Snippets from Erich Fromm’s book, “To Have or to Be”
Unrestricted satisfaction of all desires is not conducive to well-being, nor is it the way to happiness or even to maximum pleasure. pg12
To be an egoist refers not only to my behaviour but to my character. It means: that I want everything for myself; that possessing, not sharing, gives me pleasure; that I must become greedy because if my aim is having, I am more the more I have; that I must feel antagonistic towards all others: my customers whom I want to deceive, my competitors whom I want to destroy, my workers whom I want to exploit. I can never be satisfied, because there is no end to my wishes; i must be envious of those who have more and afraid of those who have less. But I have to repress all these feelings in order to represent myself (to others as well as to myself) as the smiling, rational, sincere, kind human being everybody pretends to be. pg15-16
Greed and peace preclude each other. pg 16
Idiomatic Changes
A certain change in the emphasis on having and being is apparent in the growing use of nouns and the decreasing use of verbs in Western language in the past few centuries. A noun is the proper denotation for a thing. I can say that I have things: for instance that I have a table, a house, a book, a car. The proper denotion for an activity, a process, is a verb: for instance I am, I love, I desire, I hate, etc. Yet ever more frequently an activity is expressed in terms of having; that is, a noun is used instead of a verb. But to express an activity by to have in connection with a noun is an erroneous use of language, because processes and activities cannot be possessed; they can only be experienced. pg 29
Contemporary Usage
During the two hundred years since Du Marais, this trend of the substitution of nouns for verbs has grown to proportions that even he could hardly have imagined. Here is a typical, if slightly exaggerated, example of today’s language. Assume that a person seeking a psychoanalysts help opens the conversation wit the following sentence: ‘Doctor, I have a problem; I have insomnia. Although I have a beautiful house, nice children, and a happy marriage, I have many worries.’ Some decades ago, instead of ‘I have a problem’, the patient probably would have said, ‘I am troubled’; instead of ‘I have insomnia’, ‘I cannot sleep’; instead of ‘I have a happy marriage’, ‘I am happily married’.
The more recent speech style indicates the prevailing high degree of alienation. By saying ‘I have a problem’ instead of ‘I am troubled’, subjective experience is eliminated: the I of experience is replaced by the it of possession. I have transformed my feeling into something I possess: the problem. But ‘problem’ is an abstract expression for all kinds of difficulties. I cannot have a problem, because it is not a thing that can be owned; it, however, can have me. That is to say, I have transformed myself into ‘a problem’ and am now owned by my creation. This way of speaking betrays a hidden, unconscious alienation. pg 31
Yet the linguistic history of ‘having’ indicates that the word is indeed a problem. To those who believe that to have is a most natural category of human existence it may come as a surprise to learn that many languages have no word for ‘to have’. In Hebrew, for instance, ‘I have’ must be expressed by the indirect form jesh li (‘it is to me’). In fact languages that express possession in this way, rather than by ‘I have’, predominate. pg 32
The attitude inherent in consumerism is that of swallowing the whole world. pg 36
Learning
Students in the having mode of existence will listen to a lecture, hearing the words and understanding their logical structure and their meaning and, at best they can, will write down every word in their looseleaf notebooks – so that, later on, they can memorise their notes and thus pass an examination. But the content does not become part of their own individual system of thought, enriching and widening it. Instead, they transform the words they hear into fixed clusters of thought, or whole theories, which they store up. The students and the content of the lectures remain strangers to each other, except that each student has become the owner of a collection of statements made by somebody else (who had either created them or taken them over from another source).
Students in the having mode must have but one aim: to hold on to what they ‘learned’