Is There Room for Otherness in Humanism? Erich Fromm’s Alternative

ABSTRACT

Humanism has been criticized as a philosophical and political stance from different points of view in recent decades. The paper summarizes four common types of criticism, stemming from political, ethical, technological, and ecological concerns. These criticisms relate back to a preoccupation with the respect for otherness or difference, either toward human or non-human beings. The paper tries to demonstrate that these concerns are also to be found as essential elements in the development of humanism itself, not only among its political and theoretical opponents. It does so with reference to Erich Fromm’s works, where a life-oriented ethics is coupled with a demand for sustained political relatedness to difference, without giving up notions of a radical humanism and the anthropology that accompanies it.

KEYWORDS:

• Humanism
• differences
• otherness
• Erich Fromm
• anti-humanism

Introduction: Objections to humanism

Humanism has become an object of suspicion in the social sciences from different points of view. Among these, at least four typical stances may be distinguished. The first one leads us back to a political concern. An emphasis on the anthropological uniformity of the species came to sound increasingly difficult to defend as a solid point of departure for progressive political action as a praxis (negatively) centered around inequality skewed toward an (affirmative) privileging of difference. Humanism, especially of European ascent, came to be seen as part of a larger technology which, despite its professed universal ends, is actually restricted, both in concept and in reality, to a small and privileged group. Humanitas is, from this point of view, tendentially the humanitas of a historically specific population, to the exclusion of others. Instead of trying to enlarge the concept to accommodate the myriad of cultural variants we are aware of, it would be better to remain wary of any claims to universality, and struggle for a language and tactics that express the will of the singular – as singular, without subsuming it to any general conception.

The second stance may be called ethical. As much as certain conceptions of humanity are seen to participate in broader power structures, either securing or risking the life and integrity of certain groups, they also include – consciously or not – certain ethical assumptions. This is seen in the way people treat each other, and themselves. Inasmuch as humanism expresses not only a general anthropology, but also a general psychology – so the argument goes – it makes claims on what would be the right way to live, again, to the exclusion of several customs and characterological outlooks. This seems to risk the claim of democratic societies to pluralism. To fight against a general conception of humanity would then pave the way for an actual development of human diversity. Instead of the abstract false universality of any historically specific concept of “man” (and “woman”), we would guarantee and further the peaceful coexistence of actually given modes of life.

A third stance is what could be called an ecological objection to humanism. The concern here is not so much with differences within our species, but with those that appear in our relation to other beings – depending on the theoretical grounding, not only living ones. In this respect, it is said, the prevailing tendency in humanism is the opposite to the one denounced in the ethical objection. Its first sin is to presuppose too much difference between our species and others – more than is actually the case. Already as living bodies we would be irreducible to speciation: our livelihood as individuals is actually the result of a large aggregate of different organisms, which are essential components to the functioning of some of our organs. Humanism would thus emphasize “human dignity” to the exclusion of a comparably fair treatment of other beings. It would pave the way for the exploitation of “nature” – of everything not deemed “human” in a full spiritual sense, including perhaps our inner nature. This leads to the mistreatment of animals, the carelessness in handling the environment and to a catastrophic mode of social reproduction that has led us to the ongoing ecological crisis. The end result of humanism would ironically be the extinction of the human species, if not of most living species in the planet.

Sometimes associated with the previous stance is, finally, a fourth technological objection. This argument tends to regard humanism in its various forms as too restrictive of the prospects for current social development. Our technical capacities are increasingly leading – especially but not uniquely, in the global North – to the possibility of manipulating aspects of human life which would previously have been considered immutable, such as the process of sexual reproduction, as an example. With these technological advances, an emphasis on the supposedly invariant traits of the species sounds too naively conservative. If even what once seemed as the most invariably “natural” aspects of our lives now appears as open to modification, an emphasis on notions such as that of “human nature” seems to preclude the variety of betterment, experimentation, and stylization of social life that the current technical innovations allows us to envision. The argument is that with the promise of a reorganization of even the most fundamental aspects of the body and the environment, we should think about the possibilities for transcending the “naturally” given constraints of our constitution – not about sticking to them out of faith in an outmoded anthropology.

While none of these general forms of argument are specifically tied to any one current in social theory, blends of them may be seen to inform a number of contemporary works. These range from post-structuralism to actor-network theory, and from anti-essentialist forms of feminism to object-oriented ontologies and trans-humanisms, all with their respective impact upon some sectors of the social sciences. I do not claim to have exhausted the possible objections to humanism, but I do hope to have presented an honest summary of those objections stripped from the specifics of any theoretical vocabulary. I also hope to have captured the foundations of the controversy as it has developed approximately in the past 60 years.

Antecedents both to humanistic and anti-humanistic positions may be traced deep into the past, but for the purposes of this paper I have kept to the more modern formulations. My goal is not so much to recapture the history of rebuttals and counter-rebuttals between the two tendencies. I will rather use the four main objections I have sketched to develop a defense of humanism based on the work of Erich Fromm.

Even though Fromm is perhaps mostly remembered as the proponent of a synthesis between Marxism and psychoanalysis, and as an early participant of the Frankfurt School, his political interests extended far beyond these fields. His actual intellectual connections included both representatives of the social sciences and psychoanalysis (such as Alfred Weber and Margaret Mead, Harry Stack Sullivan and Tom Bottomore), but also a number of religious and political leaderships. These later influences ranged from Zen Buddhist D. T. Suzuki to Protestant theologian Paul Tillich, and from Catholic bishop Dom Hélder Câmara to socialists like Raya Dunayevskaya and Adam Schaff. Fromm’s ideas reflect the diversity of social worlds in which he was involved. He tried to reconcile a variety of conflicting ethical and political positions within the formulation of a philosophical and political stance he called “radical humanism” (Fromm, 1983). Born in 1900 and deceased in 1980, he is sufficiently close to our times to speak a language that still resonates with contemporary scientific and philosophical controversies. Having inhabited a variety of antagonistic spheres in the sciences, in politics, and in religion, he developed an ethics that takes seriously the question underlying all the objections we typified before. Namely: is it possible to be attentive to otherness, and still remain a humanist?

The political objection

Fromm would have been the first to acknowledge the seriousness of the political objection against humanism. According to him:

the concept [of human nature] has so often been abused as a shield behind which the most inhuman acts are committed. In the name of human nature, for example, Aristotle and most thinkers up to the eighteenth century defended slavery. Or in order to prove the rationality and necessity of the capitalist form of society, scholars have tried to make a case for acquisitiveness, competitiveness, and selfishness as innate human traits. Popularly, one refers cynically to “human nature” in accepting the inevitability of such undesirable human behavior as greed, murder, cheating, and lying. (1992a, p. 247)

In terms of Fromm’s (1961) own vocabulary, this leads back to a distinction between ideology and ideals. Fromm was very mistrustful of the destiny of ideas and ideal aspirations once they became institutionalized as the official language to be propagandized and defended by bureaucracies or other interested organizations. For example, he was preoccupied with distinguishing between the more or less spontaneous forms of popular religiosity and their further intellectualization with the growth of institutional religion (Fromm, 2014). A difference is established between those moments in which a certain language is born as an expression of enthusiasm for a new collective goal, and its gradual loss of meaning and emotional charge, which may eventually fade into a complete modification of the originally intended meaning of the message. This reduction of an originally “true” ideal to a restrictive form of “ideological” common sense is followed in Fromm’s depth psychology by a change in their psychic roots. For Fromm “convictions,” whether true or false, are a product of the enduring association between certain emotional attitudes and their corresponding representations; whereas “opinions,” again both true and false, may just as well be acquired by superficial processes of conditioning, thus being more easily changeable and less deeply rooted in the personality which bears them (Fromm, 1994b).

Humanism, so goes Fromm’s take, is and can only be true inasmuch as it is an “ideal” – that is, an expression of genuine aspiration toward a different form of life, grounded in an experiential anticipation of this possibility. It is the “concern for the unfolding of those qualities by virtue of which man is man” (Fromm, 2005c, p. 97).¹ “Humanity” stands as a concept between a definition of what a human being is as such (or is in general), and what he or she can be in his or her specific development. It is furthermore taken as denoting a process. “Man is not a thing; he is a living being caught up in a continual process of development. At every point in his life he is not yet what he can be and what he may yet become” (1986b, p. 140). This is true not only at the individual level, in terms of psychological development and maturation, but also at the level of the species. Humans acquire different outlooks throughout history that are the product of their own relations, both between themselves and with non-human beings. Because each “specimen” appears as part of the conditions for the variance of each other “specimen,” the overall development of the species is conditioned by its own successive actualizations throughout time.

“Man creates himself in history” (Fromm, 1992d, p. 205), and thus every attempt at finding out what human beings “are,” in relation to what they “can” be, is for Fromm historically circumscribed. It is limited by whichever actual developments have occurred up to that point and are available to an observer. The general concept of the “human” can only be inferred from the “many manifestations of man in various cultures and in various individuals” (Fromm, 2005b, p. 67). But cultures themselves are non-finite processes, responding with new developments to ever renewed economic and political conditions as history continues. It is only this very gradual, never finished global process (or set of processes) that may be taken as a basis for an attempted general anthropology, with all its political implications for the way societies can be organized.

The problem is thus, at first, not so much to measure singular human occurrences against a given general conception. In practical terms: it is not to postulate criteria of membership to humanity. It is rather to begin with the acknowledgment of differences and to remain sensitive to them. “[H]ow different can we be and yet remain human?” (Fromm, 1968, p. 61) – this is the Frommian question. If taken seriously as a question (that is, without bypassing it with a presupposed concept of the “human”), it treats any given anthropological concept, not so much as inherited wisdom, but as a piece of a puzzle that can only be solved with particular attentiveness to alterity – including those forms of psychological and cultural differentiation that may not yet exist, but presumably lay in future historical developments.

Because a definitive concept could only be extracted after the full infinity of human possibilities had been concreted in history, “no final statement about what it means to be human can be made now: it is possible that it may never be able to be made even if human evolution were to far transcend the present point of history” (Fromm, 1968, p. 61). And yet, in Fromm’s view, it would be important not to completely give up the project for an approximately correct anthropology, both explicative and normative. Knowledge that our anthropologies are historically limited wasn’t enough for discarding them altogether. It was, quite to the contrary, a call for trying to overcome the social conditions that make for those epistemic limitations.

In fact, much in line with the historical conception we discussed above, Fromm doesn’t treat science in isolation from the broader cultural development of different societies. In the understanding of human affairs, he thinks that “there are systems like that of the human organism or of a society which can be changed by human interference, provided this interference is based on the proper knowledge of the functioning of the system.” But, at the same time,

The understanding of society as a system is made particularly difficult by the fact that the thinking and feeling of the observer are, in themselves, parts of the system, and hence that the observer looks at the system […] from the standpoint of his own wishes and of the part he plays in it. (Fromm, 2005a, p. 44)

This acquires a special meaning when it comes to highly differentiated systems, as is the case for most contemporary societies. It is Fromm’s view that as long as domination remains as a general social fact, our knowledge of humanity will of necessity remain incomplete in a twofold sense. First, domination imposes a practical limitation on the possible modes of life for those involved in the power relation. Second, it asks for an ideal justification or obfuscation of the actual state of affairs. “To put it differently, the truth is historically conditioned: it is dependent on the degree of rationality and the absence of contradictions within the society” (Fromm, 1980, p. 4). Hence the possibility that any vocabularies – including those of humanistic inclination – may come to be used as a means of either reproducing inequality, or suppressing difference, thus fulfilling an ideological function.

One of the conditions for being able to develop a general anthropology would be to keep alive the knowledge that the current forms of thought and feeling do not exhaust our possible experiences, or those that are generally available for human beings:

The critical understanding and awareness of the fiction in the social pattern in which we live is a very essential condition for the full awareness of the dissociated part of another person. In addition to that I would say, that it is very necessary to understand other societies and other cultures, from the primitive ones to the civilized ones – to understand and see simply other possibilities of structures and experiences, which for them were conscious but which for us are unconscious. (Fromm, 2010a, p. 111)

To move beyond the immediately possible experience is to move beyond the limitations of one’s social circle, and ultimately those of one’s own society. It is also to call for their practical abolition, whenever it can be demonstrated that a richer, more differentiated life experience is being precluded by the current social structure. It is important to keep in mind that what appears initially as bearing the characteristic of “otherness” can be traced back to the thinking and feeling subject as a possibility of her own experience as well. For Fromm there can be no effective basis for a truly plural political organization without this common grounding of human experience, to which a general anthropological concept aspires.

For Fromm pluralism implied a concept of equality – one which he distinguished from indifferent “sameness:”

The idea that all men are created equal implied that all men have the same fundamental right to be considered as ends in themselves and not as means. Today, equality has become equivalent to interchangeability, and is the very negation of individuality. Equality, instead of being the condition for the development of each man’s peculiarity, means the extinction of individuality […]. Equality was conjunctive with difference, but it has become synonymous with “indifference.” (Fromm, 1990a, p. 74)

A politics of humanistic orientation should also be a politics that welcomes human difference without discrimination – including the “[c]omplete equality of races and sexes” (Fromm, 2010b, p. 80). But because difference is in some cases coupled with inequality, it is not to be taken in terms of its current modes of existence only. In fact, domination precludes the concretion of a more radical differentiation. What appears as an antagonism between particular cultural or social stances would often look from a Frommian point of view actually as an interruption of differentiation proper, not its expression. Fromm treats cultural and psychological differences in terms of the social conditions that are necessary for their development (or suspension). The effort for a general anthropology may then be seen as an “ideal” guideline: the intellectual expression for the underlying political problem: that what is common to humans have the appropriate conditions to be experienced as such, and that what is peculiar to humans have the appropriate conditions to be developed. Psychologically formulated this would mean that what is human has to be experienced both in its general simplicity and in its singular complexity, in “abstract“and “concrete relatedness” at the same time (Fromm, 1990b, p. 114).

Fromm believes that the most trustworthy basis for a social organization that allows for and accepts human differentiation is not provided by conceiving of singular human phenomena in isolation, or in their simple, immediate antagonism. It is provided by treating singularity as an outcome of relatedness – for only in relating to others do we actualize our general potentialities into particular effective forms. Indeed, what we have in common, for Fromm, is first and foremost the very need to become different than what we are now: to actualize our human potentialities and grow (Fromm, 1990a). There is no way to truly fulfill this aspiration without organizing our relations to others in a way that acknowledges the same necessity for all. My need and capacity to change and to effect difference in myself, implies that of others to do the same. We must therefore by necessity extend the treatment of outer differences into the treatment of inner differences. If they are to be mutually affirmative and politically effective, these differences presuppose each other, are related to each other, and must remain in unity.

For Fromm the human being is “a primarily social being, who is only in the sense of being related” (1992b, p. 21): we can only “become what we potentially are” (1990a, p. 159) in the “process of being related” (2010c, p. 58). Only relatedness to other beings activates in us the forces that will leads us to change. Thus the claim of each specimen to individuate – to develop inner difference – can only be fulfilled under the premise of an openness to and affirmation of our differences with others. Only if we remain available for change can we relate to others, since relating to others prompts us to change. The alternative to individuation is a fallback into narcissism (indifference, lack of relatedness) or into “incestuous symbiosis.” These fallback positions are the bases for ethnocentrism and nationalism (Fromm, 1964).

We may thus summarize a Frommian response to the political objection to humanism as follows. Since human beings are conceived of as in need for development and differentiation, this already includes a reference to others (and to otherness) as a necessary part of the process. In relating to others, I make myself available to affection, to being moved by the effect others have over me. This happens precisely to the extent that they are different than myself. In being affected, I open myself to those aspects and experiential traits which have not yet fully developed in me, which have not been fully incorporated into my sense of self – and yet lay within me. I discover the otherness that lies within myself as well, and only through that process do I become effectively able to relate fully to others as others. Difference is not subordinated to what is common, and yet it implies it, since I find in myself, albeit in a distinct figuration, that otherness which originally seemed to be completely external to me. Not only must singularity be able to emerge out of yet undifferentiated human potentialities, but also a direct experience of our commonality with others in its simplicity must be possible as the result of our crossing through differences.

While a purely intellectual apprehension of human differences may thus stop short of an understanding of our commonalities, a reliable political affirmation of difference must be grounded in our practical, experiential relatedness to others. It is a matter of who we are and who we become, not only a matter of thought. In this sphere, commonality is not the abstraction of difference into a more general identity standing above it. Rather, it is the concrete outcome of effectively relating inner and outer differences. Its aspect of simplicity appears only at the end, sublating the richness of human variety as concretely dealt with. It is the experiential discovery of commonality as something that lay within differences themselves, in the very process of becoming different than who we were before.

Radical humanism justifies itself politically not as a general anthropology of purely theoretical interest, but as the apprehension in thought of an experience that goes beyond a strictly intellectual purpose. It aims not so much at describing human commonalities per se, but at expressing those traces and mechanisms of the experience of difference which allow us to further it, and affirm it. It aims at organizing conceptually those paths into otherness that allow us to develop, in practice, a sustainable political relationship to difference.

The ecological and technological objections

As his thought evolved there was a gradual but important shift in Fromm’s emphasis, from the human species as such, into the life processes in general. If his earlier works speak about a “humanistic ethics” (Fromm, 1990a), his later thinking incorporates these as a special case of the more general “biophilic ethics” (Fromm, 1992a); an ethics of “life-centered values” (Fromm & Maccoby, 1996, p. 5), and of “reverence for life” (Fromm, 1968, p. 92). If taken seriously, these views are not limited to human life, but extend to life in general – to everything that pertains to the category of the “organic.” It was Fromm’s position that some broad, but important characteristics may be said to pertain to all forms of life. Everything alive would be a process of “structured growth” (1964, p. 41). Hence what was good for life would be everything that allowed for the expression of the organism’s potentialities in its relation to the environment in such a way that it could become and express more of its inner possibilities.

Fromm grounded this normative stance psychologically with the concept of “biophilia:” of love for life and for all that is alive (Fromm, 1992a). An understanding of what this means presupposes that we grasp the significance of the shift away from Freudian anthropology in his psychoanalysis. Whereas Freud’s (1957) primary category in the understanding of motivation was Trieb – the drive and its derivatives – Fromm’s analytic unit is that of the “attitude.” An attitude is always an emotional attitude – a volitional readiness rooted in a feeling or affect, these being the primary responses of the psyche to its objects. When an attitude acquires a definite object, it acts as a singular finite passion to be satisfied; but as an attitude, it is relatively independent from specific objects for its satisfaction, and remains as a want for action even when these objects are found lacking (Fromm, 1997b). The crucial matter in Fromm’s characterology is that he found that such “attitudes” such as the readiness to love, to exercise power, to submit, to destroy etc., were not indifferently juxtaposed one to the other. Rather, they struggled for the possession and direction of the whole of the personality, and sometimes achieved dominance as the central (mostly unconscious) striving to which the subject would be passionately devoted. This process of generalization of what were initially single, discreet “attitudes,” would give rise to the phenomenon of “structuralization” of the personality (Fromm, 1968, p. 94). In the process of its development, the affective, intellectual, and sensuous faculties would gradually come to mutually determine their capacities in the exercise of human activity, finding a greater or lesser degree of integration or conflict. An attitude which generalized itself to become, beyond a mode of feeling and wanting readiness, also a determinant of thinking and action, would become a character orientation. A character formation flowing from a more or less constant affective interaction with the outside world would become a driving force that would be able to activate (or deactivate) the remaining human powers as means for its satisfaction (Fromm, 1990a).

Fromm distinguished a series of these basic orientations, which having the process of generalization of primary attitudes as their grounding, would now come to determine a series of derivative attitudes or character traits. Among the general orientations “biophilia” has a special status. A “love for life” presupposes not only a simple process of attitude and orientation-formation. It entails more than a process of affective relation and re-action to others and to oneself. One must have the knowledge of what is “alive,” both in the physical and in the psychic sense, and the capacity to exercise care and responsibility with regards to this object – to respect it in its nature and particularity (Fromm, 1995). This presupposes a participation of the whole human faculties, and recognition of the attributes of life which can be imputed to other sentient beings as well. Every attitude was, for Fromm, “conjunctive” (1995, p. 46): because its activity was partially independent from the availability of a specific object in which it could be invested, it could be freely directed to others or to oneself. The idea that there could be something like a basic striving to “love life” takes this reflexive quality a step beyond. It implies the idea that the mature human organism is – given the appropriate conditions for its self-development – capable of experiencing itself as an organism that is alive. With that, the human organism is experienced as part of the general process of life. It is “conjunctively” made capable of experiencing other organisms, human or not, in the same fashion, and thus to extend to them as much respect for their nature as it would perhaps lend to its own species, or to self. This experience would find its logical counterpart in what Fromm called “paradoxical thinking,” such as in: “Man is a unique individual – man’s individuality is sham and unreal. Man is ‘this and that’ and man is ‘neither this nor that’” (1998, p. 84).

We thus meet in Fromm an instance of professed humanism which – in trying to avoid the mistakes of anthropocentrism – gave life in general (perhaps with special attention to sentient beings), and not to humans as such, the ultimate grounding for its ethics. This would not in the least contradict Fromm’s claim for radical humanism, at least from his own point of view. For him, the achievement of a general anthropology would appear only as a special case in the problem of understanding life processes as such. That humans partake of the characteristics of many other living beings does not preclude that they could (and should) also be recognized in their specificity, as bearers of particular needs and qualities, just as every other species is characterized by their own needs and qualities. Knowledge of human beings would not hinder – indeed, would require – knowledge of other beings, both in their similarities and in their differences with us.

Fromm’s thinking thus leaves us with plenty of room for an ecologically adequate conception of society. It derives from his premises that human “relatedness” is, both in its psychic and material aspects, not only directed to members of the same species, but also to other living creatures. Furthermore, life is characterized by interdependence, both within and without specifically human relations. His very last writings give evidence even to an incipient attention to the cosmological conditionality of human life, extending beyond the immediate life process into its ecological presuppositions (Fromm, 1980). Here as elsewhere, the main difficulty is not lack of attention to non-human beings, but the degree of abstraction into which his argument is developed. To talk about life in general does not yet resolve the problem of knowing what is particular for each creature as a form of life – as concrete, specific being. It also doesn’t account for the forms of restriction that some forms of life impose on others.

Fromm’s biophilic ethics had consequences also for his treatment of technology and technique, which I’ll reference just in passing here. Only in the knowledge of human needs (and, more broadly, those of any living being) would he consider humans prepared to discriminate between desirable and undesirable technological developments (Fromm, 1968). Fromm would never have treated the specifically human conjunction of affective, intellectual, and sensuous capacities as a claim to domination over other beings. They were for him more simply a specialization of the natural evolutionary process of life, in a form which allowed for the problems – both psychic and social – that are characteristic for the members of our species. It is against the peculiarity of these problems, as they are enmeshed in the broader structure of dependencies that characterizes our organic existence, that the desirability of technological development should be measured. In Fromm’s judgment, technical developments would find their value not as artifacts antagonizing and interfering with a “nature” to be left immaculate, but as possible instruments either in furthering or hindering our capacity to grow.

In this respect, the greatest risk Fromm anticipated was not interference with the body as such, but rather the development of a symbiotic dependency on technical objects (Fromm, 1998). He believed he saw the beginnings of a “religion of technology” (Fromm, 1986a, p. 30): an investment of our sense of omnipotence and destructiveness into a technique that could fulfill all our needs immediately or obliterate us at will. The greatest risk in technology would not lay in its bare modification of our life conditions, but rather in the possibility that we would alienate our sense of responsibility and activeness and hence also lose the capacity to think critically about the use we give to technique.

The ethical objection

In Fromm’s mature works, psychic processes are a form and continuation of life processes in general, as embodied in every organism (Fromm, 2001). At the same time, the discontinuity between instinctual indetermination and the growth of the capacity for thinking – which is organically constitutive for humans – creates a specifically human “contradiction” (1964, p. 115). The need to act and its natural indeterminacy are both, in Fromm’s (1992c) opinion, built into the existence of every single human. We are pressed toward acting, but we have no naturally prescribed route into how action should unfold. It is this that opens the way for all the more sophisticated characterological configurations we hinted at above. The crystallization of character “orientations” as general volitional patterns comes, for Fromm, as a substitute for what, in other species, would have been the greater weight of instinctual patterns and their modification in learning through conditioning.

Fromm’s works are consistently oriented by the principle that the formation of character is mainly conditioned by actual social experience. That is, experience developed within social relations. Fromm (1981) never gave up this mode of explanation, and it provides the core of his socio-psychoanalytic reasoning. It is a characteristic impasse in his later writings, however, that more and more of what could be considered as “human singularity” came to be formulated in terms of its grounding in biologically-given “potentialities,” as opposed to their actual development as an outcome of lived experience. Fromm’s (1990a) earlier writings introduce an organic determination to personality only in formal, not in substantive terms, with the concept of “temperament.” He came later to refer more directly to a “basic personality” – an “original nature” characterized by constitutional traits (Fromm, 1980, p. 65; Fromm & Maccoby, 1996, p. 20), which would then be conserved or repressed in the contact with the actual environment.

The strengthening and refinement of Fromm’s concept of “life” is followed in his later writings by this partial change in content, but its conditions of possibility are already given in the earlier steps of his thought. Because the actualization of an organism’s (and especially a human being’s) “potentialities” is always an imperfect, incomplete, partly accidental process, Fromm (1990a) can only grant present existence to utmost “singularity” in the form of not-yet-actualized tendencies. Any potentiality can only be conceived as such in reference to the content of its realization. It retains the specification of what is merely potential as a necessary determinacy in its conception. In ascribing reality to this content before its actualization, one treats it not as an indifferent possibility, but as an immanent goal. “Potential” is now not only the condition of possibility for a later development, a yet formless content, but the pressure and disposition toward form. Conceived in purely material terms, this points to an organism’s genetic patrimony. We thus rarely, but significantly, stumble upon formulations of an organism’s developmental path as the “form and structure implanted in its chromosomes” (Fromm, 1997a, p. 197) – and ultimately, we hear about the “immanent evolutionary goals inherent in the chromosomes” (1987, p. 56) of a living being, including of course human beings. Thus the subordination of “humanistic ethics” to “biophilic ethics” comes to represent not only an enlargement of the field of ethics to the whole of life, but also, in some respects, a restriction of the field of desirable conducts to what is – by hypothesis, at least – prefigured in the constitution of the body.

Formulated in logical terms, this means that both the more general (undifferentiated) and the more specific (particularized) aspects of any human being come to be portrayed as in “potential” form, having genes as their material substratum. Instead of identifying the singularity of each organism as the contingent outcome of its life history, we now understand the vicissitudes of its life as the history of alternate negations or affirmations of an aspiration to being which, even in its finest specificities, is given prior to the beginning of its action in the world: “Education should help men become as they were born” [my translation] (Fromm, 1977, pp. 17–18).

This can only be done, however, at the cost of subsuming the basic premise over which Fromm’s characterology develops: that human differentiation is the outcome of actual, concrete course of the relations each subject establishes, and requires contact with the difference in others. This is but an extreme and rare possible corollary in Fromm’s writings, which are otherwise outstandingly concentrated in the social conditioning of personality, both by structural and interactional factors. It is not merely casual, however, that this secondary trend will be found in his works. It is one of the ways in which it fulfills the need to ground its normative claims: valuing some developmental paths over others.

In the course of actually lived life, the actualization of some potentialities instead of others appears as a purely contingent matter. It comes as a response to experience, whatever it has been. Conceived as merely “potential” – that is, as merely possible – every characterological outcome is equally valuable and unavoidable. It is no more a response to the conditions under which it develops than any other. One way to revert this contingent indifference into a normative valuation is to impute necessity, an immanent preference – a stronger reality or push toward some possibilities over others. If pursued to its last consequences, this attempt may be brought to the consideration we gave it above, in which singularity is organically prefigured, and later only acted out or blocked from developing:

If you’re an apple tree, you become a good apple tree; if you are a strawberry, you become a good strawberry. I’m not speaking whether you should be a strawberry or an apple tree, because the diversity of man is tremendously great. Each person has in many ways his own entity and you might say it’s most specific, there are not persons repeated. He is unique in this sense, there is no other person exactly like him. The problem is not to create a norm for people to be the same but to create a norm that the full flowering, the full birth, the full aliveness should be in each person regardless of which “flower” he is. (Fromm, 1994a, p. 77)

With such a conception, we earn the conditions for a materialistic, life-oriented grounding of a humanistic ethics, which gives singularity a central place. What is won on one side is, however, lost on the other. With a reference to the genetic prefiguration of an individual’s development, we include the whole spectrum of human characterological outlooks as that toward which one could be made to aspire. Any and every human trait may thus be projected backwards into the inner determination an organism strives to bring into reality. We end up with a valuation of singularity as such. Everything differentiated is to be valued, as long as it remains faithful to its inner determination – including attitudes Fromm would most actively deny as part of a biophilic ethics, such as destructiveness:

What is inherited are only dispositions. A man can have a disposition that inclines him towards destructiveness or love, artistic creation or depressions. But this does not mean that he will become actively schizophrenic, loving or artistic. It means only that here is a disposition, and it depends on his life vicissitudes and surrounding what will become of this disposition [my translation]. (Fromm, 1977, pp. 17–18)

In trying to ground a valuation of human singularity on its genetic patrimony, we are thus led to a logical dead-end. We cannot reconcile respect for singularity, the mode of determination to which human character is subject, and the valuation of some orientations over others, within a purely material, genetic notion of life. It is thus not in this tendency in Fromm’s writings – in any case a secondary one – that we will find a justification for a humanistic ethics that fulfills the condition we seek: that of attentiveness to otherness. It is rather in his conception of life as demanding “structured growth” – one which reunites the organic and the psychological aspects in the same tendency (Fromm, 1990b), and puts the need for differentiation at the core of human strivings. Not singularity as such, but the possibility to continue moving toward it; not becoming something, but the capacity to keep becoming, are then the core values.

Fromm thought different forms of desire were not merely equivalent modes of satisfaction, but rather carried specific psychological consequences according to their affective quality . He saw Freud as one of the precursors of the same sort of “systemic thinking” to which he later subscribed (Fromm, 1980). Indeed, Freudian analysis, inasmuch as it is oriented by the so-called “economic” point of view, produces a picture of the mind in which the activation of each claim for satisfaction is understood in the global context of the forms of pleasure available for the subject. But in this, Freud’s thought still gave primacy to the category of quantity. The reference of each singular desire to all others is not so much a matter of the content of what is wanted, but of the relation between this content and the actual availability of means for the discharge of the corresponding amount of energy (Freud, 1957). The dynamics of desire – the actual content and meaning of each partial aim, either conscious or not – is subordinated to its economics. Satisfaction becomes a matter of the distribution of the available quanta of energy through the relatively indifferent vessels constituted by this or that aim, this or that object. Whether the aim is of a sadistic, destructive, narcissistic, or loving nature, is not relevant per se, but only inasmuch as it originates psychic conflict, or can be sufficiently accommodated within the subject’s practice of life. What today is satisfied in oral sex may tomorrow be sublimated into a character trait, or simply displaced onto a later anal-sadistic fixation. Whichever solution allows for less suffering and a modicum of accommodation between the claims of the body and those of society suffices as a solution.

In Fromm’s analysis, primacy is given to the quality of desire over the quantity (intensity, pressure, investment) of energy associated to it. Of course, Fromm (1990a) still deemed a quantitative appreciation of the forces operating in the mind as an important aspect: the strength (or “weight”) of a desire would not be indifferent to the constitution of character. But the specificity of his approach lies in the idea that a certain affective reaction, with the corresponding attitudes, is not related to others only in terms of subtracting the energy that could be available for other endeavors. It is related to them, first and foremost, in terms of requiring and entailing other, qualitatively related attitudes, to produce and reproduce themselves. Affective and attitudinal constellations have in Fromm the character of meaningful syndromes. Their components behave as poles: each attitude fosters or hinders the development of every other attitude, according to the practical requirements for its satisfaction, and its affective coloring. Needs generate and constrain other needs, either immediately – per force of their affective grounding – or mediately – as the consequences of acting in the world in a certain manner that reverberates back into the subject. Character emerges as an intricate net of relations between relations, of forces which suspend or activate each other’s power, according to their qualitative affinity or repellence.

This is what Fromm (1990a) meant by character “system” or “structure:” that the content of what a subject wants is not determined only as a distribution of intensities or quanta through the vessels of indifferent aims, but as a product of the interaction between such qualitatively specific aims. Character is, in other words, not only constituted by relations to others and to oneself, but is also self-constitutive. Its component parts, interacting with each other, exert an inner determination among themselves. Psychic forces are only characterologically relevant if their content can be demonstrated, in its difference and relatedness to other psychic motions, to fulfill a part in the production and reproduction of character. Contrary to Freud, character stands not as a conscious-preconscious category, but as a mainly unconscious one (Fromm, 1994b). The reproduction of a character formation, after it has crystalized around its dominant orientation, is thus the product of a complex ecology between outer and inner elements. To want this or that is not only a matter of greater or lesser satisfaction, but also a determinant in the whole spectrum of possible experiences to the subject, as she organizes herself at a given moment.

Fromm thus inverts the Freudian paradigm and subordinates psychic economics to psychic dynamics in his metapsychology. Consequently, what remains repressed is not given solely by social (ethical, aesthetic, logical) criteria, as in Freud’s (1955) writings. Fromm (2001) recognized that all of these sources of repression – “social filters,” as he called them – are valid. Because of the very quality of their inner aims, some forms of life are substantively more prone to the overcoming of repression and illusion, whereas others require dissociation and illusion as a part of their inner reproduction. Some character configurations would systemically foster a capacity for change and openness to difference – as is the case with predominantly loving types. Others would be tendentially reclusive or hostile to loving and more open character configurations. More pathological configurations demand by their very nature an interruption and fixation of the process of change into crystalized, self-obstructing forms – as is the case with predominantly sadistic or destructive characters. Healthier configurations are hence characterized by those attitudinal constellations in which the capacity for change is retained; in which the content of my desire allows and leads toward continued relatedness and openness to differences.

For Fromm difference is not only something to be faced as embodied in “others,” in the bodies, practices and institutions of other subjects, but also exists – in germinal, potential or semi-actualized form – as determinative of selfhood. Everything that remains excluded from the process of psychic growth lingers unconsciously as a hampered possibility in life. This is the reason why for Fromm humanism meant that “each man represents all of humanity” (2001, p. 17). Any one subject could have become any other subject, given the same conditions and practice of life, even when there are differences in genetic disposition. The psychic raw material for any singular development is also contained, with only slight differences of degree and intensity, in any other individual – mostly in unconscious form. Openness to “outer” difference thus presupposes, and enhances, openness to “inner” difference. Everything in us that is not currently felt and thought exists already as a potential as part of who we are.

We now see the significance of Fromm’s experiential grounding of humanism. This is particularly clear in his understanding of the therapeutic process in psychoanalysis. According to him, with the advance of analysis, the analysand “experiences the infant, the child, the adolescent, the criminal, the insane, the saint, the artist, the male, and the female within himself; he gets more in touch with humanity, with the universal man” (1987, p. 106). The development of universality in the human being is, in this formulation, not a reduction to an abstract generality, but the development of this generality into the many specific forms which it can take within the same subject. Sensitivity and openness to inner difference therefore remain the most central aspects of a depth psychology such as Fromm’s. They are the vehicle for any desirable subjective transformation in the clinical setting, but also a precondition for the capacity to be able to live with – and affirm – the differences in others. The goal of life, thus portrayed, is to “develop through individuality to universality” [my italics] (Fromm, 2005b, p. 68). What we arrive at is not the imprisonment of singularity under the tyranny of false abstraction, but a concept of universality which is pregnant in its inner determinations. It represents the articulation between all the forms of particularity we can know in the lives of any singular person. Humanity, thus conceived, “is not an abstraction,” but a reality (Fromm, 1968, p. 4). To achieve this universality would be the destination and final result of experiencing all partial figurations of human life, not a point of departure or reduction from it.

Fromm thus comes to the view that with due openness to experience, we arrive at the “unconditional acceptance of the other as being no other than myself” (2010d, p. 21). That a general concept of the human could emerge from the variety of human manifestations was for him not the result of an intellectual process of abstraction. If that were the case, following Adorno (2000), there would always necessarily remain something incommensurable between the abstract and the concrete, and between the concept and the thing it refers to. This acceptance of the other as being no other that myself is rather an expression of the lived, concrete articulation of differences within the subject. When it comes to human matters, a subject that knows is, for Fromm (1981), one who is not the same in the beginning and in the end of the process of knowing. This may be the reason why Fromm didn’t develop his “paradoxical logic” into a “dialectics” in the modern Western sense. He maintained an antagonism between generality and singularity among individuals. This antagonism is also verified in the relation between the realm of sensuous singularity and the realm of verbal generality (Hegel, 2020, chapter II). The sphere in which the solution for this contradiction was to be sought was for Fromm not that of conceptual thought, but that of affective experience and psychic integration, which ultimately is the result of a certain practice of life. The practice of getting in touch with oneself appears for Fromm first as a restless movement, a chain of contradictory figurations of one’s life. Only in the end does this movement converge toward the peaceful, resting simplicity implied in the notion of “humanity”. This comes only as the last step in articulating the complexity of antagonistic human experiences within oneself.

It is this – to go back to the beginning of our argument – that Fromm’s notion of “ideal” tries to capture. What this ideal expresses is an anticipation of what the full experience of a certain psychic content would look like – if and when it came to have the conditions for its adequate development. In his concept of a “humanistic experience” Fromm formulated the expected result of this process of traveling through the subjective instances of human difference (2001, p. 129). Significantly for our discussion of biophilia and ecology, Fromm sometimes included a reference to other living beings as part of what lies to be found within the human as well (Fromm, 1986b, p. 100; 2001, pp. 128–129). In terms of the affective constellation that would result from this process, Fromm wrote about “solidarity” as the capacity to experience an “identity with all beings” (2001, p. 156). This presupposed the capacity to experience a non-identity within oneself. The attitude toward the stranger and the attitude toward oneself would therefore be conjunctive (Fromm, 2001, p. 171). The capacity to experience others in the concreteness of their existence would be conditioned by the same factors that allow for a rich self-experience.

The ethical objection to humanism is concerned that this position might end up violating the stranger. Fromm agrees that this can be a problem, but only as long as what is “human” and what is “familiar” to oneself are made identical. For him, the final goal of a humanistic ethics would be to break through the attachment to what is familiar and learn to love the stranger. By being able to plunge into the depths of experience we come to the conclusion that in the end “we are all strangers” (1983, p. 145).

Conclusion

I hope to have demonstrated that a preoccupation with otherness – and respect toward it – is not necessarily irreconcilable with a humanistic stance, at least as far as Fromm’s case goes. An emphasis on the unity and perfectibility of the species and an emphasis on its diversity are not foreign to each other. This is because in a humanism thus conceived, the central tenet is to come to experience and understand what is initially foreign. It is a proposal for an ethical and epistemic posture that welcomes otherness and treats it seriously, as something immanent to every living subject.

Fromm liked to quote Terentius’ sentence – homo sum, humani nihil a me alienum puto – nothing human is alien to me – which Marx once included as his “favorite maxim” in a confession to his daughter Laura. Taken as a judgment of fact, the sentence is false for any living human being. Something always remains that, besides being unknown, is also felt as alien to us. Taken as an orientation and guideline for scientific enquiry, however, it provides us with the central insight that informs a sensitive humanism. To “become human” and “not to remain alien to what is human” are but one and the same process. A good horizon for the historical sciences would be to act so as to enlarge our capacity for the experience of difference, without losing track of the effort to keep communication alive – even between the most paradoxically irreconcilable aspects of human activity.

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Funding

The work was supported by the Erich Fromm Stiftung.

Notes on contributors

Matheus Capovilla Romanetto

Matheus Capovilla Romanetto, M.Sc., is Master in Sociology at the University of São Paulo. For the last two years he was a fellow at the Erich Fromm Institut Tübingen, where he developed research on the ontological premises of Fromm’s social psychology, his approach to psychoanalytic clinical work, as well as his political activities with religious and socialist groups in the 1960s and 1970s. The resulting material is now being prepared for publication as a book under the title Clinic and Politics: Subjective Bases of Social Transformation in Erich Fromm.

Notes

¹ It has not escaped the attention of some of scholars that Fromm (1981) still retained the English word “man” as a translation for the German “Mensch,” even though he was aware of the possibility of a more modern solution of combining both genders, “woman and man,” when aiming at a reference to the species in its totality. In this text, we have opted for “human” as a common denominator for the species whenever the sentence is ours, but Fromm’s use of “man in general” has been retained in quotations of his works.