Book Review: The Art of Being - Erich Fromm's Prescient
Critique of Contemporary Technology and Consumerism
It’s not often that one stumbles across a book by a member
of the Frankfurt School at a Value Village store in Toronto.
So, when I came across a copy of The Art of Being by Erich
Fromm at one such store recently, I didn’t hesitate to buy it, despite the
recent big jump in book prices at that thrift-store chain – and the scarcity of
shelf space at home.
Given the book’s brevity and my interest in the Frankfurt
School, it quickly advanced to the top of my “to-read” pile.
I found it a remarkably bracing and relevant read, despite
being a minor book that came late in Fromm’s career.
The Art of Being spoke to me with an assured, unified, and eloquent
voice even though it was assembled posthumously from unused parts of an earlier
book entitled To Have or to Be.
It’s a small book – 134 pages including index – but The Art
of Being has an expansive purpose: sketching out the steps needed to live a
full and rewarding life in contemporary capitalist society.
That seems pretty ambitious, but Fromm was well positioned
to essay it.
He was an important figure in some of the key intellectual
movements of the 20th Century.
Born in 1900 in Frankfurt, he started his university studies in 1918 at the university
in that city with two semesters of legal studies. In the summer of 1919, Fromm began
studying at the University of Heidelberg, where he received his PhD in sociology
in 1922.
Then, during the mid-1920s,
he trained to become a psychoanalyst, and began his own clinical practice in
1927.
In 1930. he joined the
Frankfurt Institute for Social Research, the institutional home of the
Frankfurt School.
There, Fromm associated with
Theodor Adorno, Max Horkheimer and the other leaders of the Frankfurt School, a
group of thinkers associated with a radical critique of contemporary Western
civilization that took its basic impetus from the work of Karl Marx but
deepened and extended Marx’s vision into the cultural and social realms.
I won’t write too much about
the Frankfurt School as a whole in this piece.
The work of Adorno,
Horkheimer, and its other original exponents such as Herbert Marcuse, is varied
and complex, and they themselves wrote copiously.
There are also a lot of
excellent books about the Frankfurt school and its thinkers.
Two notable overviews are The
Dialectical Imagination: A History of the Frankfurt School and the Institute of
Social Research 1923-1950, by Martin Jay, and Grand Hotel Abyss: The Lives of
the Frankfurt School, by Stuart Jeffries.
Another reason for not
expanding too much about the “school” is that Fromm’s formal association with
them was relatively brief.
He left the Institute for
Social Research in in the late 1930s and would subsequently become somewhat
estranged from the other important members of the school.
But, according to some
scholars, Fromm collaborated closely with Horkheimer, the key intellectual
architect of the Frankfurt school, in its early days.
I would argue he remained in
fundamental agreement with the other members of the school about the failings
of contemporary capitalist society, although he ultimately went in a different
direction in this thinking about it.
The members of the Frankfurt
School were criticized by some for their essentially academic approach. They
were accused or theorizing deeply about the alienating effects of capitalism, but
not advancing a concrete program to do about anything about it.
Marxist philosopher Gyorgy
Lukacs depicted them as taking up residence at the “Hotel Grand Abyss,” where
they watched in relative comfort the spectacle of monopoly capitalism “destroying
the human spirit,” in the words of Stuart Jefferies, who took the title of his
book from Lukacs’s image.
(I tend to imagine the Grand
Hotel Abyss as a more bookish version of the Grand Budapest Hotel in the Wes
Anderson movie of the same name.)
Fromm is like a guest at the
hotel who, being more practically minded and psychologically oriented than his
fellow residents, moves out and opens a clinic next door with the intent of
helping people who have been wounded psychologically by capitalism.
Which brings us back to The
Art of Being.
Fromm wrote the Art of Being
in the later stages of his long and productive career, and he had by then
travelled a considerable distance from his early days with the Frankfurt
School.
He was much more deeply
versed in psychological thought than the other doyens of the Frankfurt School.
Fromm was of Jewish
extraction, and after fleeing from the Nazis to the US, he continued to
practice as a therapist. He also continued to pursue research into “Neo-Freudian”
psychology, which focused on understanding the individual based on the network
of relationships in which they are enmeshed, along with thinkers such as Karen
Horney, Eric Erickson, and Harry Stack Sullivan.
Fromm’s background in psychology
informs his approach in The Art of Being, which he wrote in 1974-76.
He starts by pondering the
goal of human life, which he describes in this way: “it can be defined as
developing oneself in such a way as to come closest to the model of
human nature (Spinoza) or, in other words, to grow optimally according to the
conditions of human existence and thus to become fully what one
potentially is.”
To achieve that, a human
being must be free to use their own reason to discover and pursue their own
potential.
But throughout history, humans
have been confronted by two forms of oppression that prevented them from doing
that: the external oppression of tyranny, and the internal “shackles of
illusion” – illusory beliefs about human nature and the world that prevent them
from realizing their own potential.
The Enlightenment and the following
centuries saw increasing liberation from external oppression as democracy
replaced tyranny, Fromm observes.
But political liberation from
external tyranny can hide the fact that “new un-freedom can develop, but in
hidden and anonymous forms,” Fromm writes.
“The outer chains have simply
been put inside of man. The desires and thoughts that suggestion-apparatus of
society fills him with, claim him more thoroughly than outer chains.”
What Fromm means is that the network
of beliefs that help constitute capitalist society are introjected into his
mind and personality before he has had an opportunity to reason independently
about his aims in life and the means of pursuing them.
“Any attempt to overcome the
possibly fatal crisis of the industrialized parts of the world, and perhaps of
the human race, must begin with the understanding of the nature of both inner
and outer chains; it must be based on the liberation of man in the classic,
humanist sense as well as in the modern, political and social sense,” Fromm
writes.
“History has clearly shown that
one ideology without the other leaves man dependent and crippled,” he writes.
The next few chapters are
spent making some suggestions about ways to liberate oneself from the inner
chains.
But Fromm doesn’t set himself
up as a guru who can provide the definitive method for achieving liberation.
And he pointedly criticizes the movements promising quick and easy liberation that
were proliferating at the time he wrote the book. Fromm targets Maharishi
Mahesh Yogi and his Transcendental Meditation movement for a particularly
scorching critique.
Instead, he contends that the
wisdom one needs to achieve liberation - to realize the “Art of Being” - is
available in the works of Muslim and Christian mystics (he cites Meister Eckhart
repeatedly), and in Spinoza and Marx, as he says in one passage. Elsewhere, he
also cites the Buddha.
He warns that such liberation
does not come easily – it requires independent thought and discipline.
Interestingly, in the light
of the recent resurgence of interest in psychedelics, he critiques the idea
drugs can offer a short-cut to awakening.
“Binges of widened
consciousness are an escape from a narrow consciousness, and after the ‘trip’
they are no different from what they were before and from how their fellow men
have been all the time: Half-awake people,” he writes.
More positively, Fromm does
undertake to provide a summary of some of the ideas he learned from studying
those “masters.”
Among the topics he addresses
is the need for concentration. In words that are even more relevant now than
when he wrote them, Fromm deplores the detrimental effects of modern life on
the ability to concentrate.
“The capacity to concentrate
has become a rarity in the life of cybernetic man. On the contrary, it seems as
if he does everything to avoid concentration,” he writes.
He refers to TV as “a good
teacher of non-concentration,”
Social media, smartphones and
the Internet didn’t exist when Fromm wrote, but it’s not hard to imagine how he
would critique their negative effects on our ability to concentrate.
He briefly explores the topic
of meditation. Fromm draws extensively from Buddhist teachings in this section,
suggesting he had an openness to non-Western intellectual traditions that far surpassed
his colleagues in the Frankfurt School.
In perhaps the weakest
section of the book, Fromm explores the notion of “self-analysis.”
He suggests it might behoove
people to undertake a self-directed analysis of their psyches broadly similar
to what one experiences in psychoanalysis, but without an analyst.
His suggestions as to how to
do that are under-developed, though, and he seems to be suggesting exploring
the depths of one’s own psyche is a relatively easy affair, which is in direct
contradiction with his insistence elsewhere that liberation isn’t easy.
The last few chapters provide
a concise but thought-provoking exploration of the obstacles that contemporary
Western civilization put in the way of psychological liberation.
It’s in the section that
Fromm explores the distinction between “Having” and “Being” as modes of
existence.
The first is one that focused
on material possessions and the external world. The second is one where people
freely and thoughtfully endeavour to realize their full potential.
He’s not opposed to all possessions.
In fact, he argues some
possessions are essential to the realization of human potential that characterizes
“being.”
“Man must have a body,
shelter, tools, vessels. These things are necessary for his biological
existence; there are other things he needs for his spiritual existence, such as
ornaments and objections of decoration – briefly, artistic and ‘sacred’ objects
and the means to produce them,” Fromm writes.
(Just think of the musical
instruments and other things that Apple showed being flattened and compressed
into the newest, flattest iPad ad in the controversial ad it quickly pulled
earlier this year.)
The problem creeps in when
people start accumulating possessions not because they need them to live a
fully human life, but because society tells them to.
“The change of function
happens at the point where possession ceases to be an instrument for greater
aliveness and productivity but is transformed into a means for passive-reception
consumption,” Fromm writes.
Fromm is also intensely
critical of the effects of modern technology on our ability to realize
potential. Instead of enhancing our powers, Fromm argues it diminishes them and
puts us in passive, rather than an active and creative role.
“In contrast to the generally
accepted view, modern man is basically very helpless in his relation to the
world,” he writes. “He only appears powerful because he dominates nature to an
extraordinary degree. But this domination is almost completely alienated …”
“Thus, modern man can be said
to live in a symbiotic relationship with the world of machines. Inasmuch as he is
part of them, he is – or appears – to be powerful. Without them, standing by
himself, using his own resources, he is powerless as a little child,” Fromm
writes.
It struck me while I was
reading that passage how powerfully relevant it still is in a period when the
progenitors of generative AI are developing technologies that are designed to
displace human beings from some of their essential creative activities –
writing, drawing, and painting, and making music.
In fact, it’s remarkable how
The Art of Being seems to have gained relevance in the roughly 50 years it’s been
written, rather than lost it.
It’s more relevant than in
the 1970s in part because technology has grown so much more ubiquitous and
powerful, as has the emphasis on consumption.
While it’s clearer and more
direct than theirs, Fromm’s language when discussing contemporary,
technologically driven society echoes that of his Frankfurt School associates
Horkheimer and Adorno.
But unlike them, Fromm offers
some useful tools for counteracting its problematic effects.
In fact, even if you don’t
agree with its intellectual background, Fromm’s wisdom and practicality mean The
Art of Being can still be useful.
You can just kick away the
Frankfurt School ladder supporting Fromm’s advice and take advantage of the
advice itself, to borrow an image.
As for me, I’ll be going back
to Value Village sometime soon and looking for more books like The Art of Being
– in the sincere hope that I am doing it in the spirit of Being, rather than
Having.
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