For Erich Fromm (1900-1980), the German-American psychologist, love is active power, where one preserves one’s own integrity. Love helps overcome separation and anxiety, stimulates union. Love is part of a need to know, to know someone else or self. It is a moment of knowledge of oneself and other humans, all humans. Knowledge comes from the experience of union. 

Knowledge acquired from love based on empathy. Common experiences stimulate empathy. To empathize is to gain knowledge by means of re-experiencing what another experiences, or recalling in the past a similar experience. Empathy is the act of extending my feelings, my sensations, my awareness, my feelings, my memory, to another person. Empathy requires self knowledge. It is a process of self affirmation. 

Love is an act of will, a decision, a judgment. Love is oneness. To love God is an act not a thought. Love is a joining or sharing from a center of existence. Faith is based on awareness of love within oneself. 

Love is an extension outward in an act of certainty in one’s experience, in the unity one feels based on empathy with other people, a certainty that means one’s love is not wasted. It is also a search for knowledge by extending oneself out, to discover, to know.

For Fromm, as humans distance themselves more from nature so that they rely less on instinct unlike their animal counterparts, they fear the separateness that this distance from nature brings upon them. They try to fill in the gap of this separateness by artificial associations, work, corporate units, being like everyone else, keeping up with what everyone else possesses. In so doing a person fools themselves into thinking they will be less alone. They also fool themselves into thinking that the equality of everyone doing and having the same thing makes them feel complete. Only love can make a person complete. 

“Mature love is union under the condition of preserving one’s integrity, one’s individuality. Love is an active power in man.” This involves giving. “In the very act of giving, I experience my strength, my wealth, my power. . . . I experience myself as overflowing, spending, alive, hence as joyous. . . . In the act of giving lies the expression of my aliveness.”

Love involves responsibility, a voluntary act to extend out to another, to recognize the value and worth of the other, whether it is a child, mate, or anonymous human. To respect them requires knowing them. 

Love allows for a union in a way that thought and knowledge cannot do.

Hence knowledge is not just what one thinks, consciously knows, but also what one feels, what is perhaps inexpressible but one knows nevertheless. I know another person over time by their likes and dislikes. I increasingly can predict how they might respond to a given situation. In the process of induction and deduction on my part, of observation and experience over time, I learn the character and traits of the other. But the more I know, intuit, the more I empathize. To empathize depends on my objective knowledge of the character and personality, from which subjective knowledge stems. I know a person’s feelings because I feel them too. The only way to know another person, therefore, is through love; otherwise it is superficial. To love is the willingness to extend myself out to someone, to relinquish myself totally in a desire to know what they are feeling, to give my support, my knowledge, my experiences, to them. This is empathy, an extension of my cares, my loves, my desires, concerns, fears, experiences to another. I am driven to this by feeling, of love.

From argues the love is not just a relationship to another but “an attitude, an orientation of character which determines the relatedness of a person to the world as a whole, not toward one ‘object’ of love”–to love only one person is only a “symbiotic attachment or an enlarged egotism.” Regarding all humans, all other life, the more one knows, penetrates to the core, the more one finds not differences, but sameness, hence the ability to empathize. 

To have this ability of empathy implies self-love, that one has penetrated their own feelings, thoughts, past, to know, to understand. There is a desire to go beyond oneself to achieve “transcendence” with the other–nature, humans, God. Love is “respect for one’s own integrity and uniqueness, love for and understanding of one’s own self,” which “cannot be separated from respect and love and understanding for another individual.”

Erotic love is to know a person completely, to their being, their self, and hence to know the being of other humans in general. 

Love of God is the search to know God, to do so involving thought, but more, feeling, not contemplation but action. The more one loves others, the more one has acted upon love, hence the more one loves God, who is the Creator of all. “Love of God is an intense feeling experience of oneness, inseparably linked with the expression of this love in every act of living.”

Love also involves humility. To love is to realize that one is not omnipotent, omniscient, hence narcissistic, but one knows what one does not know. 

Love helps us to develop faith, not belief, rather faith in oneself, something pervading one’s whole being, an attitude toward life. 

Faith is awareness “of existence of a self, of a core in our personality which is unchangeable and which persists throughout our life in spite of varying circumstances, and regardless of certain changes in opinions and feelings.” Such faith allows a person to know their ability to love. “To love means to commit oneself without guarantee, to give oneself completely in the hope that our love will produce love in the loved person. Love is an act of faith.”

Fromm appears to have professed himself nonreligious, but I find in reading his book that many of his ideas seem very familiar to the work of the Medieval German Christian mystic, Meister Eckhart.