Rethinking Erich Fromm’s Humanism and His View of Human Nature

ABSTRACT

This article reviews Fromm’s view of human nature that is the basis for his existential humanism. Fromm’s core idea was that the combination of minimal instinctual endowment, enormous expansion of our neocortex, and being born in a helpless state created a set of existential contradictions or dichotomies. The main contradiction or dichotomy is being part of nature yet transcending it by being aware of our mortality. Not being able to go back to the previous “harmony” with nature, humans must develop their capacity for reason, symbolic capacities, imagination and human solidarity or regress to symbiotic and incestuous ties. I make two main arguments. I show that instead of losing our instincts, humans retain three social instincts that we share with other social species, namely attachment instincts (and forming attachment bonds), affiliation to groups (group instinct) and sexual instincts. I show how these three instincts have been significantly transformed in relation to our great ape relatives making us a more flexible, adaptive, cooperative and ultrasocial species. Second I describe a new evolutionary paradigm in which genes and culture coevolve and influence each other, also known as the dual inheritance model. The main effect of this dual inheritance is that cultures, like genes, transmit information and knowledge from one generation to the next. The cumulative effect of cultural knowledge transmitted through thousands of generations is that we develop new modes of production, new technologies, art forms, and new cultural rituals and practices. To which we must adapt. This new view of what made us human puts Fromm’s view of human nature and his radical humanism on a stronger sociobiological foundation. I close by making the argument that our group instinct is both our greatest strength and greatest weakness, making us a species with a “genius for good and evil”.

KEYWORDS:

• Erich Fromm
• humanism
• human nature
• gene-cultural coevolution
• social instincts

Introduction

The humanistic tradition that Fromm represented and championed is based on four main premises. First, that despite our enormous cultural variability, we are one species. Second, through the prehistory and history of our species we become transformed as we create and adapt to new technologies, new modes of economic production, new rituals and cultural practices, new art forms and evolving languages and systems of meaning. Third, despite these multiple cultural manifestations of being human, our species is anchored in a set of core capacities and strivings that are universal. Reconciling how we can be a species that is constantly being transformed through the immense span or our prehistory and history, while at the same time maintaining a core of universal capacities and strivings has been a formidable puzzle that has riddled students of human nature for millennia, and still does. The fourth premise is ethical, and sees the goal of humanism is to promote human solidarity and the flourishing of human beings. The purpose of this article is to put Fromm’s view of human nature and humanism on a stronger sociobiological foundation.

Fromm’s view of human nature

Fromm attempted to address the puzzle of the constant transformation of our species through prehistory and history while maintaining a core of universal strivings and capacities by defining human nature as a product of existential and historical conditions. By existential conditions Fromm meant conditions rooted in our evolutionary history, and by historical conditions he meant our ongoing socioeconomic and cultural transformations. The interactions between these two sources of change created a series of dichotomies or contradictions. He first wrote about this view of human nature in Man for Himself:

The first element that differentiates human from animal existence is a negative one: the relative absence in man of instinctive regulation in the process of adaptation to the surrounding world. (…) The less complete and fixed the instinctual equipment, the more developed is the brain and therefore the ability to learn. The emergence of man can be defined as occurring at a point in the process of evolution where instinctive adaptation has reached a minimum. But he emerges with new qualities which differentiate him from the animals: his awareness of himself as a separate entity, the ability to remember the past and visualize the future, and to denote objects and acts as symbols; his reason to conceive and understand the world; and his imagination through which he reaches far beyond the ranges of his senses. Man is the most helpless of all animals, but this very biological weakness is the basis for his strength, the prime cause for his development and his specifically human qualities. (Fromm, 1947, p. 48)

The dynamism between minimal instinctual equipment and a huge neocortical brain produces several existential dichotomies that are built into the fabric of our species. As Fromm (1947) put it:

Self-awareness, reason and imagination have disrupted the “harmony” which characterizes animal existence. Their emergence has made man into an anomaly, into a freak of nature. He is part of nature, subject to the rest of nature. He is set apart while being a part; he is homeless, yet chained to the home he shares with all creatures. Cast into the world at an accidental place and time, he is forced out of it, again accidentally. Being aware of himself, he realizes his own powerlessness and the limitations of his existence. He visualizes his own end: death. Never is he free from the dichotomy of his existence. He cannot rid himself of his mind, even if he should want to; he cannot rid himself of his body as long as he is alive – and his body makes him want to be alive. (p. 49)

Fromm’s view of human nature remained constant till the end of his life. In The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness (1973), the last book where he took up the question of human nature, he wrote:

We have to arrive at an understanding of man’s nature on the basis of the blend of two fundamental biologic conditions that mark the emergence of man. One was the ever-decreasing determination of behavior by instincts. Even taking into account the many controversial views about the nature of human instincts, it is generally accepted that the higher an animal has arisen in stages of evolution, the less the weight of stereotyped behavior patterns that are strictly determined and phylogenetically programed in the brain. (Fromm’s italics, p. 223)

In this article I will make two main arguments. First I will provide a sociobiological explanation for why human behavior is so adaptive and flexible, which is an alternative to Fromm’s minimal instinctual endowment hypothesis. I will show that humans retain innate social instincts that have been transformed through human evolution to become more flexible and adaptive. This allows humans to cooperate and adapt to changing natural and cultural environments. Second, I will provide an evolutionary explanation for why, among all species, humans have the capacity to create ever more complex social and cultural environments to which they must adapt. Human cultural environments are dynamic and grow in complexity.

How did humans develop our enormous adaptive capabilities?

Fromm’s explanation is very appealing. We became more flexible and adaptive as we lost instincts that led to relatively fixed action patterns. I will show that instead of losing our instincts they were transformed to be more flexible. The main driver of this increased flexibility was the need to cooperate among small groups of nomadic hunter gatherers in order to survive during the Pleistocene era (the ice ages). The Pleistocene era affected Africa by creating dramatic climate oscillations from extremely dry to wet periods (Potts, 2013; Richerson & Boyd, 2013). The need to cooperate at high levels led to modifications in three social instincts: 1) The attachment instinct to seek protection and care and the complementary caregiving instinct to provide protection and care, 2) The group instinct that drives affiliation and identification with groups, and 3) The sexual instinct.

In comparison with our closest relatives the chimpanzees and bonobos, each of these three social instincts have been amplified or modified significantly during the course of human evolution to support closer bonding and greater cooperation. The result is that in comparison with our ape relatives we are an ultrasocial and cooperative species. As I will describe shortly, this ultrasociality, particularly in respect to our group instincts has been both a blessing and a curse.

The attachment and caregiving instincts and the development of a cooperative form of caregiving during human evolution

In developing attachment theory John Bowlby was greatly influenced by the field of ethology, particularly by the work of Konrad Lorenz and a young primatologist and ethologist Robert Hinde. Hinde became a close colleague of Bowlby and formed part of a multidisciplinary study group that met regularly at the Tavistock Institute Children’s Division directed by Bowlby. What became clear to Bowlby is that humans shared attachment and caregiving instincts with many other mammals and some species of birds, and that the development of attachment bonds serve vital survival functions. Unlike many reptiles that flee or fight when they are attacked by a predator, infants in species with attachment bonds seek protection from their mothers, who in turn fiercely defend them from predators or dangers (Bowlby, 1969/1982). Bowlby’s research team made many naturalistic observations that showed that even brief separations from their mothers, of one to three weeks, could have very negative effects (Bowlby, 1973). New laboratory procedures such as the Strange Situation (Ainsworth et al., 1978) and an instrument such as the Adult Attachment Interview (Main & Goldwyn, 1984/1998) capture the dynamics of attachment bonds through the life cycle. These studies were followed by longitudinal studies that showed the long term effects of having secure, insecure, and disorganized attachment patterns (Ainsworth, 1967; Ainsworth et al., 1978; Main, 2000; Main & Solomon, 1986; Sroufe, 2022; Sroufe et al., 2005; Watner et al., 1994).

The African saying,“it takes a village to raise a child,” aptly describes a main difference from our great ape relatives (chimpanzees, bonobos, orangutans and gorillas). Our great ape relatives are independent breeders: mothers will not allow any other member of the group to get near their infants until they are older. This maternal protection is most likely to prevent males of their species from killing infants so they can mate with the mother. Only humans and two evolutionarily distant new world monkeys are full-fledged cooperative caregivers (technically called cooperative breeders) that extensively provision and care for infants that are not their own. Caregivers who are not the genetic parent are called alloparents or allomothers from the Greek allo, meaning other. In primates, rudimentary forms of alloparental care is seen in half of the 175 existing primate species, and in only 1/5 of those species is there some minor type of provisioning (Hrdy, 2009, 2016). Cooperative breeding is associated in some species with having helpless infants that depend on their mothers to feed and protect them for a long period of time. In fact, humans have the most prolonged period of development of any known species, and the longest life span of any mammal (Gibbons, 2008). Many researchers in the field think that selective pressures favored this prolonged period of developmental immaturity to allow for the intense socializing and teaching by parents and alloparents.

Cooperative breeding had other important consequences for human evolution. Having alloparents during human evolution freed mothers from having to be the sole provider of their infants and allowed them to assist in foraging activities and provide more food for other members of the group. Mothers could begin to wean their babies earlier with assistance from others in feeding their infants easily digestible solid foods such as bananas. Chimpanzees wean their babies by age 4, when they are becoming nutritionally self-sufficient. Human mothers in contemporary nomadic hunting-gathering societies wean their babies when they are 2 years old. Weaning earlier allowed ancestral humans to increase their fertility rates, roughly doubling that of chimpanzees (Hrdy, 2009) While mothers are breast-feeding, they are less likely to be fertile, nature’s form of contraception.

Perhaps the most important effect of cooperative breeding for human evolution was having a variety of caregivers with whom to interact. This rich socializing early in development served as a powerful stimulus to develop infants’ and young children’s intersubjective mind reading abilities. Intersubjective engagement leads young children and adults to be focused and concerned about what others think and feel, and what others think and feel about them (Hrdy, 2009, 2016) Hrdy calls this intersubjective motivation a “questing for intersubjective engagement” and being an “other-regarding species” attuned to the minds of others (Hrdy, 2016, p. 60). As some authors have begun to point out, one of the essential qualities that makes intersubjective engagement fully human is the intrinsic desire for sharing experiences with others for its own sake. This sharing can be seen early in human development in 9- to 12-month-olds use of the pointing gesture (Tomasello and Carpenter, 2007) to share with caregivers objects or events of interest and in back-and-forth “sharing looks” (Carpenter & Liebal, 2011, p. 163; Hobson & Hobson, 2011). We are the only member of the great ape family that uses pointing to share experiences with others. Hrdy approvingly quotes Tomasello and Carpenter’s definition of intersubjective sharing as consisting of two humans “experiencing the same thing at the same time and knowing together that they are doing this” (Tomasello & Carpenter, 2007, p. 122). This intersubjective matrix creates a common ground of shared experiences that allows us to understand the intentions of others and collaborate toward joint goals, what Tomasello called joint or shared intentionality (Tomasello and Carpenter, 2007). Shared intentionality makes us a highly cooperative primate who can coordinate plans with others, such as going on hunting expeditions for large game.

Our group affiliative instinct

Many highly social animals live in groups such elephants and dolphins and this communal existence serves survival functions. The fact that during millions of years our hominin close relatives have lived in small groups of nomadic hunters is not an exception. So what makes our species form of group living different? The main difference is that humans’ cooperation with and commitments to groups they belong to is based on shared social norms and third party enforcement. Our group instincts are intimately connected with shared cultural beliefs and norms. Peter Richerson and Robert Boyd have expressed this idea succinctly in their article The Evolution of Subjective Commitment to Groups: A Tribal Instincts Hypothesis (Richerson & Boyd, 2001):¹

Humans evolved to be innately prepared to commit to the institutions and projects of their tribes, but culture dictates how to recognize who belongs to their tribes, what attributes of aid, praise, and punishment is due to tribal members, and how the tribes deal with other tribes, allies and clients. (p. 190)

Commitment to social groups developed in tandem with cultural institutions through group selection. Those groups that were able to develop a greater degree of social coherence and greater cooperation were selected over less cooperative groups. These group instincts were superimposed on more ancient instincts that favored altruistic behavior toward close family members (kin selection) and reciprocal altruism, a conditional form of aid based on exchanging favors. Both sets of instincts are with us, but at least among nomadic hunter groups studied in the last hundred years, group instinct supported by shared social norms will often prevail over family loyalties and conditional forms of helping each other.

Cristopher Boehm (1999, 2012) is another author who has shed light on the importance of group affiliations and the enormous importance of shared social norms in regulating the life of nomadic hunter gatherers. All our great ape relatives live in groups, but their main form of social organization is based on dominance-submissive hierarchies. This is even true of the less aggressive bonobos, in which female hierarchy is as potent as the male hierarchy. Females will band together in order not to be bullied into submission by males. Here is the interesting part: Boehm has shown that contemporary nomadic foragers studied all over the world and that live in radically different environments, are all fiercely egalitarian. They will ridicule, ostracize (and in extreme cases kill) any member of the group that tries to establish dominance over the group. The spoils of hunting and even gathering of nuts, fruits and other edibles are shared among all group members. Any attempts at free riding are exposed and ridiculed. Although nobody knows, Boehm and others speculate that this egalitarian ethos may have developed one or two million years ago. It is only when humans develop permanent settlements 16,000 years ago and invent agriculture 12,000 years ago, that human social hierarchies begin to emerge (Cortina, 2022).

There is a negative side to our group instinct. When groups feel threatened by other groups, or animosities are created that dehumanize other groups with racial and other stereotypes we can become the most destructive animal on earth. In The Heart of Man (1964) Fromm noted that group narcissism in combination with a leader with malignant narcissistic personality can lead to torture, lynching and genocide.

The transformation of sexual instincts: Developing long term pair bonds among our human ancestors

Chimpanzees and bonobos, our closest ape relatives, live in mixed-sex groups that mate promiscuously. Males and females copulate with several mates, and there is no stable sexual bond. When female chimpanzees reach sexual maturity, they move to new groups (their species solution to the incest problem), but the males stay in their natal group that includes grandfathers, fathers, uncles, and brothers. Remarkably, these patrilines do not recognize themselves as kin, so that this genealogical structure is “socially silent” (Chapais, 2008, p. 1276). Long-term stable mating relations exist in about 5% of mammals (Lukas & Clutton-Brook, 2013). Humans are the only member of the great ape family in which males and females establish long-term pair bonds (Chapais, 2008). Pair bonding is not limited to monogamy. Stable pair bonds can be maintained in polygamous unions (one male mating with several females) and, more rarely, polyandry (one female mating with several males).

Pair bonding had two important consequences. First, it created stable breeding conditions that allow fathers to interact on a regular basis with their offspring and to recognize them as one of their own. Pair bonding begins to reveal the underlying genealogical structure of kin relations. For instance, if a daughter forms a pair bond with a male from another group, the father can now recognize his daughter’s mate as an affine, that is, a familiar individual who can be tolerated and doesn’t pose a threat. In addition, by staying in their natal group, siblings develop long-term relations and maintain those relations when one migrates to other groups The second major consequence of pair bonding is that as fathers’ recognize their male offspring as kin, it transforms them from potential rivals to a nonthreatening group member. The net effect is that human male aggression is are much less aggressive than males among our great ape relatives that have promiscuous mating patterns (Chapais, 2012). Chapais describes these new social relations based on a transformation of sexual bonds as “the deep social structure of humankind” (Chapais, 2012, p. 1276).

Some authors describe the decrease of aggression among our human ancestors as a process of self-domestication. As our human ancestors developed cooperative ways to care and feed young children and developed long term mating patterns we became more tolerant and less aggressive toward the members of our group (Henrich, 2016; Hare et al., 2012). Indeed there are many similarities between the syndrome of domestication by humans of other species and the self-domestication of our human ancestors. But for another view that puts more emphasis on capacities for emotional regulation and self-control see the excellent article by Shilton et al. (2020) Human Social Evolution: Self-Domestication or Self-control.

To conclude this section I will point out that much of the research I have used here on humans’ retained instincts, such as attachment theory, was published after Fromm’s time. I think, because he was a scientist, he would have been open to this new research. But it would have required him to make a major revision of his minimal instinct hypothesis. This revision would have put his search for a sociobiological foundation of human nature on a much stronger footing.

How human societies become more complex through the prehistory and history of our species

In his book The Cultural Origins of Human Cognition (1999), Michael Tomasello says that the only possible explanation for why humans have been able to create ever more complex societies was through sociobiological transmission of cultural knowledge that accumulates through thousands of generations. Tomasello describes this cumulative cultural evolution as having a “ratchet effect” in which an individual or group first invents an artifact or practice, and later another individual or group makes a modification that is an improvement over the original. As Tomasello points out this is only possible because humans are able to put together cognitive resources through imitative, instructive and collaborative learning in ways that other animal species are not able to do. In comparison to the genetic transmission of information, the cultural transmission of information is several orders of magnitude faster. Boyd calculates that cultural evolution is 50 times faster than genetic evolution (Boyd, 2018, p. 43).

Robert Paul in his book Mixed Messages: Cultural and Genetic Inheritance in the Constitution of Human Society (2015) tells the story of how a group of brilliant evolutionary thinkers were able to develop a mathematical model that shows that our species has two modes of inheritance that interact with each other. The first is a genetic mode of inheritance based on DNA that selects mutations that enhance the survival of organisms. The second is a culturally-based model of inheritance that selects cultural knowledge that enhances the survival of groups. The cumulative effects of the cultural mode of inheritance leads to constant innovations, the ratchet effect described by Tomasello.

What is equally important is that these two forms of inheritance interact with each other, which is why this dual inheritance model is also called a gene-cultural coevolution model. A well-known example of cultural evolution having an effect on genetic evolution is the result of the domestication of cows that started during the Neolithic transition in Europe. The enzyme lactose allows human infants to digest their mother’s milk, but the production of this enzyme is turned off as infants are weaned from their mother’s breast by the second to third year of life among the remaining nomadic hunter gatherer groups that have been studied in the last 100 years. The enormous advantage of being able to drink cows milk created selective pressures that favored an epigenetic mutation that allowed the lactose enzyme to remain active beyond infancy.

The main recent proponents of this gene-cultural coevolution model have been Boyd and Richerson (2005), Richerson and Boyd (2005), and Henrich (2016). The implications of this gene-cultural coevolution model, are enormous. Without it we cannot explain how our species became dominant over all other species, how we have been able to put men on the moon, invent the internet, develop AI, and are able to modify gene sequences through genetic technologies. The secret of our species’ dominance is not based on the power of individual minds, no matter how brilliant they may be, but on the collective knowledge that has accumulated over hundreds of thousands of years.

Conclusion

I have addressed two questions raised by Fromm’s view of human nature. First, I have provide an alternative to Fromm’s view that one of the main dynamics that made us human was our relative absence of instincts. I have shown that we did not lose our instinctual endowment, instead our three social instincts were transformed and made us a significantly more cooperative and ultrasocial species. Second I, have provided an explanation based on a new gene-cultural coevolution model as to why only humans, among all known species, have the capacity to constantly transform the natural and cultural environments in which we live. This represents a new paradigm in understanding human evolution.

I have emphasized that one of the three social instincts, our group instinct, makes us an ultracooperative species but also the most violent species on earth. Through history we have seen that groups go to war against each other and commit horrendous acts of cruelty. We have seen how easy it is for leaders and elites to turn one group against another and demonize their enemies. Our group instinct is what I believe to be the root of our “genius for good and evil” (Fromm, 1964).

Disclosure statement

No potential conflict of interest was reported by the author.

Additional information

Notes on contributors

Mauricio Cortina

Mauricio Cortina, M.D., is faculty of the Washington School of Psychiatry and The Institute of Contemporary Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, Washington, D.C. and Member of the Sociedad Mexicana de Sociopsicoanalisis, Mexico City. He is the editor of four books and many published articles. His books and articles reflect his interest in the work of Erich Fromm and the Interpersonal tradition, the application of attachment theory and intersubjectivity to clinical practice and developing our understanding of human nature. He is the past president of the Red Iberoamericana de Apego and recipient of the 2019 annual John Bowlby and Mary Ainsworth Award. He is a Psychiatric Fellow of the American Academy of Dynamic Psychotherapy and Psychoanalysis, and Honorary Member of the International Attachment Network, London.

Notes

¹ I will use the language of “group instinct” rather than “tribal instinct” because the primary meaning of the word “tribe” is a particular form of social organization. It is usually understood to be a community claiming descent from a certain ancestor and led by a headman. During the vast majority of our prehistory and history, humans lived as hunter gatherer nomadic bands. These bands did not have or claim a common ancestor and they were fiercely egalitarian (Boehm, 1999).