Wednesday, December 03, 2003

Erich Fromm on reason Posted here Wednesday, December 03, 2003 at 3:49:57 PM     Erich Fromm in Beyond the Cains of Illusion. I believe that the only force that can save us from self destruction is reason; the capacity to recognize the unreality of most of the ideas that man holds, and to penetrate to the reality veiled by the layers and layers of deception and ideologies; reason, not as a body of knowledge, but as a "kind of energy, a force which is fully comprehensible only in its agency and effects a force whose "most important function consists in its power to bind and to dissolve." (fn 1) Violence and arms will not save us; sanity and reason may. .... (footnote 1 from Ernst Cassirer, The Philosophy of the Enlightenment (Boston: Beacon Press, 1955), p. 13.) ********