Erich Fromm on Existential Freedom

Hinzugefügt: 2026-05-07

[00:00:00]Hello my friend.

[00:00:02]Here is a video on Erich Fromm on existential freedom in my series to mark the publication of my book Beginning to Live, The Art of Existential Freedom.

[00:00:17]Now, Erich Fromm, 20th century humanistic psychoanalyst from the Frankfurt School, approached the concept of existential freedom not just as a philosophical gift, but as a challenge and a psychological burden.

[00:00:41]He made the distinction between two types of liberty, pretty crucial.

[00:00:50]And this underlies his whole theory of existential freedom.

[00:00:58]So, he recognized negative freedom from positive freedom.

[00:01:04]Negative freedom is freedom from something, the liberation from traditional authorities, such as the church, monarchs, feudal lords, prisons, a liberation from oppression, dominance.

[00:01:29]While this makes us independent to liberate ourselves in this way, it still leaves us free from a sense of belonging and could plunge us into negativity, isolation, and a sense of meaninglessness and insignificance in our life.

[00:01:53]Now, positive freedom for Fromm is the freedom to and that's the ultimate goal, to decide what you want to do with your ability for freedom, to act spontaneously and creatively, to integrate yourself with the world, and to love and work without sacrificing your integrity.

[00:02:22]Now, this whole idea of negative and positive freedom comes directly from Nietzsche. If you remember, Nietzsche's amor fati is exactly this. It is about freeing yourself from oppression and then taking authorship of your life and reaching out to surpassing yourself, to engaging with something more than you have been.

[00:02:54]And to love your life in all its manifestations. So, that is quite similar to Fromm.

[00:03:03]But Fromm looked much more carefully than Nietzsche at the way in which human beings have evolved and have gained more individual autonomy, more existential freedom, but have also, in doing so, lost the primary ties that gave us security in, say, the Middle Ages or the uh old times uh in Athens or Rome.

[00:03:37]That sense of belonging has gone and so people feel much more alone in a kind of moral isolation, in a kind of sense that they're only a small cog in an indifferent machine.

[00:03:57]And it also leads Fromm says to existential anxiety.

[00:04:03]So, instead of going with Heidegger on that or Kierkegaard, who say anxiety is always about your confrontation with death, Fromm sees that anxiety is generated not just by facing your own mortality, but by facing a void in your relationships, in society, and in your own life, and therefore a lack of capacity to make choices easily.

[00:04:37]So, because total freedom is so hard to bear and we feel so much existential anxiety, Fromm observed that there are three primary psychological escape routes from that anxiety.

[00:04:58]And he spoke about these three as follows. First, there is authoritarianism.

[00:05:06]Authoritarianism is not just about leaders and dictators wanting to take over a population, it is, Fromm showed, about the population the population itself and each of the individuals in that population or many of them to seek to fuse themselves with someone who seems very sure or something that is outside of themselves that is worth pledging themselves to.

[00:05:42]So, they seek a dictator-type leader.

[00:05:47]The more insecure they are, the more they want to be dominated.

[00:05:53]This is very much the same observation as Hannah Arendt made as well about what happens in totalitarian states.

[00:06:06]And leaders can exploit this insecurity in people and give them something very specific to believe in, which usually has to be very simplified and dumbed down because that is what people seek, something that speaks to their lowest instincts and makes them feel the most secure. So, if they're being spoken to as children, they will tend to go along with that and appreciate that because it takes away their anxiety about having to do something with their existential freedom. So, that was authoritarianism.

[00:06:49]The second way in which people go is into destructiveness when they feel existentially anxious. They attempt to overcome the feeling of powerlessness by destroying things instead of creating them because destruction is straightforward and very easy to do. You can destroy a building in an hour when it has taken years to build it.

[00:07:22]So, the more powerless people feel, the more they will tend to turn to destruction rather than creativity.

[00:07:32]And it is very important to show people the path towards using their power, using their existential freedom in a positive and a creative way.

[00:07:45]The third mechanism Fromm recognized was that of automaton conformity.

[00:07:53]So, that is the most common modern escape, he thought. We stop being ourselves and adopt the personalities offered to us by cultural patterns.

[00:08:07]So, we buy into certain created identities and become very extreme about holding onto those identities because they give us reassurance at not having to reinvent ourselves and use our own freedom in a responsible way. So, we end up thinking, feeling, and wanting what other people do. Fashion has a role to play in that as well.

[00:08:40]There is a lot of trouble there. All these things are bad ways for freedom to be used. Fromm's answer was that instead, we should reclaim our capacity for spontaneity and being ourselves in an authentic way.

[00:09:01]Not to act on every whim, but to engage in productive work and unselfish love.

[00:09:10]Those were the two things. And of course, work and love is also what Freud recognized were the ways in which we made sense of life in the end. So, that was quite a psychoanalytic view because that's how we bridge the gap between ourselves and the world and a way of using our existential freedom.

[00:09:34]Fromm said, "There's only one meaning in life, the act of living itself. And if we don't find the meaning of life through thought alone, we have to create it in a courageous practice of being ourselves, but also by finding a way to being ourselves in connectivity with the whole of humanity and I would add in this day and age to the whole of the universe or the multiverse.

[00:10:13]So from still very relevant today has a lot to say that makes sense.