The aim
of humanistic ethics is not the repression of man’s evilness but the productive
use of man’s inherent primary potentialities. Virtue is proportional to the
degree of productiveness a person has achieved. If society is concerned with
making them productive and hence with creating the conditions for the
development of productiveness. The first and foremost of these conditions is
that the unfolding and growth of every person is the aim of all social and
political activities, that man is the only purpose and end, and not a means for
anybody or anything except himself.
The
productive orientation is the basis for freedom, virtue, and happiness…As we
have shown, the wish to make productive use of his powers is inherent in man,
and his efforts consist mainly in removing the obstacles in himself and in his
environment which block him from following his inclination. Just as the person
who has become sterile and destructive is increasingly paralyzed and caught, as
it were, in a vicious circle, a person who is aware of his own powers and uses
them productively gains in strength, faith, and happiness, and is less and less
in danger of being alienated from himself; he has created, as we might say, a ’”virtuous
circle.” The experience of joy and happiness is not only, as we have shown, the
result of productive living but also its stimulus…Every increase in joy a culture
can provide for will do more for the ethical education of its members than all
the warnings of punishment or preaching of virtue could do.
Erich
Fromm (1947) Man for Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics (p.231-232)
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