Deconstructing the Beauty of Love Language from Fromm’s and Rumi’s Perspective

Abstract

This study explored the ways in which Eric Fromm (1900-1980) and Jalal al-Din Rumi (1207-1273) theorize love language as an ontological and practical centripetal force and inquired about their convergence offering contemporary world reflections of isolation, alienation, commodification, and fragile emotional attachments. By employing philosophical and theoretical hermeneutics approach grounded in Gadamer’s (2006) fusion of horizons along with Braun and Clarke’s (2024) reflexive thematic analysis of primary texts (Fromm’s The Art of Loving and To Have or To Be? And Rumi’s Mathnawi and Divan-i Shams in English translation), the study compared the two thinkers across seven analytical dimensions. Despite different lexical choices, one adopted a psychoanalytic-humanist approach and the other more of a Sufi-theistic approach. But both thinkers treated love as the response to human separation, a paradox of union lacking erasure of difference, a disciplined practice rather than a passive sentiment, a counterforce to the possessive, market-driven disposition, and an ethic that ranged afar the beloved to the humanity all together. There was a clear manifestation of similarity in their philosophy of love despite the East and the West cultural gap as well as the centuries’ gap between the two, while some divergences related to eventuality of love purpose and the status of the self in union were also identified. The study proposed a Love-as-a-practice convergence model that systematically connects Eastern mystical and Western humanistic traditions. This study offered textual resources for comparative religious philosophy, spiritual studies, psychology of human connections, and intercultural dialogue. It is hoped that the study makes its readers aware of the experiential value of love in the postmodern world which is full of paradoxes.