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The art of loving - by Erich Fromm

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Loving

“You may forget but
let me tell you
this: someone in
some future time
will think of us”
― Sappho, The Art of Loving Women

For those interested, I recommend a book that has similar ideas and completely changed my view of love: The Art of Loving, by Erich Fromm

Thanks doubly for the detailed response. I very much enjoyed Fromm's Escape from Freedom when I read it a few years ago, I will definitely buy the Art of Loving.

I love all you write. I'm this close to pretending to disagree just to make you argue more :)

> If I had a friend and loved him because of the benefits which this brought me and because of getting my own way, then it would not be my friend that I loved but myself. I should love my friend on account of his own goodness and virtues and account of all that he is in himself. Only if I love my friend in this way do I love him properly.

-- Meister Eckhart

> If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to all others, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism. Yet most people believe that love is constituted by the object, not by the faculty. In fact, they even believe that it is proof of the intensity of their love when they do not love anybody except the "loved" person. [..] Because one does not see that love is an activity, a power of the soul, one believes that all that is necessary to find is the right object - and that everything goes by itself afterward. This attitude can be compared to that of the man who wants to paint but who, instead of learning the art, claims that he just has to wait for the right object - and that he will paint beautifully when he finds it.

-- Erich Fromm, "The Art of Loving" (1956)

Great picks. I started Coddling this week - I've learnt so much already. Incredibly insightful. Haidt's Happiness Hypothesis was the best book I'd read in a while, also highly recommended. It's about much more than just happiness, but how our mind/self/consciousness/emotions work.

Escape from Freedom (also known as Fear of Freedom) is great, as are a lot of Fromm's books. He's my favourite psychologist, and by a long way favourite Frankfurt School writer. I also love Man for Himself, The Sane Society, To Have or To Be, The Art of Loving. He's wonderfully BS-free, combining insights into psychology, society, work, politics etc.

I'm just finishing up All About Love: New Visions by bell hooks. In it, she talks about love as an action.

She frequently quotes Erich Fromm's The Art of Loving, which seems good as well.

[1]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/All_About_Love:_New_Visions

[2]: http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Art_of_Loving

For everyone here recommending "How to win friends and influence people" (HWIP), I'd like to offer a counter point and recommend "The Art of Loving", by Erich Fromm.

The basic idea is that love and affection are not just feelings, but actual skills that need to be learned and cultivated.

It also introduces the distinction between being lovable and being loving.

HWIP largely teaches how to make yourself lovable, whereas the Art of Loving teaches the theory behind actively loving and embracing other people. I think it's a vital skill to have in any area of life, including business.

This definition of love as a binary relation is interesting. Fromm, in a way, goes beyond it. From The Art of Loving:

If a person loves only one other person and is indifferent to the rest of his fellow men, his love is not love but a symbiotic attachment, or an enlarged egotism. Yet most people believe that love is constituted by the object, not by the faculty. In fact, they even believe that it is proof of the intensity of their love when they do not love anybody except the "loved" person. This is the same fallacy which I have already mentioned above. Because one does not see that love is an activity, a power of the soul, one believes that all that is necessary to find is the right object - and that everything goes by itself afterward. This attitude can be compared to that of the man who wants to paint but who, instead of learning the art, claims that he just has to wait for the right object - and that he will paint beautifully when he finds it. If I truly love one person I love all persons, I love the world, I love life. If I can say to somebody else, "I love you," I must be able to say, "I love in you everybody, I love through you the world, I love in you also myself."

This is very well discussed in Erich Fromm's book "The art of loving". He proposed that in today's society we put too much value on the object of love, and too little in learning how to love. Thus we look intensely for the best possible partner and we may have second thoughts even once we reach a decision, instead of learning how to love and enjoy life.

The Art of Loving, while feeling a bit dated in some parts (especially Fromm's views on homosexuality), is on the whole a fantastic, short little book that I reread every few years or so. I always liked his definition of love: "Love is the active concern for the life and the growth of that which we love. Where this active concern is lacking, there is no love."

The Art of Loving was positively one of the worst books I have ever read. He was an unmarried, childless Atheist that wrote a book about love. As a religious, married man with children, his ideas on loving God, a spouse, and your children are almost completely wrong. It was like reading Ayn Rand, "true statement, true statement, true statement, completely illogical and nonsensical conclusion, unsupported by prior statements".

The Art of Loving by Erich Fromme

A description of how love (romantic love, brotherly love, love for God, love for oneself) has to be actively practiced much like any other discipline and what the consequences are for individuals living in a society that by and large does not hold this belief. As a younger person who often gets frustrated with how easy it is to get caught up in his own narcissism and materialism, this book helped me better understand myself and what my core drives are moreso than anything else I’ve encountered to date. Only like 120 pages to boot.

There can be a lot of differences between now and then. I mentioned the main point -- not being alone.

There's more: IIRC "The fundamental problem in life is getting security in the face of the anxiety from our realization that alone we are vulnerable to the hostile forces of nature and society.". The three top recommended solutions are "love of spouse, love of God, and membership in groups.". You don't want to consider the last alternative. E. Fromm, The Art of Loving.

Although I am an avid reader and have been reading on average 1 or 2 books each week for the past 15 years, I don't think I've ever read a book than "changed my life". Looking back, I think the most impactfull book for me was The Art of Loving (1956) by Erich Fromm because it opened up a world of psychology and psychoanalysis and significantly altered my view on how humans think.

Among the classic fiction the best so far were: T. Dreiser - The Bulwark, S. Maugham - Of Human Bondage, L. Tolstoy - The Kreutzer Sonata and E. Zola - l'Oeuvre & Germinal.

The Poisoning of Eros by Raymond Lawrence Jr.

The Phenomenon of Science: A Cybernetic Approach to Human Evolution by Valentin Turchin

Paul's 1st letter to the Corinthians

History, Guilt & Habit by Owen Barfield

The Prophet by Khalil Gibran

Dawn by Octavia Butler

Snow Crash by Neal Stephenson

You Are Here by Thich Nhat Hanh

The Art of Loving by Erich Fromm

Nonviolent Communication by Marshall Rosenberg

The Little Prince by Antoine de Saint-Exupéry

Want? Really?

We want a solution to the fundamental problem of life,
that is, doing something effective about feeling alone.

Or, one step deeper, we seek security from the
anxiety from our realization that alone
we are vulnerable to the hostile forces of nature
and society.

Only four solutions have been found effective,
love of spouse, love of God, membership in
a group, and one more not recommended.

Paraphrased from E. Fromm, 'The Art of Loving'.

Simple enough.

Bet the Amish do relatively well on the above.

Eric Fromm's The Art of Loving.

It's my grandmas favorite non-fiction and she's read over 1000 books. She gave it to me and it sat on my shelf for months because the title wasn't appealing and I'm not a big book reader. Since I read it, I've now bought a second version of this book and give it to friends to read.

It's a technical write-up about Love in the general sense. Fromm pitches the idea that love is an art rather than a feeling.

I highly recommend the read. This book discusses the topic in a serious and insightful way.

His 'The Art of Loving' was hands down
one of the best things I ever read.
He explained a lot to me about
people, motivations, personality,
women, etc. A lot. Some of
his explanations were shockingly
succinct but from decades of
my checking empirically right on
target.

To me in that book, he is fully
credible. I can guess how he got
the insights: Be a bright guy,
have a good background in what
was known, at least empirically,
at the time about psychology and
psychiatry,
do a lot of clinical psychology,
listen to a lot of people, and identify
the main issues and forces in
common. Now I can look at
events A, B, and C, from Fromm find
the intuitive, qualitative version of the
conditional probability of
event X given events A, B, and
C -- P(X}A, B, C) -- when this
conditional probability is high, take X
as a candidate explanation, look
at some more data, and often
conclude that Fromm nailed it again.

Jacques Neveu, Mathematical Foundations
of the Calculus of Probability,
Holden-Day, San Francisco.

Random variables and the associated
probability theory and conditional
probability theory are surprisingly
relevant, especially now with computing,
in the real world. That the set of real
valued random variables X such that E[X^2]
is finite forms a Hilbert space, e.g., is
complete, is astounding. So is the
martingale convergence theorem.

Erich Fromm, The Art of Loving.

Heavily about how what people do is in
response to the anxiety they feel from the
realization that alone they are vulnerable
to the hostile forces of nature and
society.

Social philosophy/psychology, or cultural anthropology, is mind-bending to me.

Erich Fromm's The Sane Society - on how society impacts people's mental health, and how to build towards a sane society

Fromm's The Art Of Loving - an analysis of different kinds of loves, trying to dispel pop culture's lies about love, and love is actually hard work

Ernest Becker's The Denial of Death - on how not our fear, but our complete denial of death existing leads to the weirdest outcomes in our society

Then there's political stuff -

Orwell's Essays, any large-ish collection. I find Orwell to be a much, much better non-fiction writer than fiction writer. Extremely insightful into political processes.

Robert Caro's books, perhaps the first The Years Of Lyndon B Johnson. Can't get better insights into how power works on a local and not-so-local level.

Popper's Open Society and its enemies, hard to summarise - a defense of Western society in light of the then-ongoing WW2. You probably saw the paradox of tolerance a few times pop up, that's from that book, among a ton of other stuff.

Strange when you get that realization isn't it? How could we (and so many others) go so long not realizing that criticism usually has opposite effects? Why do we continue to do so? I still don't know.

Don't be hard on yourself that you haven't changed after just 6 days. Making a major change to your personality takes some time. I suggest re-reading the book every once in a while to keep the goal fresh in your thoughts.

Also I recommend Erich Fromm's "The Art of Loving" which briefly discusses Carnegie's book and gives more of a "why" than a "how" on dealing with people.