Vital Spirits of Nature and Their Effect upon the Philosophy of Francis Bacon Book

Interesting but defective. Fromm tries to sketch an ethical system that is both objective and humanistic. That is, he believes that morality should derive from mankind's true nature and objective needs, but that we should get it from ourselves rather than from some transcendent authority. This project is self-defeating.

In the first place, Fromm's quest for objectivity devolves into a new kind of authoritarianism. Fromm believes that social scientists, especially psychologists (such as Fromm himself, to no one's surprise) are the ones who can identify what human nature is and how human needs are to be properly fulfilled. In other words, psychologists are supposed to assume precisely the same ethical authority that priests and kings wield. Priests and kings pronounce for the good of humanity too. When they claim divine authority, they're just claiming to represent the most objective and rational being in the universe, the one Person who can say what human nature and needs really are. They often go wrong, if you ask me, but so do psychologists. Why should I trust the latter more than the former?

Throughout the book, Fromm tries to disguise his authoritarianism by cloaking it with such magic question-begging words as "productive," "potential," "human," and especially "rational." For example: "Rational authority has its source in competence. ... its acceptance depend[s] on its performance." (9) This tells me nothing. For in Fromm's system, the only way to figure out whether the psychologists are "performing rationally" is to ask psychologists. No one else would necessarily know. Being frequently trapped in irrational ways of thinking, we often don't recognize our own needs, and we're not allowed to appeal to any (other) authority for ethical guidance. If I am trapped in "masochistic" thinking, as Fromm says I probably am, then how am I even supposed to tell whether a psychologist is competent? Perhaps she's just gratifying my self-loathing in especially clever ways.

Second, Fromm relies heavily on equivocation. In particular, he deliberately conflates the concepts of a man and mankind. (We see this ambiguity even in the title.) This allows him to dismiss the possibility that two individuals can have conflicting genuine interests. In other words, Fromm writes as if the existence of a common human nature -- an essential similarity between a man and mankind -- means that individuals' true interests are in harmony. In fact, it suggests the opposite. The more similar two people are, the more likely they are to clash over a finite resource, and the harder it will be for anyone to settle their claims in a way that will satisfy both. To be valid, ethics must deal with the fact that individuals are separate entities with equal competing claims. Fromm never faces this fact.

Third, this same equivocation forces Fromm to slip (without admitting it) into ethical egoism. His prime moral principle boils down to enlightened self-interest. Claiming that the good of mankind and the good of the individual are one and the same, Fromm denies both the possibility and the rightness of any sort of altruism. In fact, he condemns it. He condemns the idea of sacrificing one's own needs to those of others, and he insists that the true needs of the individual and the true needs of mankind are identical. That is solipsism, not objectivity. It not only remakes man in Fromm's image, but denies that there is any purpose in human life independent of Fromm's.

Let me boil this down to a single hypothetical scenario. Suppose I give up my life to save the life of someone else. In doing this, I am not defending my enlightened self-interest; I am instead giving up my self entirely. I am obeying a perceived higher moral principle, one that permits and even encourages me to terminate my own "human potential." (For there is nothing in my personality or in human psychology to suggest that my internal purpose is to die young. On the contrary, self-preservation is about as basic a natural impulse as I can think of. The justification for dying young, thwarting my internal purposes, must come from outside of me.) In such a case, either my self-sacrifice is evil, or Fromm's ethical system is false.

Given my own objective, rational study of centuries' worth of recorded human self-examination on the subject of self-sacrifice, I am inclined toward the latter conclusion.