Leaving home: Erich Fromm, Katherine Dunham, and unfolding humanism

This article explores the lives and friendship between Erich Fromm (1900–1980) and Katherine Dunham (1909–2006), alongside their parallel philosophies and practice of “humanism.” The German Jewish scholar Erich Fromm was a Frankfurt School Critical Theorist, Marxist philosopher and organizer, psychoanalyst, and deeply influenced by Jewish philosophy, among other traditions. The African American scholar Katherine Dunham was a pioneering anthropologist, dancer, choreographer, and civil rights/freedom activist. The article offers a brief introduction on Fromm’s and Dunham’s lives and relationship, exploring a common thread in each: the need to leave home, travel, and embrace a more expansive world. The humanist thought and practice of each thinker is then explored. Fromm’s humanism is expressed in his theory of human nature, his clinical work, his activism, and his philosophy of education and social change. Dunham’s humanism is expressed both in her theory and practice of dance, as well as in her politics, pedagogy, and anthropological methods. Interweaving the contextual work of biography and history with the large philosophical questions to which each thinker speaks through their dialectic of locatedness and partial transcendence of location, each thinker is shown to demonstrate a humanism that acts as an embodied faith in the unfolding of human potential. In each thinker, humanism reveals a dialectical unity of sameness and otherness that is expressed in a hope found in productiveness and aliveness, in the whole person (rational, embodied, connected) and in community.