The
word “interest” today has lost most of its meaning. To say, “I am interested”
in this or that is almost equivalent to saying “I have no particular strong
feeling about it but I am not entirely indifferent.” It is one of those cover
up words which mask the absence of intensity and which are vague enough to
cover almost anything fro having an interest in a certain industrial stock to
an interest in a girl. But this deterioration of meaning which is so general
cannot deter us from using words in their original and deeper meaning, and that
means to restore them to their them to their own dignity. “Interest comes from
the Latin iner-esse, that is, “to be in-between.” If I am interested, I must
transcend my ego, to be open to the world, and jump into it. Interest is based
activeness. It is the relatively constant attitude, which permits one at any
moment to grasp intellectually as well as emotionally and sensuously the world
outside.
The
interested person becomes interesting to others because interest has an infectious
quality which awakens interest in those who cannot initiate it without help. The meaning of interest
becomes still clearer when we think if the opposite: curiosity. The curious
person is basically passive. He wants to be fed with knowledge and sensations
and can never have enough, since quantity of information is a substitute for
the depth quality of knowledge. The most important realm in which curiosity is
satisfied is gossip, be it the small-town gossip of the woman who sits at the
window and watches with her spyglasses what is going on around her; or the
somewhat more elaborate gossip which fills the newspaper columns, occurs in the
faculty meetings of professors as well as in the management meetings of the
bureaucracy, and at the cocktail parties of the writers and artists. Curiosity,
by its very nature is insatiable, since aside from it maliciousness, it never
really answers the question, Who is the other person?
Interest
has many objects; persons, plants, animals, ideas, social structures, and it
depends to some extent on the temperament and the specific character of a
person as to what his interests are. Nevertheless the objects are secondary. Interest
is an all-pervading attitude and form of relatedness to the world, and one
might define it in a very broad sense as the interest of the living being in
all that is alive and grows. Even when this sphere of interest in one
person is small, if the interest is genuine, there will be no difficulty in
arousing his interest in other fields, simply because he is an interested
person.
(Erich
Fromm: The revolution of hope, pg 83-85)