Chapter One of the
Book “Man for Himself”
Erich
Fromm
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Editorial Note:
Ethics is a decisive factor
in Theosophy and Psychology.
The text below is reproduced from
the book “Man for Himself”, by Erich
Fromm, Holt, Rinehart and Winston,
New York, 15th Printing, November
1960, 254 pp., see Chapter One, pp. 3-7.
We add two explanatory footnotes.
(Carlos Cardoso Aveline)
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“Surely, I
said, knowledge is the food
of the soul;
and we must take care, my
friend, that
the Sophist does not deceive
us when he
praises what he sells, like the
dealers
wholesale or retail who sell the food
of the body;
for they praise indiscriminately
all their
goods, without knowing what are really
beneficial or
hurtful: neither do their customers
know, with the
exception of any trainer or physician
who may happen
to buy of them. In like manner
those who carry
about the wares of knowledge, and
make the round
of the cities, and sell or retail them
to any customer
who is in want of them, praise them
all alike;
though I should not wonder, O my friend, if
many of them
were really ignorant of their effect upon
the soul; and
their customers equally ignorant, unless
he who buys of
them happens to be a physician of the
soul. If,
therefore, you have understanding of what is
good and evil
you may safely buy knowledge of
Protagoras or
any one; but if not, then, O my friend,
pause, and do
not hazard your dearest interests at a
game of chance.
For there is far greater peril in buying
knowledge than
in buying meat and drink (…).”
Plato, in Protagoras
A spirit of pride and optimism has distinguished
Western culture in the last few centuries: pride in reason as man’s instrument
for his understanding and mastery of nature; optimism in the fulfillment of the
fondest hopes of mankind, the achievement of the greatest happiness for the
greatest number.
Man’s pride has been justified. By virtue of his reason he has built a
material world the reality of which surpasses even the dreams and visions of
fairy tales and utopias. He harnesses physical energies which will enable the
human race to secure the material conditions necessary for a dignified and
productive existence, and although many of his goals have not yet been attained
there is hardly any doubt that they are within reach and that the problem of production - which was the
problem of the past - is, in principle, solved. Now, for the first time in his
history, man can perceive that the idea of the unity of the human race and the
conquest of nature for the sake of man is no longer a dream but a realistic
possibility. Is he not justified in being proud and in having confidence in
himself and in the future of mankind?
Yet modern man feels uneasy and more and more bewildered. He works and
strives, but he is dimly aware of a sense of futility with regard to his
activities. While his power over matter grows, he feels powerless in his
individual life and in society. While creating new and better means for mastering nature, he has
become enmeshed in a network of those means and has lost the vision of the end
which alone gives them significance - man
himself. While becoming the master of nature, he has become the slave of
the machine which his own hands built. With all his knowledge about matter, he
is ignorant with regard to the most important and fundamental questions of
human existence: what man is, how he ought to live, and how the tremendous
energies within man can be released
and used productively.
The contemporary human crisis has led to a retreat from the hopes and
ideas of the Enlightenment under the auspices of which our political and
economic progress had begun. The very idea of progress is called a childish
illusion, and “realism”, a new word for the utter lack of faith in man, is
preached instead. The idea of the dignity and power of man, which gave man the
strength and courage for the tremendous accomplishments of the last few
centuries, is challenged by the suggestion that we have to revert to the
acceptance of man’s ultimate powerlessness and insignificance. This idea
threatens to destroy the very roots from which our culture grew.
The ideas of the Enlightenment taught man that he could trust his own
reason as a guide to establishing valid ethical norms and that he could rely on
himself, needing neither revelation nor the authority of the church in order to
know good and evil. The motto of the Enlightenment, “dare to know”, implying
“trust your knowledge”, became the incentive for the efforts and achievements
of modern man.
The growing doubt of human autonomy and reason has created a state of
moral confusion where man is left without the guidance of either revelation or
reason. The result is the acceptance of a relativistic position which proposes
that value judgments and ethical norms are exclusively matters of taste or
arbitrary preference and that no objectively valid statement can be made in
this realm. But since man can not live without values and norms, this
relativism makes him an easy prey for irrational value systems. He reverts to a
position which the Greek Enlightenment, Christianity, the Renaissance, and the
eighteenth-century Enlightenment had already overcome. The demands of the
State, the enthusiasm for magic qualities of powerful leaders, powerful
machines, and material success become the sources for his norms and value
judgments.
Are we to leave it at that? Are we to consent to the alternative between
religion and relativism? Are we to accept the abdication of reason in matters
of ethics? Are we to believe that the choices between freedom and slavery,
between love and hate, between truth and falsehood, between integrity and
opportunism, between life and death, are only the results of so many subjective
preferences?
Indeed, there is another alternative. Valid ethical norms can be formed
by man’s reason and by it alone. Man is capable of discerning and making value
judgments as valid as all other judgments derived from reason. The great
tradition of humanistic ethical thought has laid the foundations for value
systems based on man’s autonomy and reason. These systems were built on the
premise that in order to know what is good or bad for man one has to know the
nature of man. They were, therefore, also fundamentally psychological
inquiries.
If humanistic ethics is based on the knowledge of man’s nature, modern
psychology, particularly psychoanalysis, should have been one of the most
potent stimuli for the development of humanistic ethics. But while
psychoanalysis has tremendously increased our knowledge of man, it has not
increased our knowledge of how man ought to live and what he ought to do. Its
main function has been that of “debunking”, of demonstrating that value
judgments and ethical norms are the rationalized expressions of irrational -
and often unconscious - desires and fears, and that they therefore have no
claim to objective validity. While this debunking was exceedingly valuable in
itself, it became increasingly sterile when it failed to go beyond mere
criticism.
Psychoanalysis, in an attempt to establish psychology as a natural
science, made the mistake of divorcing psychology from problems of philosophy
and ethics. It ignored the fact that human personality can not be
understood unless we look at man in his totality, which includes his need to
find an answer to the question of the meaning of his existence and to discover
norms according to which he ought to live. Freud’s “homo psychologicus” is just
as much an unrealistic construction as was the “homo economicus” of classical
economics. It is impossible to understand man and his emotional and mental
disturbances without understanding the nature of value and moral conflicts. The
progress of psychology lies not in the direction of divorcing an alleged
“natural” from an alleged “spiritual” realm and focusing attention on the
former, but in the return to the great tradition of humanistic ethics which
looked at man in his physico-spiritual totality, believing that man’s aim is to be himself and that the condition for
attaining this goal is that man be for
himself. [1]
I have written this book [2] with
the intention of reaffirming the validity of humanistic ethics, to show that
our knowledge of human nature does not lead to ethical relativism but, on the
contrary, to the conviction that the sources of norms for ethical conduct are
to be found in man’s nature itself; that moral norms are based upon man’s
inherent qualities, and that their violation results in mental and emotional
disintegration. I shall attempt to show that the character structure of the
mature and integrated personality, the productive character, constitutes the
source and the basis of “virtue” and that “vice”, in the last analysis, is
indifference to one’s own self and self-mutilation. Not self-renunciation nor
selfishness but self-love, not the negation of the individual but the
affirmation of his truly human self, are the supreme values of humanistic
ethics. If man is to have confidence in values, he must know himself and the
capacity of his nature for goodness and productiveness.
NOTES:
[1] A Master of
the Wisdom wrote: “It is divine philosophy alone, the spiritual and psychic blending of man
with nature, which, by revealing the fundamental truths, that lie hidden under
the objects of sense and perception, can promote a spirit of unity and harmony
in spite of the great diversities of conflicting creeds. (……) And this ethical
standard must be unflinchingly applied to daily life.” See the first lines in the text “Some
Words On Daily Life”, by “A Master of the Wisdom”, which can be found
at our associated websites. (CCA)
[2] “This book”, that is, “Man for Himself”.
(CCA)
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In September 2016, after
a careful analysis of the state of the esoteric movement worldwide, a group of students
decided to form the Independent Lodge of
Theosophists, whose priorities include the building of a better future in
the different dimensions of life.
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