Activity and Busy-ness #068

Erich Fromm on being truly active

Hey, welcome back to everyone! My name is Andy. I'm a philosophy lecturer and today we want to ask the question: What does it actually mean to be active? What is real activity and what is an empty kind of activity that is actually only keeping us busy? Erich Fromm, the famous psychoanalyst and philosopher, makes this distinction between activity and busyness where he writes business with "busy" and then a hyphen and "Ness." So, not like we write business normally but really as a combination of the two words busy and Ness. And with this, he wants to emphasize that very often what we talk about as business or as being busy is just an empty way of being busy without actually being active.

And what does it mean to be active? Fromm writes, and I will read you this:

Activity in the modern sense refers only to behavior, not to the person behind the behavior. It makes no difference whether people are active because they're driven by an external force like a slave, or by internal compulsion like a person driven by anxiety. It does not matter whether they're interested in their work like a carpenter, a creative writer, a scientist, or a gardener, or whether they have no inner relation to and satisfaction in what they are doing, like the worker on the assembly line or the postal clerk.

So, this is one problem with this idea of activity, that whatever reason makes you active, whether it is the pathology of your anxiety or whether it is a slave owner who keeps you enslaved and makes you work, it all counts as activity.

This is the first problem in seeing people as active: in reality, we should not call people who are driven by compulsion or by others to work in particular ways active, because they're not realizing actively anything of their own personality. Fromm wants to emphasize that as human beings, we should really focus on activity that expresses our own humanity. And he says: To be active means to give expression to one's faculties, talents, to the wealth of human gifts with which, though in varying degrees, every human being is endowed. That means to renew oneself, to grow, to flow out, to love, to transcend the prison of one's isolated ego, to be interested, to give.

Yet, none of these experiences can be fully expressed in words. And he goes back to a concept that comes from Marx about alienation. We've talked about it in a previous video. Alienation is this idea that a worker is forced to do some repetitive kind of activity as part of their work, and normally you think of a factory where a worker is always doing one little part of a job and he never feels connected to the product because the product is something that is much bigger than his own contribution. And so the worker will never feel responsible for the result, for the outcome of this work. The factory produces the shoe, not the individual worker who only presses a button.

This alienation causes the worker to lose a feeling for the meaning of his life and for the meaning of his work. We spend hours and hours every day, in total you know, one-third of our lives at work, doing something that is not something that we understand or that we can identify with or that we even want to do in many cases. So Fromm writes about that: In alienated activity, I do not experience myself as the acting subject of my activity. Rather, I experience the outcome of my activity and that as something over there, separated from me and standing above and against me. In alienated activity, I do not really act. I am acted upon by external or internal forces. I have become separated from the result of my activity.

I think the important point here is what he said, this sentence: I am acted upon by external or internal forces. So, the force that moves me is not something that comes out of me, but I am like a puppet controlled by strings that somebody else is pulling. It can be internal forces, it can be anxiety, it can be fear. Again, it's not me, it's the fear that controls me. If I really wanted to be free, to be active rather than just busy fulfilling somebody else's activity, here is what this would look like.

Fromm writes:

In non-alienated activity, I experience myself as the subject of my activity. Non-alienated activity is a process of giving birth to something, of producing something, and remaining related to what I produce. This also implies that my activity is a manifestation of my powers and that I and my activity and the result of my activity are one. I call this non-alienated activity productive activity.

And this is what we should perhaps try to aim for in our lives. This is what you can, if you want, perhaps have a look today in your own life: where is your life controlled by busyness that is external, that forces you to do particular things that are not your choice? And where in your life do you actually have pockets of real personal, free activity that is fulfilling and that is meaningful to you? And I don't think Fromm wants us to destroy our lives and just quit our jobs and live on the street. This is not the point. But if you realize that there is this tension between the two, you can perhaps try to expand the pockets of real activity and reduce your reliance on these busy-ness activities that we are forced to do but they don't originate in our will.

So, for example, you could expand your hobbies. You could wake an hour earlier and use this hour to do something that really matters to you rather than just waking up in order to immediately jump to the office and do something that does not matter to you. So, let us have a look at these two types of activity and I will see you next time.