Fromm linked materialist happiness to a critique of unconscious religiosity
Evidence
At around the same time as work on the joint volume on Authority and the Family was being completed in New York, Fromm sent one of his chatty, thoughtful letters to Horkheimer from his holiday resort at Lake Louise in Canada. He had been thinking over many things: masochism, materialism, religion. Just as materialism was connected with the realization of happiness, religion was connected with masochism. … The analysis of the unconsciously religious person therefore seems to me to be one of the central psychological problems, an outcome and continuation of the critique of religion in the eighteenth and nineteenth centuries … I think it would be extremely productive if we could work together on these matters during the coming winter. It can be seen ever more clearly that, whatever the problem we start from, we find ourselves coming back more and more often to the same central insights … especially now, in peace and quiet, I feel quite strongly how productive and stimulating this last year of our work together has been. — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 627
Categorization
- SEED: Fromm’s pairing (unconscious religiosity as the modern continuation of 18th-19th century critique of religion) is a viable essay angle on how secularization rerouted rather than ended religious need.
- XREF: connects to: The Dialectic of Enlightenment questioned whether happiness is separable from terror — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 1410; Schopenhauerian finitude consciousness grounded Horkheimer’s historical-materialist critique — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School: Its History,…, 203
Broader Connections
- The Dialectic of Enlightenment questioned whether happiness is separable from terror
#complicates(0.75) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 1410 - Schopenhauerian finitude consciousness grounded Horkheimer’s historical-materialist critique
#expands(0.70) — Rolf Wiggershaus, The Frankfurt School, 203