Abstract
I employ the arguments of Erich Fromm and Kurt Wolff to enhance Habermas’s ideas. Erich Fromm’s ideas assert that certain modes of human conduct, such as freedom to be materialistic, distances people from the profundities of being, creating a shallow humanity that becomes fixated with commodities and goods. The chapter highlights an ironic consequence of democratic systems made visible by Fromm: that when there is a surfeit of freedom, people retreat from it because such a freedom also offers an overload of decision-making dynamics. By doing so, they blindly defer to an authoritarian personality or institutions that provide dramatic answers and reassurances that make decisions for them. In this chapter, the trinity of the media, market, and medicine is rendered into such an authority. Yet transcendence from this epiphany, can be found in the ideas of Kurt Wolff, harnessed in the chapter to enhance Habermas’s and Fromm’s ideas. Wolff asserts that the experience of life epiphanies is catalytic in providing a high degree of personal truth for those that experience them. Through his surrender and catch thesis, Wolff argues that exceptionally profound moments in the human condition inspire protagonists to confront the meaning of existence in ways that allow them to self-actualize. The significance and utility of Wolff’s surrender and catch thesis cannot be overemphasized: many Café attendees only found their mettle to live well after exceptionally close encounters with dying, encounters that declutter life so as to unearth the lucidity and courage needed to continue living.
This is a preview of subscription content, log in via an institution to check access.
Access this chapter
Tax calculation will be finalised at checkout
Purchases are for personal use only
Notes
- 1.
The Comintern, or Communist International, was an international Communist organization. Initially founded by Vladimir Lenin in 1919. Its main agenda was to create an internationalized movement to overthrow the world’s bourgeois (capitalist) class. Although dissolved in 1943, the onset of the Cold War allowed its resurrection by many Third World nationalists who embraced socialism to fight and end colonial rule in their respective countries.
- 2.
Wolff (1962) concedes that “surrender” implies “passivity” and of “giving up,” but reminds readers that this is an issue of semantics. Indeed, Wolff critiques other terms that allude to surrender, terms such as “abandonment” (which is not ideal because “it suggests a dissoluteness quite alien to surrender”), “exposure” (“…but this has a gratuitous ring of voyeurism”), and “devotion” or “dedication” (“…these limit the meaning of surrender to an attitude and inappropriately introduce a moral note”) (Wolff 1962: 21–22).
References
Backhaus, Gary, and George Psathas. 2007. The Sociology of Radical Commitment: Kurt H. Wolff’s Existential Turn. Lanham: Lexington Books.
Bauman, Zygmunt. 2000. Liquid Modernity. Cambridge: Polity.
Bauman, Zygmunt. 2004. Wasted Lives: Modernity and its Outcasts. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Beck, Ulrich. 1992. Risk Society: Towards a New Modernity. London: Sage Publications.
Fong, Jack. 2014. “The Role of Solitude in Transcending Social Crises–New Possibilities for Existential Sociology.” In A Handbook of Solitude: Psychological Perspectives on Social Isolation, edited by Robert Coplan and Julie Bowker, 499–516. Hoboken, NJ: Wiley-Blackwell Publishers.
Fromm, Erich. 1969. Escape from Freedom. New York: Henry Holt and Company, LLC.
Fromm, Erich. 2012. To Have or To Be. London: Bloomsbury Publishing.
Giddens, Anthony. 1990. Consequences of Modernity. Cambridge: Polity Press.
Giddens, Anthony. 1991. Modernity and Self-Identity. Self and Society in Late Modern Age. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press.
Godway, Eleanor. 2007. “Surrender and Catch and the Question of Reason: Kurt Wolff and John Macmurray.” In The Sociology of Radical Commitment: Kurt H. Wolff’s Existential Turn, edited by Gary Backhaus and George Psathas, 77–91. Lanham: Lexington Books.
Gordon, Joy. 2007. “Kurt Wolff’s Work and its Place in Twentieth Century Social Thought.” In The Sociology of Radical Commitment: Kurt H. Wolff’s Existential Turn, edited by Gary Backhaus and George Psathas, 64–69. Lanham: Lexington Books.
Horkheimer, Max, and Theodor W. Adorno. 1972. Dialectic of Enlightenment. New York: Continuum.
Imber, John. 2007. “Kurt H. Wolff and Sociology.” In The Sociology of Radical Commitment: Kurt H. Wolff’s Existential Turn, edited by Gary Backhaus and George Psathas, 69–75. Lanham: Lexington Books.
Kalberg, Stephen. 2007. “Kurt Wolff’s Epistemology of the Heart.” In The Sociology of Radical Commitment: Kurt H. Wolff’s Existential Turn, edited by Gary Backhaus and George Psathas, 78–80. Lanham, MD: Lexington Books.
Koestler, A. 1966. Dialogue with Death. New York: McMillan.
Marcuse, Herbert. 1964. One Dimensional Man. Boston: Beacon Press.
Mills, Kelley, T. 2012. “Letters of Milada Horáková” Center for History and New Media. WEBSITE accessed on April 22, 2014. http://chnm.gmu.edu/wwh/d/25/wwh.html.
Nietzsche, F. 2006a. Human, All too Human. Objective Systems Pty Ltd ACN.
Nietzsche, F. 2006b. Thus Spoke Zarathustra. Cambridge, UK: Cambridge University Press.
Oxley, Peter. 2006. Cosmic Time. BBC
Rinpoche, Soygal. 2012. The Tibetan Book of Living and Dying. San Francisco: Harper.
Stehr, Nico. 2007. “How I Came to Sociology and Who I Am: A Conversation with Kurt H. Wolff.” In The Sociology of Radical Commitment: Kurt H. Wolff’s Existential Turn, edited by Gary Backhaus and George Psathas, 37–61. Lanham: Lexington Books.
Tiryakian, Edward. 1962. Sociologism and Existentialism: Two Perspectives on the Individual and Society. New Jersey: Prentice Hall.
Tolle, Eckhart. 2008. A New Earth: Awakening to Your Life’s Purpose. London: Penguin.
Wolff, Kurt. 1976. Surrender and Catch: Experience and Inquiry Today. Dordrecht, Holland: D. Reidel Publishing Company.
Wolff, Kurt H. 1962. “Surrender and Religion.” Journal for the Scientific Study of Religion 2(1): 36–50.
Wolff, Kurt H. 1974. Trying Sociology. New York: John Wiley & Sons.
Author information
Authors and Affiliations
Rights and permissions
Copyright information
© 2017 The Author(s)
About this chapter
Cite this chapter
Fong, J. (2017). Enhancing Habermas with Erich Fromm and Kurt Wolff. In: The Death Café Movement. Palgrave Macmillan, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54256-0_5
Download citation
DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-319-54256-0_5
Published:
Publisher Name: Palgrave Macmillan, Cham
Print ISBN: 978-3-319-54255-3
Online ISBN: 978-3-319-54256-0
eBook Packages: Social SciencesSocial Sciences (R0)