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
- Fromm, Erich. The Art of Loving. New York: Harper & Brothers, 1956. Short quotation for commentary. The book remains in copyright.
- Beauvoir, Simone de. The Second Sex. 1949. Cited here as a question of method, not as a quotation.