To be or to have, according to Erich Fromm

Eric Frommpsychoanalyst, social psychologist and humanist philosopher, wrote the book Have or be?constituting a philosophical and psychosocial analysis of contemporary society. In it, he describes how people and societies have evolved in the face of two orientations, the orientation of being and that of having. Below, we show you their main differences.

Currently, we live in a society that increasingly requires more production, whether of material goods or internal processes, of a biological or behavioral nature. It seems that if someone does not submit to this compliance with internalized rules, which emerged with industrialization, they do not have and, therefore, they are not.

However, production, the essence of industrialization, is not synonymous with productivity. For Fromm, productivity does not mean doing the greatest number of things in the shortest time possible, nor achieving some achievements, nor having certain virtues.

Productivity has more to do with what is not seenour history, what we think, how we position ourselves in any dilemma, the decisions we make, but taking into account a certain result or an end to be achieved. It is a process of being.

Eric Fromm

The orientation of being

This focus on each person’s being is a maxim of individuality, in opposition to egocentrism, typical of the orientation of having. Throughout its pages, Erich Fromm warns against confusing individuality with egocentrism and vice versa.

In contrast to the period of preindustrialization, you no longer have to live, now you live to have. The evolution of industrial society involved reifying values ​​that previously belonged only to the orientation of being, and now belong to the orientation of having.

From the orientation of beingwe are not defined by our car, our job or our physical appearance, nor our abilities, our defects and not even our virtues linked to achievement or success. We are more than that.

At the essence of being, you can be happy with who you are, but not with what you have. You are essentially more than what you have or what you do. The orientation of being means being faithful to our history, idiosyncrasy, way of thinking, and, therefore, not changing to an orientation of having, typical of extreme materialism.

The orientation of having

Eric Fromm placed the orientation to having, instead of to being, as the basis of consumer behavior or consumerism and warned of the consequences of consumerism in the realization of being. This means that, if you do not have “X” thing, the human condition no longer exists; a criticism that he reiterates throughout the book, under the humanist foundation, which conceptualizes, pardon the redundancy, in the right to be of the human being, free of material conditions.

Another consequence that derives from the having orientation is the Equation of humanism with animalism. Erich Fromm criticized the infantilized posture of the human being, whose life process was exclusively that of having.

At a social level, Erich Fromm considered that excessive organization of public affairs culminates in the organization of the superficial, detracting from the development of the individual himself and his processes; that is, limiting the development of being, through a reduction in having. For this reason, he criticized Western culture whose life process was that of having.

Instead of being worth what we have, we must think about the premise of being worth what I am. Thus, your purposes, decisions, values ​​such as loyalty, commitment, understanding, how you help, etc., would say more about you than what you have, whether material or immaterial goods.

Confusion in language, origin of analysis

The interchangeable use of these verbs and the disastrous consequences of their confusion were recognized in the 18th century through Du Marais. We can have a clock, and this refers to the having orientation, but if we say that we have an idea, it does so in the being orientation. and not of having.

Through the psycholinguist Chomsky, Fromm points out that this confusion – in psychological terms – has been occurring for 200 years, and that this tendency to substitute nouns –referring to possession– for verbs, has become more frequent and intense, fueled by the need for consumption.

In the orientation of being, a competence or a disability does not identify us, because we are much more than that. We are our exclusive story of our own being; For this, Fromm said that it is important to refer to having and not to being when one has, for example, a skill or disability..

Likewise, he called commercial characterto those non-material possessions, such as personal characteristics that are valued upwards in the market and that everyone should follow, forgetting the concept of individuality.

Philosophical bases of the orientation of being vs. have

The process, activity and movement as an element of being, It assumes that the idea of ​​being implies constant change, as Heraclitus and Hegel expressed.. His formulations defended being as a process and not as a substance, differentiating them from Plato, Parmenides and the scholastics. Due to this changing character of being and not so focused on having, the principles of the former were similar to those of Eastern philosophy.

For Buddha, nothing is permanent, nor durable, neither for the self, nor for things. The only thing permanent are the processes. The importance of the orientation of the self can be seen in that scientific thinking has produced a revival of the philosophical concepts of the process perspective by discovering them and applying them to the natural sciences.

According to this perspective, knowledge begins with the destruction of illusions, with disillusionment –entäuschung– which has been a concept studied as a way to access knowledge. As we observe, the influence of thought on the orientation of the being has to do with processes that are often not seen as latent or unconscious in the individual or in societies.

The knowledge of the origin and potentiality of being, according to Erich Fromm

For Erich Fromm, it is necessary know the origin of the being regardless of its nature. By knowing the origin of the being we can get to know our strengths and weaknesses. Fromm, influenced by Freud, was aware of many of the limits of orthodox psychoanalysis, as well as its potential, and therefore, considered this an efficient tool in terms of the work of psychoanalysis. be repressed.

However, knowing the origin of the being is not decisive, and anticipating cognitive psychology, he defended the greater importance of thought and cognitive schemes, as a prelude to other processes such as emotional ones.

Regarding the potentiality of being, Fromm defended the need to promote it and also recognized that the path of contemporary society would represent an obstacle to that potentiality, due to the desire for values ​​limited to materialism. In his social analysis, he defended that societies and politics have a real dialogue, in order to preserve the potentiality of being and individual freedoms or rights. Among them, Food and truthful communication were considered essential for the potentiality of the being.

Be, have and do

Master Eckart went one step further and I considered that we are not what we have; neither what we do. For him, human beings should not consider so much what they should do, but rather what they are.

A concept, linked to this line of thought of the German mystic Eckart, often forgotten in Western society, is what Fromm appeals to throughout his work: the structure of having. The structure of having refers to the means or way to achieve certain goals..

Although Erich Fromm appears distant with absolutisms, religions and different ideologies, such as the linking of the New Testament to the birth of the Church, recognizes the philosophical and anthropological legacy of Christianity in relation to humanist values ​​and the detachment of having.

Homer’s Iliad is a description of glorified conquerors and thieves. Agamemnon strips the protagonist of Achilles’ arms, using her power. The characteristics of the martyr have always been being, giving and sharing, while those of the hero have been the opposite, such as having and exploiting. This has happened in the formation of many societies throughout history, and in their teachings, which is why they are a valuable source of learning.

We may be living in consumerist materialism – of goods and securities– or in iron pragmatism, in which we forget the philosophy of giving, without expecting anything returned. And maybe, thinking that we win, in that search for profit, we actually lose part of our treasure.

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