Erich Fromm on: The concept of Humanism
Humanism, as a philosophy, is about 2500 years old. There is
nothing new in it except that it is new for us. We have forgotten humanism for
the last fifty years. So let me try to remind you of the history of the idea of
humanism in our tradition. I would have to talk about a Chinese and Indian
humanism expressed in Taoism and Buddhism, but this would take a little too
much time, so I might as well begin with the idea of humanism in the Old
Testament.
One expression in the Old Testament is that God creates only
one man. And as Talmudic sources say, God created one man only in order to
indicate two things: first, that no man can say, “I am superior to you because
my ancestors were superior to yours,” and second, to indicate that anyone who
destroys one single life is as if he had destroyed mankind. Another expression
of the idea of humanism, of the one man, is the statement in the Old Testament
that man is created in the likeness of God: that all men, hence, are equal, are
the same in spite of the fact that they are not the same, because of their all
being created in the likeness of God. And eventually you find in the Old
Testament a command of love that is very significant and often overlooked and
neglected, one that refers not only to the love of our neighbor but that refers
to the love of the stranger.
The stranger is precisely the person with whom we are not
familiar. The stranger is precisely the person who does not belong to the same
tribe or to the same nation or to the same culture, and the Bible says: “Love
the stranger, for you have been strangers in
Eventually you have perhaps the most explicit expression of
Old Testament humanism in the prophetic concept of messianism.
The idea of Gotthold Ephraim Lessing (1729 – 1781), another great humanist, went in a
similar direction. He considered it the task of man to realize the essence of
the human species. You see in Lessing’s works the
same concept, namely that which is specifically human – the essence of man, the
essence of humanity – must be realized, must be made manifest, must be
developed. This is the task of man. The most important of all humanist thinkers
of the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries was perhaps Johann Wolfgang von
Goethe. I should like to mention a few ideas of Goethe here. One that he
expressed was the idea that man carries in himself not only his own
individuality but all humanity with all its potentialities, although man,
because of the limitations of his existence, can realize only part of these
potentialities. The goal of life, to Goethe was to develop through
individuality to universality. I should like to stress this, because
eighteenth- century thinking up to the philosophy of Goethe (and later Marx)
was a thinking in which one did not believe that one reached universality by
diminishing individuality, by making himself like everyone else in order to
feel his one-ness with others. On the contrary, it was believed that man, only
by developing his own individuality fully, could come to the experience of his
own humanity – and that means of all humanity. He would feel one with all,
then, precisely because he had become fully himself. And if he does not become
fully himself, if he remains, mentally speaking, a stillborn person, then he
will neither have nor be able to feel that humanity which he carries within
himself.
The experience of humanism is that – “Nothing human is alien
to me”; that I carry within myself all of humanity; that, in spite of the fact
that there are not two individuals who are the same, the paradox exists that we
all share in the same substance, in the same quality; that nothing which exists
in any human being does not exist within myself. I am the criminal and the
saint. I am the child and I am the adult. I am the man who lived a hundred
thousand years ago and I am the man who, provided we don’t destroy the human
race will live a hundred thousand years from now.
Goethe was the last of the tradition of humanists in the
nineteenth century. Then began a new wave of nationalism, and it is one of
those ironies of history that the French Revolution, was based on and
stimulated by a philosophy that was essentially humanistic, was precisely the
revolution that created the new nationalism, which began to create the new
idol, the national state. Force and nationalistic sentiments were used in order
to realize the powerful economic interests that existed within the national
state. This nationalism, which began in the French Revolution and in the
German-French wars, spread rampant into
I should like to mention briefly that the most important
expression of the eighteenth century humanism in the nineteenth century is to
be found in the Socialist thought of various types, perhaps most clearly in the
thought of Marx. Now this may sound surprising to you, because most of you have
heard that Marx was materialistic, that he believed that the main motivation of
man was material, and so on. Actually Marx is much quoted and little
understood, but so is the Bible. Marx’s aim for man was precisely that of
Spinoza, like that of Goethe; the independent, the free man: “A being does not
regard himself as independent unless he is his own master, and he is only his
own master when he owes his existence to himself. A man who lives by the favor of another considers himself
a dependent being.” Man is independent
only if he “appropriated his manifold being in an all-inclusive way and thus as
the whole man.” This latter concept of the “whole man” comes from the Renaissance
through Spinoza, Leibniz, and Goethe to Marx.
Further: “All his human relations to the world – seeing, hearing,
smelling, tasting, touching, thinking, observing, feeling, desiring, acting,
loving – in short, all the organs of his individuality…are…. the appropriation
of human reality. Private property has made us so stupid and partial that an
object is only ours when we have it, when it exists for us as capital or when
it is directly eaten, drunken, worn, inhabited, etc., in short, utilized in
some way…Thus, all the physical and intellectual senses have been replaced by
the simple alienation of all of these senses: the sense of having.
Another statement of Marx
is very characteristic for all humanistic thinking; the statement concerns man
as an active bearing against passive being. This statement refers particularly
to love. For Marx, as for Spinoza, the problem is never “to be loved”, as it is
for most of us, and the question is never the principal question, “How does
anyone love us?” but the problem is our capacity to love and the quality of
love as an active quality. “If you love without evoking love in return, that
is, if you are not able by the manifestation of yourself as a loving person to
make yourself a beloved person, then, your love is impotent, a misfortune”
Please take me back
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