Mutual Aid as a Factor of Evolution
For Marx, the human being is fundamentally a social being. We need other people not because they are means of satisfying our desires, but simply because a human being is human—and achieves full humanity only through connection with others. Goethe wrote: “A person knows oneself only insofar as one knows the world. One becomes aware of the world only within oneself, and of oneself only within the world.”
Erich Fromm put it this way: “A fully developed and therefore healthy person is a productive person—someone who is genuinely interested in the world and responds to it” (E. Fromm, Beyond the Chains of Illusion, pp. 85–88).
Sources
- Erich Fromm — Beyond the Chains of Illusion: My Encounter with Marx and Freud, pp. 85–88 — the source of the ideas from Marx, Goethe, and Fromm quoted above.
- The post title alludes to Peter Kropotkin's Mutual Aid: A Factor of Evolution (1902); the book is not the source of the quoted passage.
Questions about this article
01Why is connection with other people essential to human development?
People become fully human not in isolation but through connection with others: relationships are not merely means of satisfying desires, but the setting in which self-knowledge, knowledge of the world, and a productive response to it become possible.
02How are self-knowledge and knowledge of the world connected?
In Goethe's idea quoted by the post, a person knows the self through the world and the world through inner experience; the two processes cannot be separated.