Erich Fromm, the Art of Loving

Erich Fromm starts his article “The Art of Loving” with the question if love is an art, or pleasant sensation. In this article he criticizes people for some wrong thoughts about love. He divided his article into three parts. In the first part he mainly mentions that people don’t intend to learn about love, in the second part that love is a matter of choosing object, and in the last part that love is something like shopping.

He states people desire love so much and they watch a lot of films and listen to a lot of songs about it but they are not at all eager to learn about love (5). Besides, they just aimed to be loved and they do several things for this aim. These things are to be successful, powerful and rich, to make themselves attractive, to improve their pleasant manners, to be helpful, modest and inoffensive (5). There is a second premise behind their this peculiar attitude, they see the problem of love as the problem of an object and one of the reasons of this attitude caused by development of modern society is the change happened in twentieth century by choosing a “love object.”(5)

In the Victorian age, love was not experienced before the marriage. They marry without loving each other then they are expected to love each other. After this changed into today’s case, the importance of the object was increased (6). According to Erich Fromm, in our generation, loving is like shopping. People choose each other with respect to their package of qualities that means their attractiveness. He also mentions another point by saying that “What specifically makes a person attractive depends on fashion of the time.”(6) Characteristics of a person who makes him/her lovable changes from time to time.

Erich Fromm in the third part of his article “The Art of Loving” remarks that exchanging of human commodities enhance love. He says “Two persons thus fall in love when they feel they have found the best object available on the market, considering he limitations of their own exchange values.”(7) Hidden potentialities of humans are important as in buying real estate. He explains the third mistake causes people think there is nothing to be learned about love. This third mistake is because people confuse the initial experience of falling in love with standing in love. When two strangers suddenly become close and feel one and if beside this, sexuality is involved, they experience the most exciting, wonderful and miraculous moment but it is not a type of long lasting love of course.

In order to conclude, Erich Fromm explains some facts about love. He says love is not a simple sensation as people generally think and there are a lot of things that need to be learned. People choose each other to love with respect to each other’s qualities and these qualities which they like or don’t like changes from time to time.

Cenk Başbolat