The Art of Being

by Erich Fromm

Virtually anything can be possessed if a person orients his way of life toward having. The issue is not whether one does or does not have something, but rather whether a person’s heart is set on what he or she does or does not have. Orientation toward not-having is a having orientation, too. Fromm is not advocating asceticism; orientation toward “being” is precisely what is not identical with orientation toward “not-having.” The perpetual question concerns the position that having or not-having holds in the determination of one’s purpose in life and in the determination of one’s own identity.

It is often difficult to distinguish whether someone possesses something in the having mode of existence or, to quote Fromm, whether someone “possesses as if he were not possessing.” Yet each person can quickly test himself or herself by asking what he or she finds particularly valuable, thereby getting an idea of what would happen if he or she were to lose what was important and valuable: whether he or she would lose the ground from under his or her feet and whether life would then become meaningless. If one can then no longer feel any self-reliance or self-value (intrinsic to oneself), if life and work are no longer worth anything, then one is determining life according to an orientation toward having: having a fine vocation, obedient children, a good rapport, profound insights, better arguments, and so forth.

Love, reason, and productive activity are one’s own psychic forces that arise and grow only to the extent that they are practiced; they cannot be consumed, bought, or possessed like objects of having, but can only be practiced, exercised, ventured upon, performed. In contradistinction to objects of having—which are expended when they are used up—love, reason, and productive activity grow and increase when they are shared and used.

Therein lies the reason that all great teachers of man have arrived at essentially the same norms for living, the essence of these norms being that the overcoming of greed, illusions, and hate, and the attainment of love and compassion, are the conditions for attaining optimal being.

The goal of living as it is understood in the following pages can be postulated on different levels. Most generally speaking, it can be defined as developing oneself in such a way as to come closest to the model of human nature (Spinoza) or, in other words, to grow optimally according to the conditions of human existence and thus to become fully what one potentially is; to let reason or experience guide us to the understanding of what norms are conducive to well-being, given the nature of man that reason enables us to understand (Thomas Aquinas).

In all these teachings, inner liberation—freedom from the shackles of greed and illusions—is inseparably tied to the optimal development of reason; that is to say, reason understood as the use of thought with the aim to know the world as it is and in contrast to “manipulating intelligence,” which is the use of thought for the purpose of satisfying one’s need. This relation of freedom from greed and the primacy of reason is intrinsically necessary. Our reason functions only to the degree to which it is not flooded by greed. The person who is the prisoner of his irrational passions loses the capacity for objectivity and is necessarily at the mercy of his passions; he rationalizes when he believes he is expressing the truth.

The outer chains have simply been put inside of man. The desires and thoughts that the suggestion apparatus of society fills him with, chain him more thoroughly than outer chains. This is so because man can at least be aware of outer chains but be unaware of inner chains, carrying them with the illusion that he is free. He can try to overthrow the outer chains, but how can he rid himself of chains of whose existence he is unaware?

There is no contact between human beings that does not affect both of them.

our whole social system rests upon the fictitious belief that nobody is forced to do what he does, but that he likes to do it. This replacement of overt by anonymous authority finds its expression in all areas of life: Force is camouflaged by consent; the consent is brought about by methods of mass suggestion.

The conclusion from all these considerations is that the most important step in the art of being is everything that leads to and enhances our capacity for heightened awareness and, as far as the mind is concerned, for critical, questioning thinking. This is not primarily a question of intelligence, education, or age. It is essentially a matter of character; more specifically, of the degree of personal independence from irrational authorities and idols of all kinds that one has achieved.

People are afraid to concentrate because they are afraid of losing themselves if they are too absorbed in another person, in an idea, in an event. The less strong their self, the greater the fear of losing themselves in the act of concentration on the non-self. For the person with a dominant having orientation this fear of losing oneself is one of the main factors that operates against concentration.

There is still another reason why people are afraid of concentrating: They think that concentrating is too strenuous an activity and that they would get tired quickly. In fact the opposite is true, as anyone can observe in oneself. Lack of concentration makes one tired, while concentration wakes one up.

A person who has not been completely alienated, who has remained sensitive and able to feel, who has not lost the sense of dignity, who is not yet “for sale,” who can still suffer over the suffering of others, who has not acquired fully the having mode of existence—briefly, a person who has remained a person and not become a thing—cannot help feeling lonely, powerless, isolated in present-day society. He cannot help doubting himself and his own convictions, if not his sanity. He cannot help suffering, even though he can experience moments of joy and clarity that are absent in the life of his “normal” contemporaries. Not rarely will he suffer from a neurosis that results from the situation of a sane man living in an insane society, rather than that of the more conventional neurosis of a sick man trying to adapt himself to a sick society.

What can I know of myself as long as I do not know that the self I do know is largely a synthetic product; that most people—including myself—lie without knowing it, that “defense” means “war” and “duty” submission; that “virtue” means “obedience” and “sin” disobedience; that the idea that parents instinctively love their children is a myth; that fame is only rarely based on admirable human qualities, and even not too often on real achievements; that history is a distorted record because it is written by the victors; that over-modesty is not necessarily the proof of a lack of vanity; that loving is the opposite of craving and greed; that everyone tries to rationalize evil intentions and actions and to make them appear noble and beneficial ones; that the pursuit of power means the persecution of truth, justice and love; that present-day industrial society is centered around the principle of selfishness, having and consuming, and not on principles of love and respect for life, as it preaches. Unless I am able to analyze the unconscious aspects of the society in which I live, I cannot know who I am, because I don’t know which part of me is not me.

Assuming I wake up in the morning and see a blue sky and a shining sun, I am fully aware of the scenery, it makes me happy and more alive, but the experience is an awareness of the sky, of my response to it, and no words come to mind such as: “This is a beautiful sunny day.” Once those words form, and I begin to think about the scenery in these words, the experience has somewhat lost in intensity. When, instead, a melody comes to my mind that expresses joy, or a painting that expresses the same mood, nothing of the experience is lost. The boundary between awareness of feeling and expression of feeling in words is very fluid. There is the completely non-verbalized experience, and close to it the experience in which a word appears like a vessel that “contains” the feeling and yet does not contain it, for the feeling is constantly flowing and it overflows the vessel. The word-vessel is more like a note in a musical score, which is a symbol for a tone but not the tone itself. The feeling may be still more closely related to the word, but as long as the word is still a “living word,” it has done little harm to the feeling. But there comes a point where the word becomes separated from the feeling, i.e., also from the speaking person, and at this point the word has lost its reality, except as a combination of sounds. Many people experience this change. They were aware of a strong, beautiful—or frightening—experience. A day later, when they want to remember it by putting it into w...

Physical effects (results) are no longer proportionate to human effort, and this separation between effort (and skill) and result is one of the most significant and pathogenic features of modern society, because it tends to degrade effort and to minimize its significance.

Man today, wearing the mask of a giant, has become a weak, helpless being dependent on the machines he made, and hence on the leaders who guarantee the proper functioning of the society that produces the machines, dependent on a well-functioning business, frightened to death of losing all the props, of being “a man without rank and without title,” of just being, of being challenged by the question “Who am I?” In summary, modern man has many things and uses many things, but he is very little. His feelings and thinking processes are atrophied like unused muscles. He is afraid of any crucial social change because any disturbance in the social balance to him spells chaos or death—if not physical death, the death of his identity.

Let us assume man to be man, and his relation to the world to be a human one. Then love can only be exchanged for love, trust for trust, etc. If you wish to enjoy art you must be an artistically cultivated person; if you wish to influence other people you must be a person who really has a stimulating and encouraging effect upon others. Every one of your relations to man and to nature must be a specific expression, corresponding to the object of your will, of your real individual life. If you love without evoking love in return, i.e., if you are not able, by the manifestation of yourself as a loving person, to make yourself a beloved person, then your love is impotent and a misfortune.[xliii]

Speaking about “functional property” first, it is clear that I can own no more than I can reasonably use. This coupling of owning and using has several consequences: (1) My activity is constantly stimulated, because having only what I use, I am constantly stimulated to be active; (2) The greediness to possess (avarice) can hardly develop, because I can only wish to have the amount of things that fit my capacity to use them productively; (3) I can hardly develop envy since it would be useless to envy another for what he has when I am busy using what I have; and (4) I am not worried by the fear of losing what I have, since functional property is easily replaceable.

Narcissism is an orientation in which all one’s interest and passion are directed to one’s own person: one’s body, mind, feelings, interests, and so forth.

For the narcissistic person, only he and what concerns him are fully real; what is outside, what concerns others, is real only in a superficial sense of perception; that is to say, it is real for one’s senses and for one’s intellect. But it is not real in a deeper sense, for our feeling or understanding. He is, in fact, aware only of what is outside, inasmuch as it affects him. Hence, he has no love, no compassion, no rational, objective judgment. The narcissistic person has built an invisible wall around himself. He is everything, the world is nothing. Or rather: He is the world.

Similar yet quite different from narcissism are egotism and selfishness, the results of the property, or having, mode of existence. A person living in this mode is not necessarily very narcissistic. He may have broken through the shell of his narcissism, have an adequate appreciation of reality outside himself, not necessarily be “in love with himself”; he knows who he is and who the others are, and can well distinguish between subjective experience and reality. Nevertheless, he wants everything for himself; has no pleasure in giving, in sharing, in solidarity, in cooperation, in love. He is a closed fortress, suspicious of others, eager to take and most reluctant to give. He represents, by and large, the anal-hoarding character. He is lonely, unrelated, and his strength lies in what he has and in the security of keeping it.

We become “interested” in the world outside of our ego in the literal meaning of interest, which comes from the Latin inter esse, i.e., “to be among” or “to be over there,” rather than to be shut in within oneself. This development of “interest” can be compared to a situation in which a person has seen and can describe a swimming pool. He has spoken about it from the outside; his description has been correct, yet without “interest.” But when he has jumped into the pool, and when he has become wet and then speaks about the pool, he speaks as a different person about a different pool. Now he and the pool are not opposing each other (although they have not become identical, either). The development of interest means to jump and not to remain an outsider, an observer, a person separated from what he sees.

To sum up once more: Awareness, will, practice, tolerance of fear and of new experience, they are all necessary if transformation of the individual is to succeed. At a certain point the energy and direction of inner forces have changed to the point where an individual’s sense of identity has changed, too. In the property mode of existence the motto is: “I am what I have.” After the breakthrough it is “I am what I do” (in the sense of unalienated activity); or simply, “I am what I am.”