Loving-kindness & altruism

Loving-kindness means simply: to be there for others voluntarily and selflessly – to listen, to lend a hand, not to leave someone alone. The technical term for it is altruism. At the Kyborg Institute we understand this as a practical, freely chosen value – no distant ideal and expressly no compulsion, but something that shows itself in concrete togetherness.

Altruism – simply explained

“Altruism” sounds academic, but means something quite everyday: selflessness. The word is even comparatively young. It arose in the 19th century as a counter-term to egoism, pure self-interest. The thing itself is ancient: in everyday language we call it loving-kindness.

What is meant is not the rare, heroic exceptional case, but the quite normal readiness to think, in everyday life, of the good of others too. Loving-kindness needs no grand programme – it begins in the near sphere, with the people one actually has to do with.

Voluntary – not compelled

The word was coined in 1851 by Auguste Comte, one of the founders of sociology, in his Système de politique positive. However useful the term: Comte’s programme of order we hold to be the wrong way – in it the individual is to fit into an order led from above, and an altruism understood thus easily becomes, from our point of view, a means of order and pressure instead of giving of one’s own free will. More under Altruism in Comte.

It is precisely here that Friedrich Nietzsche sets in: his critique of the “slave morality” and of the “ascetic priests” exposes a selflessness that demands self-loss and subordination. In Beyond Good and Evil (§ 55) he describes a “ladder of religious cruelty”: “in the moral epoch of mankind” people sacrificed “the strongest instincts” they possessed, their own “nature”. Against it he sets giving from abundance, the “bestowing virtue” – and he himself calls it a selfishness, one he names “hale and holy” (Thus Spoke Zarathustra I, “On the Bestowing Virtue”). What we call altruism from abundance, Nietzsche thus calls selfishness. Our own conclusion goes further than Comte, who held the benevolent inclinations to be innate but weak: the human being is fundamentally a prosocial being. Helpfulness therefore need not be compelled; it is already there.

Lived ethics instead of imposed morality

That true selflessness must come from within is also the core of D. Harald Alke’s work „Die Ethik des Neuen Menschen” (1993). He distinguishes clearly:

• Ethics is the inner, freely grown attitude that determines our dealings with others, with nature – and with ourselves.
• Morality is the rules set from outside, dependent on time and culture; they easily rigidify into prescriptions and fall apart under pressure and fear.

Laozi already put it in a nutshell: “The more the ethical order is lost, the more ordinances and laws are needed.” Genuine loving-kindness thus cannot be decreed – it grows out of an inner attitude. This is the bridge between the academic altruism research (which calls for a lived ethics of altruism instead of an imposed morality) and the spiritual tradition of the Kyborg Institute.

Helping lies in the human being’s nature

Helpfulness is nothing put on. Research from several fields – from behavioural biology to developmental psychology – shows prosocial, that is helpful, behaviour already in small children and in close relatives in the animal kingdom.

This view the Kyborg Institute has deepened scientifically: in his specialist book „Ausgewählte Perspektiven des Altruismus” (2017), Tobias Alke evaluated over 650 works from sociology, philosophy, anthropology, psychology and economics. His conclusion points away from the prescribed altruism that we see laid out in Comte’s programme of order and call collectivist – towards an individual, voluntary altruism, borne by foresight and by the fact that feelings are a compass for us for the sense of community (see empathy).

Self-care belongs to it

Loving-kindness is sometimes misunderstood as pure self-sacrifice. It is not that. At the Kyborg Institute a simple short formula holds:

“Do good, injure no one – not even yourself.” — D. Harald Alke, Die Ethik des Neuen Menschen

Whoever wants to be there for others in a lasting way must also care for themselves – otherwise one’s own strength runs empty. Self-care is therefore no contradiction to loving-kindness, but its precondition. In the specialist discussion too it holds: selflessness needs limits, otherwise it tips into self-loss. And genuine regard arises voluntarily – never through pressure, guilt or fear.

Community: giving as a cycle

Loving-kindness remains an idea as long as it has no place at which it becomes effective. This place is the community that strengthens us. In a stable environment of friends and relatives, mutual care becomes concrete – and it is precisely this environment that demonstrably contributes to well-being.

The sociologist Marcel Mauss already described giving and taking (reciprocity) as something that founds social cohesion. Whoever gives strengthens the surroundings by which they are themselves carried – care is not a one-way street, but a cycle in which all those involved become more stable.

Values instead of articles of faith

Loving-kindness is a term with a long religious history, yet it is not bound to a particular confession – and certainly not to its being compelled. As a basic ethical attitude it is found again in many traditions; related questions are treated by the entry religion.

To it belongs the thought of responsibility: that our action has consequences that work back on us. In the “Ethics of the New Human Being” this is described with the law of cause and effect – in many cultures called karma. Whoever gives good works beyond the moment. At the Kyborg Institute we therefore understand loving-kindness and altruism openly in worldview terms and voluntarily – as grounded values that one can examine and practise in one’s own life, independently of what one otherwise believes.

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By Tobias O. R. Alke, D. Harald Alke