One can be productively related to the world by acting and by comprehending. Man produces things, and in the process of creation he exercises his powers over matter. Man comprehends the world, mentally and emotionally, through love and through reason. His power of reason enables him to penetrate through the surfaces and to grasp the essence of his object by getting into active relation with it. His power of love enables him to break through the wall which separates him from another person and to comprehend him. Although love and reason are only two different forms of comprehending the world and although neither is possible without the other, they are expressions of different powers that of emotions and that of thinking.
Productive Love
Genuine love is rooted in productiveness and may properly be called, therefore, "productive love". Productive love is rooted in care, responsibility, respect and knowledge.
Care and responsibility denote that love is an activity and not a passion by which one is overcome, nor an effect which one is "affected by".
It is believed that to fall in love is already the culmination of love, which actually it is the beginning and only an opportunity for the achievement of love. It is believed that love is the result of a mysterious quality by which two people are attracted to each other, and event which occurs without effort. Indeed, man's loneliness and his sexual desires make it easy to fall in love and there is nothing mysterious about it, but it is a gain which is as quickly lost as it has been achieved. One is not loved accidentally; one's own power to love produces love - just as being interested makes one interesting.
To love a person productively implies to care and to feel responsible for his life, not only for his physical existence but for the growth and development of all his human powers. To love productively is incompatible with being passive, with being an onlooker at the loved person's life; it implies labor and care and responsibility for his growth.
Love for mankind is looked upon as an achievement which, at best, follows love for one individual. To love one person productively means to be related to his human core, to him as representing mankind. Love for one individual, in so far as it is divorced from love for man, can refer only to the superficial and to the accidental; of necessity it remains shallow. All men are in need of help and depend on one another. Human solidarity is the necessary condition for the unfolding of any one individual.
Love is the productive form of relatedness to to others and to oneself. It implies responsibility, care, respect and knowledge and the wish for the other person to grow and develop. It is the expression of intimacy between two human beings under the condition of the preservation of each others's integrity.
Productive Thinking
Most of our thinking is necessarily concerned with the achievement of practical results, with the quantitative and superficial aspects of phenomena without inquiring into the validity of implied ends and premises and without attempting to understand the nature and quality of phenomena.
Reason involves a third dimension, that of depth, which reaches to the essence of things and processes. While reason is not divorced from the practical aims of life, it is not a mere tool for immediate action. Its function is to know, to understand , to grasp to related oneself to things by comprehending them. It penetrates through the surfaces of things in order to discover their essence, their hidden relationships and deeper meanings, their "reason". It is, as it were not two dimensional but "perspectivistic", to use Nietzsche's term; i.e., it grasps all conceivable perspectives and dimensions, not only the practically relevant ones. Being concerned with the essence of things does not mean being concerned with something "behind" things, but with the essential, with the generic and the universal, with the most general and pervasive traits of phenomena, freed from the superficial and accidental aspects.
Characteristics of Productive Thinking -
1. In productive thinking subject is not indifferent to his object but is affected by and concerned with it. On contrary, the subject is intensely interested in his object, and the more intimate this relation is, the more fruitful is his thinking. It is this very relationship between him and his object which stimulates his thinking in the first place. To him a person or any phenomenon becomes and object of thought because it is an object of interest, relevant from the standpoint of his individual life or that of human existence. A beautiful illustration of this point is the story of Buddha's discovery of the "fourfold truth". Buddha saw a dead man, a sick man, and old man. He, a young man, was deeply affected by the inescapable fate of man, and his reaction to his observation was the stimulus for thinking which resulted in his theory of nature of life and the ways of man's salvation. His reaction was certainly not the only possible one. A modern physician in the same situation might react by starting to think of how to combat death, sickness, and age, but his thinking would also be determined by his total reaction to his object. In the process of productive thinking the thinker is motivated by his interest for the object; he is affected by it and reacts to it; he cares and responds. This aspect of productive thinking expresses the subjective aspect of being related to the object of thought, in true sense.
2. Productive thinking is also characterized by objectivity, by the respect the thinker has for his object, by his ability to see the object as it is and not as he wishes it to be. The point 1 and point 2, expresses the polarity between objectivity and subjectivity is characteristic of productive thinking as it is of productiveness in general. To be objective is possible only if we respect the things we observe; that is, if we are capable of seeing them in their uniqueness and their interconnectedness. This respect is not essentially different from the respect we discussed in connection with love; in as much as I want to understand something I must be able to see it as it exists according to its own nature; while this is true with regard to all objects of thought, it constitutes a special problem for the study of human nature.
Another aspect that must be present in objective thinking about living an non living objects : that of seeing the totality of a phenomenon. If the observer isolates one aspect of the object without seeing the whole, he will not properly understand even the one aspect he is studying. This point has been emphasized as the most important element in productive thinking by Wertheimer, "Productive Processes", he writes, "are often of this nature: in the desire to get a real understand, re-questioning and investigation start. A certain region in the field becomes crucial, is focused; but it does not become isolated. A new, deeper structural view of the situation develops, involving changes in functional meaning, the grouping, etc, of the items. In this entire way of thinking, tow directions are involved : getting a whole consistent picture, and seeing what the structure of the whole requires for the parts".
Objectivity requires not only seeing the object as it is but also seeing oneself as one is, i.e. being aware of the particular constellation in which one finds oneself as on is, i.e., being aware of the observer related to the object of observation. Productive thinking, then, is determined by the nature of the object and the nature of the subject who relates himself to his object in the process of thinking. This twofold determination constitutes objectivity, in contrast to false subjectivity in which the thinking is not controlled by the object and thus degenerates into prejudice, wishful thinking, and phantasy. Objectivity does not mean detachment. It means respect; that is, the ability not to distort and to falsify things, persons, and oneself.
3. Integration of objectivity and subjectivity - All productive thinking is stimulated by the interest of the observer. It is never an interest per se which distorts ideas, but only those interests which are incompatible with the truth, with the discovery of the nature of the object under observation.
4. Crippling of productive activity results in either inactivity or overactivity. Hunger and force can never be condition for productive activity. On the contrary, freedom, economic security, and an organization of society in which work can be the meaningful expression of man's faculties are the factors conducive to the expression of man's natural tendency to make productive use of his powers. Productive activity is characterized by the rhythmic change in activity and repose. Productive work, love and thought are possible only if a person can be, when necessary, quiet and alone with himself. To be able to listen to oneself in prerequisite for ability to listen to to others; to be at home with oneself is the necessary condition for relating oneself to others.
5. One has to save oneself from symbiotic attachments in the name of love. While symbiotic relationship is one of closeness to and intimacy with the object, although at the expense of freedom and integrity.
6. One has to guard himself from withdrawal and destructiveness. The feeling of individual powerlessness can be overcome by withdrawal from others who are experienced as threats. To a certain extend withdrawal is a part of the normal rhythm in any person's relatedness to the world, a necessity for contemplation, for study, for reworking of materials, thoughts, attitudes. Its emotional equivalent is the feeling of indifference towards others, often accompanied by a compensatory feeling of self-inflation. Withdrawal and indifference can, but need not, be conscious; a matter of fact, in our culture they are mostly covered up by superficial kind of interest and sociability. Destructiveness is the active form of withdrawal.
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PS - This is an abstract from the book - Man for himself - An enquiry into the psychology of ethics, by Erich Fromm.
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