Happiness and the art of living in Erich Fromm

For Fromm, happiness is the criterion of excellence in the art of living, it is virtue in the humanistic sense, the full development of one's personality and productivity, it is the result of giving birth to oneself, in becoming what one we are in potency. If living is an art, our masterpiece is our own personality. Difficult task and the most important, since it must be done while preserving our own integrity, spending our energies to increase our powers, to love, to create, to think.

By spending our energies in this way, we feel joy, referring to a singular act, being happiness those continuous experiences of joy, those little joys of which Hermann Hesse spoke, which is the best proof that we live authentically. That joy is an internal triumph, a creative effort, the joy that accompanies all creative effort in thinking, feeling and acting, is not simply, as pleasure, a release of tension to satisfy a physiological or psychological need, but a phenomenon of abundance, maturity and joy.

The unbridled search for pleasure is born of a phenomenon of scarcity, lack of productivity and inner security and joy that comes from productive love. In this sense, joy is a phenomenon linked to freedom, not to necessity, to productivity, not to impotence and dependence, but to power and independence. A creative act, not submission to the inexorable fate of necessity.

Happiness reveals the well-being of the person as a whole, being a reflection of the increase in their vitality, the intensity of their passions, their thoughts and their love of life, on the contrary, unhappiness goes hand in hand with the decrease in creative abilities, vitality, passions and thoughts.

The mental health for Fromm is the attraction for life and everything that contributes to its growth, the pathological, on the contrary, is the attraction for everything that is harmful to the total personality, the unconscious efforts that produce the blockade and stop the development of the person, which would be the essence of masochism. Moral masochism, which is more encompassing than sexual, is the desire to be psychically damaged, humiliated and dominated, while its counterpart, moral sadism is, therefore, the desire to dominate, harm and humiliate.

To need what is harmful and prejudicial is the essence of mental illness, as is the case with people who suffer from an addictive disorder or people who submit to the authority of a leader, or powerful figure, cowardly renouncing their freedom. In that sense, pleasure can be linked to the pathological and be in contradiction with the true interests of the human being, as seen in the consumption of drugs or in the fascist and communist collective phenomena.

A person who lives to satisfy the norms of universal ethics, whose purpose is the development and growth of the human being, will achieve happiness and meaning in his life, but that achievement will depend on the courage that the human being has to be himself and being for himself.

References:
Fromm, Erich (1947). Man for himself, an inquiry into the psychology of ethics.