MAN FOR HIMSELF

(An Enquiry into the Psychology of Ethics)

Erich Fromm

Dr. Fromm outlines various forms of character structure and points to how the productive character drive powers ethical behaviour; that psychology is integral to the ground of philosophy and ethics, and that people and self cannot be understood without understanding values and moral conflicts. A person must know himself and be for himself.

Drawing heavily on the work of Freud, Jung and Spinoza, with cross-reference to the Greek and Chinese philosophers and world religions, Fromm strives to give insight into the natural ongoing 'human' search for enlightenment into the personal ways whereby a man can understand himself, others and the world. The first step on this path is to face the truth, for a man to acknowledge his fundamental aloneness and solitude in a universe indifferent to his fate, to recognize that there is no power transcending him which can solve his problems - that a person must accept the responsibility for himself and see that only by using his own powers can he derive meaning in his life. If he faces the truth without panic, he will recognize that there is no meaning to life except the meaning which he gives his life by the unfolding of his powers, by living productively.

Only constant vigilance and effort can keep us from failing in the one task that matters - the full development of our powers within the limitation set by the laws of our existence. The mature and productive individual derives his feeling of identity from the experience of himself as the agent who is one with his powers: this feeling of self can be briefly expressed as meaning "I am what I do". A person can experience, see, feel and think productively without having the gift to create something visual or communicable. Productiveness is an attitude which every human being is capable of, unless he is mentally and emotionally crippled.

The ability of man to make productive use of his powers is his potency; the inability is his impotency. With his power of reason he can penetrate the surface of phenomena and understand their essence. With his power of love he can break thru the wall which separates one person from another. With his power of imagination he can visualize things not yet existing - he can plan and thus begin to create. Where potency is lacking, man's relatedness to the world is perverted into a desire to dominate, to exert power over others as though they were things. Domination is coupled with death; potency with life.

In Ibsen's play Peer Gynt; Gynt throughout his life believed that he was acting productively and in behalf of his self when he used all his energy to make money and to become successful, according to the principle "Be enough to thyself" vs the human principle "Be true to thyself". He discovers at the end of his life that his exploitiveness and egotism have prevented him from becoming himself, that the realization of self is only possible if he were truly productive by birthing his own potentialities. In the play, these unrealized potentialities come to accuse Gynt of his "sin" and point to the real cause of his human failure and his lack of productiveness.

The Threadballs (on the ground)

We are thoughts;

You should have thought us;

Little feet, to life

You should have brought us!

We should have risen

With glorious sound;

But here like threadballs

We are earth-bound.

Withered Leaves

We are a watchword;

You should have used us!

Life, by your sloth,

Has been refused us.

By worms we're eaten

All up and down;

No fruit will have us

For spreading crown.

A Sighing in the Air

We are songs

You should have sung us!

In the depths of your heart

Despair has wrung us!

We lay and waited;

You called us not.

May your throat and voice

With poison rot!

Dewdrops

We are tears

Which were never shed.

The cutting ice

Which all hearts dread

We could have melted;

But now its dart

Is frozen into

A stubborn heart.

The wound is closed;

Our power is lost.

Broken Straws

We are deeds

You have left undone;

Strangled by doubt,

Spoiled ere begun.

At the Judgment Day

We shall be there

To tell our tale;

How will you fare?

Definitions:

Conscience: Freud - a system of commands and prohibitions embodied in the Father's Super-Ego and cultural tradition (i.e. conscience is internalized authority).

Humanistic - the voice of our loving care for ourselves: knowledge and guidance from within (as opposed to authoritarian) as to our individual success or failure in the art of living (the still small voice within).

Personality: the totality of inherited and acquired psychic qualities which are characteristic of one individual and which make the individual unique.

Temperament: refers to one's mode of reaction to stimulus and is constitutional and not changeable. Character is essentially formed by a person's experiences, especially those in early life and is changeable, to some extent, by insights and new kinds of experiences. The expression of one's character is thru the will. Types of character are:

ASSIMILATION SOCIALIZATION

1. Non-productive orientation

a) Receiving................Masochistic )

(Accepting) (Loyalty) )

)symbiosis

b) Exploiting...............Sadistic )

(Taking) (Authority) )

c) Hoarding.................Destructive )

(Preserving) (Assertiveness) )

)withdrawal

d) Marketing................Indifferent )

(Exchanging) (Fairness) )

2. Productive orientation

Working..................Loving, Reasoning

Respect: is not fear and awe; it denotes, in accordance with the root of the word (respicere = to look at), the ability to see a person as he is, to be aware of his individuality and uniqueness. To respect a person is not possible without knowing him; care and responsibility would be blind if they were not guided by the knowledge of the person's individuality.

Pleasure: if true, consists in serenity of mind and the absence of fear, and is obtained only by one who has prudence and foresight and thus is ready to reject immediate gratification for the sake of permanent and tranquil satisfaction.

Happiness: is an achievement brought about by one's inner productiveness and not a gift of the gods. Joy refers to the feeling deriving from a single act of productiveness while happiness may be said to be a continuous or integrated experience of joy. (We speak of joys (plural) but of happiness (singular)).

Hate: A) Rational, reactive hate is a person's reaction to a threat to his own or another person's freedom, life or ideas - based on the respect for life. It has an important biological function: to protect one's life, integrity and freedom, and this form of hate ceases to exist when the threat has been removed.

B) Irrational character-conditioned hate is a character trait, a continuous readiness to hate, lingering within the person who is hostile rather than reacting rationally to outside stimulus - often it is a gratuitous hate, using every opportunity to be expressed, yet rationalized as sacrifice, selflessness or inferiority feelings.

Ethics: is primarily concerned with the problem of dealing with irrational hate, the passion to destroy or cripple life. A clue to the understanding of these life-destructive energies may be that the degree of destructiveness is proportionate to the degree to which the unfolding of a person's capabilities is blocked. If life's tendency to grow, to be lived, is thwarted, the energy thus blocked undergoes a process of change and is transformed into life-destructive energy. Destructiveness is the outcome of unlived life. Those individual and social conditions which make for the blocking of life-furthering energy produce destructiveness which in turn is the source from which the various manifestations of evil spring. The evil has no independent existence of its own, it is the absence of the good, the result of the failure to realize life. The normal individual possesses in himself the tendency to develop, to grow and to be productive, and the paralysis of this tendency is in itself the symptom of mental sickness.

The Moral Power in Man

Man's main task in life is to give birth to himself, to become what he potentially is. The most important product of his effort is his own personality. One can judge objectively to what extent the person has succeeded in his task, to what degree he has realized his potentialities. If he failed in his task, one can recognize this failure and judge it for what it is - his moral failure. Even if one knows that the odds against the person were overwhelming and that everyone else would have failed too, the judgment about him remains the same. If one fully understands all the circumstances which made him as he is, one may have compassion for him; yet this compassion does not alter the validity of the judgment. Understanding a person does not mean condoning; it only means that one does not accuse him as if one were God or a judge placed above him.

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