Metaphysical Ethics and the Non-Theistic Mystical Tendency

Abstract

Erich Fromm explains man’s objectless urge for harmony in Escape from Freedom ¹ as arising from his partial liberation from the clutches of Nature which yet holds tight the lower animals. This urge is nostalgia for the lost home where, in the heart of Nature like other organic beings, content with the given, incapable of wishing what the world could not afford, man obeyed the instinctual which was absolute in his consciousness. Fromm observes in terms of the biblical myth that human history began with man’s expulsion from Paradise, the world of obedience, when by an act of choice he defied Nature, asserted his freedom and harboured longings which the universe could not fulfil. Since then he has ceased to be a citizen of Nature and become like Prometheus a prisoner in chains. In his longings he has risen above its inertia. But he has still no absolutely independent being. He is alienated on the earth, but has no home anywhere else. Nature’s rigid order is lost to him, but the world harmonious with his cravings is powerless to be born. His being in the world makes existence a discord. He realizes that to be human is to languish like an unwanted exile upon this dead planet.