"...freedom from the traditional bonds of medieval society, though giving the individual a new feeling of independence, at the same time made him feel alone and isolated, filled him with doubt and anxiety, and drove him into new submission and into a compulsive and irrational activity"
and
"..freedom has a twofold meaning for modern man: that he has been freed from traditional authorities and has become an 'individual,' but that at the same time he has become isolated, powerless and an instrument of purposes outside of himself, alienated from himself and others; furthermore, that this state undermines his self, weakens and frightens him, and makes him ready for submission to new kinds of bondage. Positive freedom on the other hand is identical with the full realization of the individual's potentialities, together with his ability to live actively and spontaneously."
Eric Fromm Escape from Freedom **************
>From http://www.infed.org/thinkers/fromm.htm
To Have or To Be (1976) was Erich Fromm's last major work. In it he argues that two ways of existence were competing for 'the spirit of mankind' - having and being. The having mode looks to things and material possessions and is based on aggression and greed. The being mode is rooted in love and is concerned with shared experience and productive activity. The dominance of the having mode (as he argued in The Anatomy of Human Destructiveness) was bringing the world to the edge of disaster (ecological, social and psychological). Erich Fromm argued that only a fundamental change in human character 'from a preponderance of the having mode to a preponderance of the being mode of existence can save us from a psychological and economic catastrophe' (1976: 165) and set out some ways forward.
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I find the arguments of Fromm, which were based on his own and his colleagues' social surveys and research at the University of Frankfurt during the Weimar Republic quite convincing in terms of explaining why it is that we haven't had the social revolution from class to classless society and why we seem to keep waiting for some Godot on a white horse "to spirit" us away to the New Jerusalem.
As for the "spirit of mankind", how about the Objective Spirit of humankind. ;p
Anyway, old Sartre said somewhere, "Men of my age are well aware of this fact: even more than the two world wars, the all-important thing in their lives has been a perpetual confrontation with the working class and with the ideology of the working class which afforded them an irrefutable vision of the world and of themselves. For us, Marxism is not merely a philosophy, it is the climate of our ideas, the environment that nourishes them, it is the movement of what Hegel calls the Objective Spirit."
Happy New Year LOBsters!
Mike B)
"Would you have freedom from wage-slavery.." Joe Hill http://www.shelfari.com/o1516968161
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