Fromm, Erich. Man for Himself: An Inquiry into the
Psychology of Ethics.
In all arts a system of objectively valid norms constitutes the theory of practice (applied science) based on the theoretical science. While there may be different ways of achieving excellent results in any art, norms are by no means arbitrary; their violation is penalized by poor results or even by complete failure to accomplish the desired end. (17)
But not only medicine, engineering, and painting are arts; living itself is an art – in fact, the most important and at the same time the most difficult and complex art to be practiced by man. Its object is not this or that specialized performance, but the performance of living, the process of developing into that which one is potentially. In the art of living, man is both the artist and the object of his art; he is the sculptor and the marble; the physician and the patient. (17-18)
Humanistic ethics is the applied science of the “art of living” based upon the theoretical “science of man.” Here as in other arts, the excellence of one’s achievement (“virtus”) is proportional to the knowledge one has of the science of man and to one’s skill and practice. But one can deduce norms from theories only on the premise that a certain activity is chosen and a certain aim is desired. (18)
There is, however, a difference between the axiom underlying ethics and that of other arts. We can imagine a hypothetical culture where people do not want paintings or bridges, but not one in which people do not want to live. The drive to live is inherent in every organism, and man can not help wanting to live regardless of what he would like to think about it. The choice between life and death is more apparent than real; man’s real choice is that between a good life and a bad life (18).
The subject matter of ethics is character, and only in reference to the character structure as a whole can value statements be made about single traits or actions. The virtuous or the vicious character, rather than single virtues or vices, is the true subject matter of ethical inquiry. (33)
The analytic situation may be defined from this standpoint as one where two people – the analyst and the patient – devote themselves to the search for truth. The aim of the cure is the restoring of health, and the remedies are truth and reason. To have postulated a situation based upon radical honesty within a culture in which such frankness is rare is perhaps the greatest expression of Freud’s genius. (36)
Although Freud did not refer to ethical values explicitly, there is an implicit connection: the pregential orientations, characteristic of the dependent, greedy, and stingy attitudes, are ethically inferior to the genital, that is, productive, mature character. Freud’s characterology thus implies that virtue is the natural aim of man’s development. This development can be blocked by specific and mostly extraneous circumstances and it can thus result in the formation of the neurotic character. Normal growth, however, will produce the mature, independent, productive character, capable of loving and of working; in the last analysis, then, to Freud health and virtue are the same. (36)
Self-awareness, reason, and imagination have disrupted the “harmony” which characterizes animal existence. Their emergence has made man into an anomaly, into the freak of the universe. He is part of nature, subject to her physical laws and unable to change them, yet he transcends 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 this world at an accidental place and time, he is forced out of it, again accidentally. Being aware of himself, he realizes his 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. (40)
Man is the only animal that can be bored, that can be discontented, that can feel evicted from paradise. Man is the only animal for whom his own existence is a problem which he has to solve and from which he cannot escape. (40)
The contemporary contradiction between an abundance of technical means for material satisfaction and the incapacity to use them exclusively for peace and the welfare of the people is soluble; it is not a necessary contradiction but one due to man’s lack of courage and wisdom. (43)
Man must accept the responsibility for himself and the fact that only by using his own powers can he give meaning to his life. But meaning does not imply certainty; indeed, the quest for certainty blocks the search for meaning. Uncertainty is the very condition to impel man to unfold his powers. If he faces the truth without panic he will recognize that there is no meaning to life except the meaning man gives his life by the unfolding of his powers, by living productively; and that only constant vigilance, activity, and effort can keep us from failing in the one task that matters – the full development of our powers within the limitations set by the laws of our existence. (45)
In our culture the picture is so particularly deceptive because most people “believe” in monotheism while their actual devotion belongs to systems which are, indeed, much closer to totemism and worship of idols than to any form of Christianity. (48)
While differences in temperament have no ethical significance, differences in character constitute the real problem of ethics, they are expressive to the degree to which an individual has succeeded in the art of living. (50-51)
Temperament refers to the mode of reaction and is constitutional and not changeable; character is essentially formed by a person’s experiences, especially of those in early life, and changeable, to some extent, by insights and new kinds of experiences. (52)
The progress of psychoanalytic theory led, in line with the progress of the natural and social sciences, to a new concept which was based, not on the idea of a primarily isolated individual, but on the relationship of man to others, to nature, and to himself. It was assumed that this very relationship governs and regulates the energy manifest in the passionate strivings of man. H.S. Sullivan, one of the pioneers of this new view, has accordingly defined psychoanalysis as a “study of interpersonal relations.” (57)
It follows Freud also in the assumption that the fundamental entity in character is not the single character trait but the total character organization from which a number of single character traits follow. These character traits are to be understood as a syndrome which results from a particular organization or, as I shall call it, orientation of character. (57)
The main difference in the theory of character proposed here from that of Freud is that the fundamental basis of character is not seen in various types of libido organization but in specific kinds of a person’s relatedness to the world. In the process of living, man relates himself to the world (1) by acquiring and assimilating thins, and (2) by relating himself to people (and himself). The former I shall call the process of assimilation; the latter, that of socialization. Both forms of relatedness are “open” and not, as with the animal, instinctively determined. (58)
These orientations, by which the individual relates himself to the world, constitute the core of his character; character can be defined as the (relatively permanent) form in which human energy is canalized in the process of assimilation and socialization. (59)
The market concept of value, the emphasis on exchange value rather than on use value, has led to a similar concept of value with regard to people and particularly to oneself. The character orientation which is rooted in the experience of oneself as a commodity and of one’s value as exchange value I shall call the marketing orientation. (68)
Since modern man experiences himself both as the seller and as the commodity to be sold on the market, his self-esteem depends on conditions beyond his control. If he is “successful,” he is valuable; if he is not, he is worthless. The degree of insecurity which results from this orientation can hardly be overestimated. If one feels that one’s own value is not constituted primarily by the human qualities one possesses, but by one’s success on a competitive market with ever-changing conditions, one’s self-esteem is bound to be shaky and in constant need of confirmation y others. Hence one is driven to strive relentlessly for success, and any setback is a severe threat to one’s self-esteem; helplessness, insecurity, and inferiority feelings are the result. If the vicissitude of the market are the judges of one’s value, the sense of dignity and pride is destroyed. (72)
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.” (72)
In the marketing orientation man encounters his own powers as commodities alienated from him. He is not one with them but they are masked from him because what matters is not his self-realization in the process of using them but his success in the process of selling them. Both his powers and what they create become estranged, something different from himself, something for others to judge and to use; thus his feeling of identity becomes as shaky as his self-esteem; it is constituted by the sum total of roles one can play: “I am as you desire me.” (72)
Since man cannot live doubting his identity, he must, in the marketing orientation, find the conviction of identity not in reference to himself and his powers but in the opinion of others about him. His prestige, status, success, the fact that he is known to others as being a certain persona re a substitute for the genuine feeling of identity. This situation makes him utterly dependent on the way others look at him and forces him to keep up the role in which he once had become successful. If I and my powers are separated from each other then, indeed, is my self constituted by the price I fetch. (72-73)
The way one experiences others is not different from the way one experiences oneself. Others are experienced as commodities like oneself; they too do not present themselves but their salable part. The difference between people is reduced to a merely quantitative difference of being more or less successful, attractive, hence valuable. (73)
These conditions necessarily color all human relationships. When the individual self is neglected, the relationships between people must of necessity become superficial, because not they themselves but interchangeable commodities are related. People are not able and cannot afford to be concerned with that which is unique and “peculiar” in each other. (74)
The superficial character of human relationships leads many to hope that they can find depth and intensity of feeling in individual love. But love for one person and love for one’s neighbor are indivisible; in any given culture, love relationships are only a more intense expression of the relatedness to man prevalent in that culture. Hence it is an illusion to expect that the loneliness of man rooted in the marketing orientation can be cured by individual love. (75)
Thinking as well as feeling is determined by the marketing orientation. Thinking assumes to function of grasping things quickly so as to be able to manipulate them successfully. Furthered by widespread and efficient education, this leads to a high degree of intelligence, but not of reason. (75)
For manipulative purposes, all that is necessary to know is the surface feature of things, the superficial. The truth, to be uncovered by penetrating to the essence of phenomena, becomes an obsolete concept – truth not only in the pre-scientific sense of “absolute” truth, dogmatically maintained without reference to empirical data, but also in the sense of truth attained by man’s reason applied to his observations and open to revisions. (75)
Knowledge itself becomes a commodity. Here, too, man is alienated from his own power; thinking and knowing are experienced as a tool to produce results. Knowledge of man himself, psychology, which in the great tradition of Western thought was held to be the condition for virtue, for right living, for happiness, has degenerated into an instrument to be used for better manipulation of others and oneself, in market research, in political propaganda, in advertising, and so on. (76)
We find today a tremendous enthusiasm for knowledge and education, but at the same time a skeptical or contemptuous attitude toward the allegedly impractical and useless thinking which is concerned “only” with the truth and which has no exchange value on the market. (76)
In view of the current emphasis on the impact of culture on personality, I should like to state that the relationship between society and the individual is not to be understood simply in the sense that cultural patterns and social institutions “influence” the individual. The interaction goes much deeper; the whole personality of the average individual is molded by the way people relate to each other, and it is determined by the socioeconomic and political structure of society to such an extent that, in principle, one can infer from the analysis of one individual the totality of the social structure in which he lives. (78-79)
They proclaimed the right of might and rationalized it by pointing to the law of nature which makes the stronger survive; love and decency were signs of weakness; thinking was the occupation of cowards and degenerates. (81)
The depersonalization, the emptiness, the meaninglessness of life, the automatization of the individual result in a growing dissatisfaction and in a need to search for a more adequate way of living and for norms which could guide man to this end. (82)
The ability of man to make productive use of his powers is his potency; the inability is his impotence. With his power of reason he can penetrate the surface of phenomena and understand their essence. With his power of love he can break through 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. Domination springs from impotence and in turn reinforces it, for if an individual can force somebody else to serve him, his own need to be productive is increasingly paralyzed. (88)
The world outside oneself can be experienced in two ways: reproductively by perceiving actuality in the same fashion as a film makes a literal record of things photographed (although even mere reproductive perception requires the active participation of the mind); and generatively by conceiving it, by enlivening and re-creating this new material through the spontaneous activity of one’s own mental and emotional powers. While to a certain extent everyone does react in both ways, the respective weight of each kind of experience differs widely. Sometimes either one of the two is atrophied, and the study of these extreme cases in which the reproductive or the generative mode is almost absent offers the best approach to the understanding of each of these phenomena. (88-89)
The normal human being is capable of relating himself to the world simultaneously by perceiving it as it is an by conceiving it enlivened and enriched by his own powers. If one of these two capacities is atrophied, man is sick; but the normal person has both capacities even though their respective weights differ. The presence of both reproductive and generative capacities is a precondition for productiveness; they are opposite poles whose interaction is the dynamic source of productiveness. With the last statement I want to emphasize that productiveness is not the sum or combination of both capacities but that it is something new which springs from this interaction. (90)
While it is true that man’s productiveness can create material things, works of art, and systems of thought, by far the most important object of productiveness is man himself. (91)
Birth is only one particular step in a continuum which begins with conception and ends with death. All that is between these two poles is a process of giving birth to one’s potentialities, of bringing to life all that is potentially given in the two cells. But while physical growth proceeds by itself, if only the proper conditions are given, the process of birth on the mental plane, in contrast, does not occur automatically. It requires productive activity to give life to the emotional and intellectual potentialities of man, to give birth to his self. It is part of the tragedy of the human situation that the development of the self is never completed; even under the best conditions only part of man’s potentialities is realized. Man always dies before he is fully born. (91)
Virtue to Spinoza is identical with the use of man’s powers and vice is his failure to use his power; the essence of evil for Spinoza is impotence. (92)
Genuine love is rotted in productiveness and may properly be called, therefore, “productive love.” (98)
Laziness and compulsive activity are not opposites but are two symptoms of the disturbance of man’s proper functioning. In the neurotic individual we often find the inability to work as his main symptom; in the so-called adjusted person, the inability to enjoy ease and repose. Compulsive activity is not the opposite of laziness but its complement; the opposite of both is productiveness. (106-107)
Destructiveness results from a more intense and more complete blocking of productiveness than withdrawal. It is the perversion of the drive to live; it is the energy of unlived life transformed into energy for the destruction of life. (110)
Genuine love is an expression of productiveness and implies care, respect, responsibility, and knowledge. It is not an “affect” in the sense of being affected by somebody, but an active striving for the growth and happiness of the loved person, rooted in one’s own capacity to love. (129)
To love is an expression of one’s power to love, and to love somebody is the actualization and concentration of this power with regard to one person. (129)
It is true that selfish persons are incapable of loving others, but they are not capable of loving themselves either. (131)
What happened was that man has accepted the contents of the Calvinistic doctrine while rejecting its religious formulation. He has made himself an instrument, not of God’s will but of the economic machine or the state. He has accepted the role of a tool, nor for God but for industrial progress; he has worked and amassed money but essentially not for the pleasure of spending it and of enjoying life but in order to save, to invest, to be successful. Monastic asceticism has been, as Max Weber has pointed out, replaced by an inner-worldly asceticism where personal happiness and enjoyment are no longer the real aims of life. (135)
Man, living in a market economy, feels himself to be a commodity. He is divorced from himself, as the seller of a commodity is divorced from what he wants to sell. To be sure, he is interested in himself, immensely interested in his success on the market, but “he” is the manager, the employer, the seller – and the commodity. His self-interest turns out to be the interest of “him” as the subject who employs “himself,” as the commodity which should obtain the optimal price on the personality market. (137)
Not only do the authoritarian ideologies threaten the most precious achievement of Western culture, the respect for the uniqueness and dignity of the individual; they also tend to block the way to constructive criticism of modern society, and thereby to necessary changes. (139)
The failure of modern culture lies not in its principle of individualism, not in the idea that moral virtue is the same as the pursuit of self-interest, but in the deterioration of the meaning of self-interest; not in the fact that people are too much concerned with their self interest, but that they are not concerned enough with the interest of their real self; not in the fact that they are too selfish, but that they do not love themselves. (139)
There is an increasing number of people to whom everything they are doing seems futile. They are still under the spell of the slogans which preach faith in the secular paradise of success and glamour. But doubt, the fertile condition of all progress, has begun to beset them and has made them ready to ask what their real self-interest as human beings is. (139-140)
Man has created such sources of mechanical energy that he has freed himself from the task of putting all his human energy into work in order to produce the material conditions for living. He could spend a considerable part of his energy on the task of living itself. (140)
The contents of the authoritarian conscience are derived from the commands and tabus of the authority; its strength is rooted in the emotions of fear of, and admiration for, the authority. Good conscience is consciousness of pleasing the (external and internalize) authority; guilty conscience is the consciousness of displeasing it. The good (authoritarian) conscience produces a feeling of well-being and security, for it implies approval by, and greater closeness to, the authority; the guilty conscience produces fear and insecurity, because acting against the will of the authority implies the danger of being punished and – what is worse – of being deserted by the authority. (146)
The scars left from the child’s defeat in the fight against irrational authority are to be found at the bottom of every neurosis. They form a syndrome the most important features of which are the weakening or paralysis of the person’s originality and spontaneity; the weakening of the self and the substitution of a pseudo self in which the feeling of “I am” is dulled and replaced by the experience of self as the sum total of others’ expectations; the substitution of autonomy by heteronomy; the fogginess or, to use H. S. Sullivan’s term, the parataxic quality of all interpersonal experiences. (157-158)
Humanistic conscience is not the internalized voice of an authority whom we are eager to please and afraid of displeasing; it is our own voice, present in every human being and independent of external sanctions and rewards. (158)
Humanistic conscience is the reaction of our total personality to its proper functioning or dysfunctioning; not a reaction to the functioning of this or that capacity but to the totality of capacities which constitute our human and our individual existence. Conscience judges our functioning as human beings; it is (as the root of the word con-scientia) indicates knowledge within oneself, knowledge of our respective success or failure in the art of living. (158)
One answer follows from the very nature of conscience itself: since its function is to be the guardian of man’s true self-interest, it is alive to the extent to which a person has not lost himself entirely and become the prey of his own indifference and destructiveness. (160)
To crave that which is harmful is the very essence of mental sickness. Every neurosis thus confirms the fact that pleasure can be in contradiction to man’s real interests. (179-180)
Unhappiness weakens or even paralyzes all our psychic functions. Happiness increases them. The subjective feeling of being happy, when it is not a quality of the state of well-being of the whole person, is nothing more than an illusory thought about a feeling and is completely unrelated to genuine happiness. (182)
Pseudo-pleasure and pseudo-pain are actually only pretended feelings; they are thoughts and feelings, rather than genuine emotional experiences. (182-183)
Hunger, thirst, and the need for sexual satisfaction, sleep, and bodily exercise are rooted in the chemism of the organism. The objective, physiological necessity to satisfy these demands is perceived subjectively as desire, and if they remain unsatisfied for any length of time painful tension is felt. If this tension is released, the relief is felt as pleasure or, as I propose to call it, satisfaction. This term, from satis-facere = to make sufficient, seems to be most appropriate for this kind of pleasure. It is the very nature of all such physiologically conditioned needs that their satisfaction ends the tension due to the physiological changes brought about in the organism. (183)
Footnote 55: It does not seem to be necessary nowadays sto show the fallacy of Bentham’s assumption that all pleasures are qualitatively alike and only different in quantity. Hardly any psychologist holds this view any more, even though the popular idea of “having fun” still implies that all pleasures have the same quality. (183)
The physiologically conditioned desires such as hunger, thirst, and so on, are satisfied with the removal of the physiologically conditioned tension, and they reappear only when the physiological need arises again; they are thus rhythmic in nature. The irrational desires, in contrast, are insatiable. The desire of the envious, the possessive, the sadistic person does not disappear with its satisfaction, except perhaps momentarily. It is in the very nature of these irrational desires that they can not be “satisfied.” They spring from a dissatisfaction within oneself. The lack of productiveness and the resulting powerlessness and fear are the root of these passionate cravings and irrational desires. Even if man could satisfy all his wishes for power and destruction, it would not change his fear and loneliness, and thus the tension would remain. The blessing of imagination turns into a curse; since a person does not find himself relieved form his fears, he imagines ever-increasing satisfactions would cure his greed and restore his inner balance. But greed is a bottomless pit, and the idea of the relief derived from its satisfaction is a mirage. Greed, indeed, is not, as is so often assumed, rooted in man’s animal nature but in his mind and imagination. (185-186)
While even in the animal, surplus energy is present and is expressed in play, the realm of abundance is essentially a human phenomenon. It is the realm of productiveness, of inner activity. This realm can exist only to the extent to which man does not have to work for sheer subsistence and thus to use up most of his energy. (187)
The evolution of the human race is characterized by the expansion of the realm of abundance, of the surplus energy available for achievements beyond mere survival. All specifically human achievements of man spring from abundance. (187)
In all spheres of activity the difference between scarcity and abundance and therefore between satisfaction and happiness exists, even with regard to elementary functions like hunger and sex. To satisfy the physiological need of intense hunger is pleasureful because it relieves tension. Different in quality from satisfaction of hunger is the pleasure derived from the satisfaction of appetite. Appetite is the anticipation of enjoyable taste experience and, in distinction to hunger, does not produce tension. Taste in this sense is a product of cultural development and refinement like musical or artistic taste and can develop only in a situation of abundance, both in the cultural and the psychological meaning of the word. Hunger is a phenomenon of scarcity; its satisfaction, a necessity. Appetite is a phenomenon of abundance; its satisfaction not a necessity but an expression of freedom and productiveness. The pleasure accompanying it may be called joy. (187)
Productive love, the closest form of relatedness between two people and simultaneously one in which the integrity of each is preserved, is a phenomenon of abundance, and the ability for it is the testimony to human maturity. Joy and happiness are the concomitants of productive love. (188-189)
Happiness is an achievement brought about by man’s inner productiveness and not a gift of the gods. Happiness and joy are not the satisfaction of a need springing from a physiological or a psychological lack; they are not the relief from tension but the accompaniment of all productive activity, in thought, feeling, and action. (189)
Happiness is the indication that man has found the answer to the problem of human existence: the productive realization of his potentialities and thus, simultaneously, being one with the world and preserving the integrity of his self. (189)
Happiness is the criterion of excellence in the art of living, of virtue in the meaning it has in humanistic ethics. (189)
The opposite of happiness thus is not grief or pain but depression which results from inner sterility and unproductiveness. (190)
Happiness is man’s greatest achievement; it is the response of his total personality to a productive orientation toward himself and the outside world. (191)
Humanistic ethics may very well postulate happiness and joy as its chief virtues, but in doing so it does not demand the easiest but the most difficult task of man, the full development of his productiveness. (191)
One of the most outstanding psychological features of modern life is the fact that activities which are means to ends have more and more usurped the position of ends, while the ends themselves have a shadowy and unreal existence. (194)
People work in order to make more money; they use this money in order to make still more money, and the end – the enjoyment of life – is lost sight of. People are in a hurry and invent things in order to have more time. Then they use the time saved to rush about again to save more time until they are so exhausted that they can not use the time they saved. We have become enmeshed in a net of means and have lost sight of ends. (194-195)
We have the most wonderful instruments and means man has ever had, but we do not stop and ask what they are for. (195)
The overemphasis on ends leads to a distortion of the harmonious balance between means and ends in various ways; one way is that all emphasis is on ends in various ways: one way is that all emphasis is on ends without sufficient consideration of the role of means. The outcome of this distortion is that the ends become abstract, unreal, and eventually nothing but pipe dreams. (195)
The isolation of ends can have the opposite effect: while the end is ideologically retained it serves merely as a cover for shifting all the emphasis to those activities which are allegedly means to this end. The motto for this mechanism is “The ends justify the means.” The defenders of this principle fail to see that the use of destructive means has its own consequences which actually transform the end even if it is still retained ideologically. (195)
Credo quia absurdum est
I believe because it is absurd.
Only the person who has faith in himself is able to be faithful to others because only he can be sure that he will be the same at a future time as he is today and, therefore, to feel and to act as he now expects to. (206)
Education is identical with helping the child realize his potentialities. The opposite of education is manipulation, which is based on the absence of faith in the growth of potentialities and on the conviction that a child will be right only if the adults put into him what is desirable and cut off what seems to be undesirable. There is no need of faith in the robot since there is no life in it either. (207)
Footnote: 66 The root of the word education is e-ducere, literally, to lead forth, or to bring out something which is potentially present. Education in this sense results in existence, which means literally to stand out, to have emerged from the state of potentiality into that of manifest reality. (207)
The basis of rational faith is productiveness; to live by our faith means to live productively and to have the only certainty which exists: the certainty of growing from productive activity and from the experience that each one of us is the active subject of whom these activities are predicated. (208)
It follows that the belief in power (in the sense of domination) and the use of power are the reverse of faith. To believe in power that exists is identical with disbelief in the growth of potentialities which are as yet unrealized. It is a prediction of the future based solely on the manifest present; but it turns out to be a grave miscalculation, profoundly irrational in its oversight of human potentialities and human growth. There is no rational faith in power. There is submission to it or, on the part of those who have it, the wish to keep it. While to many power seems to be the most real of all things, the history of man has proved it to be the most unstable of all human achievements. Because of the fact that faith and power are mutually exclusive, all religions and political systems which originally are built on rational faith become corrupt and eventually lose what strength they have if they rely on power or even ally themselves with it. (208-209)
The ideas of freedom or democracy deteriorate into nothing but irrational faith once they are not based upon the productive experience of each individual but are presented to him by parties or states which force him to believe in these ideas. (210)
Reactive, rational hate is a person’s reaction to a threat to his own or another person’s freedom, life, or ideas. Its premise is respect for life. Rational hate has an important biological function: it is the affective equivalent of action serving the protection of life; it comes into existence as a reaction to vital threats, and it ceases to exist when the threat has been removed; it is not the opposite but the concomitant of the striving for life. (215)
Character-conditioned hate is different in quality. It is a character trait, a continuous readiness to hate, lingering within the person who is hostile rather than reacting with hate to a stimulus from without. Irrational hate can be actualized by the same kind of realistic threat which arouses reactive hate; but often it is a gratuitous hate, using every opportunity to be expressed, rationalized as reactive hate. (215)
Destructiveness is the outcome of unlived life. (216)
Today we can meet a person who acts and feels like an automaton; we find that he never experiences anything which is really his; that he experiences himself entirely as the person he thinks he is supposed to be; that smiles have replaced laughter, meaningless chatter replaced communicative speech and dulled despair has taken the place of genuine sadness. (223)
The failure to achieve maturity and integration of the whole personality is a failure in the sense of humanistic ethics. In a more specific sense many neuroses are the expression of moral problems, and neurotic symptoms result from unsolved moral conflicts. (224)
To violate the forces directed toward life in any human being necessarily has repercussions on ourselves. Our own growth, happiness, and strength are based on the respect for these forces, and one cannot violate them in others and remain untouched oneself at the same time. The respect for life, and of others, as well as one’s own, is the concomitant of the process of life itself and a condition of psychic health. In a way, destructiveness against others is a pathological phenomenon comparable to suicidal impulses. While a person may succeed in ignoring or rationalizing destructive impulses, he – his organism as it were – cannot help reacting and being affected by acts which contradict the very principle by which his life and all life are sustained. (225)
The position that man is basically destructive and selfish leads to a concept which maintains that ethical behavior consists in the suppression of these evil strivings in which man would indulge without exercising constant self-control. Man, according to this principle, must be his own watchdog; he must, in the first place, recognize that his nature is evil, and, in the second, use his will power to fight his inherent evil tendencies. Suppression of evil or indulgence in it would then be his alternative. (226)
Entirely different from suppression and repression is a third type of reaction to destructive impulses. While in suppression the impulse remains alive and only the action is prohibited, and while in repression the impulse itself is removed from consciousness and is acted upon (to some extent) in disguised fashion, in this third type of reaction the life-furthering forces in a person fight against the destructive and evil impulses. The more aware a person is of the latter the more is he able to react. Not only his will and his reason take part, but those emotional forces in him which are challenged by his destructiveness. In this reaction the emphasis is not on one’s feeling of badness and remorse but on the presence and use of productive forces within man. Thus, as a result of the productive conflict between good and evil, the evil itself becomes a source of virtue. (229)
The aim of humanistic ethics is not the repression of man’s evilness (which is fostered by the crippling effect of the authoritarian spirit) but the productive use of man’s inherent primary potentialities. Virtue is proportional to the degree of productiveness a person has achieved. If society is concerned with making people virtuous, it must be concerned with making them productive and hence with creating the conditions for the development of productiveness. The first and foremost of these conditions is that the unfolding and growth of every person is the aim of all social and political activities, that man is the only purpose and end, and not a means for anybody or anything except himself. (229)
The productive orientation is the basis for freedom, virtue, and happiness. Vigilance is the price of virtue, but not the vigilance of the guard who has to shut in the evil prisoner; rather, the vigilance of the rational being who has to recognize and to create the conditions for his productiveness and to do away with those factors which block him and thus create the evil which, once it has arisen, can be prevented from becoming manifest only by external or internal force. (229-230)
Just as the person who has become sterile and destructive is increasingly paralyzed and caught, as it were, in a vicious circle, a person who is aware of his own powers and uses them productively gains in strength, faith, and happiness, and is less and less in danger of being alienated from himself; he has created, as we might say, a “virtuous circle.” (230)
Repression of evilness may spring from a spirit of self-castigation and sorrow, but there is nothing more conducive to goodness in the humanistic sense than the experience of joy and happiness which accompanies any productive activity. Every increase in joy a culture can provide for will do more for the ethical education of its members than all the warnings of punishment or preachings of virtue could do. (230)
The will is not an abstract power of man which he possesses apart from his character. On the contrary, the will is nothing but the expression of his character. (233)
The productive person who trusts his reason and who is capable of loving others and himself has the will to act virtuously. The nonproductive person who has failed to develop these qualities and who is a slave of his irrational passions lacks this will. (233)
Man, while like all other creatures subject to forces which determine him, is the only creature endowed with reason, the only being who is capable of understanding the very forces which he is subjected to and who by his understanding can take an active part in his own fate and strengthen those elements which strive for the good. (233)
There is perhaps no phenomenon which contains so much destructive feeling as “moral indignation,” which permits envy or hate to be acted out under the guise of virtue. The “indignant” person has for once the satisfaction of despising and treating a creature as “inferior,” coupled with the feeling of his own superiority and righteousness. (236)
By “universal” ethics I mean norms of conduct the aim of which is the growth and unfolding of man; by “socially immanent” ethics I mean such norms as are necessary for the functioning and survival of a specific kind of society and of the people living in it. (240)
Man’s submission to the combination of threat and promise is his real “fall.” By submitting to power = domination he loses his power = potency. He loses his power to make use of all those capacities which make him truly human; his reason ceases to operate; he may be intelligent, he may be capable of manipulating things and himself, but he accepts as truth that which those who have power over him call the truth. He loses the power of love, for his emotions are tied to those upon whom he depends. He loses his moral sense, for his inability to question and criticize those in power stultifies his moral judgment with regard to anybody and anything. He is prey to prejudice and superstition for he is incapable of inquiring into the validity of the premises upon which rest false beliefs. His own voice cannot call him back to himself since he is not able to listen to it, being so intent on listening to the voices of those who have power over him. Indeed, freedom is the necessary condition of happiness as well as of virtue; freedom, not in the sense of the ability to make arbitrary choices and not freedom from necessity, but freedom to realize that which one potentially is, to fulfill the true nature of man according to the laws of his existence. (247)
Our moral problem is man’s indifference to himself. It lies in the fact that we have lost the sense of significance and uniqueness of the individual, that we have made ourselves into instruments for purposes outside ourselves, that we experience and treat ourselves as commodities, and that our own powers have become alienated from ourselves. We have become things and our neighbors have become things. The result is that we feel powerless and despise ourselves for our impotence. Since we do not trust our own power, we have no faith in man, no faith in ourselves or in what our own powers can create. We have no conscience in the humanistic sense, since we do not dare to trust our judgment. We are a herd believing that the road we follow must lead to a goal since we see everybody else on the same road. We are in the dark and keep up our courage because we hear everybody else whistle as we do. (248)