describe an elephant in the dark. One, touching his trunk,

;

said "this animal

his ear, said "this

animal is like a fan"

a water pipe" ; another, touching ;

a third, touching

his legs, described the animal as a pillar.

Secondly, the paradoxical standpoint led to the emphasis i

on transforming man, rather than to the development of

dogma on the one hand, and science on the other. From the ;

Indian, Chinese and mystical standpoints, the religious task

man is not to think right, but to act right, and/or to become one with the One in the act of concentrated meditaof

tion.

The

opposite

true for the

main stream

of Western

thought. Since one expected to find the ultimate truth in the

thought, major emphasis was on thought, although

right

right action

velopment

was held to be important too. In religious de-

this

led to the formulation of dogmas, endless

arguments about dogmatic formulations, and intolerance of the

"non-believer"

or heretic.

furthermore led to the

emphasis on "believing in God" as the main aim of a religious

attitude.

This, of course, did not

mean that there

was not also the concept that one ought to live right. But

THE ART OF LOVING

nevertheless, the person

—even

who believed in God

—

God felt himself to be superior to the one who lived God, but did not "believe" in him. The emphasis on thought has also another and historically a very important consequence. The idea that one could find

did not live

the truth in thought led not only to dogma, but also to science. In scientific thought, the correct thought

all

that

matters, both from the aspect of intellectual honesty, as well as from the aspect of the application of scientific thought to

practice

—

that is, to technique.

In short, paradoxical thought led to tolerance and an effort

toward self-transformation. The Aristotelian stand-

point led to dogma and science, to the Catholic Church, and to the discovery of atomic energy.

The consequences of this difference between the two standpoints for the problem of the love of God have already been

explained implicitly, and need only to be summarized briefly.

In the dominant Western religious system, the love of God is

essentially the

same as the belief in God, in God's exist-

ence, God's justice, God's love. The love of God is essentially

a thought experience. In the Eastern religions and in mysticism, the love of

God is an intense feeling experience of

oneness, inseparably linked with the expression of this love in

every act of living.

The most radical formulation has been

given to this goal by Meister Eckhart: "If therefore I

changed into God and He makes me one with Himself, then,

by the living God, there is no distinction between us.

Some people imagine that they are going to see God, that they are going to see God as if he were standing yonder, and they here, but it

not to be so.

God and I: we are one.

THE THEORY OF LOVE

By knowing God I take him to myself. By loving God, I penetrate him,"

We can return now to an important parallel between the love for one's parents and the love for God. The child starts

out by being attached to his mother as "the ground of all 55

He feels helpless and needs the all-enveloping love of mother. He then turns to father as the new center of his

being.

affections, father being

a guiding principle for thought and

action; in this stage he is motivated by the need to acquire

and to avoid his displeasure. In the stage of full maturity he has freed himself from the person of mother and of father as protecting and commanding powers; he has established the motherly and fatherly principles in himself. He has become his own father and mother; he is father and father's praise,

mother. In the history of the human race we see

—

and can same development: from the beginning of the love for God as the helpless attachment to a mother Goddess, through the obedient attachment to a fatherly God, to a mature stage where God ceases to be an outside power, where man has incorporated the principles of love and justice into himself, where he has become one with God, and eventually, to a point where he speaks of God only in a anticipate

—

the

poetic, symbolic sense.

From these considerations it follows that the love for God cannot be separated from the love for one's parents. If a person does not emerge from incestuous attachment to mother, clan,

nation,

he retains the childish dependence on a

punishing and rewarding father, or any other authority, he

cannot develop a more mature love for God; then his re37 Meister Eckhart, op. cit., pp.

181-2.

THE ART OF LOVING

82 ligion

God was

that

of the

earlier

experienced

phase of

in which mother or a

religion,

all-protective

punishing-rewarding father.

In contemporary religion we find all the phases, from the

and most primitive development to the highest, still The word "God" denotes the tribal chief as well as the "absolute Nothing.' In the same way, each individual retains in himself, in his unconscious, as Freud has shown, all the stages from the helpless infant on. The question is to what point he has grown. One thing is certain the nature earliest

present.

of his love for God corresponds to the nature of his love for

man, and furthermore, the real quality of his love for God and man often is unconscious covered up and rationalized by a more mature thought of what his love is. Love for man, furthermore, while directly embedded in his relations to his family, is in the last analysis determined by the structure of the society in which he lives. If the social structure

—

one of submission to authority

overt authority or the

anonymous authority of the market and public opinion, his concept of God must be infantile and far from the mature concept, the seeds of which are to be found in the history of monotheistic religion.

III.

Love and Its Disintegration in Contemporary Western Society

IF LOVE is a capacity of the mature, productive character, it follows that the capacity to love in an individual living in any given culture depends on the influence this culture has

on the character of the average person. If we speak about in contemporary Western culture, we mean to ask

love

whether the social structure of Western civilization and the spirit resulting

love.

from it are conducive to the development of

To raise the question is to answer it in the negative.

No objective observer of our Western life can doubt that love

—brotherly

love,

motherly love, and erotic love

— a is

relatively rare phenomenon,

and that its place is taken by a number of forms of pseudo-love which are in reality so many forms of the disintegration of love. Capitalistic society

based on the principle of political

freedom on the one hand, and of the market as the regulator of all economic, hence social relations,

on the other. The

commodity market determines the conditions under which commodities are exchanged, the labor market regulates the 83

THE ART OF LOVING

and sale of labor. Both useful things and useful human energy and skill are transformed into commodities which are exchanged without the use of force and without fraud under the conditions of the market. Shoes, useful and needed as they may be, have no economic value (exchange value) if there is no demand for them on the market; human energy and skill are without exchange value if there is no demand for them under existing market conditions. The owner of capital can buy labor and command it to work for the profitable investment of his capital. The owner of labor acquisition

must sell it to capitalists under the existing market conditions, unless

he is to starve. This economic structure is re-

flected in a hierarchy of values. Capital

commands labor;

amassed things, that which is dead, are of superior value to labor, to human powers, to that which is alive.

This has been the basic structure of capitalism since its beginning. But while it is still characteristic of modern capitalism, a

number of factors have changed which give con-

temporary capitalism its

specific qualities

and which have

a profound influence on the character structure of modern

man. As the

result

of the

development of capitalism we

witness an ever-increasing process of centralization and concentration

of capital.

The

large enterprises

grow

in size

continuously, the smaller ones are squeezed out. The ownership of capital invested in these enterprises is more and more

separated from the function of managing them. Hundreds of

thousands of stockholders "own" the enterprise; a managerial

bureaucracy which is well paid, but which does not own the

manages it. This bureaucracy is less interested in making maximum profits than in the expansion of the enter-

enterprise,

LOVE

—DISINTEGRATION IN WESTERN SOCIETY 85

and in their own power. The increasing concentration and the emergence of a powerful managerial I bureaucracy are paralleled by the development of the labor I movement. Through the unionization of labor, the individual worker does not have to bargain on the labor market by and for himself; he is united in big labor unions, also led by a powerful bureaucracy which represents him vis-a-vis the !

jprise,

of capital

industrial colossi.

The initiative has been shifted, for better

I or worse, in the fields of capital as well as in those of labor,

from the individual

the

bureaucracy.

increasing

number of people cease to be independent, and become de| pendent on the managers of the great economic empires. Another decisive feature resulting from this concentration of capital,

and characteristic of modern capitalism, lies in

the specific

way of the organization of work. Vastly cen-

tralized enterprises with a radical division of labor lead to

an organization of work where the individual loses his individuality,

where he becomes an expendable cog in the

machine. The human problem of modern capitalism can be formulated in this way

Modern capitalism needs men who co-operate smoothly and

in large

numbers;

who want to consume more and

more; and whose tastes are standardized and can be easily influenced and anticipated. It needs men who feel free and

independent, not subject to any authority or principle or conscience

—

yet willing to be commanded, to do what is ex-

pected of them, to fit into the social machine without friction;

who can be guided without force, led without leaders,

—

prompted without aim except the one to make good, to be on the move, to function, to go ahead.

THE ART OF LOVING

What is the outcome? Modern man is alienated from himself, from his fellow men, and from nature.

He has been

transformed into a commodity, experiences his life forces as an investment which must bring him the maximum profit obtainable under existing market conditions. Human relaare

tions

essentially

those

alienated automatons,

each

basing his security on staying close to the herd, and not being different in thought, feeling or action. While everybody tries

to be as close as possible to the rest, everybody remains

pervaded by the deep sense of

alone,

utterly

insecurity,

anxiety and guilt which always results when human separateness cannot be overcome. liatives

Our civilization offers many pal-

which help people to be consciously unaware of this

aloneness:

first

of all the strict routine of bureaucratized,

mechanical work, which helps people to remain unaware of

most fundamental human

their

desires, of the

longing for

transcendence and unity. Inasmuch as the routine alone does not succeed in this, man overcomes his unconscious despair

by the routine of amusement, the passive consumption of sounds and sights offered by the amusement industry; fur-

thermore by the satisfaction of buying ever new things,

and soon exchanging them for others. Modern man is actually close to the picture Huxley describes in his Brave

World: well self,

fed, well clad, satisfied sexually, yet

New

without

without any except the most superficial contact with his

fellow men, guided by the slogans which Huxley formulated so succinctly, such as: 1 Gf.

"When the individual feels, the com-

a more detailed discussion of the problem of alienation and of

modern society on the character of man in Society, E. Fromm, Rinehart and Company, New York, 1955. the influence of

The Sane

DISINTEGRATION IN WESTERN SOCIETY

LOVE

munity reels"; or "Never put off till tomorrow the fun you i

can have today," or, as the crowning statement

""Everybody

is happy nowadays." Man's happiness today consists in "having fun." Having fun lies in the satisfaction of consuming

and "taking in" commodities, sights, food, drinks, cigarettes, lectures, books, movies all are consumed, swal-

—

people,

lowed. The world is one great object for our appetite, a big apple, a big bottle, a big breast; we are the sucklers, the eternally expectant ones, the hopeful ones

—and

the eternally

disappointed ones. Our character is geared to exchange and to receive, to barter and to consume; everything, spiritual as

well as material objects, becomes an object of exchange and of consumption.

The situation as far as love is concerned corresponds, as it has to by necessity, to this social character of modern man. Automatons cannot love; they can exchange their "personality packages" and hope for a fair bargain. One of the most significant expressions of love, and especially of marriage with this alienated structure, is the idea of the "team."

In any number of described

description

articles

on happy marriage, the ideal

that of the smoothly functioning team. This

not too different from the idea of a smoothly

functioning employee; he should be "reasonably independent," co-operative, tolerant, and at the same time ambitious and aggressive. Thus, the marriage counselor tells us, the husband should "understand" his wife and be helpful. He should comment favorably on her new dress, and on a tasty dish. She, in turn, should understand when he comes home tired and disgruntled, she should listen attentively when he talks

about his business troubles, should not be angry but

THE ART OF LOVING

understanding when he forgets her birthday. All this kind of relationship amounts to is the well-oiled relationship between

two persons who remain strangers all their lives, who never arrive at a "central relationship,

but who treat each other

with courtesy and who attempt to make each other feel better. In this concept of love and marriage the main emphasis is

on finding a refuge from an otherwise unbearable sense

of aloneness. In "love" one has found, at last, a haven from

One forms an alliance of two against the world, and this egoism a deux is mistaken for love and intimacy. The emphasis on team spirit, mutual tolerance and so forth is a relatively recent development. It was preceded, in the years after the First World War, by a concept of love in which mutual sexual satisfaction was supposed to be the basis for satisfactory love relations, and especially for a happy marriage. It was believed that the reasons for the frequent unhappiness in marriage were to be found in that the marriage partners had not made a correct "sexual adjustment"; the reason for this fault was seen in the ignorance aloneness.

regarding "correct" sexual behavior, hence in the faulty sexual technique of one or both partners. In order to "cure"

and to help the unfortunate couples who could not love each other, many books gave instructions and counsel concerning the correct sexual behavior, and promised implicitly or explicitly that happiness and love would follow. The underlying idea was that love is the child of sexual pleasure, and that if two people learn how to satisfy each this fault,

other sexually, they will love each other. It fitted the general illusion of the time to assume that using the right techniques is

the solution not only to technical problems of industrial

DISINTEGRATION IN WESTERN SOCIETY

LOVE

production, but of all human problems as well. One ignored the fact that the contrary of the underlying assumption

true.

Love is not the result of adequate sexual satisfaction, but sexual happiness— even the knowledge of the so-called sexual

technique

— the is

result of love. If aside

from everyday ob-

servation this thesis needed to be proved, such proof can be

found in ample material of psychoanalytic data. The study

—

frigidity in women, of the most frequent sexual problems and the more or less severe forms of psychic impotence in

men

—shows

that the cause does not lie in a lack of knowl-

edge of the right technique, but in the inhibitions which

make it impossible to love. Fear of or hatred for the other sex are at the bottom of those difficulties which prevent a

person from giving himself completely, from acting spontaneously, from trusting the sexual partner in the immediacy and directness of physical closeness. If a sexually inhibited person can emerge from fear or hate, and hence become

capable of loving, his or her sexual problems are solved. If not,

no amount of knowledge about sexual techniques will

help.

But while the data of psychoanalytic therapy point to the fallacy

of the idea that knowledge of the correct sexual

technique leads to sexual happiness and love, the underlying

assumption that love satisfaction

the concomitant of mutual sexual

was largely influenced by the theories of Freud.

For Freud, love was basically a sexual phenomenon. "Man having found by experience that sexual (genital) love afforded

him his greatest gratification, so that it became in

fact a prototype of all happiness to him,

must have been

THE ART OF LOVING

thereby impelled to seek his happiness further along the path of sexual

relations,

point of his life."

make genital eroticism the

central

The experience of brotherly love is, for

Freud, an outcome of sexual desire, but with the sexual instinct

being transformed into an impulse with "inhibited

aim." "Love with an inhibited aim was indeed originally full of sensual love,

and in man's unconscious mind is so still." 3

As far as the feeling of fusion, of oneness ("oceanic feelis the essence of mystical experience and the

ing"), which

root of the most intense sense of union with one other person

or with one's fellow men, is concerned, it was interpreted by

Freud as a pathological phenomenon, as a regression to a 4 state of an early "limitless narcissism." It is

only one step further that for Freud love is in itself

an irrational phenomenon. The difference between irrational love,

and love as an expression of the mature personality

does not exist for him. He pointed out in a paper on transference love,

that transference love is essentially not different

from the "normal" phenomenon

of love.

always verges on the abnormal,

always accompanied by

blindness to reality, compulsiveness,

and

Falling in love

a transference

from love objects of childhood. Love as a rational phenomenon, as the crowning achievement of maturity, was, to Freud, no subject matter for investigation, since it had no real existence.

However, it would be a mistake to overestimate the influ2 S.

Freud, Civilization and Its Discontents, translated by J. Riviere,

The Hogarth Press, Ltd., London, 1953, p. 69. s Ibid.,

p. 69.

* Ibid., p. 21. 5 Freud,

Gesamte Werke, London, 1940-52, Vol. X.

LOVE

DISINTEGRATION IN WESTERN SOCIETY

ence of Freud's ideas on the concept that love is the result of sexual attraction, or rather that it is the same as sexual satisfaction,

reflected

conscious feeling.

Essentially

the

causal nexus proceeds the other way around. Freud's ideas

were partly influenced by the spirit of the nineteenth cen-

became popular through the prevailing spirit of the years after the First World War. Some of the factors which influenced both the popular and the Freudian tury;

partly they

concepts were, first, the reaction against the strict mores of the Victorian age.

The second factor determining Freud's

theories lies in the prevailing concept of man, which is based

on the structure of capitalism. In order to prove that capitalism corresponded to the natural needs of man, one had to

show that man was by nature competitive and full of mutual While economists "proved" this in terms of the insatiable desire for economic gain, and the Darwinists in terms of the biological law of the survival of the fittest, Freud came to the same result by the assumption that man is hostility.

driven by a limitless desire for the sexual conquest of

all

women, and that only the pressure of society prevented man from acting on his desires. As a result men are necessarily jealous of each other, and this mutual jealousy and competition would continue even if all social and economic reasons for it would disappear.

Eventually, Freud was largely influenced in his thinking

by the type

materialism prevalent in the nineteenth

only pupil of Freud who never separated from the master, and who in the last years of his life changed his views on love, was Sandor FerenczL For an excellent discussion on this subject see The Leaven of Love by Izette de Forest, Harper & Brothers, New York, 6 The

yet

1954.

THE ART OF LOVING

92 century.

One believed that the substratum of all mental

phenomena was to be found in physiological phenomena hence love, hate, ambition, jealousy were explained by Freud as so many outcomes of various forms of the sexual instinct.

He did not see that the basic reality lies in the totality of human existence, first of all in the human situation common to all men, and secondly in the practice of life determined by the specific structure of society. (The decisive step beyond this type of materialism was taken by

Marx in his "historical

materialism," in which not the body, nor an instinct like the

need for food or possession, serves as the key to the understanding of man, but the total life process of man, his "practice of life").

satisfaction

According to Freud, the full and uninhibited all

instinctual desires

would

create mental

health and happiness. But the obvious clinical facts demonstrate that

men— and women—who devote their lives to un-

restricted sexual satisfaction

do not

attain happiness,

and

very often suffer from severe neurotic conflicts or symptoms.

The complete satisfaction of all instinctual needs is not only not a basis for happiness, it does not even guarantee sanity.

Yet Freud's idea could only have become so popular in the period after the First

which had occurred

World War because of the changes in the spirit of capitalism,

from the

emphasis on saving to that on spending, from self-frustration as a means for economic success to consumption as the basis for

an ever- widening market, and as the main satisfaction

for the anxious, automatized individual. Not to postpone the satisfaction of

any desire became the main tendency in the

sphere of sex as well as in that of all material consumption. It is interesting to

compare the concepts of Freud, which

DISINTEGRATION IN WESTERN SOCIETY

LOVE

Correspond to the spirit of capitalism as it existed, yet unbroken, around the beginning of this century, with the theoretical concepts of one of the most brilliant contemporary ^psychoanalysts, the late H. S. Sullivan. In Sullivan's psychoparialytic

system

find,

contrast to Freud's,

strict

|fdivision between sexuality and love.

What is the meaning of love and intimacy in Sullivan's If&ohcept? "Intimacy is that type of situation involving two

people which permits validation of all components of pergonal worth. Validation of personal worth requires a type of fj relationship

ijitlearly

which

I call collaboration,

by which

mean

formulated adjustments of one's behavior to the ex-

pressed needs of the other person in pursuit of increasingly that is, more and more nearly mutual satisfac^identical

—

and in the maintenance of increasingly similar security 7 operations." If we free Sullivan's statement from its somewhat involved language, the essence of love is seen in a situation of collaboration, in which two people feel: "We play

| tions,

according to the rules of the game to preserve our prestige

and feeling of superiority and merit." 8 Just as Freud's concept of love is a description of the ex7 H. S, Sullivan, The Interpersonal Theory of Psychiatry 3 W. W. Norton Co., New York, 1953, p. 246. It must be noted that although

Sullivan gives this definition in connection with the strivings of preadolescence, he speaks of them as integrating tendencies, coming out during pre-adolescence, "which when they are completely developed, we call love," and says that this love in pre-adolescence "represents the beginning of something very like full-blown, psychiatrically defined

lover 8 Ibid., p. 246. Another definition of love by Sullivan, that love begins when a person feels another person's needs to be as important as his own, is less colored by the marketing aspect than the above formulation.

THE ART OF LOVING

perience of the patriarchal male in terms of nineteenth-century capitalism, Sullivan's description refers to the experience of the alienated, marketing personality of the twentieth century.

It is

a description of an "egotism a

deux" of two

people pooling their common interests, and standing together against a hostile and alienated world. Actually his definition of intimacy

in principle valid for the feeling of

any co-

operating team, in which everybody "adjusts his behavior to the expressed needs of the other person in the pursuit of

common aims"

(it

remarkable that Sullivan speaks here

of expressed needs, when the least one could say about love is

that

implies a reaction to unexpressed needs between

two people). Love as mutual sexual satisfaction, and love as "teamwork" and as a haven from aloneness, are the two "normal" forms of the disintegration of love in modern Western society, the socially patterned pathology of love. There are many individualized forms of the pathology of love, which result in conscious suffering and which are considered neurotic by psychiatrists and an increasing number of laymen alike. Some of the more frequent ones are briefly described in the following examples.

The basic condition for neurotic love lies in the fact that one or both of the "lovers" have remained attached to the

and transfer the feelings, expectations and fears one once had toward father or mother to the loved person in adult life the persons involved have never emerged from a pattern of infantile relatedness, and seek for this pattern in their affective demands in adult life. In these cases, figure of a parent,

;

the person has remained, affectively, a child of two, or of

LOVE

—DISINTEGRATION IN WESTERN SOCIETY 95

or of twelve, while intellectually

I'five,

and socially he is on

I the level of his chronological age. In the more severe cases, this

emotional immaturity leads to disturbances in his social

effectiveness; in the less severe ones, the conflict

limited

["to the sphere of intimate personal relationships. 1

Referring to our previous discussion of the mother- or I father-centered personality, the following

example for this

type of neurotic love relation to be found frequently today fleals

with

men who in their emotional development have

remained stuck in an infantile attachment to mother. These men who have never been weaned as it were from mother. These men still feel like children; they want mother's protection, love, warmth, care, and admiration; they want mother's unconditional love, a love which is given for no

i'ja're

other reason than that they need it, that they are mother's child, that they are helpless.

Such men frequently are quite

affectionate and charming if they try to induce a woman to

love them,

and even after they have succeeded in this. But

their relationship to the

woman (as, in fact, to all other

people) remains superficial and irresponsible. Their aim is to

be loved, not to love. There is usually a good deal of

vanity in this type of man,

more or less hidden grandiose

ideas. If they have found the right woman, they feel secure,

on top of the world, and can display a great deal of affection and charm, and this is the reason why these men are often so deceptive. But when, after a while, the woman does not continue to live up to their phantastic expectations, conflicts and resentment start to develop. If the woman is not always admiring them, if she makes claims for a life of her own, if She wants to be loved and protected herself, and in extreme

THE ART OF LOVING

96 cases, if she

not willing to condone his love affairs with

other women (or even have an admiring interest in them),

man feels deeply hurt and disappointed, and usually rationalizes this feeling with the idea that the woman "does the

not love him, is selfish, or is domineering." Anything short of the attitude of a loving mother toward a charming child is taken

as proof of a lack of love. These men usually confuse

their affectionate behavior, their wish to please, with genuine

love

and thus arrive at the conclusion that they are being

treated quite unfairly; they imagine themselves to be the

great lovers

and complain bitterly about the ingratitude of

their love partner.

In rare cases such a mother-centered person can function without any severe disturbances. If his mother, in

fact,

"loved" him in an overprotective manner (perhaps being domineering, but without being destructive),

he finds a

wife of the same motherly type, if his special gifts and talents

permit him to use his charm and be admired (as is the case

sometimes with successful politicians), he is "well adjusted" in a social sense, without ever reaching a higher level of

maturity. But under less favorable conditions

—

naturally more frequent

—and

these are

his love life, if not his social life,

will be a serious disappointment; conflicts, and frequently in-

tense anxiety and depression arise when this type of personality is left alone.

In a still more severe form of pathology the fixation to

mother is deeper and more irrational. On this level, the wish is

not, symbolically speaking, to return to mother's protect-

ing arms, nor to her nourishing breast, but to her all-receiving

—and

—womb.

all-destroying

the nature of sanity is

DISINTEGRATION IN WESTERN SOCIETY

LOVE

I to grow out of the womb into the world, the nature of severe

mental disease is to be attracted by the womb, to be sucked

—and

back into it

that is to be taken away from life. This

kind of fixation usually occurs in relation to mothers who relate themselves to their children in this swallowing-destroy-

ing way. Sometimes in the name of love, sometimes of duty, they want to keep the child, the adolescent, the man, within

them; he should not be able to breathe but through them; not be able to love, except on a superficial sexual level

—

de-

grading all other women; he should not be able to be free

and independent but an eternal cripple or a criminal. This aspect of mother, the destructive, engulfing one, is

Mother can give and she can take life. She is the one to revive, and the

the negative aspect of the mother figure. life,

—and nobody can

one to destroy; she can do miracles of love

hurt more than she. In religious images (such as the Hindu goddess Kali)

and in dream symbolism the two opposite

aspects of mother can often be found.

A different form of neurotic pathology

to be found in

such cases where the main attachment is that to father.

A case in point

a man whose mother is cold and aloof,

while his father (partly as a result of his wife's coldness) concentrates all his affection and interest on the son. He is a

"good father," but at the same time authoritarian. Whenever he

pleased with the son's conduct he praises him,

him presents,

gives

affectionate;

whenever the son

pleases him, he withdraws, or scolds.

dis-

The son, for whom

father's affection is the only one he has, becomes attached to

father in a slavish way. His

main aim in life is to please feels happy, secure and

father

—and when he succeeds he

THE ART OF LOVING

98 satisfied.

But when he makes a mistake,

succeed in pleasing father, he

fails,

feels deflated,

or does not

unloved, cast .

out. In later life such a man will try to find a father figure

to whom he attaches himself in a similar fashion. His whole life

becomes a sequence of ups and downs, depending on

whether he has succeeded in winning father's praise. Such

men are often very successful in their social careers. They are conscientious, reliable, eager

—provided

their chosen father

image understands how to handle them. But in their relationships to women they remain aloof and distant. The woman

no central significance to them; they usually have a slight contempt for her, often masked as the fatherly concern for a little girl. They may have impressed a woman initially by their masculine quality, but they become increasingly disappointing, when the woman they marry discovers that she is

destined to play a secondary role to the primary affection

for the father figure who is prominent in the husband's life at

any given time; that is, unless the wife happens to have

—and

remained attached to her father

thus is happy with a

husband who relates to her as to a capricious child.

More complicated is the kind of neurotic disturbance in love which is based on a different kind of parental situation,

occurring when parents do not love each other, but are too

any signs of dissatisfacAt the same time, remoteness makes them

restrained to quarrel or to indicate tion outwardly. also

unspontaneous in their relationship to their children.

What a little girl experiences is an atmosphere of "correctness,"

but one which never permits a close contact with

and hence leaves the girl puzzled and afraid. She is never sure of what the parents feel or either father or mother,

DISINTEGRATION IN WESTERN SOCIETY

LOVE

think; there is always an element of the unknown, the mysterious, in the

atmosphere. As a result the

girl

withdraws

into a world of her own, day-dreams, remains remote, retains the

and

same attitude in her love relationships later on.

Furthermore the withdrawal results in the development of intense anxiety, a feeling of not being firmly grounded in the

world, and often leads to masochistic tendencies as the only

way to experience intense excitement. Often such women would prefer having the husband make a scene and shout, to maintaining a more normal and sensible behavior, be-

his

cause at least it would take away the burden of tension and I

fear

from them; not so rarely they unconsciously provoke

such behavior, in order to end the tormenting suspense of affective neutrality.

Other frequent forms of irrational love are described in the following paragraphs, without going into an analysis of the specific factors in childhood development which are at their roots

A form of pseudo-love which is not infrequent and

is often

experienced (and more often described in moving pictures

and novels) as the "great love" is idolatrous love. If a person has not reached the level where he has a sense of identity, of I-ness, rooted in the productive unfolding of his own powers,

he tends to "idolize" the loved person. He is alienated from

own powers and projects them into the loved person, who is worshiped as the summum bonum, the bearer of all

his

love, all light, all bliss. all

In this process he deprives himself of

sense of strength, loses himself in the loved one instead

of finding himself. Since usually no person can, in the long

run, live

up to the expectations of her (or his)

idolatrous

THE ART OF LOVING

100

disappointment is bound to occur, and as a remedy a new idol is sought for, sometimes in an unending

worshiper,

circle. is,

What is characteristic for this type of idolatrous love

at the beginning, the intensity and suddenness of the love

experience. This idolatrous love

often described as the

true, great love; but while it is meant to portray the intensity

and despair of the idolator. Needless to say it is not rare that two

and depth

of love,

only demonstrates the hunger

persons find each other in a mutual idolatry which, sometimes, in extreme cases, represents the picture of

a folie a

deux.

Another form of pseudo-love is what may be called "sentimental love"

Its

essence

lies

in the fact that love

ex-

perienced only in phantasy and not in the here-and-now relationship to another person

who is real. The most wide-

spread form of this type of love is that to be found in the vicarious love satisfaction experienced by the

consumer of

screen pictures, magazine love stories and love songs. All the unfulfilled desires for love, union, satisfaction in the

and closeness find their

consumption of these products.

A man

and a woman who in relation to their spouses are incapable

moved to tears when they participate in the happy or unhappy love of ever penetrating the wall of separateness are

story of the couple on the screen.

For many couples, seeing

these stories on the screen is the only occasion on which they

—not

experience love

for each other, but together, as spec-

tators of other people's "love."

As long as love is a day

dream, they can participate; as soon as it comes down to the reality of the relationship between two real people

frozen.

—they

are

LOVE

—DISINTEGRATION IN WESTERN SOCIETY

Another aspect of sentimental love is the abstractification of love in terms of time.

A couple may be deeply moved

by memories of their past love, although when this past was present no love was experienced or the phantasies of

—

How many engaged or newly married

their future love.

couples

dream of their bliss of love to take place in the

future, while at the very moment at which they live they are

already beginning to be bored with each other? This tend-

ency coincides with a general attitude characteristic of

modern man. He lives in the past or in the future, but not

He remembers sentimentally his childhood and his mother or he makes happy plans for the future. Whether love is experienced vicariously by participating in

in the present.

—

the fictitious experiences of others, or whether it

shifted

away from the present to the past or the future, this abstractified and alienated form of love serves as an opiate which alleviates the pain of reality, the aloneness and separateness of the individual. Still

another form of neurotic love lies in the use of pro-

jective

mechanisms for the purpose of avoiding one's own

problems, and being concerned with the defects and frailties

of the "loved" person instead.

this respect

very

Individuals behave in

much as groups, nations or religions do.

They have a fine appreciation for even the minor shortcomings of the other person, their

own

—always busy

and go blissfully ahead ignoring trying to accuse or to reform the

other person. If two people both do

—

so often the

case-^-the relationship of love becomes transformed into one

of mutual projection. If I

am domineering or indecisive,

or greedy, I accuse my partner of it, and depending on my

THE ART OF LOVING

102

character, I either want to cure him or to punish him. The

other person does the same

—and both thus succeed

in ignor-

own problems and hence fail to undertake any steps which would help them in their own development.

ing their

Another form of projection

the projection of one's

own problems on the children. First of all such projection takes place not infrequently in the wish for children. In such cases the wish for children is primarily determined by project-

ing one's own problem of existence on that of the children.

When a person feels that he has not been able to make sense of his own life, he tries to make sense of it in terms of the life

of his children.

But one is bound to fail within oneself

and for the children. The former because the problem of existence can be solved by each one only for himself,

and

not by proxy; the latter because one lacks in the very qualities

which one needs to guide the children in their own search for an answer. Children serve for projective purposes also

when the question arises of dissolving an unhappy marriage. The stock argument of parents in such a situation is that they cannot separate in order not to deprive the children of the blessings of a unified home.

Any detailed study would

show, however, that the atmosphere of tension and unhap-

more harmful to the children than an open break would be which teaches them at least that man is able to end an intolerable situation by

piness within the "unified family"

—

a courageous decision.

One other frequent error must be mentioned here. The illusion,

namely, that love means necessarily the absence of

conflict.

Just as

customary for people to believe that

pain and sadness should be avoided under all circumstances,

LOVE

DISINTEGRATION IN WESTERN SOCIETY

IO3

they believe that love means the absence of any conflict. And

they find good reasons for this idea in the fact that the strug-

around them seem only to be destructive interchanges which bring no good to either one of those concerned. But the reason for this lies in the fact that the "conflicts" of most

gles

people are actually attempts to avoid the real conflicts. They are disagreements on minor or superficial matters which by their very nature solution.

do not lend themselves to clarification or

Real conflicts between two people, those which do

not serve to cover up or to project, but which are experi-

enced on the deep level of inner reality to which they belong, are not destructive. They lead to clarification, they produce

a catharsis from which both persons emerge with more

knowledge and more strength. This leads us to emphasize again something said above.

Love is possible only if two persons communicate with each other from the center of their existence, hence if each one of them experiences himself from the center of his existence. Only in this "central experience" is human reality, only here is aliveness, only here is the basis for love. Love,

experienced thus, is a constant challenge; it is not a resting place,

but

a moving, growing, working together

;

even

whether there is harmony or conflict, joy or sadness, is sec-

ondary to the fundamental fact that two people experience themselves from the essence of their existence, that they are

one with each other by being one with themselves, rather than by fleeing from themselves. There is only one proof for the presence of love: the depth of the relationship, and the aliveness and strength in each person concerned; this is the fruit by which love is recognized.

104

THE ART OF LOVING

Just as automatons cannot love each other they cannot love God. The disintegration of the love of God has reached

the same proportions as the disintegration of the love of man.

This fact is in blatant contradiction to the idea that we are witnessing a religious renaissance in this epoch. Nothing

could be further from the truth.

though there are exceptions)

What we witness

(even

a regression to an idolatric

concept of God, and a transformation of the love of God into a relationship fitting

an alienated character structure.

The regression to an idolatric concept of God is easy to see. People are anxious, without principles or

faith,

they find

themselves without an aim except the one to move ahead;

hence they continue to remain children, to hope for father or mother to come to their help when help is needed.

True, in religious cultures, like that of the Middle Ages, the average man also looked at God as to a helping father

and mother. But at the same time he took God seriously also, in the sense that the paramount goal of his life was to live ac-

cording to God's principles, to make "salvation" the supreme

concern to which all other activities were subordinated. Today, nothing of such effort

present. Daily

life

strictly

separated from any religious values. It is devoted to the striving for material comforts, and for success on the personality

market. The principles on which our secular efforts are built are those of indifference and egotism (the latter often labeled as "individualism," or "individual initiative").

Man of truly

religious cultures may be compared with children at the age

of eight,

who need father as a helper, but who begin to

adopt his teachings and principles in their lives. Contemporary man is rather like a child of three, who cries for father

LOVE

—DISINTEGRATION IN WESTERN SOCIETY IO5

when he needs him, and when he can play.

otherwise

quite self-sufficient

In this respect, in the infantile dependence on an anthropomorphic picture of God without the transformation of life according to the principles of God, we are closer to a primitive idolatric tribe than to the religious culture of the Middle

Ages, In another respect our religious situation shows features which are new, and characteristic only of contemporary

Western capitalistic society. I can refer to statements made in a previous part of this book. Modern man has transformed

himself into a commodity; he experiences his life energy as

an investment with which he should make the highest profit, considering his position and the situation on the personality

He is alienated from himself, from his fellow men and from nature. His main aim is profitable exchange of his skills, knowledge, and of himself, his "personality package" with others who are equally intent on a fair and profitable exchange. Life has no goal except the one to move, no principle except the one of fair exchange, no satisfaction market,

except the one to consume.

What can the concept of God mean under these circumstances? It is transformed from its original religious meaning into one fitting the alienated culture of success. In the reli-

gious revival of recent times, the belief in God has been trans-

formed into a psychological device to make one better fitted for the competitive struggle.

Religion allies itself with auto-suggestion and psychother-

apy to help man in his business activities. In the twenties one had not yet called upon God for purposes of "improving one's personality."

The best-seller in the year 1938, Dale

THE ART OF LOVING

106

Carnegie's How to

Win Friends and Influence People, remained on a strictly secular level. What was the function of Carnegie's book at that time is the function of our greatest best-seller today,

The Power of Positive Thinking by the

Reverend N. V. Peale. In this religious book it is not even questioned whether our dominant concern with success is in itself

in accordance with the spirit of monotheistic religion.

On the contrary, this supreme aim is never doubted, but belief in God

and prayer is recommended as a means to in-

crease one's ability to be successful. Just as modern psychiatrists recommend happiness of the employee, in order to be more appealing to the customers, some ministers recommend love of God in order to be more successful. "Make God your partner" means to make God a partner in business, rather than to become one with Him in love, justice and truth. Just as brotherly love has been replaced by impersonal fairness,

God has been transformed into a remote General Director of Universe, Inc.; you know that he is there, he runs the show (although it would probably run without him too), you never see him, but you acknowledge his leadership while you are "doing your part."

IV.

The Practice of Love

HAVING dealt with the theoretical aspect of the art of we now are confronted with a much more difficult problem, that of the practice of the art of loving. Can any-

loving,

thing be learned about the practice of an art, except by practicing it?

The difficulty of the problem is enhanced by the fact that most people today, hence many readers of this book, expect to be given prescriptions of "how to do it yourself," and that means in our case to be taught how to love. I am afraid that anyone who approaches this last chapter in this spirit will

be gravely disappointed.

To love is a personal experi-

ence which everyone can only have by and for himself; in fact, there is

hardly anybody who has not had this experi-

ence in a rudimentary way, at least, as a child, an adolescent,

an adult. What the discussion of the practice of love can do is

to discuss the premises of the art of loving, the approaches

to it as it were,

proaches.

and the practice of these premises and ap-

The steps toward the goal can be practiced only

by oneself, and discussion ends before the decisive step is taken. Yet, I believe that the discussion of the approaches 107

108

THE ART OF LOVING

—

may be helpful for the mastery of the art for those at least who have freed themselves from expecting "prescriptions." The practice of any art has certain general requirements, quite regardless of whether we deal with the art of carpentry, medicine, or the art of love. First of all, the practice of an art requires discipline. I shall never be good at anything if I do

not do it in a disciplined way; anything I do only if "I am in the mood"

may be a nice or amusing hobby, but I shall

never become a master in that art. But the problem is not only that of discipline in the practice of the particular art (say practicing every day a certain amount of hours) but it is

that of discipline in one's whole life. One might think that~

nothing is easier to learn for modern man than discipline.

Does he not spend eight hours a day in a most disciplined

way at a job which is strictly routinized? The fact, however, is

that modern man has exceedingly little self-discipline out-

side of the sphere of work. When he does not work, he wants

to be lazy, to slouch or, to use a nicer word, to "relax." This

very wish for laziness is largely a reaction against the routinization of life. Just because man is forced for eight hours a

day to spend his energy for purposes not his own, in ways not his own, but prescribed for him by the rhythm of the

work, he rebels and his rebelliousness takes the form of an infantile self-indulgence.

In addition, in the battle against

authoritarianism he has become distrustful of all discipline, of that enforced by irrational authority, as well as of rational discipline imposed by himself. Without such discipline, however, life becomes shattered, chaotic, and lacks in concentration.

That concentration is a necessary condition for the mas*-

THE PRACTICE OF LOVE

109

tery of an art is hardly necessary to prove. Anyone who ever tried to learn

an art knows this. Yet, even more than self-

discipline, concentration

trary,

rare in our culture.

On the con-

our culture leads to an unconcentrated and diffused

mode of life, hardly paralleled anywhere else. You do many things at once;

you read,

the radio, talk, smoke,

listen to

eat, drink. You are the consumer with the open mouth, eager

and ready to swallow everything

—

edge. This lack of concentration difficulty in

pictures, liquor,

shown

knowlin

our

being alone with ourselves. To sit still, without

talking, smoking, reading, drinking,

people.

clearly

They become nervous and

impossible for most

fidgety,

and must do

something with their mouth or their hands. (Smoking is one

symptoms of this lack of concentration; it occupies hand, mouth, eye and nose.

of the

A third factor is patience. Again, anyone who ever tried to master an art knows that patience is necessary if you want

to achieve anything. If one is after quick results, one never learns an art. Yet, for modern man, patience is as difficult to

practice as discipline trial

and concentration. Our whole indus-

system fosters exactly the opposite: quickness. All our

machines are designed for quickness: the car and airplane bring us quickly to our destination better.

—and the quicker the

The machine which can produce the same quantity

in half the time is twice as good as the older and slower one.

Of course, there are important economic reasons for this. But, as in so many other aspects, human values have become determined by economic values. What is good for machines must be good for man so goes the logic. Modern man thinks he loses something time when he does not do

—

THE ART OF LOVING

110

things quickly; yet he does not know what to do with the

time he gains

—except

kill it.

Eventually, a condition of learning any art is a supreme

concern with the mastery of the art. If the art is not something of supreme importance, the apprentice will never learn it.

He will remain, at best, a good dilettante, but will never

become a master. This condition is as necessary for the art of loving as for

any other art.

It seems,

though, as

the

proportion between masters and dilettantes is more heavily

weighted in favor of the dilettantes in the art of loving than is the case with other arts.

One more point must be made with regard to the general One does not begin to learn an art directly, but indirectly, as it were. One must learn a

conditions of learning an art.

great

number of other

things

—before one

—and

starts

often seemingly disconnected

with the art itself. An apprentice

in carpentry begins by learning how to plane wood;

an ap-

prentice in the art of piano playing begins by practicing scales;

an apprentice in the Zen art of archery begins by

doing breathing exercises. 1 If one wants to become a master in

any

art,

one's

least related to it.

whole life must be devoted to

it,

or at

One's own person becomes an instrument

in the practice of the art, and must be kept fit, according to

the specific functions it has to fulfill. With regard to the art of loving, this means that anyone who aspires to become a

master in this art must begin by practicing discipline, concentration

and patience throughout every phase of his life.

1 For a picture of the concentration, discipline, patience and concern necessary for the learning of an art, I want to refer the reader to Z e n in the Art of Archery, by E. Herrigel, Pantheon Books, Inc., New York,

1953.

THE PRACTICE OF LOVE

III

How does one practice discipline? Our grandfathers would have been

much better equipped to answer this question.

Their recommendation was to get up early in the morning, not to indulge in unnecessary luxuries, to work hard. This type of discipline had obvious shortcomings. It was rigid and

was centered around the virtues of frugality and saving, and in many ways was hostile to life. But in a reaction to this kind of discipline, there has been an increasing tendency to be suspicious of any discipline, and to make unauthoritarian,

disciplined, lazy indulgence in the rest of one's life the coun-

and balance for the routinized way of life imposed on us during the eight hours of work. To get up at a regular hour, to devote a regular amount of time during the day to terpart

activities

such as meditating, reading, listening to music,

walking; not to indulge, at least not beyond a certain mini-

mum, in escapist activities like mystery stories and movies, not to overeat or overdrink are some obvious and rudimentary rules. It is essential, however, that discipline should not

be practiced like a rule imposed on oneself from the outside, but that it becomes an expression of one's own will; that it is felt

as pleasant,

and that one slowly accustoms oneself to

a kind of behavior which one would eventually miss, if one stopped practicing it. It is one of the unfortunate aspects of

our Western concept of discipline (as of every virtue) that its

practice is supposed to be somewhat painful and only if

it is

painful can it be "good." The East has recognized long

ago that that which is good for man his soul

—must

also

—

for his body and for

be agreeable, even though at the be-

ginning some resistances must be overcome.

Concentration is by far more difficult to practice in our

THE ART OF LOVING

112

culture, in which everything seems to act against the ability

to concentrate. The most important step in learning concentration is to learn to be alone with oneself without reading, listening to the radio,

smoking or drinking. Indeed, to be

able to concentrate means to be able to be alone with one-

—and

this ability is precisely a condition for the ability to

love. If I

am attached to another person because I cannot

self

stand on my own feet, he or she may be a lifesaver, but the relationship is not one of love. Paradoxically, the ability to

be alone is the condition for the ability to love. Anyone who tries to be

alone with himself will discover how difficult it is.

He will begin to feel restless, fidgety, or even to sense considerable anxiety. He will be prone to rationalize his unwillingness to go on with this practice by thinking that it has no is just silly, that it takes too much time, and so on, and so on. He will also observe that all sorts of thoughts come to his mind which take possession of him. He will find

value,

himself thinking about his plans for later in the day, or

about some difficulty in a job he has to do, or where to go in the evening, or about his mind

any number of things that will fill

—rather than permitting

to empty itself. It would

be helpful to practice a few very simple exercises, as, for instance, to

sit

in a relaxed position

(neither slouching, nor

rigid) j to close one's eyes, and to try to see a white screen in

and to try to remove all interfering picand thoughts, then to try to follow one's breathing; not to think about it, nor force it, but to follow it and in

front of one's eyes, tures

—

doing so to sense it; furthermore to try to have a sense of "I" ; I

myself, as the center of my powers, as the creator

of my world.

One should, at least, do such a concentration

THE PRACTICE OF LOVE

II3

morning for twenty minutes (and if possible and every evening before going to bed. 2 Besides such exercises, one must learn to be concentrated

exercise every

longer)

in everything

one does, in listening to music, in reading a

book, in talking to a person, in seeing a view. The activity at this

very

moment must be the only thing that matters, to

which one is fully given. If one is concentrated, it matters little what one is doing; the important, as well as the unimportant things assume a new dimension of reality, because they have one's

full

To learn concentration re-

attention.

quires avoiding, as far as possible, trivial conversation, that is,

conversation which

not genuine. If two people talk

about the growth of a tree they both know, or about the taste of the bread they have just eaten together, or about a

common experience in their job, such conversation can be relevant,

provided they experience what they are talking

about, and do not deal with it in an abstractified way; on the other hand, a conversation can deal with matters of politics or religion and yet be trivial; this happens when the

two people talk in cliches, when their hearts are not in what they are saying. I should add here that just as it is important to avoid trivial conversation,

important to avoid bad

company. By bad company I do not refer only to people

who are vicious and destructive one should avoid their com;

2 While there is a considerable amount of theory and practice on this point in the Eastern, especially the Indian cultures, similar aims have been followed in recent years also in the West. The most significant, in my opinion, is the school of Gindler, the aim of which is the sensing of one's body. For the understanding of the Gindler method, cf. also Charlotte Selver's work, in her lectures and courses at the New School, in

New York.

THE ART OF LOVING

114

pany because their orbit is poisonous and depressing. I mean also the company of zombies, of people whose soul is dead,

although their body is alive; of people whose thoughts and conversation are trivial;

who chatter instead of talk, and

who assert cliche opinions instead of thinking. However, it is

not always possible to avoid the company of such people,

nor even necessary.

way

—

that

is,

one does not react in the expected

cliches

and trivialities

—but

directly

and

humanly, one will often find that such people change their behavior, often helped by the surprise effected by the shock of the unexpected.

To be concentrated in relation to others means primarily to be able to listen. Most people listen to others, or even give

They do not take the other do not take their own answers seriously either. As a result, the talk makes them tired. They are under the illusion that they would be even more tired advice, without really listening.

person's talk seriously, they

they listened with concentration. But the opposite is true.

Any activity, if done in a concentrated fashion, makes one more awake

(although afterward natural and beneficial

tiredness sets in), while every unconcentrated activity makes

one sleepy—while at the same time it makes it difficult to fall asleep at the end of the day.

To be concentrated means to live fully in the present, in the here and now, and not to think of the next thing to be

done, while I

am doing something right now. Needless to

say that concentration must be practiced most of

all

people who love each other. They must learn to be close to

each other without running away in the many ways in which this is customarily

done.

The beginning of the practice of

THE PRACTICE OF LOVE

II5

concentration will be difficult; it will appear as if one could

never achieve the aim. That this implies the necessity to have patience need hardly be said. If one does not

know that

everything has its time, and wants to force things, then in-

deed one will never succeed in becoming concentrated

—nor

in the art of loving. To have an idea of what patience is one

need only watch a child learning to walk. It falls, falls again,

and falls again, and yet it goes on trying, improving, until one day it walks without falling. What could the grown-up person achieve if he had the child's patience and its concentration in the pursuits which are important to him One cannot learn to concentrate without becoming sensitive to oneself. What does this mean? Should one think about oneself all the time, "analyze" oneself, or what? If we were to talk about being sensitive to a machine, there would be little difficulty in explaining what is meant. Anybody, for instance, who drives a car is sensitive to it. Even a small, unaccustomed noise is noticed, and so is a small change in the pickup of the motor. In the same way, the driver is sensitive to changes in the road surface, to movements of the cars before and behind him. Yet* he is not thinking about all these factors; his mind is in a state of relaxed alertness, open to all relevant changes in the situation on which he is concentrated

—

that of driving his car safely.

we look at the situation of being sensitive to another human being, we find the most obvious example in the senIf

and responsiveness of a mother to her baby. She notices certain bodily changes, demands, anxieties, before they are overtly expressed. She wakes up because of her child's crying, where another and much louder sound would sitiveness

THE ART OF LOVING

Il6

not waken her. All this means that she is sensitive to the manifestations

the

child's

life;

she

not anxious or

worried, but in a state of alert equilibrium, receptive to any

communication coming from the child. In the same way one can be sensitive toward oneself. One is aware,

significant

for instance, of a sense of tiredness or depression, and instead

and supporting it by depressive thoughts which are always at hand, one asks oneself "what hap55 pened? Why am I depressed? The same is done by noticing of giving in to

when one is irritated or angry, or tending to daydreaming, or other escape activities. In each of these instances the im-

portant thing is to be aware of them, and not to rationalize them in the thousand and one ways in which this can be

done; furthermore, to be open to our own inner voice, which

—

will tell us

—why we

often rather immediately

are anxious,

depressed, irritated.

The average person has a sensitivity toward his bodily processes; he notices changes, or even small amounts of pain; this kind of bodily sensitivity is relatively easy to experience

because most persons have an image of how it feels to be

The same sensitivity toward one's mental processes is much more difficult, because many people have never known a person who functions optimally. They take the psychic well.

functioning of their parents and relatives, or of the social

group they have been born into, as the norm, and as long as they do not differ from these they feel normal and without

There are many people, for who have never seen a loving person, or a person

interest in observing anything.

instance,

with integrity, or courage, or concentration.

quite

obvious that in order to be sensitive to oneself, one has to

— THE PRACTICE OF LOVE

117

have an image of complete, healthy human functioning

and how is one to acquire such an experience if one has not had it in one's own childhood, or later in life? There is certainly no simple answer to this question; but the question points to one very critical factor in our educational system.

While we teach knowledge, we are losing that teaching

which is the most important one for human development: the teaching which can only be given by the simple presence of a mature, loving person. In previous epochs of our own culture, or in

China and India, the man most highly valued

was the person with outstanding spiritual qualities. Even the teacher was not only, or even primarily, a source of information, but his function was to convey certain human and the same attitudes. In contemporary capitalistic society

—

holds true for Russian Communism

—

the men suggested for

admiration and emulation are everything but bearers of significant spiritual

qualities.

Those are

essentially in the

public eye

who give the average man a sense of vicarious

satisfaction.

Movie stars, radio entertainers, columnists, im-

portant business or government figures

—

these are the models

for emulation. Their main qualification for this function

often that they have succeeded in making the news. Yet, the situation does not seem to be altogether hopeless. If one considers the fact that

a man like Albert Schweitzer could be-

come famous in the United States, if one visualizes the many possibilities to make our youth familiar with living and historical personalities who show what human beings can achieve as human beings, and not as entertainers (in the broad sense of the word), if one thinks of the great works of literature and art of all ages, there seems to be a chance

THE ART OF LOVING

Il8

of creating a vision of good human functioning, and hence

of sensitivity to malfunctioning. If we should not succeed in

keeping alive a vision of mature

life,

then indeed we are

confronted with the probability that our whole cultural tradition will break

down. This tradition is not primarily based

on the transmission of certain kinds of knowledge, but of certain kinds of

human traits.

If the

coming generations

any more, a five-thousand-year-old culture will break down, even if its knowledge is transmitted and further developed.

will not see these traits

Thus far I have discussed what is needed for the practice of any art.

Now I shall discuss those qualities which are of

specific significance for the ability to love. According to what I said

about the nature of love, the main condition for the

achievement of love is the overcoming of one's narcissism.

The narcissistic orientation is one in which one experiences as real

only that which exists within oneself, while the

phenomena in the outside world have no reality in themselves,

but are experienced only from the viewpoint of their

being useful or dangerous to one. The opposite pole to narcissism is objectivity; it is the faculty to see people and things

as they are, objectively, and to be able to separate this objective picture from

a picture which is formed by one's desires

and fears. AH forms of psychosis show the inability to be objective, to an extreme degree. For the insane person the only reality that exists is that within him, that of his fears

and desires. He sees the world outside as symbols of his inner world, as his creation. All of us do the same when we dream. In the dream we produce events, We stage dramas, which are the expression of our wishes and fears (although some-

THE PRACTICE OF LOVE

119

times also of our insights and judgment), and while we are asleep we are convinced that the product of our dreams is as real as the reality which we perceive in our waking state.

The insane person or the dreamer fails completely in having an objective view of the world outside; but all of us are

more or less insane, or more or less asleep; all of us have an unobjective view of the world, one which is distorted by our

narcissistic

orientation.

Do I need to give examples?

Anyone can find them easily by watching himself, his neighbors, and by reading the newspapers. They vary in the degree of the narcissistic distortion of reality. A woman, for instance, calls up the doctor, saying she wants to come to his office that same afternoon. The doctor answers that he is not free this same afternoon, but that he can see her the next day. Her answer is: But, doctor, I live only five minutes from your office. She cannot understand his explanation that it does not save him time that for her the distance is so short.

She experiences the situation narcissistically: since she saves time, he saves times; the only reality to her is she herself.

—are the

Less extreme— or perhaps only less obvious tortions

dis-

which are commonplace in interpersonal relations.

How many parents experience the child's reactions in terms of his being obedient, of giving

them pleasure, of being a

and so forth, instead of perceiving or even being interested in what the child feels for and by himself? credit to them,

How many husbands have a picture of their wives as being domineering, because their own attachment to mother makes

them interpret any demand as a restriction of their freedom?

How many wives think their husbands are ineffective or

THE ART OF LOVING

120

stupid, because they do not live up to a phantasy picture of

a shining knight which they might have built up as children?

The lack of objectivity, as far as foreign nations are conis notorious. From one day to another, another nation is made out to be utterly depraved and fiendish, while one's own nation stands for everything that is good and cerned,

noble. Every action of the enemy is judged by one standard

—every

action of oneself by another. Even good deeds by enemy are considered a sign of particular devilishness, meant to deceive us and the world, while our bad deeds are

the

necessary and justified by our noble goals which they serve.

Indeed, if one examines the relationship between nations, as well as between individuals, one comes to the conclusion that objectivity is the exception,

and a greater or lesser degree of

narcissistic distortion is the rule.

The faculty to think objectively is reason; the emotional attitude behind reason is that of humility.

to use one's reason,

possible only

To be objective,

one has achieved an

attitude of humility, if one has emerged from the dreams of

omniscience and omnipotence which one has as a child.

In terms of this discussion of the practice of the art of loving, this

means: love being dependent on the

relative

absence of narcissism, it requires the development of humility,

objectivity and reason. One's whole life must be devoted

to this aim. Humility and objectivity are indivisible, just as love

is.

cannot be truly objective about

my family if I

cannot be objective about the stranger, and vice versa. If I want to learn the art of loving, I must strive for objectivity in every situation, and become sensitive to the situations where I am not objective. I must try to see the difference

THE PRACTICE OF LOVE between

121

my picture of a person and his behavior, as it is

harcissistically distorted,

and the person's reality as it exists

regardless of my interests, needs and fears. To have acquired

the capacity for objectivity and reason

achieving the art of loving, but

regard to everybody with

half the road to

must be acquired with

whom one comes in contact. If

someone would want to reserve his objectivity for the loved person, and think he can dispense with it in his relationship to the rest of the world, he will soon discover that he fails

both here and there.

The ability to love depends on one's capacity to emerge from narcissism, and from the incestuous fixation to mother and clan; it depends on our capacity to grow, to develop a productive orientation in our relationship toward the world

and ourselves. This process of emergence, of birth, of waking up, requires one quality as a necessary condition: faith.

The practice of the art of loving requires the practice of faith. What is faith? Is faith necessarily a matter of belief in God, or in religious doctrines? Is faith by necessity in conor divorced from, reason and rational thinking? Even to begin to understand the problem of faith one must differentiate between rational and irrational faith. By irratrast to,

tional faith I understand the belief (in a person or an idea)

which is based on one's submission to irrational authority. In contrast, rational faith is a conviction which is rooted in one's own experience of thought or feeling. Rational faith is

not primarily belief in something, but the quality of certainty

and firmness which our convictions have. Faith is a

character trait pervading the whole personality, rather than

a specific belief.

THE ART OF LOVING

122 Rational faith

emotional

activity.

rooted in productive intellectual and

In rational thinking, in which faith

supposed to /have no place, rational faith is an important

component. How does the scientist, for instance, arrive at a

new discovery? Does he start with making experiment after experiment, vision of

gathering fact

after

fact,

without having a

what he expects to find? Rarely has a truly im-

portant discovery in any field been made in this way. Nor

have people arrived at important conclusions when they were merely chasing a phantasy. The process of creative thinking in any field of human endeavor often starts with what may be called a "rational vision," itself a result of considerable previous study, reflective thinking, and observation. When the scientist succeeds in gathering enough data, or in

working out a mathematical formulation to make his original vision highly plausible,

tentative hypothesis.

he may be said to have arrived at a

A careful analysis of the hypothesis in

order to discern its implications, and the amassing of data which support it, lead to a more adequate hypothesis and eventually perhaps to its inclusion in a wide-ranging theory.

The history of science is replete with instances of faith in reason and visions of truth. Copernicus, Kepler, Galileo, and

Newton were all imbued with an unshakable faith in reason. For this Bruno was burned at the stake and Spinoza suffered excommunication. At every step from the conception of a rational vision to the formulation of a theory, faith is necessary: faith in the vision as a rationally valid aim to pursue, faith in the hypothesis

as a likely and plausible proposition,

and faith in the final theory, at least until a general consensus about

its

validity

has been reached. This faith

THE PRACTICE OF LOVE

1^3

rooted in one's own experience, in the confidence in one's

power of thought, observation, and judgment. While irrational

faith

the acceptance of something as true only

because an authority or the majority say so, rational faith is

rooted in an independent conviction based upon one's own

productive observing and thinking, in spite of the majority's opinion.

Thought and judgment are not the only realm of experience in which rational faith is manifested. In the sphere of

human relations, faith is an indispensable quality of any significant friendship

or love. "Having faith" in another

person means to be certain of the reliability and unchangeability of his

fundamental attitudes, of the core of his per-

By this I do not mean that a person may not change his opinions, but that his basic motivations sonality, of his love.

remain the same; that, for instance, his respect for life and

human dignity is part of himself, not subject to change. In the same sense we have faith in ourselves. We are aware of the existence of a self, of a core in our personality

which is unchangeable and which persists throughout our life in spite of varying circumstances, and regardless of certain changes in opinions and feelings. It is this core which is the reality behind the word "I," and on which our conviction of our own identity is based. Unless we have faith in

the persistence of our self, our feeling of identity is threatened

and we become dependent on other people whose approval then becomes the basis for our feeling of identity. Only the person

who has faith in himself is able to be faithful to

others, because only he car* be sure that he will be the same

at a future time as

he is today and, therefore, that he will

124

THE ART 0F LOVING

feel and act as he

now expects to. Faith in oneself is a con-

of our ability to promise,

dition

and since,

as Nietzsche

man can be defined by his capacity to promise, faith is one of the conditions of human existence. What matters in

said,

relation to love is the faith in one's own love; in its ability to

produce love in others, and in its reliability.

Another meaning of having faith in a person refers to the faith

we have in the potentialities of others. The most rudi-

mentary form in which this faith exists is the faith which the mother has toward her newborn baby: that it will live,

grow, walk, and talk. However, the development of the child in this respect occurs with such regularity that the expecta-

tion of it does not seem to require faith. It is different with

those potentialities which can potentialities to love, to

fail

to develop:

the child's

be happy, to use his reason, and

more specific potentialities like artistic gifts. They are the seeds which grow and become manifest if the proper conditions for their development are given, and they can be stifled if these

are absent.

One of the most important of these conditions is that the significant person in tialities.

The

a child's life have faith in these poten-

presence of this faith makes the difference

between education and manipulation. Education is identical with helping the child realize his potentialities. 3 The opposite o£ education is manipulation, which is based on the absence of faith in the

growth of potentialities, and on the convic-

tion that a child will be right only if the adults put into him

what is desirable and suppress what seems to be undesirable. 8 The root of the word education is e-ducere, literally, to lead forth, or to bring out something which is potentially present.

THE PRACTICE OF LOVE

125

There is no need of faith in the robot, since there is no life in it either*

The faith in others has its culmination in faith in mankind. In the

Western world this faith was expressed in re-

ligious terms in the Judaeo-Christian religion, and in secular

language it has found its strongest expression in the humanistic political

and social ideas of the last hundred and fifty

years. Like the faith in the child, it is based on the idea that

the potentialities of man are such that given the proper conditions he will be capable of building a social order governed

by the principles of equality, justice and love. Man has not yet achieved the building of such an order, and therefore the

conviction that he can do so requires faith. But like all rational faith this too is not wishful thinking, but based upon

the evidence of the past achievements of the

human race

and on the inner experience of each individual, on his own experience of reason and love. While irrational faith is rooted in submission to a power which is felt to be overwhelmingly strong, omniscient and omnipotent, and in the abdication of one's own power and strength, rational faith is based upon the opposite experience. We have this faith in a thought because it is the result of our own observation and thinking. We have faith in the potentialities of others, of ourselves, and of mankind because, and only to the degree to which, we have experienced the growth of our own potentialities, the reality of growth in ourselves, the strength of our own power of reason and of love. The basis of rational faith is productiveness; to live by our faith means to live productively. It follows that the belief in power (in the sense of domination) and the use of power

THE ART OF LOVING

126

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. There is submission to it or, on the part of

those who have it, the wish to keep it. While to many power

seems to be the most real of all things, the history of man has proved it to be the most unstable of all human achievements. Because of the fact that faith and power are mutually

and political systems which originally become corrupt and eventually lose what strength they have, if they rely on power or ally exclusive, all religions

are built on rational faith

themselves with it.

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

ever 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 To be loved, and to love,

security, makes himself a prisoner.

need courage, the courage to judge certain values as of

—and

ultimate concern

to take the

jump and stake every-

thing on these values.

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

courage of nihilism.

the

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 op-

THE PRACTICE OF LOVE

127 power is

posite of the courage of love, just as the faith in

the opposite of the faith in life. Is there anything to be practiced about faith and courage?

Indeed, faith can be practiced at every moment.

It takes

faith to bring up a child; it takes faith to fall asleep; it takes faith to begin any work. But we all are accustomed to hav-

ing this kind of faith. Whoever does not have it suffers from

overanxiety about his child, or from insomnia, or from the

do any kind of productive work; or he is suspicious, restrained from being close to anybody, or hypochondriacal, or unable to make any long-range plans. To stick to one's judgment about a person even if public opinion or some unforeseen facts seem to invalidate it, to stick to one's convictions even though they are unpopular all this requires faith and courage. To take the difficulties, setbacks and sorrows of life as a challenge which to overcome makes us stronger, rather than as unjust punishment which should not happen to us, requires faith and courage. The practice of faith and courage begins with the small details of daily life. The first step is to notice where and when one loses faith, to look through the rationalizations which are used to cover up this loss of faith, to recognize where one acts in a cowardly way, and again how one rationalizes it. To recognize how every betrayal of faith weakens one, and how increased weakness leads to new betrayal, and so inability to

—

on, in a vicious circle.

Then one will also recognize that

while one is consciously afraid of not being loved, the real,

though usually unconscious fear is that of loving. To love

means to commit oneself without guarantee, to give oneself completely in the hope that our love will produce love in the

THE ART OF LOVING

128

loved person. Love is an act of faith, and whoever is of little

Can one say more about the pracSomeone else might; if I were a poet or a

faith is also of little love. tice

of faith?

preacher, I might try. But since I am not either of these, I

cannot even try to say more about the practice of faith, but

am sure that anyone who is really concerned can learn to have faith as a child learns to walk.

One attitude, indispensable for the practice of the art of loving,

which thus far has been mentioned only implicitly

should be discussed explicitly since it is basic for the practice

have said before that by activity is not meant "doing something/ but an inner activity, the producof love:

activity, I

tive 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. For I shall become incapable of relating myself actively to the loved person if I

am lazy, if I am

not in a constant state of awareness, alertness, activity. Sleep is the

only proper situation for inactivity; the state of awake-

ness is one in which laziness should have no place. The para-

doxical situation with a vast number of people today is that

they are half asleep when awake, and half awake when asleep, or when they want to sleep. To be fully awake is the condition for not being bored, or being boring

—and indeed, not

be bored or boring is one of the main conditions for loving.

To be active in thought, feeling, with one's eyes and ears, throughout the day, to avoid inner laziness, be it in the form of being receptive, hoarding, or plain wasting one's time, is

an indispensable condition for the practice of the art of

loving. It is an illusion to believe that in such a

one can separate life

way that one is productive in the sphere of love

THE PRACTICE OF LOVE

129

and unproductive in all other spheres. Productiveness does not permit of such a division of labor. The capacity to love

demands a state of intensity, awakeness, enhanced vitality, result of a productive and active

which can only be the orientation in

many other spheres of life. If one is not pro-

ductive in other spheres, one is not productive in love either.

The discussion of the art of loving cannot be restricted to the personal realm of acquiring and developing those characteristics

and attitudes which have been described in this

chapter. It

inseparably connected with the social realm.

If to love means to have a loving attitude toward everybody, if

love is a character trait, it must necessarily exist in one's

relationship

not only with one's family and friends, but

whom one is in contact through one's

toward those with

work, business, profession. There is no "division of labor"

between love for one's own and love for strangers. On the contrary, the condition for the existence of the former is the existence of the latter.

To take this insight seriously means

indeed a rather drastic change in one's social relations from the customary ones. While a great deal of lip service is paid to the religious ideal of love of one's neighbor, our relations

are actually determined, at their best, by the principle of fairness. Fairness meaning

not to use fraud and trickery in the

exchange of commodities' and services, and in the exchange of feelings. "I give you as much as you give me," in material

goods as well as in love, is the prevalent ethical maxim in capitalist society. It

of fairness ethics

may even be said that the development the particular ethical contribution of

capitalist society.

The reasons for this fact lie in the very nature of capitalist

THE ART OF LOVING

130 society.

In pre-capitalist societies, the exchange of goods was

determined either by direct force, by tradition, or by personal bonds of love or friendship. In capitalism, the all-deter-

mining factor is the exchange on the market. Whether we deal with the

commodity market, the labor market, or the

market of services, each person exchanges whatever he has to sell for that which he wants to acquire under the conditions of the market, without the use of force or fraud.

Fairness ethics lend themselves to confusion with the ethics of the Golden Rule. The maxim "to do unto others as you would like them to do unto you" can be interpreted as meaning "be fair in your exchange with others." But actually, it was formulated originally as a more popular version of the Biblical "Love thy neighbor as thyself." Indeed,

the Jewish-Christian

norm of brotherly love is entirely dif-

ferent 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 your neighbor, but not to love him. It is no accident that 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 begin with recog-

nizing the difference between fairness and love.

Here, however, an important question arises. If our whole social and economic organization is based on each one seek-

ing his own advantage, if it is governed by the principle of

egotism tempered only by the ethical principle of fairness,

how can one do business, how can one act within the frame-

THE PRACTICE OF LOVE

I3I

work of existing society and at the same time practice love? Does the latter not imply giving up all one's secular concerns and sharing the life of the poorest? This question has been raised and answered in a radical way by the Christian monks, and by persons like Tolstoi, Albert Schweitzer, and Simone 4 Weil. There are others who share the opinion of the basic incompatibility between love and normal secular life within our society. They arrive at the result that to speak of love

today means only to participate in the general fraud; they claim that only a martyr or a mad person can love in the

world of today, hence that all discussion of love is nothing but preaching. This very respectable viewpoint lends itself readily to a rationalization of cynicism. Actually it is shared implicitly by the average person who feels "I would like to

be a good Christian it

seriously."

—but would have I

This "radicalism"

results

to starve if I meant

moral nihilism.

Both the "radical thinkers" and the average person are unloving automatons and the only difference between them is that the latter is not aware of it, while the former knows it

and recognizes the "historical necessity" of this fact. I

am of the conviction that the answer of the absolute in-

compatibility of love and "normal" life is correct only in an abstract sense.

The principle underlying capitalistic society

and the principle of love are incompatible. But modern society seen concretely is a complex phenomenon. A salesman of a useless commodity, for instance, cannot function economically without lying; a skilled worker, a chemist, or a physician can.

Similarly,

a farmer, a worker, a teacher,

4 Cf. Herbert Marcuse's article "The Social Implications of Psychoanalytic Revisionism," Dissent, New York, summer, 1955.

THE ART OF LOVING

132

and many a type of businessman can try to practice love without ceasing to function economically. Even if one recognizes the principle of capitalism as being incompatible with

the principle of love, one must admit that "capitalism" is in itself

a complex and constantly changing structure which

still

permits of a good deal of non-conformity and of per-

sonal latitude.

In saying this, however, I do not wish to imply that we

can expect the present social system to continue indefinitely,

and at the same time to hope for the realization of the ideal of love for one's brother. People capable of love, under the

present system, are necessarily the exceptions; love

phenomenon in present-day Western Not so much because many occupations would not

necessity a marginal society.

permit of a loving attitude, but because the spirit of a production-centered, commodity-greedy society is such that only

the non-conformist can defend himself successfully against it.

Those who are seriously concerned with love as the only

rational

answer to the problem of human existence must,

then, arrive at the conclusion that important

and radical

changes in our social structure are necessary,

love

become a social and not a highly individualistic, marginal phenomenon. The direction of such changes can, within the scope of this book, only be hinted at.

Our society is run by

a managerial bureaucracy, by professional politicians; people

aim is producing more and consuming more, as purposes in themselves. All activities are subordinated to economic goals, means have are motivated by mass suggestion, their

5 In The Sane Society, Rinehart & Company, have tried to deal with this problem in detail.

New York, 1955, I

THE PRACTICE OF LOVE become ends; man is an automaton

—

well fed, well clad, but

without any ultimate concern for that which is his peculiarly

human quality and function. If man is to be able to love, he must be put in his supreme place. The economic machine must serve him, rather than he serve it. He must be enabled to share experience, to share work, rather than, at best, share

must be organized in such a way that man's social, loving nature is not separated from his social existence, but becomes one with it. If it is true, as I have tried to show, that love is the only sane and satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence, then any society which excludes, relatively, the development of love, must in the long run perish of its own contradiction with the basic in profits. Society

necessities of human nature. Indeed, to speak of love is not

"preaching," for the simple reason that it means to speak of the ultimate this

and real need in every human being. That

need has been obscured does not mean that it does not

exist.

To analyze the nature of love is to discover its gen-

eral absence today and to criticize the social conditions which

are responsible for this absence. To have faith in the possi-

a social and not only exceptional-individual phenomenon, is a rational faith based on the insight into the very nature of man. bility of love as