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)