An Inquiry Into Erich Fromm's Humanistic Ethics

As one of the most famous modern western humanitarian, Erich Fromm takes the existent state of people in 20th century as his observing and studyding object. By his critical eyes, Fromm scanned the modern capitalist societies represented by America and the people's conditions of existence living in it. Fromm has acute insight into the breakdown of the value of western societies and the all-sided dissimilation of people living in it through the appearance of the western societies'economic prosperity and material abundance. Fromm diagnosed that as sick society and morbid person, then delivered an thought-provoking plaint that modern western societies was moving into backslide and their people was sinking into depression. In order to help modern western societies change from sickness into sound and save western people from spiritual and moral crisis, Fromm critically absorbed the humanistic academic distillate of Freudian psychoanalytic theory, Marxist theory, the social critical theory of Frankfurt School. Basing on the combination of these ideas, Fromm established his new humanistic ethics. Fromm's humanistic ethics is committed to revealing the symptom of society and the dissimilation of person,and views the realization of "human freedom", "human liberation" and "human all-round development" and the construction of a right socity as the theoretical mission.This paper systematicly expatiates and analyses Fromm's ideas of humanitarianism around the main line of humanitarianism. Firstly, this paper discuss es Fromm's understanding of the concept of human and human nature, and his basic ideas about the good and evil of human nature which set out from the basic of Fromm's ideas of humanitarianism:the theory of human nature. Secondly, this paper expounds the main content of Fromm's ideas of humanitarianism:views of freedom, the theory of love, the ideas of overall dissimilation, and Fromm's discussion of the humanistic ethics. In the basic of analysing the morbidity of modern capitalist societies and the spiritual crisis of people living in it, this paper discusses Fromm's scheme of "right society" to resove these issues and the social reform measures to achieve that target. At last, this paper delivers an overall evaluation on Fromm's ideas of humanitarianism including the evaluation of the traits of his theory, the theory's significance, contribution and limitations.