Talk:Erich Fromm/Comments
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
The following excerpt is extremely difficult to read. After about three passes, I think I got the gyst of the author's point, but it seems like it could be cleaned up a great deal to make attempts at comprehension less of a chore. Suggest rewriting in a manner that makes the same points, but with fewer parentheticals and less of--these imbedded asides--in order to aid readability.
-GTW.
Fromm's thesis of the "escape from freedom" is epitomized in the following passage. The "individualized man" referenced by Fromm is man bereft of "primary ties" of belonging (nature, family, etc.), also expressed as "freedom from":
"There is only one possible, productive solution for the relationship of individualized man with the world: his active solidarity with all men and his spontaneous activity, love and work, which unite him again with the world, not by primary ties but as a free and independent individual . . . . However, if the economic, social and political conditions . . . do not offer a basis for the realization of individuality in the sense just mentioned, while at the same time people have lost those ties which gave them security, this lag makes freedom an unbearable burden. It then becomes identical with doubt, with a kind of life which lacks meaning and direction. Powerful tendencies arise to escape from this kind of freedom into submission or some kind of relationship to man and the world which promises relief from uncertainty, even if it deprives the individual of his freedom." (Erich Fromm, Escape from Freedom [N.Y.: Rinehart, 1941], pp. 36-7. The point is repeated on pp. 31, 256-7.)
In terms of Karl Marx's societal dialectic, Fromm is saying in the above that if the "relations of production" (Fromm's "economic, social and political conditions") are ineluctably hostile to the development of the "productive forces"--man, principally, and, in Fromm, "individualized man"--the principal productive force (man), instead of changing the relations of production in a positive way (as Marx predicted), will achieve a "dynamic adaptation" (i.e., an active psychological adaptation); yielding "socially patterned defects" associated with a specific "social character," whereby the productive force (man) internalizes without cavil the imperatives of the relations of production. Thus Fromm disavows Marx's assumption that the historical development of the productive forces must be lineally economic (always more productive capacity, etc.) and determinative (such that the relations of productions must do all the adjusting). With reference to Marx's mentor (G.W.F. Hegel), Fromm's view is as if Hegel's Absolute Spirit were to get sick--mentally, of course--instead of relentlessly superseding the various inadequate "shapes of consciousness" (the philosophical progenitors of Marx's "relations of production") on the high historical road to absolute self-knowledge (liberation from all self-misconceptions, analogous to Marx's goal of human self-emancipation). In this manner a Frommian Absolute Spirit would experience its truth as unbearable, hence something that must be "repressed"; the upshot being a neurotic World Spirit escaping from its erstwhile Enlightenment destiny. In such a world, contrary to the master's (Hegel) formula, the historically real would not be rational; nor would the rational comprehension of such a world attain to reality. The post-mortem does not vivify the corpse. Fromm therefore implies that Marx's materialistic "transformational criticism" (via Feuerbach)—turning Hegel's idealism "right side up"—erred by leaving the agency that is inverted to materiality (Absolute Spirit) untouched in its exclusively progressive imperative. Marx said that the worker had nothing to lose but his chains, and a world to win. Fromm's psychological demurrer shows how and why the worker becomes attached to his chains, very much in the classic Buddhist sense of "attachment" (upadhi); and thereby has a human world to lose.
