The Art of Loving | The Erich Fromm Channel

Well, I would say love is something everybody talks about, and the need for love is one of the most basic needs of men; namely, the experience of union with another being, of becoming one with another being. And yet I would say that love today is a relatively rare phenomenon. Why is it so difficult for us to be in love as human beings? What is wrong with us, as you see it? Because we are concerned with things; we are concerned with success; we are concerned with money; we are concerned with instrumentalities. Love is not easy. Uh, all great religions postulate love as one of the greatest accomplishments. If it were that easy, or as easy as most people think, certainly the great religious leaders would have been rather naive. It rarely occurs to modern people that we can create anything through love. Our usual and almost exclusive concern is to be loved, not to emanate love ourselves, not to can love in others, do our love for them and so to create something new, something that had not existed in the world before.

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In 1956, the psychoanalyst Eric Fromm published his classic book, *The Art of Loving*. It became an international bestseller, selling millions of copies in multiple languages across the world. It remains Fromm's most well-known and most widely read book. In his forward, Fromm wrote, "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 them. It wants to convince the reader that all their attempts for love are bound to fail unless they try most actively to develop their total personality; 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. Or anyone can ask themselves how many truly loving persons they have known. Is love an art, then? It requires knowledge and effort. Or is love a pleasant sensation which to experience is a matter of chance, something one falls into if one is lucky? This little book is based on the former premise, while doubtedly the majority of people today believe in the latter.

Not that people think that love is not important; they are starved for 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 making oneself attractive are to develop pleasant manners, interesting conversation, to be helpful, inoffensive, modest. Many of the ways to make yourself lovable are the same as those used to make oneself successful, to win friends and influence people. As a matter of fact, what most people in our culture mean by being lovable is essentially a mixture of being popular and having sex appeal. There is an assumption that the problem of love is the problem of the object, not the problem of 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. Our whole culture is based on the appetite for buying, on the idea of a mutually favorable exchange. Modern people's happiness consists in the thrill of looking at the shop windows and in buying all that they can afford to buy. We look at people in a similar way; an attractive partner is the prize we are after. Attractive usually means a nice package of qualities which are popular and sought after on the personality market. I'm 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 potential. 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. 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 labor market.

Another error 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 standing in love. If two people who have been strangers, as all of us are, suddenly let the wall between them break down and feel close, feel one—this moment of oneness is one of the most exhilarating, most exciting experiences in life. It's all the more wonderful and miraculous for persons who have 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 disappointments, their mutual boredom kill whatever is left of the initial excitement. Yet, in the beginning, they do not know all of this; in fact, they take the intensity of the infatuation, this being crazy about each other, for proof of the intensity of their love, while it may only prove the degree of their preceding loneliness. This attitude that nothing is easier than to love has continued in spite of the overwhelming evidence to the contrary. There is hardly any activity, any enterprise, which is started with such tremendous hopes and expectations and yet which fails so regularly as love. If this were the case with any other activity, 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 way 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 into two parts: one, the mastery of the theory; the other, the mastery of the practice. 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 one—my 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 carpentry, and for love. And maybe here lies the answer to 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 is considered to be more important than love: success, prestige, money, power. Almost all our energy is used for the learning of how to achieve these aims, and almost none to learn the art of loving. Could it be 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?

Any theory of love must begin with a theory of people, of human existence. We have emerged from the animal kingdom, from instinctive adaptation. We have transcended nature, although we never leave it; we are part of it, and yet, once torn away from nature, we cannot return to it. Once thrown out of paradise, a state of original oneness with nature, cherubim with flaming swords block our way if we should try to return. People can only go forward by developing their reason, by finding a new harmony, a human one, instead of the prehuman harmony which is irretrievably lost. When people are born, the human race as well as the individual—we are thrown out of a situation which was definite, as 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. This awareness of ourselves as a separate entity, the awareness of our own short lifespan, of the fact that without our will we are born and against our will we will die, that we will die before those whom we love or they before us, the awareness of our aloneness and separateness, of our helplessness before the forces of nature and of society—all this makes our separate, disunited existence an unbearable prison. We would become insane could we not liberate ourselves from this prison and reach out, unite ourselves in some form or other with people, with the world outside. The experience of separateness arouses anxiety; it is indeed the source of all anxiety. The world can invade me without my ability to react. Separateness is the source of intense anxiety, and it arouses shame and the feeling of guilt. The deepest need of people is to overcome their separateness and to leave the prison of their aloneness.

People of all ages and cultures are confronted with the question of how to overcome separateness, how to achieve union, how to transcend one's own individual life and find atonement. The question is the same for early humans living in caves, for the nomadic person taking care of their flock, for the peasant in Egypt, the Phoenician trader, the Roman soldier, the medieval monk, the Japanese samurai, the modern clerk, and the factory hand. The question is the same, for it springs from the same ground: the human situation, the conditions of human existence. The answer varies. The question can be answered by animal worship, by human sacrifice or military conquest, by indulgence in luxury, by aesthetic renunciation, by obsessional work, by artistic creation, by the love of God, and by the love of humanity. While there are many answers, the record of which is human history, they are nevertheless 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 number of answers which have been given. Fromm identifies three categories of solutions sought by humans escaping the state of anxiety and aloneness: orgiastic states, herd conformity, and creative activity or productive work. These may have the form of an autoinduced trance, sometimes with the help of drugs. Many rituals of tribes offer a vivid picture of this type of solution. In a transitory 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 the group is added which makes the solution all the more effective. Closely related to and often blended with this orgiastic solution is the sexual experience. It can produce a state similar to the one produced by a trance or to the effects of certain drugs. Rites of communal sexual were part of many tribal rituals. It seems that after the orgiastic experience people can go on for a time without suffering too much from their separateness. Slowly, the tension of anxiety mounts, and then it is reduced again by the repeated performance of this ritual. As long as these orgiastic states are a matter of common practice in a tribe, they do not produce anxiety or guilt 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 chosen by an individual in a culture which has left behind these common practices. In contrast to those participating in the socially patterned solution, such individuals suffer from guilt feelings and remorse; 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 sex 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 is by far the most frequent solution chosen by people in the past and in the present: the union based on conformity with the group, its customs, practices, and beliefs. With the growing development of culture, the group enlarges; it becomes the citizenry of a large state, the members of a church. Even the poor Roman felt pride because they could say, "Civis Romanus sum." Rome and the empire were his family, his home, his world. In contemporary 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 everybody else, if I have no feelings or thoughts which make a difference, if I conform in custom, dress, ideas to the patterns of the group, I am saved—saved from the frightening experience of aloneness. The dictatorial systems used threats and terror to induce this conformity; the democratic countries, suggestion and propaganda. There is indeed one great difference between the two systems: in the democracies, nonconformity is possible and in fact by no means entirely absent; in the totalitarian systems, only a few unusual heroes and martyrs can be expected to refuse obedience. But in spite of this difference, the democratic societies show an overwhelming degree of conformity. The reason lies in the fact that there has to be an answer to the quest for union, and if 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 a few steps away from the herd, if one understands the depths of the need not to be separated. 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 individuals, 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 in the majority. The consensus of all serves as a proof for the correctness of their ideas. This increasing tendency for the elimination of differences is closely related to the concept and the experience of equality. Equality had meant, in a religious context, that we are all God's children, that we all share in the same human, divine 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, a cosmos by ourselves. Equality is a condition for the development of individuality. It was also the meaning of the concept in the philosophy of the Western Enlightenment. It meant, most clearly formulated by Kant, that no person must be the means for the ends of another person; that all men are equal inasmuch as they are ends and only ends. Following the ideas of the Enlightenment, thinkers of various schools defined equality as the abolition of exploitation, of the use of man by man, regardless of whether this use were cruel or humane. In contemporary capitalistic society, the meaning of equality has been transformed. By equality, one refers to the equality of automatons, of people who have lost their individuality. Equality today means sameness rather than oneness. It is the sameness of abstractions, of the people 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. Just as modern mass production requires the standardization of commodities, so the social process requires standardization of people, 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 suicide in contemporary Western society are symptoms of this relative failure of herd conformity. Furthermore, this solution concerns mainly the mind and not the body, and for this reason, too, is lacking in comparison with the orgiastic solutions. 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 their contact with the herd. Even our funeral, which we anticipate as our last great social affair, is in strict conformance with the pattern. Another factor of contemporary life must be considered: the role of the work routine and of the pleasure routine. People become nonentities; they have little initiative; the 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: cheerfulness, tolerance, reliability, ambition, and an ability to get along with everybody without friction. Fun is routinized in similar, although not quite as drastic, ways. Books are selected by the book clubs, movies by the film and theater owners, and the advertising slogans paid for by them. The rest is also uniform: 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, all activities are routinized and prefabricated. How should people caught in this net of routine not forget that they are human, a unique individual, and 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 separateness?

A third way of attaining union lies in creative activity, that of the artist or of the artisan. In any kind of creative work, the creative person unites themselves with their material, which represents the world outside. Whether a carpenter makes a table or a goldsmith a piece of jewelry, whether the peasant grows their corn or the painter paints a picture—in all types of creative work, the worker and their objects become one. People unite themselves with the world in the process of creation. This, however, only holds true for productive work, for work in which I plan, produce, see the results of my work. In the modern work process of a clerk, the worker on the endless belt, little is left of this uniting quality of work. The worker becomes an appendix to the machine or to the bureaucratic organization; they have ceased to be themselves; hence, no union takes place beyond that of conformity. The unity achieved in productive work is not interpersonal; the unity achieved in orgiastic fusion is transitory; the unity achieved by conformity is only pseudo-unity; hence, they are only partial answers to the problem of existence. The full answer lies in the achievement of interpersonal union, a fusion with another person in love. This desire for interpersonal fusion is the most powerful striving in humans; it is the most fundamental passion; it is the force which keeps the human race together, the clan, the family, and society. The failure to achieve it means insanity or destruction, self-destruction or destruction of others. Without love, humanity could not exist for a day. Fusion can be achieved in different ways. 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 4,000 years? As with all semantic difficulties, the answer can only be arbitrary. What matters is that we know what kind of union 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? The passive form of the symbiotic union is that of submission, or if we use a clinical term, of mass masochism. The masochistic person escapes from the unbearable feeling of isolation and separateness by making themselves part and parcel of another person who directs them, guides them, protects them, who is their life and their…

Oxygen, as it were, the power of the one to whom one submits is inflated; may they be a person or a god, they are everything; I am nothing except in as much as I am part of them. The masochistic person does not have to make decisions, does not have to take any risks; they are never alone, but they are not independent; they have no intent, integrity; they are not yet fully born.

In a religious context, the object of worship is called an idol; in a secular context of a masochistic love relationship, the essential mechanism, that of idolatry, is the same. 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 a masochistic submission to fate, to sickness, to rhythmic music, to the aristic states produced by drugs or under hypnotic TR. In all these instances, the person renounces their integrity, makes themself the instrument of somebody or something outside of themselves.

The active form of symbiotic fusion is domination or, to use the psychological term corresponding to masochism, sadism. The sadistic person wants to escape from their aloneness and their sense of imprisonment by making another person part and parcel of themself; they inflate and enhance themself by incorporating another person who worships them. 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, and that the masochistic person is commanded, exploited, hurt, humiliated. This is a considerable difference in a realistic sense; in a 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 and the masochistic manner, usually toward different objects.

In contrast to symbiotic union, mature love is union under the condition of preserving one's integrity, one's individuality. Love is an active power in humans, a power which breaks through the walls which separate the individual from their fellow people, which unites them with others. Love makes them overcome the sense of isolation and separateness, yet it permits them to be themselves, to retain their integrity. In love, the paradox occurs that two beings become one and yet remain two.

If we say love is an activity, we face a difficulty which lies in the ambiguous meaning of the word activity. By activity, in the modern usage of the word, is usually meant action which brings about a change in an existing situation by means of an expenditure of energy. Thus, people are considered active if they do business, study medicine, work on an endless belt, build a table, or are engaged in sports. What is not taken into account is the motivation of activity. Take, for instance, a person may be driven to incessant work by a sense of deep insecurity and loneliness, or another one driven by ambition or greed for money. In all these cases, the person is the slave of the passion, and their activity is in reality a passivity because they are driven; they are the sufferer, not the actor. On the other hand, a person sitting quietly and contemplating with no purpose or aim except that of experiencing themselves and their oneness with the world is considered to be passive because they are not doing anything. In reality, this attitude of concentrated meditation is the highest activity; there is an activity of the soul 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 achievement of external aims; the other concept of activity refers to the use of people's inherent powers, regardless of whether any external change is brought about. The latter concept of activity has been formulated most clearly by Spinoza; he differentiates among the effects between active and passive effects, actions and their passions. In the exercise of an active effect, people are free; they are the master of their effect. In the exercise of a passive effect, people are driven, the object of motivations of which they themselves are not aware. Thus, Spinoza arrives at the statement that virtue and power are one and the same. Envy, jealousy, ambition, any kind of greed or 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 effect; 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 is 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. Some people are willing to give, but only in exchange for receiving; giving without receiving, for them, is being cheated. 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 truly loving person, giving is the highest expression of potency. In the very act of giving, I experience my strength, my wealth, my power. This experience of heightened vitality and potency fills me with joy; I experience myself as overflowing, spending, alive, hence as joyous. Giving is more joyous than receiving, receiving—not because it is a deprivation, but because in the act of giving lies the expression of my aliveness. The hoarder who is anxiously worried about losing something is, psychologically speaking, the poor, impoverished person, regardless of how much they have. Whoever is capable of giving of themself is rich. 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, and it is degrading not only because of the suffering it caused directly but because it deprives them 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? They give of the most precious thing that they have: their life. This does not necessarily mean that they sacrifice their life for another, but that they give their joy, their interest, their understanding, their knowledge, their humor, their sadness—of all expressions and manifestations of that which is alive in them. In thus giving of their life, they enrich the other person; they do not give in order to receive; giving is in itself exquisite joy. In the act of giving, something is born, and both persons involved are grateful for the life that is 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. But not only in love does giving mean receiving; the teacher is taught by their students, the actor is stimulated by their audience, the psychoanalyst is cured by their patients, providing they do not treat each other as objects but are related to each other genuinely and productively.

The ability to love as an act of giving depends on the character development of the person. In this orientation, the person has overcome dependency, narcissistic omnipotence, the wish to exploit others or to hoard, and is acquired faith in their own human powers, courage to rely on their powers in the attainment of their goal. To the degree that these qualities are lacking, they are afraid of giving themselves, hence of loving.

Beyond the element of giving, the active character of love becomes evident in that it 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 for her child; no assurance of her love would strike us as sincere if we saw her lacking in care for the infant. 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 her love for flowers. Love is the active concern for the life and the growth of that which we love. 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 responsibility 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. The loving person responds. 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 “resp,” which means “to look at,” the ability to see a person as they are, to be aware of their unique individuality. Respect means the concern that the other person should grow and unfold as they are. It is clear that respect is possible only if I have achieved independence; respect exists only on the basis of freedom. “Liber,” as an old French song says, love is the child of freedom, never that of domination. To respect a person is not possible without knowing them; care and responsibility would be blind if 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. I may know that a person is angry even if they do not show it overtly, but I may know them more deeply than that; then I know that they are anxious and worried, that they feel lonely or guilty; then I know that their anger is only the manifestation of something deeper, and I see them as anxious and embarrassed—that is, as the suffering person rather than as the angry one.

The basic need to fuse with another person so as to transcend the prison of one's separateness is closely related to another specifically human desire: that to know the secret of humanity. While life in its merely biological aspects is a miracle and a secret, humanity in our human aspects is an unfathomable secret. We know ourselves, and yet, even with all the efforts we may make, we do not know ourselves. 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 help desiring to penetrate into the secret of humanity's soul, into the innermost nucleus which is we. There is one way, a desperate one, to know the secret: it is that of complete power over another person, the power which makes them do what we want, feel what we want, think what we want, which transforms them 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 them, to force them to betray their secret in their suffering. In this craving for penetrating humanity's secret and hence our own lies an essential motivation for the depth and intensity of cruelty and destructiveness. In children, we often see this path to knowledge quite overtly: 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 secrets. The cruelty itself is motivated by something deeper: the wish to know the secret of things and life. The other path to knowing the secret is love. Love is 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. 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 all I have done is to destroy them. Love is the only way of knowledge which, in the act of union, answers my question. 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 humanity.

The longing to know ourselves and to know our fellow people has been expressed in the Delphic motto “Know thyself.” It is the mainspring of all psychology, but 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; we would still remain an enigma to ourselves, as others would remain an enigma to us. The only way of full knowledge lies in the act of love. This act transcends thought; it transcends words; it is the daring plunge into the experience of union. The problem of knowing humanity is parallel to the religious problem of knowing God. In conventional Western theology, the attempt is made to know God by thought, to make statements about God; it is assumed that I can know God in my thoughts. In mysticism, the attempt is given up to know God by thought, and it is replaced by the experience of union with God in which there is no more room and no need for knowledge about God. The experience of union with people, or religiously speaking with God, is by no means irrational; it is the knowledge that we shall never grasp the secret of humanity and of the universe, but that we can know nevertheless in the act of love. Psychology is a science; it has its limitations; and as the logical consequence of theology is mysticism, so the ultimate consequence of psychology is love.

Care, responsibility, respect, and knowledge, and mutual independence—they are a syndrome of attitudes which are to be found in the mature person. The polarity between the male and female principles exists within each person; they carry in themselves the principle of receiving and of penetrating, of matter and of spirit. People find union within themselves only in the union of their female and their male polarity. This polarity is the basis for all 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 two people, each of them is reborn. 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 receiving and that of penetrating; 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: “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.”

Freud has been criticized for his overvaluation of sex. This criticism was often prompted by the wish to remove elements from Freud's system which aroused criticism and hostility among conventionally minded people. Freud keenly sensed this motivation, and for this very reason, for every attempt to change his theory of sex, in his time, Freud's theory had a challenging and revolutionary character, but the sexual mores have changed so much that Freud's theories are no longer shocking. The criticism of Freud is not that he overemphasized sex, but his failure to understand sex deeply enough. It is necessary to correct and deepen Freud's concept by translating Freud's insight from the physiological into the biological and existential dimension. In line with his physiological materialism, he sees in the sexual instinct the result of a chemically produced tension in the body which is painful and seeks for relief; sexual desire, in this concept, is an itch; sexual satisfaction is the removal of this itch. In fact, as far as this concept of sexuality is concerned, masturbation would be the ideal sexual satisfaction. What Freud ignores is the psychobiological aspect of sexuality, the 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 female sexuality. The same idea is also expressed in a rationalized form in Freud's theory that the little boy experiences the woman as a castrated man. Sexual attraction is only partly motivated by the need for removal of tension; it is mainly the need for union with another. There is masculinity and femininity in character. 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, endurance, motherliness. It must always be kept in mind that in each individual both characteristics are blended. Very often, if the masculine character traits of a man are weakened because emotionally he has remained a child, he will try to compensate for this lack by the exclusive emphasis on his male role in sex. The result is the Don Juan who needs to prove his male prowess 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 masculinity. If the feminine sexuality is weakened or perverted, it is transformed into masochism or possessiveness.

The experience of being loved by a mother is a passive one; there is nothing I have to do in order to be loved. Mother's love is unconditional; all I have to do is be, to be her child. Mother's love is bliss, is peace; it need not be acquired; it need not be deserved. But there is a negative side too to the unconditional quality of mother's love: not only does it not need to be deserved, it also cannot be acquired, produced, controlled. If it is there, it is like a blessing; if it is not there, it is as if all beauty had gone out of life, and there is nothing I can do to create it. For most children, before the age from 8 and a half to 10, the problem is almost exclusively that of being loved, of being loved for what one is. It takes many years from this first beginning to the maturing of love. Eventually, they overcome their egocentricity; the needs of the other person are as important as their own; in 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. They feel a sense of new union, of sharing, of oneness; more than that, they feel the potency of producing love by loving rather than the dependence of receiving by being loved and, for that reason, having to be small, helpless, sick, or good. Infantile love follows the principle “I love because I am loved”; mature love follows the principle “I am loved because I love.” Immature love says “I love you because I need you”; mature love says “I need you because I love you.”

Love is not primarily a relationship to a specific person; it is an attitude, an orientation of character which determines the relatedness of a person to the world as a whole, not towards one object of love. If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to the rest of their fellow people, their 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 for the loved person, because one does not see that love is an activity, a power of the soul; one believes that all that is necessary to find is the right object and that everything goes by itself afterward. The attitude can be compared to that of a man who wants to paint but who, instead of learning the art, claims that one 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 no differences between various types of love which depend on the kind of object which is loved. 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 their 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, the experience of Union with all people, of human solidarity, of human atonement—it is based on the experience that we are all one. The difference in talents, intelligence, knowledge are negligible in comparison with the identity of the human core common to all people. 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 from Center to Center instead of that from periphery to periphery is Central relatedness, or as Simone Weil expressed it so beautifully, the same words—e.g., a man says to his wife, “I love you”—can be commonplace or extraordinary according to the manner in which they are spoken. And this manner depends on the depth of the region in a person’s being from which they proceed, without the will being able to do anything. 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 equals, we are not always equal. Inasmuch as we are human, we are all in need of help—today I, tomorrow you. Helplessness is a transitory condition; the ability to stand and walk on one’s own feet is the permanent and common one. Yet love of the helpless one, Love of the poor and the stranger, is at the beginning of Brotherly Love. To Love one’s flesh and blood is no achievement; the animal loves its young and cares for them. The helpless one loves their Master since their life depends on them; the child loves their parents since they need them. Only, only in the love of those who do not serve a purpose, love begins to unfold significantly.

In the Old Testament, the central object of people’s love is the poor, the stranger, the Widow, and the orphan, and eventually the national enemy, the Egyptian and the Edomite. “You know the heart of the stranger,” says the Old Testament, “For You Were Strangers in the land of Egypt; therefore love the stranger.”

Motherly love is unconditional affirmation of the child’s life and their needs. Affirmation of the child’s life has two aspects: one is the care and responsibility absolutely necessary for the preservation of the child’s life and their growth; the other aspect goes further than mere preservation. It is the attitude which instills in the child a love for living, which gives them the feeling it is good to be alive, it is good to be a little child, and it is good to be on this Earth. 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 expressed in biblical symbolism: the promised land—land is always a mother symbol—is described as flowing with milk and honey. Milk is the symbol of the first aspect of Love, that of care and affirmation; honey symbolizes the sweetness of Life, the love for it, and the happiness in being alive. Most mothers are capable 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 not achieved by many. The effect on the child can hardly be exaggerated. Love for life is as infectious as 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.

The relationship of parent and child is, by its very nature, one of inequality, where one needs all the help and the mother 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. The real achievement of motherly love lies not in the parents’ love for the small infant but in their love for the Growing Child. Most people are happy with the newborn child and eager in their care for it, in spite of the fact that they do not get anything in return from the child. One factor may be the narcissistic element; whilst the infant is still felt to be a part of the parent, their love and infatuation may be a satisfaction of their narcissism. Another motivation may be found in a parent’s wish for power or possession; the child, being helpless and completely subject to their will, is a natural object of satisfaction for a domineering and possessive person. There is also the need for Transcendence, rooted in the fact that we are not satisfied with the role of the creature; that we cannot accept ourselves as dice thrown out of the cup; we need to feel as the Creator. There, one transcending the passive role of being created, parents transcend themselves in the infant; their love for it gives Life Meaning and significance. 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 motherly love is to care for the child’s growth, and that means to want the child’s separation from themselves. Here lies the basic difference to erotic love. In erotic love, two people who were separate become one; in motherly love, two people who are one become separate. They must not only tolerate, they must wish and support the child’s separation. It is only at this stage that motherly love becomes such a difficult task; it is also at this stage that many mothers fail in their task of motherly love. The narcissistic, the domineering, the possessive can succeed in being a loving parent as long as the child is small. Only the really loving person, who is happier in giving than in taking, who is firmly rooted in their own existence, can be a loving parent when the child is in the process of Separation. The person who is not capable of Love in This sense can be an affectionate parent as long as the child is small, but cannot be a loving parent, the test of which is the willingness to Bear separation and even after the separation to go on loving.

In contrast to both types of Love is erotic love. It is the craving for complete Fusion, for Union with one other person. It is, by its very nature, exclusive and not Universal. It is, perhaps, the most deceptive form of love. There is, first of all, it is often confused with the explosive experience of falling in love, the sudden collapse of the barriers which existed until that moment between two strangers. But, as pointed out before, the experience of sudden intimacy is, by its very nature, short-lived. After the Stranger has become an intimately known person, there are no more barriers to be overcome; there is no more sudden closeness to be achieved. The loved person becomes as well known as oneself, or perhaps I should better say, as little known. If there were more depth in the experience of the other person, if one could experience the infiniteness of their personality, the other person would never be so familiar, and the Miracle of overcoming the barriers might occur every day anew. But for lost people, their own person as well as others is soon explored and soon exhausted; for them, intimacy is established primarily through sexual contact, since they experience the separateness of the other person primarily as physical separateness. Physical Union means overcoming separateness. Beyond that, there are other factors which, to many people, denote the overcoming of separateness: to speak of one’s own personal life, one’s hopes and anxieties; to show oneself with one’s childlike or childish aspects; to establish a common interest in the world—all this is taken as overcoming separateness. Even to show one’s anger, one’s hate, one’s complete lack of inhibition is taken for intimacy, and this makes explain the perverted attraction married couples often have for each other, who seem intimate only when they’re in bed or when they give vent to their Mutual hate and 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 new conquest, a new love, always with the illusion 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 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 is, 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. Sexual attraction creates, for the moment, the illusion of Union; yet without love, this Union leaves strangers as far apart as they were before. Sometimes it makes them ashamed of each other or even makes them hate each other, because when the illusion has gone, they feel their estrangement even more markedly than before.

In his 1949 essay, *Man-Woman*, Fromm wrote that tenderness implies love; tenderness implies respect; tenderness implies knowledge. Tenderness, by its very nature, is something quite different from sex or hunger or thirst. You might say that such drives as sex and hunger and thirst are characterized by a self-propelling dynamism; they become more and more intense and end in a rather sudden climax in which satisfaction is achieved and nothing more is wanted for the moment. Tenderness belongs to another type of striving; tenderness is not self-propelling; it has no aim; it has no climax; it has no end; its satisfaction is in the very act itself, in the joy of being friendly, of being warm, of considering and respecting another person and of making this other person happy. I think tenderness is one of the most self-assertive, joyful experiences anyone can have, and human beings are generally capable of it. For such people, there is nothing selfless about it; there is nothing sacrificial about it. It is only sacrificial for the person who cannot be tender. Tenderness is discouraged in our culture. The reason for this is partly that our culture is purpose-oriented; everything has a purpose; you must get somewhere. Tenderness is not the physiological purpose of relief or sudden satisfaction that sex has; it has no purpose except the enjoyment of a feeling of warmth, pleasure, and care for another person.

Returning back to *The Art of Loving*, Fromm said that one can often find two people in love with each other who feel no love for anybody else. Their love is an egotism à 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 humankind, they remain 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 humankind, all that is alive. It is exclusive only in the sense that I confuse myself fully and intensely with one person only. Erotic love, if it is love, has one premise: that I love from the essence of my being and experience the other person in the essence of their being. In essence, all human beings are identical; 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 commit 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 marriage in which the two partners never chose each other but are chosen for 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 a spontaneous emotional reaction, of suddenly being gripped by an irresistible feeling. One neglects to see an important factor in erotic love: that of will. To love somebody is not just a strong feeling; it is a decision; it is a judgment; it is a promise. If love were only a feeling, there would be no basis for the promise to love each other forever. Both views, then—that of erotic love as completely individual attraction, unique between two specific persons, as well as the other view that erotic love is nothing but an act of will—are true. Or is it maybe put more aptly: the truth is neither this nor that. 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.

It is a widespread belief that while it is virtuous to love others, it is sinful to love oneself. It is assumed that self-love is the same as selfishness. This view goes far back in Western thought. Calvin speaks of self-love as a pest; Freud speaks of self-love in psychiatric terms, but nevertheless his value judgment is the same as that of Calvin; for him, self-love is the same as narcissism. It is a virtue to love my neighbor as a human being; it must be a virtue and not a vice to love myself since I am a human being too. There is no concept of people in which I myself am not included. The Love of My Own Self is inseparably connected with the love for any other being. Not only others, but we ourselves are the object of our feelings and attitudes. Love of others and love of ourselves are not all Alternatives. The affirmation of one’s own life, happiness, growth, freedom is rooted in one’s capacity to love, i.e., in care, respect, responsibility, and knowledge. If they can only love others, they cannot love at all. The selfish person is interested only in themself; wants everything for themself; feels no pleasure in giving, but only in taking; the world outside is looked at only from the standpoint of what they can do to get out of it; they lack interest in the needs of others. Selfishness and self-love, far from being identical, are actually opposites. The selfish person does not love themself too much but too little; in fact, they hate themselves. This lack of fondness and care for themselves leaves them empty and frustrated; they’re unhappy and anxiously concerned to snatch from Life the satisfactions which they block themself from attaining. It is easier to understand selfishness by comparing it with the greedy concern for others, as we find it, for instance, in an over-solicitous 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 is overtly concerned not because she loves the child too much but because she has to compensate for her lack of capacity to love them at all. These ideas on self-love cannot be summarized better than quoting Meister Eckhart on this topic: “If you love or like including yourself, you will love them as one person, that is both God and man; thus he is a great righteous man who loving himself loves all others equally.”

In the beginning of human history, people still identify with the world of animals and trees and try to find Unity by remaining one with the natural world. At a later stage of development, humans transform the product of their own hands into a god; this is the stage of the worship of Idols made of clay or precious metals. People project their own powers and skills into the things they make. At a still later stage, people give their gods the form of human beings. In the beginning of the monotheistic development, we find a despotic, jealous God who considers man, whom he created, as his property and is entitled to do with him whatever he pleases. This is the phase of religion in which God drives Humanity out of paradise; this is the phase in which God decides to destroy the human race by the flood. But simultaneously a new phase begins; it goes in the direction of transforming God from a father figure into a symbol of the principles of Justice, Truth, and Love. 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, of the vision of the flower which will grow from the spiritual seed within man. God cannot have a name; a name 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 prohibition to make any image of God, to pronounce his name in vain, eventually to pronounce his name at all, aims at the same goal: that of freeing people from the idea that God is a person. Following the maturing idea of monotheism can lead only to one conclusion: not to mention God’s name at all; not to speak about God. Then God becomes what he potentially is in monotheistic theology: the nameless one, an inexpressible stammer referring to the unity underlying the phenomenal Universe, the ground of all existence. God becomes truth, love, justice. This makes all the difference to the nature of the love of God. Inasmuch as God is the father, I am the child; I have not yet acquired the objectivity to realize my limitations as a human being, my ignorance, my helplessness. I still claim, like 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. The belief in God, to most people, is the belief in a helping father, a childish illusion. In spite of the fact that this concept of religion has been overcome by some of the greatest teachers of the human race, it is still the dominant form of religion.

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 is only a historically conditioned one in which Humanity has expressed their experience of higher Powers, their longing for truth and for Unity at a given historical period. But I believe also that the consequences of strict monotheism and a non-theistic ultimate concern with the spiritual reality are two views which, though different, need not fight each other. Since Aristotle, the Western world has followed the logical principles of Aristotelian 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. This axiom of Aristotelian logic has so deeply imbued our habits of thought that it is felt to be natural and self-evident, while on the other hand, the statement that X is A and not A seems to be nonsensical. 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 in Chinese and Indian thinking, in the philosophy 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 in words: that are strictly true seem to be paradoxical. Paradoxical logic in Western thought has its earliest philosophical expression in Heraclitus’s philosophy. He assumes the conflict between opposites is the basis of all existence; the all-one conflicting in itself is identical with itself, conflicting Harmony, as in the bow and in the liar; 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; or the Tao in its regular course does nothing, and so there is nothing which he does not do. 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. Not to know and yet to think we 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: “He who knows the Tao does not care to speak about it; he who is, however, ready to speak about it does not know it.” 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. The perceiving thought must transcend itself if it is to attain true reality; opposition is a category of Humanity’s mind, not in itself an element of reality. Inasmuch as God represents the Ultimate Reality, and inasmuch as the human mind perceives reality in contradictions, no positive statement can be made of God. 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.

"When you say the true religious experience, what do you mean by that, doctor?"

"I mean by that the capacity to feel deep love, deep Oneness with my fellow man, with nature, and if I were religious in the uh conventional sense, I would say with God. But it doesn't matter whether one uses God or doesn't; what matters is which experience a person has."

If the right thought is not the ultimate truth and not the way to Salvation, there is no reason to fight others whose thinking has arrived at different formulations. This tolerance is beautifully expressed in the story of several men who were asked to describe an elephant in the dark. One, touching his trunk, said, "This animal is like a water pipe." Another, touching his ear, said, "This animal is like a fan." A third, touching his legs, described the animal as a pillar.

From the Indian, Chinese, and mystical standpoints, the religious task of people is not to think right, but to act right. The opposite is true for the mainstream of Western thought, since one is expected to find the ultimate truth in the right thought. Major emphasis was on thought, although right action was held to be important too, in the religious development. This led to the formulation of dogmas, endless arguments about dogmatic formulations, and intolerance of the non-believer or heretic. It furthermore led to the emphasis on believing in God as the main aim of a religious attitude.

In the Eastern religion and in mysticism, the love of God is an intense feeling, an 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.

"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 hear, "but it is not to be so. God and I, we are one. By knowing God, I take him to myself."

There is an important parallel between the love for one's parents and the love for God. In the stage of full maturity, the individual has freed themselves from the person of mother and father as protecting and commanding Powers; they have established the motherly and fatherly principles in themsel; they have become their own father and mother; they are father and mother. The word "God" denotes the tribal Chief as well as the absolute nothing. The question is to what point we have grown. One thing is certain: the nature of our love for God corresponds to the nature of our love for Humanity. Furthermore, the real quality of our love for God and people often is unconscious, covered up, and rationalized. Love for humankind, furthermore, while directly embedded in our relations to our family, is determined by the structure of the society in which we live. If the social structure is one of submission to Authority, our concept of God must be infantile and far from the mature concept.

Is the social structure of Western civilization and the spirit resulting from it conducive to the development of love? To raise the question is to answer it in the negative. No objective observer of our Western life can doubt that love is a relatively rare phenomenon and that its place is taken by pseudo-loves, which are many forms of the disintegration of Love. Capitalistic Society is 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. Both useful things and useful human energy and skill are transformed into Commodities which are exchanged without the use of force 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; the owner of Labor must sell it under the existing market conditions, unless unless they are to starve.

This economic structure is reflected in a hierarchy of values. Capital commands labor; a mass things, that which is dead, are of superior value to labor, to human powers, to that which is alive. Modern capitalism needs people who cooperate 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 people who feel free and independent, not subject to any Authority or principle or conscience, 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.

What is the outcome? Modern people are alienated from themselves, from their fellow people, and from nature. They have been transformed into a commodity, experiencing their life energy as an investment which must bring them the maximum profit obtainable. Human relations are essentially those of alienated automatons, each basing their 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 utterly alone, pervaded by the deep sense of insecurity, anxiety, and guilt. Our civilization offers many opiates which help people to be unaware of this aloneness: the strict routine of bureaucratized, mechanical work, which helps people to remain unaware of their most fundamental human desires, of the longing for Transcendence and unity. People overcome their unconscious despair by the routine of amusement, the passive consumption of sounds and sights offered by the amusement industry, by the satisfaction of buying ever new things and soon exchanging them for others. Modern people are actually close to the picture Huxley describes in his Brave New World: well-fed, well-clad, satisfied, yet without self, without any except the most superficial contact with our fellow people. Guided by the slogans which Huxley formulated so succinctly, such as "When the individual feels, the community reels," or "Never put off till tomorrow the fun you can have today," people's happiness today consists in having fun. Having fun lies in the satisfaction of consuming and taking in Commodities: sights, food, drinks, cigarettes, people, lectures, books, movies—all are consumed, swallowed. The world is one great object for our appetite: a Big Apple, a big bottle, a big breast. We are all 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. 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, within this alienated structure is the idea of the team. In any number of articles on happy marriage, the ideal described is that of the smoothly functioning team. This description is not too different from the idea of a smoothly functioning employee. All this kind of relationship amounts to is the well-oiled relationship between two persons who remain strangers all their lives, but who treat each other with courtesy and who attempt to make each other feel better. In this concept of Love and Marriage, one has found at last a haven from aloneness; one forms an alliance of two against the world. This egoism ad do is mistaken for love and intimacy.

It has been believed that a reason for frequent unhappiness in marriage is to be found in the faulty sexual technique of one or both partners. In order to help the unfortunate couples who could not love each other, many books give instructions and counsel concerning the correct sexual behavior and promised 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 other sexually, they will love each other. One ignored the fact that the contrary of the underlying assumption is true: love is not the result of adequate sexual satisfaction, but sexual happiness; fear of or hatred for the other person are often at the bottom of those difficulties which prevent someone from giving themselves completely, from acting spontaneously. If a person can emerge from fear or hate and hence become capable of loving, this can help solve their sexual problems; if not, no amount of knowledge about sexual techniques will help.

A form of pseudo-love which is not infrequent and is often experienced and more often described on screen and in novels as the great love is idolatrous love. If a person has not reached the level where they have a sense of identity rooted in the productive unfolding of their own powers, they tend to idolize the love person; they are alienated from their own powers and project them into the love person, who is woried as the bearer of all love, all light, all Bliss. Since usually no person can, in the long run, live up to the expectations of their idolatrous worshipper, disappointment is bound to occur, and as a remedy, a new Idol is sought for, sometimes in an unending Circle. What is characteristic for this type of idolatrous Love is, at the beginning, the intensity and suddenness of the love experience. This idolatrous love is often described as the true gray love, but while it is meant to portray the intensity and depth of love, it only demonstrates the hunger and despair of the idolator. Needless to say, it is not rare that two persons find themselves in mutual idolatry.

Another form of pseudo-love is what may be called sentimental love. Its essence lies in the fact that love is experienced only in fantasy and not in the here-and-now relationship to another person who is real. A couple who, in relation to each other, are incapable of ever penetrating the wall of separateness are moved to tears when they participate in the happy or unhappy love story of the couple on the screen. For many couples, seeing those stories on the screen is the only occasion on which they experience love—not for each other, but together, the spectators of other people's love. As long as love is a daydream, they can participate; as soon as it comes down to the reality of the relationship between two real people, they are frozen. Another aspect of sentimental love is the abstraction 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 fantasies of their future love. How many engaged or newly married 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 tendency coincides with the general attitude characteristic of modern people: they live in the past or in the future, but not the present. Whether love is experienced vicariously by participating in the fictitious experience of others, or whether it is shifted away from the present to the past or the future, this abstracted and alienated form of love serves as an opiate which alleviates the pain of reality, the aloneness and separateness of the individual.

Another form of neurotic love lies in the use of projective mechanisms for the purpose of avoiding one's own problems and being concerned with the defects of the loved person instead. Individuals behave in this respect very much as groups, Nations, or religions do: they have a fine appreciation for even the minor shortcomings of the other person and go blissfully ahead, ignoring their own, always busy trying to accuse or to reform the other person. If two people both do it, as is so often the case, the relationship of Love becomes transformed into one of mutual pro rection. "If I am domineering or indecisive or greedy, I accuse my partner of it, and depending on my character, I either want to cure them or punish them. The other person does the same." Another form of projection is the projection of one's own problems on the children. When a person feels that they have not been able to make sense of their own life, they try to make sense of it in terms of the life of their children. But one is bound to fail, because the problem of existence can be solved by each person only for themselves and not by proxy. 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 unhappiness within the unified family is more harmful to the children than an open break would be, which teaches them that at least people are able to end an intolerable situation by a courageous decision.

One other frequent error must be mentioned here: the illusion that love means necessarily the absence of conflict. Just as it is customary for people to believe that pain and sadness should be avoided under all circumstances, they believe that love means the absence of any conflict. The struggles 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 people are actually attempts to avoid the real conflicts. There are disagreements on minor or superficial matters which, by their very nature, do not lend themselves to clarification or solution. Real conflicts between two people—those which do not serve to cover up or to project, but which are experienced 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. Only in this central experience is human reality; only here is aliveness; only here is the basis for love. Love is a constant challenge; it is not a resting place, but a moving, growing, working together. Whether there is harmony or conflict, joy or sadness, it is secondary to the fundamental fact that two people are one with each other by being one with themselves rather than by fleeing from themselves. There is only one proof of the presence of love: the depth of the relationship and the liveness and strength in each person concerned. This is the fruit by which love is recognized.

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 people. 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 mother or father to come to their help when help is needed. True, in religious cultures like that of the Middle Ages, the average person also looked at God as a helping father and mother, but at the same time they took God seriously also in the sense that the paramount goal of their life was to live according to God's principles, to make salvation the Supreme concern to which all other activities were subordinated. Today, nothing of such effort is present. Daily life is strictly separated from any religious values; it is devoted to the striving for material comfort and for Success on the personality Market. The principles on which our secular efforts are built are those of indifference and egotism. People 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 people are rather like a child of three, who cries for father when they need him and otherwise is quite self-sufficient when they can play. Modern people have transformed themselves into a commodity. We are alienated from ourselves, from our fellow people, and from nature. Our main aim is a profitable exchange of our skills, knowledge, and of ourselves—our personality package—with others who are equally intent on a fair and profitable exchange. Life is no goal except the one to move, no principle except the one of fair exchange, no satisfaction except the one to consume.

What can the concept of God mean under these circumstances? In the religious revival of recent times, the belief in God has been transformed into a psychological device to make one better fitted for the competitive struggle. Religion allies itself with auto-suggestion and Psychotherapy to help people in their business activities. The bestseller in the year 1938, Dale Carnegie's How to Win Friends and Influence People, remained on a strictly secular level. What was the function of Carnegie's book at the time is the function of our greatest bestseller today, The Power of Positive Thinking by 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, belief in God and prayer is recommended as a means to increase one's ability to be successful. "Make God your partner" means to make God a partner in business rather than to become one with him in love. Just as brotherly love has been replaced by impersonal fairness, God has been transformed into a remote General director of the 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.

Having dealt with the theoretical aspect of The Art of Loving, we are now confronted with a much more difficult problem: that of the practice of The Art of Loving. Can anything 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 expect to be given prescriptions of how to do it yourself. I am afraid that anyone who approaches this last chapter in this spirit will be gravely disappointed. To love is a personal experience which everyone can only have by and for themselves. In fact, there is hardly anybody who has not had this experience in a rudimentary way, at least as a child, an adolescent, an adult.

First of all, the practice of an art requires discipline. I shall never be any good at anything if I do not do it in a disciplined way. Anything I do only if I'm 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 or a certain amount of hours—but it is that of a discipline in one's whole life. One might think that nothing is easier to learn for modern people than discipline. Do we not spend eight hours a day in a most disciplined way at a job which is strictly routinized? The fact, however, is that modern people have exceedingly little self-discipline outside of the sphere of work. When we do not work, we want 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 people are forced for eight hours a day to spend our energy for purposes not our own, in ways not our own but prescribed for us by the rhythm of the work, we rebel, and our rebelliousness takes the form of an infantile self-indulgence. In addition, in the battle against authoritarianism, we have become distrustful of all discipline—of that enforced by irrational Authority as well as of a rational discipline imposed by ourselves. Without such discipline, however, life becomes shattered, chaotic, and lacking concentration. That concentration is a necessary condition for the mastery 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 is rare in our culture. On the contrary, our culture leads to an unconcentrated and diffused mode of Life, hardly paralleled anywhere else. We do many things at once: read, listen to the radio, talk, smoke, eat, drink. We are the consumer with the open mouth, eager and ready to swallow everything: films, liquor, knowledge. This lack of concentration is clearly shown in our difficulty in being alone with ourselves. To sit still without talking, smoking, reading, drinking is impossible for most people; they become nervous and fidgety and must do something with their mouth or hands.

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 another art. Yet, for modern people, patience is as difficult to practice as discipline and concentration. Our whole industrial system fosters exactly the opposite: quickness. All our machines are designed for quickness, and the quicker the better. 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...

People, people—so goes the logic. Modern people think we lose something—time—when we do not do things quickly. Yet we do not know what to do with the time we gain except kill it. Eventually.

A condition of learning any art is supreme concern with the mastery of the art. If the art is not something of supreme importance, the apprentice will never learn it; they 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 if the proportion between masters and dilettantes is more heavily weighed in favor of the dilettantes in The Art of Loving than is the case with other arts.

One does not begin to learn an art directly, but indirectly, as it were. One must learn a great number of other and often seemingly disconnected things before one starts with the art itself. An apprentice in carpentry begins learning how to play in wood. An apprentice in the art of piano begins by practicing scales. An apprentice in the Zen art of archery begins by doing breath exercises.

If one wants to become a master in any art, one's whole life must be devoted to it, or at least related to it, 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 their life.

How does one practice discipline? Our grandfathers would have been much better equipped to answer this question. The 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 authoritarian, 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.

To get up at a regular hour; to devote a regular amount of time during the day to activities such as meditating, breathing, listening to music, walking; not to indulge, at least not beyond a certain minimum, in escapist activities like mystery stories and movies; not to overeat or overdrink—as 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 that its practice is supposed to be somewhat painful, and only if it is painful can it be good. The Easterners recognized long ago that that which is good for us, for our body and for our soul, must also be agreeable, even though at the beginning some resistances must be overcome.

Concentration is by far more difficult to practice in our 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 oneself, and this ability is precisely a condition for the ability to love. If I am attached to another person because I cannot stand on my own feet, they may become 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 themself will discover how difficult it is; they will begin to feel restless, fidgety, or even to sense considerable anxiety. They will observe that all sorts of thoughts come to mind which take possession of them. It would be helpful to practice a very few simple exercises, as, for instance, to sit in a relaxed position, neither slouching nor rigid; to close one's eyes and to try and see a white screen in front of one's eyes, and to try to remove all interfering pictures and thoughts; then to try to follow one's breathing, not to think about it nor force it, but to follow it and to try and have a sense of “I” as the center of my powers, as the creator of my world. One should at least do such a concentration exercise every morning for 20 minutes, and if possible longer, and every evening before going to bed.

Besides such exercises, one must learn to be concentrated 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 attention. To learn concentration requires avoiding, as far as possible, trivial conversation—that is, conversation which is not genuine.

I should add here that just as it is important to avoid trivial conversation, it is important to avoid bad company. By bad company, I do not refer only to people who are vicious and destructive; 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 tricks, who chatter instead of talk, and who assert cliché opinions instead of thinking. The conversation can deal with matters of politics or religion and yet be trivial; this happens when the two people talk in clichés, when their hearts are not in what they are saying. However, it is not always possible to avoid the company of such people, nor even necessary. If one does not react in the expected way—that is, in clichés and trivialities—but directly and humanely, one will often find that such people change their behavior, often helped by the surprise affected 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 advice, without really listening; they do not take the other person's talk seriously; they 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 if 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.

The beginning of the practice of concentration will be difficult. One cannot learn to concentrate without becoming sensitive to oneself. If I 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; yet they are not thinking about all these factors; their mind is in a state of relaxed alertness, open to all relevant changes in the situation on which they are concentrated. In the same way, one can be sensitive towards oneself. One is aware, for instance, of a sense of tiredness or depression; one asks oneself, “What happened? Why am I depressed?” The same is done by noticing when one is irritated or angry, or tending to daydreaming or other escape activities. In each of these instances, the important 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 often rather immediately why we are anxious, depressed, irritated.

The average person has a sensitivity towards their bodily processes; they notice changes or even small amounts of pain. Sensitivity towards one's mental processes is much more difficult because many people have never known a person who functions optimally; they take the functioning of their parents and relatives, or of the social group they have been born into, as the norm. There are many people, for instance, who have never seen a loving person, or a person with integrity, or courage, or concentration. It’s quite obvious that in order to be sensitive to oneself, one has to 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 in later life? 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 person most highly valued was the one with outstanding spiritual qualities. Even the teacher was not only, or even primarily, a source of information, but their function was to convey certain human attitudes. In contemporary capitalistic society, the people suggested for admiration and emulation are everything but bearers of significant spiritual qualities. Those are essentially in the public eye who give the average person a sense of vicarious satisfaction; their main qualification for this function is 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 become 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; if one thinks of the great works of literature and art of all ages, there seems to be a chance of creating a vision of good human functioning and hence of sensitivity to malfunctioning.

The main condition for the achievement of love is the overcoming of one's narcissism. The narcissistic orientation is one in which people experience 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. 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 world which is formed by one's desires and fears. For the insane person, the only reality that exists is that within them—that of their fears and desires; they see the world outside as symbols of their inner world, as their 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 sometimes also of our insights and judgments; 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 themselves, their neighbors, and by reading the newspapers. They vary in the degree of the narcissistic distortion of reality. How many parents experience the child in terms of being obedient, of being a credit to them, instead of being interested in what the child feels for and by themself? How many wives think their husbands are ineffective or stupid because they do not live up to a fantasy picture of a shining knight which they might have built up as children? The lack of objectivity as far as foreign nations are concerned is notorious; from one day to another, another nation is made out to be utterly depraved and vicious, while one's own nation stands for everything that is good and noble. 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 be objective, to use one's reason, is possible only if 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 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. Humility and objectivity are indivisible; I 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; I must try to see the difference between my picture of a person and their behavior, and the person's reality as it exists regardless of my interests, needs, and fears.

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 contrast to, or divorced from, reason and rational thinking? Even to begin to understand the problem of faith, one must differentiate between rational and irrational faith. By irrational faith, I understand the belief 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. In rational thinking, in which faith is supposed to have no place, rational faith is an important component. 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. The history of science is replete with instances of faith and 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 completion of a rational vision to the formulation of a theory, faith is necessary. While irrational faith is 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.

Faith is an indispensable quality of any significant friendship or relationship. It means to be certain of the reliability and unchangeability of their fundamental attitudes, of the core of their personality, of their love. Not that a person may not change their opinions, but that their basic motivations remain the same. 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 themself is able to be faithful to others. Faith in oneself is a condition of our ability to promise. Faith is one of the conditions of human existence. What matters is the faith in one's own love, in its ability to produce love in others, and in its reliability.

The presence of faith makes the difference between education and manipulation. Education is identical with helping the child realize their potential. The opposite of education is manipulation, which is based on the absence of faith and on the conviction that a child will be right only if the adult puts into them what is desirable and suppresses what seems to be undesirable. There is no need of faith in the robot, since there is no life in it either. To have faith requires courage, the ability to take a risk, the readiness even to accept pain and disappointment. Whoever cuts themself off in a system of defense where distance and possession are the only means of security makes themself a prisoner. To be loved and to love need courage—the courage to judge certain values as of ultimate concern and to take the jump and stake everything 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 is the courage of nihilism; it is rooted in a destructive attitude towards life, in the willingness to throw away life because one is incapable of loving it. The courage of despair is the opposite of the courage of love, just as the faith in power is the opposite of the faith in life.

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; to stick to one's judgment about a person even if public opinion seems to invalidate it; to stick to one's conviction even though they are unpopular. All this requires faith and courage. To take the difficulties, setbacks, and sorrows of life as a challenge rather than as an 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 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 loved person. Love is an act of faith, and whoever is of little faith is also of little love.

Can one say more about the practice of faith? Someone else might. If I were a poet or a 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 I am sure that anyone who is really concerned can learn to have faith, as a child learns to walk.

Love is an activity. If I love, I am in a constant state of active concern with the loved person. Sleep is the only proper situation for inactivity; the state of awakeness is one in which lazy easiness should have no place. The paradoxical 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 to be bored or boring is one of the main conditions for loving. It is an illusion to believe that one can separate life in such a way that one is productive in the sphere of love and unproductive in all other spheres. Productiveness does not permit such a division of labor. The capacity of love demands a state of intensity, awakeness, enhanced vitality, which can only be the result of a productive and active orientation in many other spheres of life. If one is not productive in other spheres, one is not productive in love either.

Our society is run by a managerial bureaucracy, by professional politicians; people are motivated by mass suggestion; their aim is producing more and consuming more as purposes in themselves; all activities are subordinated to economic goals; means have become ends; people are automatons, well-fed, well-clad, but without any ultimate concern for that which is our peculiarly human quality and function. If we are to be able to love, humanity must be put in its supreme place; the economic machine must serve us rather than we serve it; we must be enabled to share experience, to share work, rather than at best share in profits. Society must be organized in such a way that our social, loving nature is not separated from our social existence, but becomes one with it.

If it is true 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 necessities of human nature. Indeed, to speak of love is not preaching, for the simple reason that it means to speak of the ultimate and real need in every human being. That this need has been obscured does not mean that it does not exist. To analyze the nature of love is to discover its general absence today and to criticize the social conditions which are responsible for this absence. To have faith in the possibility of love as a social and not only exceptional individual phenomenon is a rational faith based on the insight into the very nature of humankind.

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