I am happy to report that I am better equipped to answer this question than a few weeks ago. I didn’t expect such a cliché question to yield so many fruits. The last 10 days have been exceptionally fertile ground for investigating the question of love.1
First, because the wonderful Maris and I got married! During our honeymoon, Maris has been reading aloud the book The Art of Loving by Erich Fromm, which we received as a wedding gift from a friend. As a result, we spent hours of intense conversation on the theory and practice of love.
Here is a cherry-picked review of pieces from the book that feel particularly alive to me. It’s only 100 pages long, so if you enjoy this post, I’d recommend you give it a try.
Love is an art.
I talked above about the practice of love, because contrary to the common understanding, the book introduces love not as a feeling but as an activity. It’s something you can learn through a bit of theory and a lot of hands-on experience, just like carpentry, painting or writing.
It doesn’t mean that the feeling of love, of loving and being loved, doesn’t exist. It means that feeling isn’t a productive focus point for someone who wants to bring more love into their life.
I recently encountered a similar clarification in the recent Cate Hall book You can just do things, where she talks about commitment. She says that if you think commitment comes from the feeling of being committed, like in a long-term relationship, then you face two losing choices.
Your first option is to delude yourself into thinking you will feel that way for the rest of the relationship, so you sign up and end up breaking up when the feeling inevitably vanishes during a hard time. Your second option is to correctly realize that the feeling of commitment will not persist throughout the coming hardships, and decide never to commit.
Your third option, the winning option, is to refuse to identify the action of commitment and the feeling of commitment. Instead, you decide to see commitment as a coordination problem between your present and future selves. You can solve it by “tying yourself to the mast”: design your future environment and incentives so it is harder to quit than to follow through when you start doubting.
Marriage, pooling resources in the same pot, is an example of tying yourself (and your partner) to the mast: you make divorce costlier than the discomfort of a rough patch.
While this is a useful frame for marriage, The Art of Loving fortunately has much more to say about the practice of love beyond an incentive structure.
Love is giving.
More precisely, love is giving without losing, without being impoverished. This paradoxical tone is omnipresent in Erich’s prose. How can I give if I have less after the act and don’t get anything in exchange? At the very least, I would have spent time and attention, two resources that are finite in my life.
The author responds: there is a kind of giving where you make the receiver a giver. In taking part, you both give birth to life, and you both rejoice in it. You are not giving up anything, because giving expresses your individuality, your potentiality. Giving is living.
Erich calls “productive” anyone who can see giving through this non-transactional frame. With this adjective, he makes his signature move: redefining a term used in the capitalistic world (productivity) to mean something diametrically opposed. It might be clearer to use “fertile” or “life-giving”.
The productive character understands that the only way to live life well is through loving and giving. She understands that happiness and comfort are not worthy aims for a fulfilling life.
From this clarity, giving is not a sacrifice but a joyous expression of one’s individuality.
Can we practice this version of giving when making a living requires a job and transactional relationships? Yes, Erich says, in a hopeful section towards the end. Capitalism is not a monolithic social system. There is enough wiggle room to carve out a giving, loving life if we are ready to choose the hard and scary path of anti-conformity. That’s what this final section is about!
The practice of love.
How to develop such a productive character? First, by cultivating qualities needed for the practice of any art: discipline, concentration, patience, and a supreme concern for the mastery of the art. Second, through qualities specific to the art of loving: objectivity to overcome our narcissism and rational faith in our own and others’ ability.
If this sounds like value name-dropping, well, this is what the book sounds like at times. It often introduces chains of values where one is necessary for the other to appear, along with (often very enlightening) distinctions on the different meanings of the terms.
It’s a bit heavy to digest but overall helpful, as you are left with value names that act as pointers to a pretty subtle and nuanced signification. Here are two such helpful pointers.
On discipline, Erich makes it clear that we should not understand this word as talking about externally imposed rules, or even self-coercive behaviors. For him, discipline should be rooted in the fruits of the practice. We are reliably engaged in the art because we would miss it if we stopped. Even if the activity is challenging, we understand at our core that it makes us more alive. This conviction is what makes us come back to the desk.
Concentration is the only quality for which he gives practical recommendations for cultivation. He recommends what is basically a 20-minute mindfulness meditation in the morning and in the evening. Probably novel in 1953, but not really groundbreaking advice today. But he goes on to make a more interesting claim:
One must learn to be concentrated in everything he does […]. 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
What? Of course what I do matters! I’m sure there are ways I could spend your time on more loving activities than others! - my upset self reacts.
If I try to emulate the voice of the author, he’d say that concluding that you can do whatever as long as you concentrate is a misunderstanding. Pick your activity carefully, run experiments, clarify your aspirations, rest, make mistakes, but at every moment do one thing. Do it fully, with all your attention.
Closing words.
Reading this 80-year-old book with my wife has been a wonderful way to start our marriage. We recognized many ideas from the book as principles we supported. For instance, the discussion on motherly and fatherly love closely matches the post I wrote on maternal and paternal love.
Yet, Enrich writes with such radicality that it felt like a cold shower: in a capitalist society, there is room to live an intense, loving life. It’s not easy, but it’s not impossible.
1I wrote this post 2 weeks ago and only got to publishing now!
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