Erich Fromm: The Art of Loving

Throughout the ages, there have been two schools of thought on the nature of love. One holds that love is an involuntary passion that springs from an inner sense of lack and thrives on illusions. Plato, Schopenhauer, Nietzsche, Freud and Lacan all subscribe to this point of view. By this account, love is “blind”, and therefore the adversary of reason or of the sober realism that characterizes the “lover of wisdom”. The other school, represented by Max Scheler, Martin Buber and Erich Fromm, claims that love includes a strong element of volition, is a creature of abundance and bestows insight that is impossible to achieve in any other way. From this perspective, a truly loving disposition and a truth-loving disposi