To Have or To Be? (Continuum Impacts)
The modern sense of activity makes no distinction between activity and mere busyness.
Erich Fromm • To Have or To Be? (Continuum Impacts)
Tennyson, as we see him in his poem, may be compared to the Western scientist who seeks the truth by means of dismembering life.
Erich Fromm • To Have or To Be? (Continuum Impacts)
During courtship neither person is yet sure of the other, but each tries to win the other. Both are alive, attractive, interesting, even beautiful—inasmuch as aliveness always makes a face beautiful. Neither yet has the other; hence each one’s energy is directed to being, i.e., to giving to and stimulating the other. With the act of marriage the si
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Love and marriage. Ouch.
they constantly change their egos, according to the principle: “I am as you desire me.”
Erich Fromm • To Have or To Be? (Continuum Impacts)
For Aquinas, too, the life devoted to inner stillness and spiritual knowledge, the vita contemplativa, is the highest form of human activity. He concedes that the daily life, the vita activa, of the average person, is also valuable, and it leads to well-being (beatitudo), provided—and this qualification is crucial—that the aim toward which all one’
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I've still never read Aquinas. May have to...
Heraclitus’ and Hegel’s radical concept of life as a process and not as a substance is paralleled in the Eastern world by the philosophy of the Buddha. There is no room in Buddhist thought for the concept of any enduring permanent substance, neither things nor the self. Nothing is real but processes.3 Contemporary scientific thought has brought abo
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From the footnote here:- Z. Fišer, one of the most outstanding, though little-known, Czech philosophers, has related the Buddhist concept of process to authentic Marxian philosophy. Unfortunately, the work has been published only in the Czech language and hence has been inaccessible to most Western readers. (I know it from a private English translation.)- Fromm, Erich. To Have or To Be? (Continuum Impacts) (p. 202). Open Road Media. Kindle Edition.It appears that none of this Czech's works available even today in English. Bummer!
the Shabbat is a day of truce in the human battle with the world. Even tearing up a blade of grass is looked upon as a breach of this harmony, as is lighting a match. Neither must social change occur. It is for this reason that carrying anything on the street is forbidden (even if it weighs as little as a handkerchief), while carrying a heavy load
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the industrial age has indeed failed to fulfill its Great Promise, and ever growing numbers of people are becoming aware that: Unrestricted satisfaction of all desires is not conducive to well-being, nor is it the way to happiness or even to maximum pleasure.
Erich Fromm • To Have or To Be? (Continuum Impacts)
The deepest yearning of human beings seems to be a constellation in which the two poles (motherliness and fatherliness, female and male, mercy and justice, feeling and thought, nature and intellect) are united in a synthesis, in which both sides of the polarity lose their mutual antagonism and, instead, color each other.
Erich Fromm • To Have or To Be? (Continuum Impacts)
Faith, in the having mode, is a crutch for those who want to be certain, those who want an answer to life without daring to search for it themselves.