The Spelling Bee Hero

Consider an episode that took place some years ago at the national spelling bee in Washington. D.C. A thirteen-year-old boy was asked to spell echolalia, a word that means a tendency to repeat whatever one hears. Although he misspelled the word, the judges misheard him, told him he had spelled the word right, and allow him to advance. When the boy learned that he had misspelled the word, he went to the judges and told them. He was eliminated after all. Newspaper headlines the next day proclaimed the honest young man a “spelling bee hero,” and his photo appeared in The New York Times. “The judges said I had a lot of integrity,” the boy told reporters. He added that part of his motive was, “I didn’t want to feel like a slime.

When I read that quote from the spelling bee hero, I wondered what Kant would think. Not wanting to feel like a slime is an inclination, of course. So, if that was the boy’s motive for telling the truth, it would seem to undermine the moral worth of his act. But this seems too harsh. It would mean that only unfeeling people could ever perform morally worthy acts. I don’t think this is what Kant means.

If the only reason the boy told the truth was to avoid feeling guilty, or to avoid bad publicity should his error be discovered, then his truth-telling would lack moral worth. But if he told the truth because he knew it was the right thing to do, his act has moral worth regardless of the pleasure or satisfaction that might attend it. As long as he did the right thing for the right reason, feeling good about it doesn’t undermine its moral worth.

The same is true of Kant’s altruist. If he comes to aid of other people simply for the pleasure it gives him, then his action lacks moral worth. But if he recognizes a duty to help one’s fellow human beings and acts out of that duty, then the pleasure he derives from it is not morally disqualifying…

Sandel, J. Michael (2009) Justice: What’s the right thing to do? New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

What’s Moral? Look for the Motive

According to Kant, the moral worth of an action consists not in the consequences that flow from it, but in the intention from which the act is done. What matters is the motive, and the motive must be of a certain kind. What matters is doing the right thing because it’s right, not for some ulterior motive.

“A good will is not good because of what it effects or accomplishes,” Kant writes. It is good in itself, whether or not it prevails. “Even if… this will is entirely lacking in power to carry out its intentions; if by its utmost effort it still accomplishes nothing… even then it would still shine like a jewel for its own sake as something which has its full value in itself.”

For any action to be morally good, “it is not enough that it should conform to the moral law – it must also be done for the sake of the moral law.” And the motive that confers moral worth on an action is the motive of duty, by which Kant means doing the right thing for the right reason.

In saying that only the motive of duty confers moral worth on an action, Kant is not yet saying what particular duties we have. He is not yet telling us what the supreme principle of morality commands. He’s simply observing that, when we assess the moral worth of an action, we assess the motive from which it’s done, not the consequences it produces.

If we act out of some motive other than duty, such as self-interest, for example, our action lacks moral worth. This is true, Kant maintains, not only for self-interest but for any and all attempts to satisfy our wants, desires, preferences, and appetites. Kant contrasts motives such as these – he calls them “motives of iinclination” – with the motive of duty. And he insists that only actions done out of the motive of duty have moral worth.

Sandel, J. Michael (2009) Justice: What’s the right thing to do? New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Persons and Things

It is 3:00 a.m., and your college roommate asks you why you are up late pondering moral dilemmas involving runaway trolleys.

“To write a good paper in Ethics 101,” you reply.

“But why write a good paper?” your roommate asks.

“To get a good grade.”

“But why care about grades?”

“To get a job in investment banking.”

“But why get a job in investment banking?”

“To become a hedge fund manager someday.”

“But why be a hedge fund manager?”

“To make a lot of money.”

“But why make a lot of money?”

“To eat lobster often, which I like. I am, after all, a sentient creature. That’s why I’m up late thinking about runaway trolleys!”

This is an example of what Kant would call heteronomous determination – doing something for the sake of something else, for the sake of something else, and so on. When we act heterogeneously, we act for the sake of ends given outside us. We are instruments, not authors, of the purpose we pursue.

Kant’s notion of autonomy stands in stark contrast to this. When we act autonomously, according to a law we give ourselves, we do something for its own sake, an end in itself. We cease to be instruments of purposes given outside us. This capacity to act autonomously is what gives human life its special dignity. It marks out the difference between persons and things….

Sandel, J. Michael (2009) Justice: What’s the right thing to do? New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux.

Self-Actualization

Do your relationships promote the actualization of your potential? 

Do your relationships result in identifying your talents and abilities and developing them to the fullest extent possible? 

Your answers are an important indicator reflecting the quality of your relationships.

Self-actualization is the drive to actualize your potential and take joy and a sense of fulfillment from being all that you can be. You discover what your talents and abilities are in your interpersonal relationships. How other people respond tells you whether you can sing, paint, act, run quickly, learn quickly, or understand difficult concepts. Once you being to actualize your potentialities, you need to be time competent and autonomous.

To be time competent

To be time competent is to tie the past and the future to living fully in the present. The self-actualized person appears to be less burdened by guilt, regrets, and resentments from the past than is the non-self-actualized person, and the self-actualized person’s aspirations tend to be tied realistically to present goals.

Neither inner-directed nor outer-directed

Self-actualization is also dependent on being autonomous. Autonomy is the ability to understand what others expect in any given situation and to be free to choose whether or not to meet their expectations. Autonomous people have internalized the love, support, and acceptance of others so they can apply values and principles flexibly in order to act in ways that are appropriate to the current situation. They are neither inner-directed, that is, controlled by a small number of values and principles set early in life that are rigidly adhered to no matter what the situation is like, nor outer-directed, that is, controlled by others’ expectations and pressure to conform.

Respond in flexible and appropriate ways

In making decisions concerning what behavior is appropriate in a situation, autonomous people tend to consider both their own internal values and the expectations of other people and then respond in flexible and appropriate ways. Autonomy is the result of the internalization of values derived from previous caring and supportive relationships (internalized values provide guides for appropriate behavior and self-approval) and the acquisition of social skills and social sensitivity (which provide accurate understanding of others’ expectations for one’s behavior).

In addition to interpersonal effectiveness and self-actualization, interpersonal skills are keys to living a happy and healthy life – a high-quality life.

David W. Johnson (2014) Reaching Out: Interpersonal Effectiveness and Self-actualization. Boston: Pearson. P.63.

Love of Others and Love of Ourselves

Love of others and love of ourselves are not alternatives. On the contrary, an attitude of love toward themselves will be found in all those who are capable of loving others. Love, in principle, is indivisible as far as the connection between ‘objects’ and one’s own self is concerned. Genuine love is an expression of productiveness and implies care, respect, responsibility, and knowledge. It is not an “affect” in the sense of being affected by somebody, but an active striving for the growth and happiness of the loved person, rooted in one’s own capacity to love.

To love is an expression of one’s power to love, and to love somebody is the actualization and concentration of this power with regard to one person. It is not true, as the idea of romantic love would have it, that there is only the one person in the world whom one could love and that it is the great chance of one’s life to find that one person. Nor is it true, if that person be found that love for him (or her) results in a withdrawal of love from others. Love which can only be experienced with regard to one person demonstrates by this very fact that it is not love, but a symbiotic attachment. The basic affirmation contained in love is directed toward the beloved person as an incarnation of essentially human qualities. Love of one person implies love of man as such. The kind of “division of labor,” as William James calls it, by which one loves one’s family but is without feeling for the “stranger,” is a sign of a basic inability to love. Love of man is not, as is frequently supposed, an abstraction coming after the love for a specific person, but it is its premise, although, genetically, it is acquired in loving specific individuals.

From this it follows that my own self, in principle, must be as much an object of my love as another person. 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 an individual is able to love productively, he loves himself too; if he can love only others, he can not love at all.

Erich Fromm (1947) Man for Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics.(p.134-135)

Irrational Desires

Although the pleasure derived from the satisfaction of genuine physiological needs and of irrational psychic needs consists in the relief from tension, the quality of the pleasure differs significantly. The physiologically conditioned desires such as hunger, thirst, and so on, are satisfied with the removal of the physiologically conditioned tension, and they reappear only when the physiological need arises again; they are thus rhythmic in nature. The irrational desires, in contrast, are insatiable. The desire of the envious, the possessive, the sadistic person does not disappear with its satisfaction, except perhaps momentarily. It is in the very nature of these irrational desires that they can not be “satisfied.” They spring from a dissatisfaction within oneself. The lack of productiveness and the resulting powerlessness and fear are the root of these passionate cravings and irrational desires. Even if man could satisfy all his wishes for power and destruction, it would not change his fear and loneliness, and thus the tension would remain. The blessing of imagination turns into a curse; since a person does not find himself relieved from his fears, he imagines ever-increasing satisfactions would cure his greed and restore his inner balance. But greed is a bottomless pit, and the idea of the relief derived from its satisfaction is a mirage. Greed, indeed, is not, as is so often assumed, rooted in man’s animal nature but in his mind and imagination.

We have seen that the pleasures derived from the fulfillment of physiological needs and neurotic desires are the result of the removal of painful tension. But while those in the first category are really satisfying, are normal, and are a condition for happiness, those in the latter are at best only a temporary mitigation of need, an indication of pathological functioning and of fundamental unhappiness. I propose to call the pleasure derived from the fulfillment of irrational desires “irrational pleasure” in contradistinction to “satisfaction,” which is the fulfillment of normal physiological desires.

Erich Fromm (1947) Man for Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics. p.188-189.

Unfolding human potentialities

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)

Humanistic Conscience

Humanistic conscience is not the internalized voice of an authority whom we are eager to please and afraid of displeasing; it is our own voice, present in every human being and independent of external sanctions and rewards. What is the nature of this voice? Why do we hear it and why can we become deaf to it?

Humanistic conscience is the reaction of our total personality to its proper functioning or dysfunctioning; not a reaction to the functioning of this or that capacity but to the totality of capacities which constitute our human and our individual existence. Conscience judges our functioning as human beings; it is (as the root of the word con-scientia indicates) knowledge within oneself, knowledge of our respective success or failure in the art of living. But although conscience is knowledge, it is more than mere knowledge in the realm of abstract thought. It has an affective quality, for it is the reaction of our total personality and not only the reaction of our mind. In fact, we need not be aware of what our conscience says in order to be influenced by it.

Actions, thoughts, and feelings which are conducive to the proper functioning and unfolding of our total personality produce a feeling of inner approval, of “rightness,” characteristic of the humanistic “good conscience.” On the other hand, acts, thoughts, and feelings injurious to our total personality produce a feeling of uneasiness and discomfort, characteristic of the “guilty conscience.” Conscience is thus a re-action of ourselves to ourselves. It is the voice of our true selves which summons us back to ourselves, to live productively, to develop fully and harmoniously – that is, to become what we potentially are. It is the guardian of our integrity; it is the “ability to guarantee one’s self with all due pride, and also at the same time to say yes to one’s self.” If love can be defined as the affirmation of the potentialities and the care for, and the respect of, the uniqueness of the loved person, humanistic conscience can be justly called the voice of our loving care for ourselves.

Humanistic conscience represents not only the expression of our true selves; it contains also the essence of our moral experiences in life. In it we preserve the knowledge of our aim in life and of the principles through which to attain it; those principles which we have discovered ourselves as well as those we have learned from others and which we have found to be true.

Humanistic conscience is the expression of man’s self-interest and integrity, while authoritarian conscience is concerned with man’s obedience, self-sacrifice, duty, or his “social adjustment.” The goal of humanistic conscience is productiveness and, therefore, happiness, since happiness is the necessary concomitant of productive living. To cripple oneself by becoming a tool of others, no matter how dignified they are made to appear, to be “selfless,” unhappy, resigned, discouraged, is in opposition to the demands of one’s conscience; any violation of the integrity and proper functioning of our personality, with regard to thinking as well as acting, and even with regard to such matter as taste for food or sexual behaviour is acting against one’s conscience.

Erich Fromm (1947) Man for Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics. (p.162 - 163)

Fear of Disapproval

The fear of disapproval, though less dramatic than the irrational fear of death and of old age, is a hardly less significant expression of unconscious guilt feeling. Here also we find the irrational distortion of a normal attitude: man naturally wants to be accepted by his fellows; but modern man wants to be accepted by everybody and therefore is afraid to deviate, in thinking, feeling, and acting, from the cultural pattern. One reason among others for this irrational fear of disapproval is an unconscious guilt feeling. If man cannot approve of himself because he fails in the task of living productively, he has to substitute approval by others for approval by himself. This craving for approval can be fully understood only if we recognize it as a moral problem, as the expression of the all-pervasive though unconscious guilt feeling.

Erich Fromm (1947) Man for Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics, p.168.

New Act of Birth

The fact that man’s birth is primarily a negative act, that of being thrown out of the original oneness with nature, that he cannot return to where he came from, implies that the process of birth is by no means an easy one. Each step into his new human existence is frightening. It always means to give up a secure state, which was relatively known, for one which is new, which one has not yet mastered. Undoubtedly, if the infant could think at the moment of the severance of the umbilical cord, he would experience the fear of dying. A loving fate protects us from this first panic. But at any new step, at any new stage of our birth, we are afraid again. We are never free from two conflicting tendencies: one to emerge from the womb, from the animal form of existence into a more human existence, from bondage to freedom; another, to return to the womb, to nature, to certainty and security. In the history of the individual, and of the race, the progressive tendency has proven to be stronger, yet the phenomenon of mental illness and the regression of the human race to positions apparently relinquished generations ago, show the intense struggle which accompanies each new act of birth

Erich Fromm (1956) The Sane Society.

Happiness

Happiness is an achievement brought about by man’s inner productiveness and not a gift of the gods. Happiness and joy are not the satisfaction of a need springing from a physiological or a psychological lack; they are not the relief from tension but the accompaniment of all productive activity, in thought, feeling, and action. Joy and happiness are not different in quality; they are different only inasmuch as joy refers to a single act while happiness may be said to be a continuous or integrated experience of joy; we can speak of “joys”(in the plural) but only of “happiness” (in the singular).

Happiness is the indication that man has found the answer to the problem of human existence: the productive realization of his potentialities and thus, simultaneously, being one with the world and preserving the integrity of his self. In spending his energy productively he increases his powers, he “burns without being consumed.”

Happiness is the criterion of excellence in the art of living, of virtue in the meaning it has in humanistic ethics. Happiness is often considered the logical opposite of grief or pain. Physical or mental suffering is part of human existence and to experience them is unavoidable. To spare oneself from grief at all cost can be achieved only at the price of total detachment, which excludes the ability to experience happiness. The opposite of happiness thus is not grief or pain but depression which results from inner sterility and unproductiveness.

Erich Fromm (1947) Man for Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics

The Automaton Citizen and Human Rights (audio)

YouTube audio record

Nonproductive Submissive Automaton Activity

A common type of nonproductive activity is the reaction to anxiety, whether acute or chronic, conscious or unconscious, which is frequently at the root of the frantic preoccupations of men today. Different from anxiety-motivated activity, though often blended with it, is the type of activity based on submission to or dependence on an authority. The authority may be feared, admired, or “loved” – usually all three are mixed – but the cause of the activity is the command of the authority, both in a formal way and with regard to its contents. The person is active because the authority wants him to do. This kind of activity is found in the authoritarian character. To him activity means to act in the name of something higher than his own self. He can act in the name of God, the past, or duty, but not in the name of himself. The authoritarian character receives the impulse to act from a superior power which is neither assailable nor changeable, and is consequently unable to heed spontaneous impulses from within himself.

Resembling submissive activity is automaton activity. Here we do not find dependence on overt authority, but rather on anonymous authority as it is represented by public opinion, culture patterns, common sense, or “science.” The person feels or does what he is supposed to feel or do; his activity lacks spontaneity in the sense that it does not originate from his own mental or emotional experience but from an outside source.

Among the most powerful sources of activity are irrational passions. The person who is driven by stinginess, masochism, envy, jealousy, and all other forms of greed is compelled to act; yet his actions are neither free nor rational but in opposition to reason and to his interests as a human being. A person so obsessed repeats himself, becoming more and more inflexible, more and more stereotyped. He is active, but he is not productive.

Although the source of these activities is irrational and the acting persons are neither free nor rational, there can be important practical results, often leading to material success. In the concept of productiveness we are not concerned with activity necessarily leading to practical results but with an attitude, with a mode of reaction and orientation toward the world and oneself in the process of living. We are concerned with man’s character, not with his success.

  

excerpt from Erich Fromm (1947) Man for Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics

Productiveness

Productiveness is man’s realization of the potentialities characteristic of him, the use of his powers. But what is “power”? It is rather ironical that this word denotes two contradictory concepts: power of = capacity and power over = domination. This contradiction, however, is of a particular kind. Power = domination results from the paralysis of power = capacity. “Power over” is the perversion of “power to.” The ability of man to make productive use of his powers is his potency; the inability is his impotence. With his power of reason he can penetrate the surface of phenomenon and understand their essence. With his power of love he can break through the wall which separates one person from another. With his power of imagination he can visualize things not yet existing; he can plan and thus begin to create. Where potency is lacking, man’s relatedness to the world is perverted into a desire to dominate, to exert power over others as though they were things. Domination is coupled with death, potency with life. Domination springs from impotence and in turn reinforces it, for if an individual can force somebody else to serve him, his own need to be productive is increasingly paralyzed….

The crippling of productive activity results in either inactivity or over-activity….

Productive activity is characterized by the rhythmic change of activity and repose. Productive work, love, and thought are possible only if a person can be, when necessary, quiet and alone with himself. To be able to listen to oneself is a prerequisite for the ability to listen to others; to be at home with oneself is the necessary condition for relating oneself to others.

excerpt from Erich Fromm (1947) Man for Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics

Temperament and Character

…Temperament refers to the mode of reaction and is constitutional and not changeable; character is essentially formed by a person’s experiences, especially of those in early life, and changeable, to some extent, by insights and new kinds of experiences. If a person has a choleric (easily angered) temperament, for instance, his mode of reaction is “quick and strong.” But what he is quick and strong about depends on his kind of relatedness, his character. If he is a productive, just, loving person he will react quickly and strongly when he loves, when he is enraged by injustice, and when he is impressed by new idea. If he is a destructive or sadistic character he will be quick and strong in his destructiveness or in his cruelty.

The confusion between temperament and character has had serious consequences for ethical theory. Preferences with regard to differences in temperament are mere matters of subjective taste. But differences in character are ethically of the most fundamental importance…

In the application of C.G. Jung’s concepts of temperament, those of “introvert” and “extrovert,” we often find the same confusion. Those who prefer the extrovert tend to describe the introvert as inhibited and neurotic; those who prefer the introvert describe the extrovert as superficial and lacking in perseverance and depth. The fallacy is to compare a “good” person of one temperament with a “bad” person of another temperament, and to ascribe the difference in value to the difference in temperament….

Excerpt from Erich Fromm (1947) Man for Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics

Art of Living

If ethics constitutes the body of norms for achieving excellence in performing the art of living, its most general principles must follow from the nature of life in general and of human existence in particular. In most general terms, the nature of all life is to preserve and affirm its own existence. All organisms have an inherent tendency to preserve their existence: it is from this fact that psychologists have postulated an “instinct” of self-preservation. The first “duty” of an organism is to be alive.

 

“To be alive” is a dynamic, not a static, concept. Existence and the unfolding of the specific powers of an organism are one and the same. All organisms have an inherent tendency to actualize their specific potentialities. The aim of man’s life, therefore, is to be understood as the unfolding of his powers according to the laws of his nature.

 

Man, however, does not exist “in general.” While sharing the core of human qualities with all members of his species, he is always an individual, a unique entity, different from everybody else. He differs by his particular blending of character, temperament, talents, dispositions, just as he differs at his fingertips. He can affirm his human potentialities only by realizing his individuality. The duty to be alive is the same as the duty to become oneself, to develop into the individual one potentially is.

To sum up, good in humanistic ethics is the affirmation of life, the unfolding of man’s powers. Virtue is responsibility toward his own existence. Evil constitutes the crippling of man’s powers; vice is irresponsibility toward himself.

 

Excerpt from Erich Fromm (1947) Man for Himself: An Inquiry into the Psychology of Ethics

Greed

Greed is a common quality of desires by which men are driven to achieve a certain goal. In the nongreedy feeling, man is not driven, he is not passive, but he is free and active.

Greed can be motivated in two ways: 1. By a physiological imbalance which produces the greedy desire for food, drink, etc. Once the physiological need is satisfied, the greed ceases, unless the imbalance is chronic. 2. By a psychological imbalance, especially the presence of increased anxiety, loneliness, insecurity, lack of identity, etc., which is alleviated by the satisfaction, power, fame, property, etc. This type of greed is, in principle, insatiable, unless a person’s anxiety, etc., ceases or is greatly reduced. The first type of greed is reactive to circumstances; the second is inherent in the character structure.

The greedy feeling is highly egocentric. Whether it is hunger, thirst, or sexual desire, the greedy person wants something for himself exclusively, and that by which he satisfies his desire is only a means for his own purposes. This is obvious when we speak of hunger and thirst, but it is also the case when we speak of sexual arousal in its greedy form, where the other person becomes primarily an object. In the non-greedy feeling, there is little egocentricity. The experience is not needed to preserve one’s life, to allay anxiety, or to satisfy or enhance one’s ego; it does not serve to still a powerful tension, but begins precisely where necessity in the sense of survival or stilling of anxiety ends. In the non-greedy feeling, the person can let go of himself, is not compulsively holding on to what he has and what he wants to have, but is open and responsive.

excerpt from: Erich Fromm (1968) The Revolution of Hope.

pdf: Greed

Fortitude

Fortitude is the capacity to resist the temptation to compromise hope and faith by transforming them – and thus destroying them – into empty optimism or into irrational faith. Fortitude is the capacity to say “no” when the world wants to hear “yes.”

… The third kind of fearlessness is to be found in the fully developed person, who rests within himself and loves life. The person who has overcome greed does not cling to any idol or any thing and hence has nothing to lose; he is rich because he is empty, he is strong because he is not the slave of his desires. He can let go of idols, irrational desires, and fantasies, because he is in full touch with reality, inside and outside himself. If such a person has reached full “enlightenment,” he is completely fearless. If he has moved toward his goal without having arrived, his fearlessness will also not be complete. But anyone who tries to move toward the state of being fully himself knows that whenever a new step toward fearlessness is made, a sense of strength and joy is awakened that is unmistakable. He feels as if a new phase of life had begun. He can feel the truth of Goethe’s lines: “I have put my house on nothing, that’s why the whole world is mine.” (Ich hab mein Haus auf nichts gestellt, deshalb gehört mir die ganze Welt.)

Hope and faith, being essential qualities of life, are by their very nature moving in the direction of transcending the status quo, individually and socially. It is one of the qualities of all life that it is in a constant process of change and never remains the same at any given moment. Life that stagnates tends to die; if the stagnation is complete, death has occurred. It follows that life in its moving quality tends to break out of and to overcome the status quo. We grow either stronger or weaker, wiser or more foolish, more courageous or more cowardly. Every second is a moment of decision, for the better or the worse. We feed our sloth, greed, or hate, or we starve it. The more we feed it, the stronger it grows; the more we starve it, the weaker it becomes.

What holds true for the individual holds true for a society. It is never static; if it does not grow, it decays; if it does not transcend the status quo for the better; it changes for the worse. Often we, the individual or the people who make up a society, have the illusion we could stand still and not alter the given situation in the one or the other direction. This is one of the most dangerous illusions. The moment we stand still, we begin to decay.

excerpt from: Erich Fromm (1968) The Revolution of Hope.

pdf: Fortitude

Faith

Faith is not a weak form of belief or knowledge; it is not faith in this or that; faith is the conviction about the not yet proven, the knowledge of the real possibility, the awareness of pregnancy. Faith is rational when it refers to the knowledge of the real yet unborn; it is based on the faculty of knowledge and comprehension, which penetrates the surface and sees the kernel. Faith, like hope, is not prediction of the future; it is the vision of the present in a state of pregnancy.

The statement that faith is certainty needs a qualification. It is certainty about the reality of the possibility – but it is not certainty in the sense of unquestionable predictability. The child may be stillborn prematurely; it may die in the act of birth; it may die in the first two weeks of life. That is the paradox of faith: it is the certainty of the uncertain. It is certainty in terms of man’s vision and comprehension; it is not certainty in terms of the final outcome of reality. We need no faith in that which is scientifically predictable, nor can there be faith in that which is impossible. Faith is based on our experience of living, of transforming ourselves. Faith that others can change is the outcome of the experience that I can change.

There is an important distinction between rational and irrational faith. While rational faith is the result of one’s own inner activeness in thought or feeling, irrational faith is submission to something given, which one accepts as true regardless of whether it is or not. The essential element of all irrational faith is its passive character, be its object an idol, a leader, or an ideology. Even the scientist needs to be free from irrational faith in traditional ideas in order to have rational faith in the power of his creative thought. Once his discovery is “proved,” he needs no more faith, except in the next step he is contemplating. In the sphere of human relations, “having faith” in another person means to be certain of his core – that is, of the reliability and unchangeability of his fundamental attitudes. In the same sense we can have faith in ourselves – not in the constancy of our opinions but in our basic orientation to life, the matrix of our character structure. Such faith is conditioned by the experience of self, by our capacity to say “I” legitimately, by the sense of our identity.

Hope is the mood that accompanies faith. Faith could not be sustained without the mood of hope. Hope can have no base except in faith.

excerpt from: Erich Fromm (1968) The Revolution of Hope.

pdf : Faith

Compassion and Empathy

Compassion and empathy are two other feelings clearly related to tenderness but not entirely identical with it. The essence of compassion is that one “suffer with” or, in a broader sense, “feels with” another person. This means that one does not look at the person from the outside – the person being the “object” of my interest or concern – but that one puts himself into the other person. This means I experience within myself what he experiences. This is a relatedness which is not from the “I” to the “thou” but one which is characterized by the phrase: I am thou. Compassion or empathy implies that I experience in myself that which is experienced by the other person and hence that in this experience he and I are one. All knowledge of another person is real knowledge only if it is based on my experiencing in myself that which he experiences. If this is not the case and the person remains an object, I may know a lot about him but I do not know him. Goethe has expressed this kind of knowledge very succinctly: “Man knows himself only within himself, and he is aware of himself within the world. Each new object truly recognized opens up a new organ within ourselves.”

The possibility of this kind of knowledge based on overcoming the split between the observing subject and the observed object requires, of course, the humanistic promise which I mentioned above, namely, that every person carries within himself all of humanity; that within ourselves we are saints and criminals, although in varying degrees, and hence that there is nothing in another person we cannot feel as part of ourselves. This experience requires that we free ourselves from the narrowness of being related only to those familiar to us, either by the fact that they are blood relations or, in a larger sense, that we eat the same food, speak the same language, and have the same “common sense.”

excerpt from: Erich Fromm (1968) The Revolution of Hope.

pdf: Compassion and Empathy