In his work “Analysis of Man”, the philosopher Erich Fromm defends the character as being the matter of Ethics, because when analyzed as a whole it offers a basis for making valid statements about actions isolated.
He defends the importance of making a distinction between character and temperament so that the difference in value is no longer attributed to the difference in temperament, as this has already led to the extermination of people and peoples because their predominant temperaments diverged from those that were considered suitable.
Personality it is the totality of inherited and acquired psychic qualities that characterize an individual and make him original. Temperament it refers to the way of reacting, which is unconstitutional and immutable. Character is essentially formed by people's experiences, especially in childhood, and modifiable, to some extent, by new experiences.
Erich Fromm's characterology has its fundamental basis in relationshipperson-world, in the processes of assimilation and socialization. The character system is the basis of adjustment of the individual to society and may be the equivalent in men of instinct in animals.
Thus, we can understand that the child is shaped by the character of his parents. Parents and their methods of education they are determined by the social structure of the culture, and therefore many members of a social class or culture may share significant elements of character. In other words, the child acquires the character that will make him want to do what he has to do in the society in which he is inserted.
We can understand what Fromm calls the social character as a common denominator between the intrinsic characteristics of the individual and their culture. The social character should not be understood as something fixed and immutable, but as a person's reaction to opportunities and external impositions that society offers to meet needs existential.
There is also the individual character, what distinguishes the person from the rest of the members of the same culture. The individual character stems from several factors: the parents' personality, their physical, psychic, material and temperament differences, for example. This makes each person perceive the world in a way.
Fromm groups social orientations together in order to explain them better. It is important to emphasize that the character of a concrete individual is the mixture of some of these orientations and the predominance of one is due, above all, to the culture in which the individual lives. The first division he makes is between those that have productive guidance and those who have unproductive orientation.
within the Unproductive Orientations are at receptive guidance, a exploratory orientation, a cumulative orientation and the mercantile orientation. Let's understand each of them:
At receptive guidance, the person thinks that the “source of all good” is outside of himself and believes that the only way to get what he wants is to receive it from an outside source. In other words, they think they can't do anything without help and, therefore, they expect everything to be done by others, decreasing the participation in the activity itself.
At exploratory orientation, as well as the receptive, the basic premise is the feeling that the source of all good is outside and that the person himself can produce nothing. Unlike the receptively oriented person, the exploratively oriented person does not expect to receive things from others but rather to take them.
At cumulative orientation, spending or making are considered a threat and in their relationships with others they are prone to distrust. From an “immaterial” point of view, intimacy is a threat; alienation or possession means security. They always live with the intention of accumulating the maximum and spending the minimum, whether material or sentimental.
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THE mercantile orientation, predominant in “modern” culture, Fromm analyzes more carefully. A person with a mercantile orientation has the impression that he is a commodity himself and his success depends on knowing how to sell his abilities, on knowing how to impress. Your self-esteem depends on the value they attach to it, so it only presents its salable part.
The premise of this orientation is emptiness, the absence of any specific quality that is not changeable, as any unchanging trait may clash with market demands. It is always necessary to “be in fashion” in the personality market, it is necessary to adapt to the type of personality that is being most sought after.
References to this most valued type at the time (recall that Fromm wrote this work in the 1940s) are found in the media, as the author himself points out: “magazines, newspapers, news and cinema show, with many variations, the descriptions and images of the lives of those who were successful” (p.68).
Here is the recipe for what it should look like and what attitudes are desirable if you want to gain money and power. These models are equivalent to the saints, concretely showing the norms through their success. What differentiates people is their market price and as peculiarities are worthless, they become synonymous with oddities.
Intelligence is evaluated according to the criteria of mental accumulation, not in terms of critical thinking and understanding. what matters is accumulate as much knowledge as possible as quickly as possible., to meet the demands of a market in which knowledge has become a commodity and thought is an instrument to produce results. This can be clearly seen in the experiences we have in relation to education: “From primary school to higher education courses, the purpose of learning is to gather as much information as possible that is above all useful” (P. 72).
Fromm's other critique of modernity appears when he presents a counterpoint to various types of unproductive orientation. His criticism is the fact that in the 20th century there is no longer any concern to describe a model of a good man and society, restricting his criticism. Psychoanalysis itself, according to him, analyzed in detail the neurotic character, “but the character of a normal, mature and healthy personality was not taken into account” (p. 77).
In making this counterpoint, instead of analyzing the neurotic character, he intends to investigate the nature of the character fully developed that serves as a model for human development, which is the ideal of ethics humanist.
THE productive personality orientation it refers to man's ability to use his strength and to realize his potential, because the productivity for the author is nothing but the “accomplishment, due to the potential that characterizes it, it is the use of its powers” (p. 81). The author presents the difference between productivity and activity:
a) “a person can be active, without being its real actor” (p. 79), such as when you are hypnotized;
b) an activity can be a reaction motivated by demands;
c) the activity can be submitted to an authority;
d) the activity can be the “automaton activity”, that is, it can be submitted to an anonymous authority (public opinion, cultural standards, science, etc.);
e) the activity can be driven by irrational passions.
We can understand the difference between productivity and activity as follows: even if activities such as those described above, can lead the person to material success, this does not mean that he was productive, as he was acting irrationally and/or submissive.
FROMM, Erich. The analysis of man. Rio de Janeiro: Zahar, 1974
By Wigvan Pereira
Graduated in Philosophy
