LOVE

1956

The twentieth century puts love on the desk. Not to crown it. To ask what it is doing, and who was never taught.

Love is not primarily a relationship to a specific person; it is an attitude, an orientation of character which determines the relatedness of a person to the world as a whole.

Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving

Is love a feeling or a practice?

In 1956 Erich Fromm, a psychoanalyst who had left Nazi Germany, published a small book called The Art of Loving. He thought people had begun to look for love the way they looked for a bargain, instead of learning it. The sentence below is his. The others on this page were asking different questions, in different decades. None of them closes the question.

Erich Fromm. The Art of Loving. 1956.

AskedBeing loved

The right person

A capacity

A question at a desk. Was he right? Earlier traditions already trained faculties under other names.

Can I love you without possessing you?

Is the erotic a source of knowledge?

Can love become a social force?

Who teaches us how?

Sources
  1. Fromm, Erich. The Art of Loving. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1956. Short quotation for commentary. The book remains in copyright.
  2. Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. 1949. Cited here as a question of method, not as a quotation.
  3. Freud, Sigmund. The psychoanalytic account of desire, from Three Essays on the Theory of Sexuality (1905) onward. Paraphrase of the program. Not a quotation.
  4. Lorde, Audre. “Uses of the Erotic: The Erotic as Power.” 1978. The erotic as a resource of power and information. Paraphrase. Not a quotation. The essay remains in copyright.
  5. Baldwin, James. The Fire Next Time. New York: Dial Press, 1963. “Love takes off the masks that we fear we cannot live without and know we cannot live within.” Short quotation for commentary. The book remains in copyright.
  6. King, Martin Luther, Jr. Strength to Love. New York: Harper & Row, 1963. Agape as love in action, including toward adversaries. Paraphrase. Not a quotation. The book remains in copyright.
  7. hooks, bell. All About Love: New Visions. New York: William Morrow, 2000. The ingredients she names, after M. Scott Peck: care, commitment, trust, responsibility, respect, and knowledge. Paraphrase of the list. Not a quotation. The book remains in copyright.