uence this universe, not by supplication, but by action. And now again this consciousness of man’s harmonious relationship with the universe, with society and with his fellow men, can be actualized, and again not through supplication but through the deed.
Though never so powerful materially and technologically, Western democracy, with its concern for the sacredness of the human person gone astray, has never before been so seriously threatened, morally and spiritually. National security and individual freedom are in ominous conflict. The possibility of a universal community and the technique of degradation exist side by side. There is no doubt that evil is accumulated among men in their passionate desire for unity. And yet, confronted with this evil which had split, isolated and killed the living reality, confronted with death, man, from the very depths of his soul, cries out for “the unmediated whole of feeling and thought” and for the possibility to reassemble the fragments, to restore unity through justice. Christianity in history could only reply to this protest against evil by the Annunciation of the Kingdom, by the promise of Eternal Life—which demanded faith. But the spiritual and moral suffering of man had exhausted his faith and his hope. He was left alone. His suffering remained unexplained.
However, man has now reached the last extremity of denigration. He yearns to consecrate himself. And so, among the spiritual and moral ruins of the West and of the East a renaissance is prepared beyond the limits of nihilism, darkness and despair. In the depths of the Western and Eastern spiritual night, civilization with its many faces turning toward its source may rekindle its light in an imminent new dawn—even as in the last book of Revelation which speaks of a Second Coming with a new heaven, a new earth and a new religious quality of life.
And I saw a new heaven and a new
earth: for the first heaven and the
first earth were passed away….52
In spite of the infinite obligation of men and in spite of their finite power, in spite of the intransigence of nationalisms, and in spite of spiritual bereavement and moral amnesia, beneath the apparent turmoil and upheaval of the present, and out of the transformations of this dynamic period with the unfolding of a world-consciousness, the purpose of World Perspectives is to help quicken the “unshaken heart of well- rounded truth” and interpret the significant elements of the World Age now taking shape out of the core of that undimmed continuity of the creative process which restores man to mankind while deepening and enhancing his communion with the universe.
Ruth Nanda Anshen
New York, 1956
1 Cf. a more detailed study of sadism and masochism in E. Fromm, Escape from Freedom, Rinehart & Company, New York, 1941.
2 2Spinoza, Ethics IV, Def. 8.
3 3Cf. a detailed discussion of there character orientations in E. Fromm, Man for Himself. Rinehart & Company, New York, 1947, Chap. III, pp. 54-117.
4 Compare the definition of joy given by Spinoza.．．網．
5 “Nationalokonomie und Philosophie,” 1844, published in Karl Marx’ Die Fruksckriften, Alfred Kroner Verlag, Stuttgart, 1953, pp. 300, 301, (My translation, E.F.)
6 I, Bable, The collected Stories, Criterion Books, New York, 1955.
7 The above statement has an important implication for the role of psychology in contemporary Western culture While the great popularity of psychology certainly indicates an interest in the knowledge of man, it also betrays the fundamental lack of love in human relations toady. Psychological knowledge thus becomes a substitute for full knowledge in the act of love, instead of being a step toward it.
8 R.A. Nicholson, Rumi, George Allen and Unwin, Ltd. London, 1950, pp. 122-3.
9 9Freud himself made first step in this direction in his later concept of the life and death instincts. His concept of the former (eros) as a principle of synthesis and unification is on an entirely different pla