Work · Socialism, Anarchism, Marxism & Critical Theory
To Have or to Be?
Two modes of existence: the having mode defines us by what we own, the being mode by what we do and share – with Eckhart, Marx and the Buddha as witnesses.
Introduction
Fromm’s last major book, published in 1976 in English and German, brings together his humanist psychoanalysis and his social criticism. In the having mode we treat the world, other people, knowledge and even ourselves as possessions; the being mode consists in active, shared experience – learning, loving, remembering, conversing – rather than passive consumption. Fromm opens with a contrast between a poem by Tennyson, who plucks a flower to know it, and a haiku by Bashō, who only looks. He argues that industrial consumer society systematically cultivates having and ends with proposals for a society of the “new human being”, with industrial democracy and limits on consumption. The book became a bestseller, especially in West Germany.
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