Read online fromm to be or to have. To have or to be

Modern society can easily be called a consumer society. Many people are addicted to the things they buy. They strive to possess more prestigious, expensive goods and begin to associate their importance with these things. But do things characterize a person’s personality? Only to a small extent. But are they capable of making a person truly happy? For some, maybe yes, but in most cases it is just an illusion of happiness. In the book “To Have or to Be?” Erich Fromm discusses these topics. The key question is included in the title of the book, and it is so complex and multifaceted that discussions about it took up an entire book.

A philosopher and sociologist who wanted the world to take a better path, Erich Fromm wondered what was more important for a person. Is it so important to have material possessions, a lot of things, or a few very expensive things? Maybe a person should appreciate the very opportunity to live, enjoy every day he lives, the opportunity to be here and now? The author of the book expresses his thoughts on these issues. He also talks about joy and pleasure, which only at first seem similar, and talks about other serious issues. The life of each person is not considered separately, it is closely intertwined with the life of the entire society, industrialization and the development of science. It’s difficult to say where all this might lead, but from the book you can find out what Erich Fromm thinks about this.

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Erich Fromm.

TO HAVE OR TO BE?

Erich Fromm

To have or to be?

"Nika-Center"
"Vist-S"
Kyiv 1998

Preface

In this book I revisit two major themes that I have explored in previous works. Firstly, I continue my research in the field of radical humanistic psychoanalysis, paying special attention to the analysis of egoism and altruism - the two main orientations of character. In the third part of the book, I continue to develop a theme that was touched upon in the books "A Healthy Society" and "Revolution of Hope", namely: crisis modern society And possible ways overcoming it. Of course, it is likely that I will repeat some thoughts expressed earlier, but it seems to me that the new point of view underlying this work, as well as the fact that I have expanded the scope of my previous concepts in it, will serve as compensation even for those who is familiar with my previous works.

The title of this book almost coincides with the title of two previously published books: “To Be and to Have” by Gabriel Marcel and “Having and Being” by Balthasar Steelin. All these books are imbued with the spirit of humanism, but their approach to the problem is completely different. Thus, Marcel views it from theological and philosophical points of view; Steelin's book is a constructive discussion of materialism in modern science and a unique contribution to Wirklichkeitsanalyse 1 ; this book contains an empirical psychological and social analysis of two ways of existence. I recommend the books of Marcel and Steelin to those who are seriously interested in this topic. (Until recently I did not know that it was published English translation Marcel's books, and read the wonderful translation made by Beverly Hughes especially for me. But in the List of References I indicated the published book.)

1 Analysis of reality (German). (Approx. Transl.)

To make the book easier to read, I have kept the number of footnotes and their length to a minimum. The full names of books, references to which are in brackets in the text, are given in the List of References.

Finally, I would like to fulfill the pleasant duty of expressing my gratitude to those who have assisted me in improving the content and style of this book. First of all, to Rainer Funk: our long conversations gave me the opportunity to better understand the intricacies of Christian theology; he unfailingly supplied me with recommendations on theological literature; In addition, he read the manuscript several times, and his brilliant constructive suggestions and criticisms helped me improve it and eliminate some inaccuracies. I thank Marion Odomirok, whose careful editing has greatly improved this book. I would also like to thank Joan Hughes, who patiently and conscientiously typed through the many versions of the manuscript and made several good suggestions for improving the language and style of the book. Finally, I would like to express my gratitude to Annie Fromm, who read several drafts of the manuscript and provided many valuable ideas and suggestions each time.

E.F.
New York, June 1976

To act is to be.
Lao Tzu

People shouldn't think so much
about what they should do,
so much about what they are.
Meister Eckhart

The more insignificant yours being,
the less you show your life,
the more yours property,
the more yours alienated life...
Karl Marx

Introduction
The collapse of great hopes and new alternatives

The end of one illusion

From the very beginning of the industrial age, the hope and faith of generations was nourished by the Great Promises of Limitless Progress - premonitions of material abundance, personal freedom, dominion over nature, i.e. the greatest happiness for the greatest number of people. It is known that our civilization began when man learned to sufficiently control nature, but until the beginning of the age of industrialization this control was limited. Industrial progress, which has seen the replacement of animal and human energy, first by mechanical and then by nuclear energy, and the replacement of the human mind by the electronic machine, has led us to think that we are on the way to unlimited production and therefore unlimited consumption, which technology can do us as omnipotent, and science as omniscient. We thought that we could become superior beings who could create a new world using nature as a building material.

Men, and increasingly women, experienced a new sense of freedom and became masters of their own lives: freed from the shackles of feudalism, man could (or thought he could) do what he wanted. This was indeed true, but only for the upper and middle classes; the rest, if the same pace of industrialization were maintained, could be imbued with the belief that this new freedom would eventually spread to all members of society. Socialism and communism soon became movements aimed at creating new society and formation new a person, into a movement whose ideal was the bourgeois way of life for everyone, and the standard of men and women of the future became bourgeois. It was assumed that wealth and comfort would ultimately bring boundless happiness to everyone. A new religion arose - Progress, the core of which was the trinity of unlimited production, absolute freedom and boundless happiness. The new Earthly City of Progress was supposed to replace the City of God. This new religion gave its adherents hope, energy and vitality.

One must visualize the enormity of the Great Expectations, the amazing material and spiritual achievements of the industrial age, in order to understand what trauma is caused to people today by the disappointment that these Great Expectations did not come true. The Industrial Age has failed to deliver on the Great Promise, and more and more people are beginning to come to the following conclusions:

1. Unlimited satisfaction of all desires cannot be the path to prosperity - happiness or even maximum pleasure.

2. It is impossible to become independent masters of our own lives, since we have realized that we have become cogs in a bureaucratic machine, and our thoughts, feelings and tastes are completely dependent on the government, industry and the media under their control.

3. Since economic progress has affected a limited number of rich nations, the gap between rich and poor countries is increasingly widening.

4. Technological progress has created a danger for environment and threat nuclear war– each of these dangers (or both together) can destroy life on Earth.

Laureate Nobel Prize world for 1952 Albert Schweitzer, making a speech while receiving the prize, called on the world to “dare to face the current situation... Man has become a superman... But the superman, endowed with superhuman strength, has not yet risen to the level of superhuman intelligence. the more his power grows, the poorer he becomes... Our conscience must awaken to the realization that the more we turn into supermen, the more inhuman we become.”

Why Great Expectations Didn't Realize

Even without taking into account the economic contradictions inherent in industrialism, we can conclude that the collapse of Great Expectations is predetermined by the industrial system itself, mainly by its two main psychological attitudes: 1) the purpose of life is happiness, maximum pleasure, i.e. satisfaction of any desire or subjective need of the individual (radical hedonism); 2) selfishness, greed and selfishness (so that this system could function normally) lead to peace and harmony.

It is well known that throughout human history, rich people have followed the principles of radical hedonism. Owners of unlimited funds - aristocrats Ancient Rome, major Italian cities of the Renaissance, as well as England and France in the 18th and 19th centuries. looked for the meaning of life in boundless pleasures. But maximum pleasure (radical hedonism), although it was the goal of life for certain groups of people in certain time, never, beyond the only one until the 17th century. exception, was not put forward as welfare theories none of the great Teachers of life Ancient China, neither in India, nor in the Middle East and Europe.

Socrates' student Aristippus, a Greek philosopher (first half of the 4th century BC) was this only exception; he taught that the purpose of life is bodily pleasures and total amount experienced pleasures constitute happiness. What little is known about his philosophy has come to us thanks to Diogenes Laertius, but this is enough to consider Aristippus the only true hedonist, for whom the existence of a desire serves as the basis for the right to satisfy it and thereby achieve the goal of life - pleasure.

Epicurus can hardly be considered a supporter of the Aristypian type of hedonism. Although for Epicurus the highest goal is “pure” pleasure, it means “the absence of suffering” (aponia) and a state of tranquil spirit (ataraxia). Epicurus believed that pleasure as the satisfaction of desire cannot be the goal of life, since it is inevitably followed by its opposite, which, thus, prevents humanity from achieving the true goal - the absence of suffering. (Epicure's theory is in many ways reminiscent of Freud's.) However, as far as conflicting information about the teachings of Epicurus allows us to judge, it seems that he, unlike Aristippus, is a representative of a kind of subjectivism.

Other Masters of the past thought primarily about how humanity could achieve well-being (vivere bene), without claiming that the existence of desire is ethical standard. One of important elements their teachings consist in distinguishing purely subjective needs (desires), the satisfaction of which leads to the receipt of incoming pleasure, from the needs inherent in human nature, the implementation of which contributes to the development of man and leads to his prosperity(eudaimonia). In other words, they made a distinction between purely subjectively felt needs And objective, real needs and they believed that if the first, at least some of them, have a detrimental effect on human development, then the second correspond to human nature.

The theory that the purpose of life is the satisfaction of all human desires was first clearly expressed by philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries after Aristippus. This concept arose easily at a time when the word “benefit” ceased to mean “benefit for the soul”, but acquired the meaning of “material, monetary gain.” This happened at a time when the bourgeoisie not only freed itself from political shackles, but also threw off all the chains of love and solidarity and began to profess the belief that existence only for oneself means nothing more than to be oneself. For Hobbes, happiness is a continuous movement from one passionate desire (cupiditas) to another; La Mettrie even recommends the use of drugs, as they create the illusion of happiness; de Sade considers it legitimate to satisfy cruel impulses precisely because they exist and require satisfaction. These thinkers lived in the era of the final victory of the bourgeoisie, and what was a far from philosophical way of life for aristocrats became theory and practice for them.

Since the 18th century. Many ethical theories arose: some of them were more developed forms of hedonism, such as utilitarianism, others were strictly anti-hedonic systems - the theories of Kant, Marx, Thoreau and Schweitzer. However, in our era, i.e. After the end of the First World War, there was a return to the theory and practice of radical hedonism. The desire for boundless pleasure comes into conflict with the ideal of disciplined work, similar to the contradiction between the ethics of obsession with work and the desire for complete idleness in free time. An endless conveyor belt and bureaucratic routine, on the one hand, television, cars and sex, on the other, make this contradictory combination possible. Obsession with work alone, as well as complete idleness, would drive people crazy. Combining them with each other makes it possible to live completely. Moreover, both of these contradictory attitudes correspond to economic necessity: 20th century capitalism. is based both on the maximum consumption of goods produced and services offered, and on collective labor brought to automation.

Taking human nature into account, it can be theoretically concluded that radical hedonism cannot lead to happiness. But even without theoretical analysis Observable facts clearly indicate that our way of “seeking happiness” does not lead to prosperity. Our society consists of obviously unhappy people - lonely, always worried and sad, capable only of destruction, constantly feeling their dependence and rejoicing if they managed to somehow kill the time that they are constantly trying to save.

Can the achievement of pleasure (as a passive affect as opposed to an active one - prosperity and joy) be a satisfactory answer to the problem of human existence - this is the question that is being solved by our time - the time of the greatest social experiment. For the first time in history, satisfaction of the need for pleasure is not the privilege of a minority, but is becoming available to an increasingly large part of the population. In industrialized countries, this experiment has already given a negative answer to the question posed.

Another psychological assertion of the industrial age, that individual selfish aspirations lead to an increase in everyone's well-being, as well as to harmony and peace, also does not stand up to criticism from a theoretical point of view; observed facts confirm its inconsistency. And yet this principle, denied only by one of the great representatives of classical political economy - David Ricardo, should be considered fair. If a person is selfish, then this manifests itself not only in his behavior, but also in his character. This means: wanting everything for yourself; enjoy the possession yourself and not share with others; be greedy, because if the goal is possession, then the individual is all the more Means, the more It has; experience antagonism towards other people - towards customers who need to be deceived, towards competitors who need to be ruined, towards their workers who need to be exploited. An egoist can never be satisfied, since his desires are endless; he should envy those who have more and fear those who have less. But he is forced to hide his feelings in order to present himself (both to others and to himself) as smiling, reasonable, sincere and kind person what everyone tries to seem like.

The desire for unlimited possession inevitably leads to class war. The communists' claim that there will be no class struggle in a classless society is untenable, because the goal of the communist system is to implement the principle of unlimited consumption. But since everyone wants to have more, the formation of classes is inevitable, which means class struggle is inevitable, and on a global scale, war between nations. Greed and peace are mutually exclusive.

The fundamental changes that occurred in the 18th century gave rise to such guiding principles of economic behavior as radical hedonism and boundless egoism. In medieval society, as in other highly developed and primitive societies, economic behavior was determined by ethical principles. For scholastic theologians, the economic categories “price” and “private property” were concepts of moral theology. And even if theologians, with the help of the formulations they found, adapted their moral code to new economic requirements (for example, Thomas Aquinas’s definition of the concept of “fair price”), then economic behavior still remained human and, therefore, corresponded to the norms of humanistic ethics. However, capitalism of the 18th century. underwent radical changes in several stages: economic behavior became separated from ethics and human values. It was assumed that the economic system functions on its own, in accordance with its own laws, regardless of the needs and will of man. The collapse of ever-increasing numbers of small businesses in favor of the growth of ever-larger corporations, and the attendant suffering of the workers, seemed to be an economic necessity that was regrettable, but had to be accepted as the inevitable consequence of some law of nature.

Development of new economic system was no longer determined by necessity benefits for humans but by necessity benefits for the system. They tried to reduce the severity of this contradiction with the help of the following assumption: what is beneficial for the development of the system (or even for any one large corporation) is also beneficial for people. This logical construction was supported by an additional statement: those qualities that the system requires from a person - selfishness, selfishness and greed - are supposedly innate, i.e. inherent in human nature. Societies in which selfishness, selfishness and greed were absent were considered “primitive”, and their members were considered “naive, like children.” People could not understand that these traits are not natural inclinations, thanks to which industrial society developed, but product social conditions.

Another important factor arose - man’s attitude towards nature changed: it became hostile. Man - a “whim of nature” - according to the conditions of his existence, is part of it and at the same time, thanks to reason, rises above it. Man tries to solve the existential problem facing him by throwing away the messianic dream of harmony between humanity and nature, conquering nature and transforming it in accordance with his own purposes until this conquest becomes more and more like destruction. The spirit of conquest and hostility that has overwhelmed humanity makes it impossible to see that the resources of nature have limits and will eventually be exhausted, and nature will take revenge on man for his predatory attitude towards her.

Industrial society is characterized by contempt for nature - as for things that were not produced by a machine - as well as for people who do not produce machines (representatives of Japan and China). Today people are attracted to powerful mechanisms, everything mechanical, lifeless, and the thirst for destruction is increasingly seized.

The Economic Necessity of Human Change

According to the argument discussed above, the character traits of a person generated by our socio-economic system, i.e. our way of life, are pathogenic and as a result form a sick personality, and, consequently, a sick society. There is, however, another opinion. It is put forward from a completely new point of view and testifies to the need for deep psychological changes in a person in order to avoid economic and environmental disasters. Two reports prepared on behalf of the Club of Rome (the first by D. Meadows et al., the second by M. Mesarovic and E. Pestel) examine global technological, economic and demographic trends. M. Mesarovich and E. Pestel come to the conclusion that “a major, and ultimately global, catastrophe can be avoided” only with the help of global economic and technological changes carried out according to a specific master plan. As proof of this thesis, they provide data based on the most extensive and systematic research ever conducted in this area. (The report of these scientists has certain methodological advantages compared to earlier studies by D. Meadows, who, however, proposes even more radical economic transformations as an alternative to disaster.) As M. Mesarovic and E. Pestel believe, the necessary economic changes are possible only in in that case "if in the values and attitudes of a person(or as I would say, in the orientation of human character) There will be fundamental changes that will lead to the emergence of a new ethic and a new attitude towards nature."(italics mine – E.F.). Their conclusions are confirmed by the opinions of other experts expressed before and after their report.

Unfortunately, it should be noted that both of the reports mentioned are too abstract and, in addition, they do not consider either political or social factors, without which no realistic plan is possible. Nevertheless, they provide valuable data and, for the first time, examine the economic picture of the world community, its opportunities and the dangers it contains. The authors' conclusion about the need for a new ethics and a new attitude towards nature is especially valuable, since this demand of theirs contradicts their own philosophical positions.

E.F. Schumacher, also an economist and at the same time a radical humanist, takes a slightly different position. He bases his demand for a radical change in man on two arguments: the modern social system creates a sick personality; economic disaster is inevitable if social system will not be fundamentally changed.

A fundamental change in man seems necessary not only from an ethical or religious point of view, not only as a psychological need due to the pathogenic nature of the currently existing social character, but also as a prerequisite for the physical survival of the human race. Living a righteous life is no longer seen as fulfilling a moral or religious requirement. For the first time in history the physical survival of the human race depends on a radical change in the human heart. However, changing a person's heart is possible only with such fundamental socio-economic transformations that will provide him with the conditions for change, as well as give him the necessary courage and foresight.

Is there any alternative to disaster?

All the data mentioned above has been published and is well known. The question arises: is no serious effort being made to avoid what looks very much like the final verdict of fate? While in private life only a madman can remain passive in the face of danger that threatens his life, those invested with public power do practically nothing to prevent this danger, and those who have entrusted their lives to them allow them to do nothing.

How did it happen that the instinct of self-preservation - the strongest of all instincts - seemed to cease to motivate us to action? One of the most trivial explanations is that the activities that our leaders are engaged in give the impression that they understand the problems facing humanity and are somehow trying to solve them: endless conferences, resolutions, negotiations make it possible to pretend that effective measures are being taken to prevent a disaster. In reality, no serious changes occur, but both the leaders and the led lull their consciousness and their desire to survive, creating the appearance that they know the path to salvation and that they are taking the right actions.

Another explanation is that the selfishness generated by the system forces its leaders to put personal success above public duty. It is difficult to surprise anyone nowadays that leading political figures and representatives of the business community are making decisions that serve their personal benefit, but are harmful and dangerous for society. Indeed, if one of the pillars of modern morality is selfishness, why should they act differently? They don’t seem to know that greed (like submission) makes people stupid, even when they pursue their own interests in their personal lives, taking care of themselves and their loved ones (see J. Piaget “Moral Judgments of a Child”). Ordinary members of society are also selfishly absorbed in personal affairs and are unlikely to notice what goes beyond the boundaries of their own narrow world.

Another reason for the decline in the instinct of self-preservation can be described this way: the necessary changes in people's lifestyles must be so radical that today people refuse to make the sacrifices that these changes would require, preferring to live under the threat of a future catastrophe. This fairly widespread attitude towards life can be confirmed by the incident described by Arthur Koestler, which happened to him during Civil War in Spain. When news of the advance of Franco's troops arrived, Koestler was in the comfortable villa of his friend. It was clear that the villa would be captured and Koestler would most likely be shot. The night was cold and rainy, but the house was warm and cozy, and Koestler stayed, although logically he should have tried to escape. He remained in captivity for several weeks before his journalist friends, after spending considerable effort, miraculously rescued him. The same behavior is typical of people who refuse to undergo a medical examination, fearing to find out the diagnosis of a dangerous disease that requires serious surgery, and would rather risk dying “of their own accord.”

In addition to the described reasons for a person’s fatal passivity in matters of life and death, there is another one, which, in fact, prompted me to write this book. What I mean is this: we currently have no other models of social order than corporate capitalism, social democratic or Soviet socialism, or technocratic “fascism with a smiling face.” This view is largely supported by the fact that very few attempts have so far been made to investigate the feasibility of new models of society and to experiment with them. Indeed, to create new and realistic alternatives for building a human society, imagination alone is not enough. Problems of social reconstruction should become, at least in part, the subject of the same deep interest on the part of the best minds of our time as science and technology are today.

main topic This book is an analysis of two main ways of existence: possession And being. In ch. I provides some general observations about the differences between the two methods. In ch. II, this distinction is illustrated with real-life examples that the reader can easily relate to his own experience. In ch. III presents interpretations of being and having in the Old and New Testaments, as well as in the writings of Meister Eckhart. Subsequent chapters are devoted to a particularly difficult problem - the analysis of the differences between having and being as modes of existence: an attempt is made to draw theoretical conclusions based on empirical data. Up to the last chapters, it is mainly the individual aspects of these two basic modes of existence that are described; the final chapters examine their role in the formation of the New Man and the New Society and possible alternatives to a destructive way of existence for humans and the catastrophic socio-economic development of the whole world.

Preface.

Chapter 3. The principles of having and being in the Old and New Testaments and in the writings of Meister Eckhart.

Part II. An analysis of the fundamental differences between the two ways of being.

Chapter 4. Mode of possession - what is it?

Chapter 5. What is a mode of being?

Chapter 6. Other aspects of having and being.

Part III. The New Man and the New Society.

Chapter 7. Religion, character, society.

Chapter 8. Conditions for human change and traits of a new person.

Chapter 9. Features of the new society.

Bibliography.

Preface.

In this book I revisit two major themes that I have explored in previous works. Firstly, I continue my research in the field of radical humanistic psychoanalysis, paying special attention to the analysis of egoism and altruism - the two main orientations of character. In the third part of the book, I continue to develop the topic that was touched upon in the books “A Healthy Society” and “Revolution of Hope”, namely: the crisis of modern society and possible ways to overcome it. Of course, it is likely that I will repeat some thoughts expressed earlier, but it seems to me that the new point of view underlying this work, as well as the fact that I have expanded the scope of my previous concepts in it, will serve as compensation even for those who is familiar with my previous works.

The title of this book almost coincides with the title of two previously published books: “To Be and to Have” by Gabriel Marcel and “Having and Being” by Balthasar Steelin. All these books are imbued with the spirit of humanism, but their approach to the problem is completely different. Thus, Marcel views it from theological and philosophical points of view; Steelin's book is a constructive discussion of materialism in modern science and a unique contribution to Wirklichkeitsanalyse 1; this book contains an empirical psychological and social analysis of two ways of existence. I recommend the books of Marcel and Steelin to those who are seriously interested in this topic. (Until recently, I did not know that an English translation of Marcel's book had been published, and I read the excellent translation made by Beverly Hughes especially for me. But in the List of References I indicated the published book.)

1 Analysis of reality (German). (Approx. Transl.)

E.F. New York, June 1976.

Introduction. The collapse of great hopes and new alternatives.

To act is to be.

Lao Tzu

People shouldn't think so much about what they should do, so much about what they are.

Meister Eckhart

The more insignificant yours being, the less you show your life, the more your property, the more yours alienated life.

Karl Marx

The end of one illusion.

Men, and increasingly women, experienced a new sense of freedom and became masters of their own lives: freed from the shackles of feudalism, man could (or thought he could) do what he wanted. This was indeed true, but only for the upper and middle classes; the rest, if the same pace of industrialization were maintained, could be imbued with the belief that this new freedom would eventually spread to all members of society. Socialism and communism soon turned from movements aimed at creating a new society and the formation of a new man into a movement whose ideal was the bourgeois way of life for all, and the bourgeois became the standard for the men and women of the future. It was assumed that wealth and comfort would ultimately bring boundless happiness to everyone. A new religion arose - Progress, the core of which was the trinity of unlimited production, absolute freedom and boundless happiness. The new Earthly City of Progress was supposed to replace the City of God. This new religion gave its adherents hope, energy and vitality.

1. Unlimited satisfaction of all desires cannot be the path to prosperity - happiness or even maximum pleasure.

3. Since economic progress has affected a limited number of rich nations, the gap between rich and poor countries is increasingly widening.

4. Technological progress has created dangers for the environment and the threat of nuclear war - each of these dangers (or both together) can destroy life on Earth.

1952 Nobel Peace Prize laureate Albert Schweitzer, in his acceptance speech, called on the world to “dare to face the current situation... Man has become a superman... But the superman, endowed with superhuman strength, has not yet risen to the level of superhuman intelligence "The more his power grows, the poorer he becomes... Our conscience must be awakened to the realization that the more we turn into supermen, the more inhuman we become."

Why Great Expectations did not come true.

Even without taking into account the economic contradictions inherent in industrialism, we can conclude that the collapse of Great Expectations is predetermined by the industrial system itself, mainly by its two main psychological attitudes: 1) the goal of life is happiness, maximum pleasure, i.e. satisfaction of any desire or subjective need of the individual (radical hedonism); 2) selfishness, greed and selfishness (so that this system can function normally) lead to peace and harmony.

It is well known that throughout human history, rich people have followed the principles of radical hedonism. The owners of unlimited funds are the aristocrats of Ancient Rome, large Italian cities of the Renaissance, as well as England and France of the 18th and 19th centuries. looked for the meaning of life in boundless pleasures. But maximum pleasure (radical hedonism), although it was the goal of life for certain groups of people at certain times, was never, except for the only time before the 17th century. with the exception, it was not put forward as a theory of well-being by any of the great Teachers of life, neither in Ancient China, nor in India, nor in the Middle East and Europe.

Socrates' student Aristippus, a Greek philosopher (first half of the 4th century BC) was this only exception; he taught that the purpose of life is bodily pleasures and the total sum of pleasures experienced constitutes happiness. What little is known about his philosophy has come to us thanks to Diogenes Laertius, but this is enough to consider Aristippus the only true hedonist, for whom the existence of a desire serves as the basis for the right to satisfy it and thereby achieve the goal of life - pleasure.

Other Masters of the past thought primarily about how humanity could achieve well-being (vivere bene), without claiming that the existence of desire was an ethical norm. One of the important elements of their teaching is to distinguish purely subjective needs (desires), the satisfaction of which leads to the receipt of incoming pleasure, from the needs inherent in human nature, the implementation of which contributes to human development and leads to his well-being (eudaimonia). In other words, they made a distinction between purely subjectively felt needs and objective, actual needs and they believed that if the first, at least some of them, have a detrimental effect on human development, then the second correspond to human nature.

The theory that the purpose of life is the satisfaction of all human desires was first clearly expressed by philosophers of the 17th and 18th centuries after Aristippus. This concept arose easily at a time when the word “benefit” ceased to mean “benefit for the soul”, but acquired the meaning of “material, monetary gain.” This happened at a time when the bourgeoisie not only freed itself from political shackles, but also threw off all the chains of love and solidarity and began to profess the belief that existing only for oneself means nothing more than being oneself. For Hobbes, happiness is a continuous movement from one passionate desire (cupiditas) to another; La Mettrie even recommends the use of drugs, as they create the illusion of happiness; de Sade considers it legitimate to satisfy cruel impulses precisely because they exist and require satisfaction. These thinkers lived in the era of the final victory of the bourgeoisie, and what was a far from philosophical way of life for aristocrats became theory and practice for them.

Taking human nature into account, it can be theoretically concluded that radical hedonism cannot lead to happiness. But even without theoretical analysis, the observed facts clearly indicate that our way of “searching for happiness” does not lead to prosperity. Our society consists of obviously unhappy people - lonely, always worried and sad, capable only of destruction, constantly feeling their dependence and rejoicing if they managed to somehow kill the time that they are constantly trying to save.

Another psychological assertion of the industrial age, that individual selfish aspirations lead to an increase in everyone's well-being, as well as to harmony and peace, also does not stand up to criticism from a theoretical point of view; observed facts confirm its inconsistency. And yet this principle, denied only by one of the great representatives of classical political economy - David Ricardo, should be considered fair. If a person is selfish, then this manifests itself not only in his behavior, but also in his character. This means: wanting everything for yourself; enjoy the possession yourself and not share with others; be greedy, because if the goal is possession, then the more the individual has, the more he has; to experience antagonism towards other people - towards customers who need to be deceived, towards competitors who need to be ruined, towards their workers who need to be exploited. An egoist can never be satisfied, since his desires are endless; he should envy those who have more and fear those who have less. But he is forced to hide his feelings in order to portray himself (both to others and to himself) as the smiling, reasonable, sincere and kind person that everyone tries to appear to be.

The desire for unlimited possession inevitably leads to class war. The communists' claim that there will be no class struggle in a classless society is untenable, because the goal of the communist system is to implement the principle of unlimited consumption. But since everyone wants to have more, the formation of classes is inevitable, which means class struggle is inevitable, and on a global scale - war between nations. Greed and peace are mutually exclusive.

The development of a new economic system was no longer determined by necessity benefits for humans, but by necessity benefits for the system. They tried to reduce the severity of this contradiction with the help of the following assumption: what is beneficial for the development of the system (or even for any one large corporation) is also beneficial for people. This logical construction was supported by an additional statement: those qualities that the system requires from a person - selfishness, selfishness and greed - are supposedly innate, i.e. inherent in human nature. Societies in which selfishness, selfishness and greed were absent were considered “primitive”, and their members were considered “naive, like children.” People could not understand that these traits are not natural inclinations, thanks to which industrial society developed, but product social conditions.

The economic necessity of human change.

According to the argument discussed above, the character traits of a person generated by our socio-economic system, i.e. our way of life, are pathogenic and as a result form a sick personality, and, consequently, a sick society. There is, however, another opinion. It is put forward from a completely new point of view and testifies to the need for deep psychological changes in a person in order to avoid economic and environmental disasters. Two reports prepared on behalf of the Club of Rome (the first by D. Meadows et al., the second by M. Mesarovic and E. Pestel) examine global technological, economic and demographic trends. M. Mesarovich and E. Pestel come to the conclusion that “a major, and ultimately global, catastrophe can be avoided” only with the help of global economic and technological changes carried out according to a specific master plan. As proof of this thesis, they provide data based on the most extensive and systematic research ever conducted in this area. (The report of these scientists has certain methodological advantages compared to earlier studies by D. Meadows, who, however, proposes even more radical economic transformations as an alternative to disaster.) As M. Mesarovic and E. Pestel believe, the necessary economic changes are possible only in in that case, " if in the values and attitudes of a person(or as I would say, in the orientation of human character) fundamental changes will occur, leading to the emergence of a new ethic and a new attitude towards nature"(my italics - E.F.). Their conclusions are confirmed by the opinions of other experts expressed before and after their report.

E.F. Schumacher - also an economist and at the same time a radical humanist - takes a slightly different position. He bases his demand for a radical change in man on two arguments: the modern social system creates a sick personality; economic disaster is inevitable unless the social system is radically changed.

A fundamental change in man seems necessary not only from an ethical or religious point of view, not only as a psychological need due to the pathogenic nature of the currently existing social character, but also as a prerequisite for the physical survival of the human race. Living a righteous life is no longer seen as fulfilling a moral or religious requirement. For the first time in history the physical survival of the human race depends on a radical change in the human heart. However, changing a person's heart is possible only with such fundamental socio-economic transformations that will provide him with the conditions for change, as well as give him the necessary courage and foresight.

Is there any alternative to disaster?

How did it happen that the instinct of self-preservation - the strongest of all instincts - seems to have ceased to motivate us to action? One of the most trivial explanations is that the activities that our leaders are engaged in give the impression that they understand the problems facing humanity and are somehow trying to solve them: endless conferences, resolutions, negotiations make it possible to pretend that effective measures are being taken to prevent a disaster. In reality, no serious changes occur, but both the leaders and the led lull their consciousness and their desire to survive, creating the appearance that they know the path to salvation and that they are taking the right actions.

Another reason for the decline in the instinct of self-preservation can be described this way: the necessary changes in people's lifestyles must be so radical that today people refuse to make the sacrifices that these changes would require, preferring to live under the threat of a future catastrophe. This fairly widespread attitude towards life can be confirmed by the incident described by Arthur Koestler, which happened to him during the Civil War in Spain. When news of the advance of Franco's troops arrived, Koestler was in the comfortable villa of his friend. It was clear that the villa would be captured and Koestler would most likely be shot. The night was cold and rainy, but the house was warm and cozy, and Koestler stayed, although logically he should have tried to escape. He remained in captivity for several weeks before his journalist friends, after spending considerable effort, miraculously rescued him. The same behavior is typical of people who refuse to undergo a medical examination, fearing to find out the diagnosis of a dangerous disease that requires serious surgery, and would rather risk dying “of their own accord.”

The main theme of this book is the analysis of two main ways of existence: possession And being. Part I makes some general observations about the differences between the two methods. Part II illustrates this distinction with real-life examples that the reader can easily relate to his own experiences. Part III presents treatments of being and having in the Old and New Testaments, as well as in the writings of Meister Eckhart. Subsequent chapters are devoted to a particularly difficult problem - the analysis of the differences between having and being as modes of existence: an attempt is made to draw theoretical conclusions based on empirical data. Up to the last chapters, it is mainly the individual aspects of these two basic modes of existence that are described; the final chapters examine their role in the formation of the New Man and the New Society and possible alternatives to a destructive way of existence for humans and the catastrophic socio-economic development of the whole world.

Part I: Understanding the difference between having and being.

Chapter 1. First look at the problem.

The meaning of the difference between having and being.

The choice between having and being is counterintuitive. Possession seems to be a natural life function: in order to live, we must possess various things. Moreover, we should enjoy the things that belong to us. And can such an alternative even arise in a society whose highest goal is to have, and to have as much as possible, and in which one can say about a person like this: “He is worth a million dollars”? With such an attitude, on the contrary, one gets the impression that the essence of being lies precisely in possession and that a person is nothing if he is nothing. doesn't have. Nevertheless, the alternative of "having or being" was the core of the systems of the great Teachers of life. The Buddha teaches that a person, in order to reach the highest stage of his development, should not strive to possess property. Jesus teaches: “For whoever wants to save his life will lose it; but whoever loses his life for My sake will save it. For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world, but lose or injure himself?” [Gospel of Luke, IX, 24-25]. According to the teachings of Meister Eckhart, the condition for acquiring spiritual wealth and spiritual power must be the desire to possess nothing, to make one’s being open and “empty” - not to allow the “I” to get in the way. According to Marx, luxury is the same vice as poverty; man's goal is to be many, but not have to many. (I am referring here to the true Marx - a radical humanist, and not to the false vulgar figure that the Soviet communists made of him.)

The distinction between being and having has interested me deeply for a long time, and I have tried to find empirical support for it using psychoanalysis to study specific individuals and groups. The results obtained led me to the conclusion that the fundamental problem of human existence is precisely the differences between the love of life and the love of death; empirical anthropological and psychoanalytic data indicate that having and being are two basic ways of human existence, and the predominance of one of them determines differences in the individual characters of people and types of social character.

Various poetic examples.

Let us consider the differences between the two modes of existence - having and being - using the example of two similar poems quoted by the late D.T. Suzuki in his Lectures on Zen Buddhism. One of them is haiku 2 by a Japanese poet of the 17th century. Basho (1644–1694), the other belongs to Tennyson, an English poet of the 19th century. Both poets describe similar experiences - their impressions at the sight of a flower they noticed while walking. Tennyson's poem says:

A flower growing among the ruins,

I extract you from the ancient cracks,

You are all before me - here is the root, the stem,

here in the palm of my hand.

You are small, flower, but if I understood,

What is your root, stem,

and what is your whole essence, flower,

Then I would know the essence of God and the essence of man.

2 Haiku - genre Japanese poetry, an unrhymed lyric tercet, the main content of which is landscape lyrics. It is distinguished by unusual sophistication and laconicism. (Approx. translation)

Basho's verse goes like this:

Take a close look:

Shepherd's purse flowers

You'll see under the fence! 3

3 Translation from Japanese by V. Markova. Quote according to the book: Classic poetry India, China, Korea, Vietnam, Japan. M., " Fiction", 1977, p.743.

It is amazing how different sensations a flower they accidentally saw causes Tennyson and Basho to feel. Tennyson's first wish - have them. He uproots it. And although the poem contains thoughtful considerations that a flower could help the poet penetrate into the essence of the nature of God and man, the flower itself, becoming a victim of the interest shown in it, is doomed to death. Tennyson, presented in this poem, is perhaps comparable to a typical Western scientist who, in his search for truth, kills all living things.

Basho has a completely different attitude towards the flower: the poet has no desire to pick it - he only “peers carefully” to “see” the flower. Suzuki comments on this tercet as follows: “Probably Basho was walking along a country road and saw something inconspicuous near the fence. He came closer, looked closely and discovered that it was just a wild plant, rather inconspicuous and not attracting the gaze of a passerby. The feeling that permeates the description this simple plot cannot be called particularly poetic, with the exception, perhaps, of the last two syllables, which in Japanese are read as “kapa.” This particle is often added to nouns, adjectives or adverbs and gives a feeling of admiration or praise, sadness or joy and in In some cases, when translated, it can be approximately conveyed by an exclamation mark, as is done in this tercet.”

To understand nature and people, Tennyson seems to need have a flower, and as a result of this possession the flower dies. Basho doesn’t want to destroy the flower, he just wants to contemplate it, but not only - to become one with it. The following poem by Goethe fully explains the difference in the positions of Tennyson and Basho:

I wandered through the forest...

Off the beaten track

I didn't want to find it

I'm nothing.

I see a flower

In the shadow of the branches,

More beautiful than all eyes,

Brighten all the stars.

I extended my hand

But he said:

"Are you really going to die?

Am I condemned?"

I took it by roots

The pet grew

And the garden is cool

He took it to himself.

A quiet place

Took it to him

It blooms again

It bloomed as before.

4 Translation from German by N. Mirimsky. Quote according to the book: Goethe I.V. Selected works: In 2 volumes. T. 1; M. "Pravda", 1985, p. 158.

Goethe's gaze, walking in the forest without any purpose, is attracted by a bright flower. He has the same desire as Tennyson: to pick a flower. But Goethe, unlike Tennyson, believes that this means ruining him. For Goethe, this flower is a living being - it even talks to the poet. Goethe solves this problem differently: not like Tennyson or Basho: he takes a flower “with roots” and transplants it “into a cool garden,” without harming its life. Goethe's position is intermediate between the positions of Tennyson and Basho: at the decisive moment the power of life overcomes simple curiosity. It is clear that Goethe expresses his concept of exploring nature in this beautiful poem.

Tennyson's relation to the flower is an expression of the principle of possession, although in in this case not something material, but knowledge. The attitude of Basho and Goethe to the flower expresses the principle of being. By being I mean a way of life in which a person does not It has nothing and nothing wishes to have anything, but is happy because he is using his abilities productively and feels in unity with the whole world. Goethe, immensely in love with life, one of the outstanding fighters against the one-sided and mechanistic approach to man, expressed his preference for being rather than having in many of his works. "Faust" is a vivid example of describing the conflict between being and possession (Mephistopheles is the personification of the latter). In the short poem “Property,” the poet speaks with the greatest simplicity about the value of being:

OWN

I know that I am not given anything to possess,

Mine is just a thought, you can’t hold it,

When she is destined to be born in the soul,

And the happy moment is also mine,

He is favored by fate

Sent to me to enjoy it to the fullest.

The difference between being and having does not boil down to the difference between East and West, but refers to types of society: one is oriented towards people, the other - towards things. Western industrial society, for which the pursuit of money, power and fame is the main meaning of life, is characterized by an orientation towards possession. In societies in which the ideas of modern "progress" do not play a dominant role and where alienation has occurred to a lesser extent, for example, in medieval society, the Zuni Indians, and African tribes, have their own Basho. It is possible that in a few generations the Japanese, as a result of industrialization, will have their own Tennysons. And the point is not at all that (as Jung believed) a Western person cannot fully comprehend the philosophical systems of the East, for example Zen Buddhism, but that modern man cannot understand the spirit of a society that is not oriented towards property and greed. Indeed, the works of Meister Eckhart (as difficult to understand as the writings of Basho or Zen Buddhism) and the Buddha are, in fact, just two dialects of the same language.

Idiomatic changes.

In the last few centuries, the semantic meaning of the concepts of “being” and “possession” has undergone some changes, which is reflected in Western languages as follows: they began to use nouns more often and verbs less often to denote them.

A noun means a thing. It can be said that you have things [ you have things], for example: I have [I have] a table, a house, a book, a car. A verb denotes an action or process, for example: I exist, I love, I desire, I hate, etc. However, increasingly, action is expressed using the concept possession, in other words, the verb is replaced by a noun. But such a designation of an action by a phrase of the verb “to have” with a noun is unauthorized from the point of view of the correct use of language, so one cannot master processes or actions; they can only be implemented or experienced.

Old observations.

The harmful consequences of this error were noted back in the 18th century. Thus, Du Marais, describing this problem in his posthumously published work “The True Principles of Grammar” (1769), writes: “In the statement “I have [I have] a watch,” the expression “I have [I have]” should be taken literally; However, in the statement "I have an idea [I have an idea]" the expression "I have [I have]" is used in a figurative sense. This form of expression is unnatural. In the case under consideration, the expression "I have an idea [I have an idea]" means “I think,” “I imagine it this way.” The expression “I have a desire” means “I wish,” “I have an intention” means “I want,” etc.”

A century after Du Marais drew attention to the phenomenon of using nouns instead of verbs, the same problem was discussed by Marx and Engels in The Holy Family, but in a more radical way. Their criticism of Bauer's "critical criticism" includes a short but very important essay on love, in which Bauer is quoted as saying: "Love... is a cruel goddess who, like every deity, seeks to take possession of the whole person and is not satisfied until ", until a person gives her not only his soul, but also his physical self. Her cult is suffering, the pinnacle of this cult is self-sacrifice, suicide." In response, Marx and Engels write: Bauer “transforms” love into a “goddess,” and, moreover, a “cruel goddess,” that is. what from loving person, out of love person he makes a man love, – by the fact that he separates “love” from a person as a special essence and, as such, endows it with independent existence" [K. Marx and F. Engels. Works, vol. 2, pp. 22-23]. Marx and Engels point out here on important feature- substitution of a verb with a noun. The noun “love” as a certain concept for denoting the action “to love” is separated from the person as the subject of the action. Love turns into a goddess, into an idol onto which man projects his love; As a result of this process of alienation, he ceases to experience love; his ability to love is now expressed by the worship of the “goddess of love.” A person ceases to be active, feeling - he turns into an alienated idolater.

Modern usage.

Even Du Marais himself could not foresee what linguistic changes would be in the future and what proportions the tendency to replace verbs with nouns would acquire in the two centuries since the publication of his work. Let us give a typical, although perhaps somewhat exaggerated, example from modern language. Let us imagine that someone in need of consultation with a psychoanalyst begins his conversation with him in this way: “Doctor, I have There is The problem is I have insomnia. I have a wonderful home, wonderful children, I have a happy marriage, but I have anxiety." Probably decades ago this patient would have said "I'm worried" instead of "I have a problem," "I can't sleep" instead of " I have insomnia”, “I am happily married” instead of “I have a happy marriage”.

Modern speech style indicates a high degree of alienation. When I say “I have a problem” instead of “I am worried,” subjective experience seems to be eliminated: “I” as the subject of experience is replaced by the object of possession. I have transformed my feeling into an object that I own, namely a problem. But the word “problem” is an abstract designation for all kinds of difficulties that we face. I I can not have because it is not a thing that can be possessed, while the problem can possess me. In other words, I have turned myself into a “problem” and now my creation owns me. Such a way of expressing itself indicates a hidden, unconscious alienation.

One may, of course, note that insomnia is as much a symptom of a physical condition as a sore throat or a toothache, and therefore we seem to have the same right to say “I have insomnia” as to say “I have a sore throat.” And yet these expressions are somewhat different: a sore throat or a toothache are bodily sensations that can vary in strength, but the mental side of them is weakly expressed. I may have a sore throat because I have a throat, and I may have a toothache because I have teeth. Insomnia is not a bodily sensation, but a certain mental state. If I say “I have insomnia” instead of “I can’t sleep,” then I am expressing my desire to be free from feelings of anxiety, worry and tension that prevent me from falling asleep, i.e. fight the phenomenon of mental order, as if it were symptom of a physical condition.

Consider another example: the expression “I have great love for you.” This expression is meaningless, since love is not a thing that can be possessed, but process, certain internal activities, the subject of which is the person himself. I can love, I can be in love, but in loving, I do nothing I have. In fact, the less I have, the more I am able to love.

Origin of terms.

“Have” is a simple word at first glance. Every person has something It has: body 5, clothes, housing, etc., right down to what modern men and women own: a car, a TV, a washing machine and much more. It is almost impossible to live without having anything. Why, then, should possession be a problem? However, the history of the word have suggests that it poses a real problem. Many people seem to think that "to have" is the most natural category of human existence, but they will be surprised to learn that the word "to have" does not exist in many languages. Thus, in Hebrew the concept “I have” is conveyed by the indirect form “this refers to me.”

5 It should be noted at least briefly that you can treat your body according to the principle of being, perceiving it as living; after all, they usually say: “I am my body,” and not “I have a body,” and it is precisely this attitude towards the body that is evidenced by the entire experience of sensory perception.

In fact, in most languages the concept of "possession" is expressed this way. It is interesting to note that in the process of the development of many languages, the construction “this refers to me” was replaced by the construction “I have”, and the reverse process, as Emile Benveniste pointed out, did not occur 6. This fact leads to the idea that the development of the word “to have” is associated with the development of private property, and in societies in which property is owned for the purpose of its use, i.e. it has a utilitarian purpose, there is no such connection. Further sociolinguistic research will show to what extent this hypothesis is justified.

Unlike the concept of "having", which is apparently quite simple, the concept of "being", or such a form of it as "to be", is much more complex and more difficult to understand. Grammatically, the verb “to be” can be used in different capacities: 1) as a connective, as, for example, in English language: "I'm tall" I[is] tall"), "I am poor" ("I [am] poor") - i.e. this connective acts as a grammatical indicator of identity (in many languages there is no word "to be" used in this sense: so , V Spanish permanent properties related to the essence of an object (ser) differ from random properties that do not express the essence of an object (estar)); 2) as an auxiliary verb to form the passive voice, as, for example, in English: “I am beaten” (“I am beaten”), here “I” is the object, not the subject of the action (cf. “I beat” – “I hit”); 3) in the meaning of “to exist” - and, as shown by Benveniste, in this case it should be distinguished from the verb “to be”, used as a connective to denote identity: " These two words coexisted and can always coexist, being completely different" [Benveniste, 1974, p. 203].

Benveniste's research reveals a new meaning for the word "to be" as an independent verb, rather than a linking verb. In Indo-European languages, “to be” is expressed by the root “ee,” which means “to have existence,” to belong to reality. “Existence” and “reality” are defined as “something reliable, consistent, true” [ibid., p. 204]. (In Sanskrit sant is existing, actual, good, true; the superlative of this word is sattama - the best.) Thus, "to be" in its etymological root means something more than just an identity between subject and attribute, more than descriptive term. “To be” is the reality of the existence of who or what is; it states his or her credibility and truth. The statement that someone or something is an awn refers to the essence of the person or thing, not to his or her appearance.

From this preliminary overview of the meanings of the words “to have” and “to be” the following conclusions can be drawn:

1. Possession and being are not just some individual qualities of an individual, examples of which can be the expressions “I have a car”, “I am white”, “I am happy”, etc., but two main ways of existence, two different types of orientation and self-orientation in the world, two different character structures, the predominance of one of which is decisive for everything that a person thinks, feels, and does.

2. When existing according to the principle of possession, the attitude towards the world is expressed in the desire to make it an object of possession, in the desire to turn everything and everyone, including oneself, into one’s property.

3. As for being as a way of existence, one should distinguish between its two forms. One of them is the opposite of possession, as shown in the example from the work of Du Marais, and means love of life and genuine involvement in what exists; the other is the opposite of appearance, it refers to the true nature, the true reality of a person or thing, as opposed to the deceptive visibility, as illustrated by the etymology of the word “to be” (Benveniste).

Philosophical Concepts of Being.

It is also difficult to analyze the concept of “being” because the problem of being has been the subject of numerous philosophical works, and one of the key questions of Western philosophy has always been the question “What is being?” Although this book will examine this concept from an anthropological and psychological point of view, it seems appropriate to discuss it from a philosophical perspective, since its connection with anthropological problems is obvious. Since even a brief overview of ideas about being in the history of philosophy from the pre-Socratic era to the present is beyond the scope of this work, I will mention only one most important point: the concepts process, activity And movement as elements inherent in being. As Georg Simmel noted, the idea that being presupposes change, i.e. being is formation, is associated with the names of the two greatest and most uncompromising philosophers of the period of the birth and heyday of Western philosophy - Heraclitus and Hegel.

The position formulated by Parmenides, Plato and the scholastic “realists” that being is a constant, eternal and unchanging substance, opposite to becoming, makes sense only if we proceed from the idealistic idea that thought (idea) is the highest reality. If idea love (in Plato's understanding) is more real than the experience of love, then it can be argued that love as an idea is constant and unchanging. But if we proceed from the existence of real people - living, loving, hating, suffering, then we can conclude that there is not a single being that is not in the process of becoming and changing. All living things can exist only in the process of movement, only by changing. The essential qualities of the life process are change and development.

The concepts of Heraclitus and Hegel, according to which life is a process and not a substance, echo the philosophy of Buddha in the Eastern world. In Buddhism there is no place for the concept of a stable, unchanging substance, either in relation to things or in relation to the human self. Nothing is real except processes 7 . Modern scientific thought has contributed to the revival of philosophical ideas about “thinking as a process”, discovering and applying them in the natural sciences.

7 One of the most outstanding, although little-known, Czech philosophers, Z. Fischer connected the Buddhist concept of process with Marxist philosophy. Unfortunately, this work is inaccessible to most Western readers because it was published only in Czech. (An English translation was made privately for me.)

Possession and consumption.

In addition to the two modes of existence - having and being - one more manifestation of possession should be mentioned, namely incorporation. The archaic form of ownership of any thing that a person eats or drinks is incorporation. A child at a certain stage of his development strives to put any thing he wants to have in his mouth. This is a purely childish form of ownership, characteristic of an age when the child is too young to exercise other forms of control over property. In many varieties of cannibalism one finds the same connection between incorporation and possession. Thus, by eating a person, the cannibal believed that he thus acquired his powers (therefore, cannibalism can be considered as a kind of magical equivalent of acquiring slaves); The cannibal believed that by eating the heart of a daredevil, he would gain his courage, and by eating a totem animal, he would gain the divine essence of which it was a symbol.

It is clear that most objects cannot be physically incorporated (and those for which this is possible disappear in the process of assimilation). But there are symbolic And magical forms of incorporation. If I believe that I have incorporated the image of some deity, or the image of my father, or an animal, then that image cannot disappear or be taken from me. It is as if I symbolically absorb the object and believe that it is symbolically present in me. This is how Freud explained the essence of the concept of “super-ego” - it is the introjected sum of paternal prohibitions and orders. In the same way, one can introject power, society, an idea, an image: no matter what happens, I have them, they are, as it were, “in my guts” and are forever protected from any external encroachment. (The words "introjection" and "identification" are often used interchangeably, but it is not entirely clear that they actually refer to the same process. In any case, the term "identification" should be used with caution, since in some cases it would be more correct to talk about imitation or submission.)

Many other forms of incorporation are not associated with physiological needs and, therefore, with any restrictions. Consumerism is characterized by an attitude, the essence of which is the desire to absorb the whole world. The consumer is an eternal baby demanding a pacifier. Pathological phenomena such as alcoholism and drug addiction clearly confirm this. These two addictions should be especially emphasized because they negatively affect a person’s performance of his social duties. Smoking is also a harmful habit, but a heavy smoker is not subject to such harsh condemnation as an alcoholic and drug addict, because smoking does not prevent the individual from performing his social functions, but “only” shortens his life.

The many forms of consumerism found in everyday life are discussed in subsequent chapters of the book. Here I would just like to note that the main objects of modern consumerism in the sphere of leisure are the car, television, travel and sex, and although such pastime is generally considered active leisure, it would be more correct to call it passive. In conclusion, it can be noted that, according to - Apparently, in modern developed industrial societies, consumption is the most important form of possession. Consumption has contradictory properties: on the one hand, it helps to reduce the feeling of worry and anxiety, since what a person owns cannot be taken away from him; but on the other hand, it forces a person to consume more and more, since any consumption eventually ceases to bring pleasure. Today's consumers may well define themselves using this formula: I am what I possess and what I consume.

Part I: Understanding the difference between having and being.

Chapter 2. Having and being in everyday life.

In the society in which we live, it is rare to find any evidence of such a mode of existence as being, since this society is mainly dominated by the acquisition of property and the extraction of profit. Possession is considered by many people to be the most natural way of existence and even the only acceptable way of life for a person. In this regard, it is very difficult to understand the essence of being as a way of existence, or at least to understand that possession is just one of the possible life orientations. And yet, the roots of both of these concepts are in human life experience. Both are reflected in our everyday life and require not an abstract, rational consideration, but a very specific one. We hope that the following simple examples of the manifestations of the principles of having and being in everyday life will help readers understand the essence of these two alternative ways of being.

Education.

Students living by the principle of possession can listen to a lecture, perceive words, understand the logic of sentence construction and their meaning, ultimately take notes on everything the lecturer said, then memorize the written text and pass the exam. However, this does not mean that the content of the lecture will become part of their own system of thinking, expand and enrich it. Such students simply record in notebooks everything they heard in the lecture in the form of records of individual thoughts or theories and, at best, save them. No connection is ever established between the content of the lecture and the students; they remain alien to each other, except that each of them becomes the owner of a certain collection of other people’s statements (formulated by the lecturer or borrowed by him from other sources).

Those students for whom the principle of possession is the main way of existence have no other goal than the desire to follow what they have learned, either by relying firmly on their memory or carefully preserving their notes. They don't try to create or invent something new; on the contrary, fresh thoughts or ideas regarding anything instill great anxiety in individuals of this type, since everything new forces them to doubt the fixed amount of knowledge that they have mastered. Indeed, for a person for whom the main way of his relationship with the world is possession, any ideas, the essence of which is not easy to assimilate and record (in memory or on paper), are frightening - like everything that develops and changes and, therefore, cannot be controlled.

Those students who have chosen being as the main way of interacting with the world acquire knowledge in a completely different way. To begin with, they never proceed to listen to a course of lectures - even the first of them, being a tabula rasa. The problems that form the subject of the lecture are already familiar to them, they have thought about them before, and in this regard they have their own questions and problems. They are not passive receptacles for words and thoughts, they listen and hear, and what is very important, getting information, they react on it actively and effectively. What they hear stimulates them to think for themselves. They have questions and new ideas are born. For such students, lectures are a living process. They perceive everything the lecturer talks about with interest and immediately compare it with life. They are not just exposed to new knowledge that they need to write down and learn. The lecture has a certain impact on each of these students and changes everyone to some extent: after the lecture, he (or she) is already somehow different from the person he was before the lecture. Of course, this method of assimilation of knowledge can only be effective if the lecturer offers his listeners material that stimulates their interest. Pouring from empty to empty does not interest students with an orientation towards the principle of being; in such cases, they prefer not to listen to the lecturer at all and focus on their own thoughts.

Here we should at least briefly pay attention to the word “interest”, which these days has become so colorless and hackneyed. The main meaning of this word lies in its root: the Latin "inter - esse" means "to be in (or) among" something. In Middle English, a lively, active interest in something is denoted by the word "to list" (adjective "listy", adverb "listily"). In modern English, “to list” is used only in the spatial sense: “a ship lists” (the ship is listing), the original psychological meaning was retained only by the negative meaning “listless” (sluggish, indifferent, apathetic, indifferent). In earlier times, “to list" meant "to actively strive for something", "to be sincerely interested in something." The root of the word is the same as "lust" (strongly, passionately desire something), but "to list" meant not passive surrender, but free and active interest or desire for something. One of the key words of the book by an unknown author of the mid-14th century “The Cloud of Unknowing” is “to list”. The fact that this word has retained only a negative meaning in the language indicates a change in the spiritual life of society over the period from the 12th to the 20th centuries.

Remembering can occur either according to the principle of having or according to the principle of being. The main difference between these two forms is the type of connection established. When remembering according to the principle of possession, such a connection can be purely mechanical, when, for example, the connection between two consecutive words is determined by the frequency of their use in a certain combination, or purely logical, as a connection between opposing or intersecting concepts; the basis for establishing a connection can be temporal and spatial parameters, size, color; connections can also be established within a specific system of thinking.

Remembering according to the principle of being is active reproduction of words, thoughts, visual images, pictures, music; in other words, the particular fact to be recalled is connected to many other facts associated with it. In this case, living connections are established, not mechanical or logical ones. Concepts are associated with each other as a result of a productive process of thinking (or feeling), which is activated when searching for the right word. Here's a simple example; If I associate the word “aspirin” with the words “headache,” then a logical conventional association arises. If these words “headache” evoke in me such associations as “stress” or “anger,” then I associate this fact with his possible reasons, which I understood by studying the phenomenon itself. The second type of remembering is an act of productive thinking. Freud's method of free association is the most striking example of this type of vivid recollection.

People who are less likely to retain information know that in order for their memory to work well, they must experience strong and immediate interest. Thus, there are known cases when people remembered the words of a long-forgotten foreign language if it was vitally necessary for them. Based on my own experience, I can report the following: although I do not have a very good memory, I was nevertheless able to remember the contents of a dream of a patient I analyzed two weeks or even five years ago, if I had to meet this person face to face again and concentrate on his personality. And just five minutes before, I was absolutely unable to remember this dream - there was no particular need for this.

Remembering according to the principle of being involves reviving in memory what a person has seen or heard before. If we try to imagine the face of a person or a landscape we once saw, we ourselves can experience such a productive restoration of memory. We will not be able to immediately remember either one or the other; we need to recreate this object, mentally bring it to life. Such restoration in memory is not always easy - after all, in order to remember this or that face or a certain landscape, we had to look at it quite carefully at one time. When such recollection is accomplished, the person whose face we remember appears before us so alive, and the landscape so distinct, as if this person or landscape were now physically present before us.

A book that will never lose its relevance. What is more important: the possession of objects of material culture or a meaningful existence, when a person realizes and enjoys every moment of a fast-flowing life? In his work “To Have or to Be?” Fromm very clearly and in detail explores the reasons for the formation of relationships according to the principle “You give me - I give you” and clearly demonstrates what this ultimately leads to.

A series: New philosophy

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The given introductory fragment of the book To have or to be? (Erich Fromm, 1976) provided by our book partner - the company liters.

On the distinction between the concepts of “to have” and “to be”

First look

The importance of understanding the difference between having and being

The opposition of the concepts “to have” and “to be” is alien to “normal human consciousness”; their opposite is not striking.

Possession seems normal function our life: in order to live, we need to have some things; To use them, you must first purchase them. In a society where the highest goal is the goal of “having” - and “having” as much as possible, where a person is said to be “worth a million” - what kind of polarity can there be in such a society between “having” and “being”? On the contrary, it seems that the very essence and meaning of being is to possess something. That is, who is nothing doesn't have, he is nothing (he is not exists).

Many major thinkers have placed the alternative “to have” or “to be” at the center of their philosophical systems. The Buddha teaches that those who want to reach the highest stage of human development need not strive to acquire property. Jesus says: “For whoever wants to save his life will lose it; but whoever loses his life for My sake will save it. For what does it profit a man to gain the whole world, but destroy or harm himself?” (Luke 9:24–25) According to the teachings of Meister Eckhart, having nothing and making your being open and “empty”, not allowing your ego to get in the way, is a condition for acquiring spiritual wealth and spiritual strength. Marx believed that luxury is the same vice as poverty; that the goal of our life should be the desire to “be able” (for which the auxiliary verb sein is used in German), and not “to have a state” (for which the auxiliary verb haben is used in German), that is, b be to many, not about to enjoy to many. (I am referring here to the real Marx, the radical humanist, and not to the widespread falsifications offered by Soviet communists.)

Differentiating the concepts of “to have” and “to be” has occupied me for a long time. I have always looked for empirical foundations for it and tried to do this with the help of psychoanalytic methods based on concrete studies of individuals and groups. And what I discovered allowed me to conclude: the distinction between these categories is on a par with the difference between the love of life and the love of death and represents the most important problem human existence. I believe that the data of anthropology and psychoanalysis make it possible to assert that having and being are two completely different forms of human experience: differences in individual and collective characters depend on the presence and intensity of one or another form.

Examples from poetry

To illustrate more clearly the difference between the two forms of existence, which are possession And being, I will give two poems that are similar in content. They belong to different eras, but were quoted by the late D. T. Suzuki in his Lectures on Zen Buddhism. One of them is the haiku of the 17th century Japanese poet Basho (1644–1694), the other belongs to the pen English poet 19th century Tennyson. Both poets described similar experiences - their reaction to a flower they saw while walking. Tennyson's poem says:

You have sprouted through antiquity, flower,

I brought you out of the ruins

And here you are in the palm of my hand -

Head, roots, stem...

Oh little flower, if only I could

To comprehend the roots of your nature,

Press you to my chest forever,

Then I would understand that there is a God

And what is a person?

The Hokku Basho translates as follows:

Take a close look!

Shepherd's purse flowers

You'll see under the fence!

It’s amazing how different an impression a randomly seen flower makes on Tennyson and Basho! Tennyson's first desire is to “master” him. He rips it off entirely, along with the roots. And although he ends the poem with thoughtful considerations that this flower can help him penetrate into the essence of the nature of God and man, the flower itself is doomed to death, becoming a victim of the interest in it thus manifested. Tennyson, as he appears in this poem, can be compared to a typical Western scientist who, in search of truth, dismembers, that is, destroys a living being.

Basho's attitude towards the flower is completely different. The poet has no desire to pick the flower; he does not even touch it. He only “peers carefully” to “see” the flower. This is how Suzuki comments on this tercet: “Probably Basho was walking along a country road and saw something inconspicuous near the fence. He came closer, looked closely and discovered that it was just a wild plant, rather inconspicuous and not attractive to the eye of a passerby. The feeling that permeates the description of this simple plot cannot be called particularly poetic, with the possible exception of the last two syllables, which in Japanese are read as “kana”. This particle is often added to nouns, adjectives or adverbs and brings a feeling of admiration or praise, sadness or joy, and in translation in some cases can be very roughly conveyed using an exclamation mark. In this haiku, all tercets end with an exclamation mark.”

Tennyson seems to need to possess a flower in order to understand nature and people, and as a result possession the flower dies. Basho just wants behold, and not only look at the flower, but become one with it - and save its life. The difference between the positions of Tennyson and Basho is fully explained by the following poem by Goethe, which describes a similar situation:

I was walking in the forest

Wasn't looking for anything

A flower in the shade

I saw it.

More beautiful than eyes

And the stars are brighter,

He was shining brightly

Among the branches.

I wanted to pluck

But he said:

Do you really want

So that I wither?

I dug up by the roots

And he took it to the garden,

May you have a sweet home

He grew up nearby.

Goethe was walking in the forest without any purpose when his gaze fell on a bright flower. Goethe has the same desire as Tennyson - to pick a flower. But unlike Tennyson, Goethe understands that to disrupt it means to destroy him. For Goethe, this flower is a completely living creature, which even talks to the poet and warns him. Goethe solves this problem differently than Tennyson or Basho. He digs up a flower with roots and transplants it into his wonderful garden to save its life.

Goethe stands somewhere between Tennyson and Basho, but at the decisive moment his love of life takes precedence over simple curiosity. It is quite obvious that this beautiful poem contains Goethe's position, his interest in the study of nature. There is a clear orientation towards possession in Tennyson's poetry, although it is not about physical but about spiritual possession, the acquisition of knowledge rather than a material object. Basho and Goethe refer to the flower from the position being. By being I mean such a way of existence when a person is nothing doesn't have and not longs to have but is happy that he uses his abilities productively and is in unity with the whole world.

Immensely in love with life, a passionate fighter against the one-sided and mechanistic approach to man, Goethe expressed his attitude towards the alternative “to have” or “to be” in many poems. His Faust is the most dramatic description of the conflict between possession And being, and Mephistopheles is the embodiment of the principle of possession. It nullifies the principle of being. In his little poem “Property,” Goethe speaks with the greatest simplicity about the value of being:

The difference between being and having is not limited to the difference between Eastern and Western ways of thinking. It characterizes two different types of social consciousness: in some societies the individual takes a central place, while in others all attention is focused on things. The possession orientation is characteristic of Western industrial society, in which the meaning of life is the pursuit of money, fame and power. In societies in which alienation is less pronounced and which are not infected with the ideas of modern “progress” (for example, in medieval society, among the Zuni Indians and African tribes), there are thinkers like Basho. Perhaps in a few generations, as a result of industrialization, the Japanese will have their own Tennysons. The point is not that Western man (as Jung believed) cannot fully comprehend the philosophical systems of the East (for example, Zen Buddhism), but that modern man cannot understand the spirit of a society that is not oriented towards property and consumer greed . Indeed, the writings of Meister Eckhart are difficult to understand, like Buddhism or the ideas of Basho, but in essence the teachings of Eckhart and Buddhism are just two dialects of the same language.

Language changes

Over the past centuries, one can detect some shift in emphasis in the use of the verbs “to be” and “to have”. So, for example (contrary to language norm Germanic languages), the action is increasingly denoted by a phrase with the verb “haben” (to have).

A noun is a designation for a thing. I can say that I have things ( I have things), for example, I have (I have) a table, a house, a book, a car. To denote an action or process, it is normal to use verbs, for example, I exist, I love, I desire, I hate, etc. However, more and more often action expressed through the concept "possession", that is, instead of a verb it is used have + noun. But such word usage is contrary to the linguistic norm, since processes and actions cannot be possessed, they can only be carried out (experienced or lived).

Old observations: from du Marais to Marx

The harmful consequences of this error were noticed back in the 18th century. Du Marais set out this problem very precisely in his posthumously published work, The True Principles of Grammar (1769). He writes: “Thus, in the statement “I have (I have) a watch,” the expression “I have (I have)” should be taken literally; however, in the statement “I have an idea (I have an idea)” the expression “ I have(I have)” is used only by analogy. This form of expression is unnatural. In this case, the expression “ I have an idea (I have an idea)” means “ I think”, “I imagine it like this and like this" Expression " I have a longing” means: “ I'm sad”; “I have a desire, an intention” means: “ I want" etc.".

A century after Du Marais drew attention to the tendency to replace verbs with nouns, Marx and Engels discussed the problem in The Holy Family, but in a much more radical way. Their criticism of Bauer's Critical Criticism includes a short but very important essay on love, which quotes Bauer's following statement: “Love ... is a cruel goddess who, like any deity, seeks to take possession of the whole man and is not satisfied until man will not give her not only his soul, but also his physical “I”. Her cult is suffering, the pinnacle of this cult is self-sacrifice, suicide.”

In response, Marx and Engels write: “Mr. Edgar Bauer turns love into a “goddess,” and, moreover, into a “cruel goddess,” by the fact that loving person makes a person subservient love: he separates from the person “ Love“as a special entity and, as such, endows it with independent existence” ( Marx K., Engels F. Op. T. 2. pp. 22–23). Marx and Engels point here to a remarkable linguistic tendency: the use of a noun instead of a verb. The noun “love” is only an abstraction of a real activity, which is called the verb “to love.” Transformed into a noun, “love” is divorced from a person as a subject of action. The loving person is turned into a man of love, love is turned into a goddess, into an idol on which a person projects his love; in this process of alienation he ceases to experience love; his ability to love finds expression in the worship of the “goddess of love.” He ceased to be an active, feeling person; instead, he was reincarnated as an alienated idolater who would die if he lost contact with his idol.

Modern usage

In the two centuries that have passed since Du Marais, the tendency to replace verbs with nouns has acquired unprecedented proportions. Here is a typical, although perhaps somewhat exaggerated example from modern language. Let's imagine a certain lady who begins a conversation with a psychoanalyst as follows: “Doctor, I have available The problem is I have insomnia. Although I I have beautiful home, wonderful children and a happy marriage, I feel anxious.” A few decades ago, instead of “I have a problem,” this patient would probably have said “I’m worried,” instead of “I have insomnia,” “I I can't sleep”, and instead of “I have a happy marriage” - “I happy married".

The modern style of speech indicates the presence high degree alienation in modern life. When I say "I have There is problem" instead of " I am concerned", subjective experience is, as it were, excluded: " I“how the subject of experience is relegated to the background, and the object of possession is brought to the forefront. Personal " I” is replaced by the impersonal presence of the problem. I have transformed my feelings into an object that I own, namely a problem. But the word “problem” is an abstract designation for any kind of difficulty. I cannot “have” a problem because it is not a thing that can be possessed; rather, the problem can take possession of me. In other words, I by myself turned it into a “problem”, and now my creation owns me. This method of mastery reveals a hidden, veiled form of alienation.

One could, of course, argue that insomnia is the same symptom of a physical condition as a sore throat or a toothache, and therefore we seem to have the right to say: “I have insomnia” as well as “I have a sore throat.” And yet there is some difference here: a sore throat or a toothache are bodily sensations that can be more or less strong, but their mental side is weakly expressed. I may have a sore throat because I have a throat, and I may have a toothache because I have teeth. Insomnia, on the contrary, is not a bodily sensation, but a certain mental state when a person cannot sleep. If I say “I have insomnia” instead of “I can’t sleep,” then I am revealing my desire to get rid of the feeling of anxiety, worry and tension that keeps me awake, and to fight the mental phenomenon as if it were was a symptom of a physical condition.

Let me give you another example: the expression “I have great love for you” is meaningless. Love is not a thing that can be possessed, but process, a certain internal activity, the subject of which is the person himself. I can love, I can be in love, but loving, I do nothing I have. In fact, the less I have, the more I am able to love.

Etymology of concepts

There is a deceptive simplicity in the word “haben” (“to have”). Every person has something It has: body, clothing, shelter and so on, right down to what many millions of people have today: a car, a TV, a washing machine and much more. It is almost impossible to live without having anything, this is obvious. So what is the complexity of the concept itself? However, the history of the word "have" suggests that it poses a genuine problem. Those who believe that "to have" is the most natural category of human existence will be surprised to learn that many languages do not have a word for the concept of "having" at all. In Hebrew, for example, instead of “I have” the impersonal form “jesh li” is used » ("I have » or “this applies to me”). In fact, languages in which possession is expressed in this way predominate.

It is interesting to note that in the development of many languages, the primary construction “this refers to me” was subsequently replaced by the construction “I have”, however, as Emile Benveniste noted, the reverse process is never observed.

This fact suggests that the development of the word “to have” is associated with the emergence of private property, and this connection is absent in societies where property has a functional purpose, that is, when we are talking about the natural right to use. Whether this hypothesis will be confirmed and to what extent, further sociological research will show.

If the concept of “haben” (to have, to possess) is relatively simple and easy to understand, then the concept of “sein” (to be) is much more complex. From a grammatical point of view, the verb “to be” can be used in different ways:

(1) as an auxiliary verb, as in English or German: "Ich bin groß" ("I am tall"), "Ich bin weiß" ("I am white"), "Ich bin arm" (" I am poor"), that is, to denote the identity of properties (it is characteristic that in many languages the word “to be” used in this sense simply does not exist). In Spanish, for example, a distinction is made between permanent properties that relate to the essence of an object ( ser), and random properties that do not express the essence of the object ( estar);

(2) as an auxiliary verb to form the passive voice, as in German: “Ich werde geschlagen” (“I am beaten”), where “I” is the object of influence, and not the subject of the action that we see in verb form “Ich schlage” (“I hit”);

(3) in the meaning " existence"("existence"). In this case, as Benveniste has shown, "sein" should be distinguished from the verb "to be", used as a connective in the verb forms Perfekt, Pl. qu.p. and etc. " Both words coexisted and can always coexist, being completely different” (Benveniste, 1974, p. 203).

Benveniste's research sheds new light on the meaning of "to be" as an independent verb rather than a linking verb. “To be” in Indo-European languages is represented by the root es- meaning “to have existence, to belong to reality.” “Existence” and “reality” are defined as “something reliable, consistent, true” (ibid., p. 204). (In Sanskrit sant– “existing, actual, good, true”, superlative sattama, “the best.”) “To be,” thus, by its etymological root means something more than a statement of the identity of the subject and the attribute; it's more than descriptive term. "To be" denotes the reality of the existence of who or what There is; it states his or her authenticity, reliability and truth. If they say about someone that he There is, then this refers to the essence, and not to the phenomenon, to the internal, and not to the superficial, to reality, and not to appearance.

This preliminary review of the meanings of the words “to have” and “to be” leads to the following conclusions.

1 By “have” or “be” I do not mean the individual personality properties that we find in expressions like “I have a car” or “I am white” or “I am happy.” I mean two main types of value orientations of an individual, two ways of a person’s existence in the world, two different personal components, the predominance of which in an individual defines him as an integrity with all his thoughts, feelings and actions.

2 A person with a “having” orientation relates to the world as an owner treats property, his property. This is an attitude where I want to make everyone and everything, including myself, my property.

3 With regard to the orientation towards “being”, two forms of existence should be distinguished. One of them is the opposite of possession. As Du Marais so well described, this form being means love of life and genuine involvement in the world. Other form being is the opposite of the concept appearance or appearance" It should be understood as the genuine, natural, real existence of the individual, in contrast to the imaginary, “ostentatious way of life.” (This is exactly how Emile Benveniste describes the etymology of the word “to be.”)

Philosophical concepts of existence

The analysis of the concept of “being” is further complicated by the fact that the problem of being has been the subject of many thousands of philosophical works, and the question “What is being?” is part of the fundamental question of Western philosophy. Although this concept will be considered here from an anthropological and psychological point of view, it is simply impossible not to touch upon its philosophical aspect, since the problem of man is, undoubtedly, a philosophical problem. Since even a brief presentation of ideas about being in the history of philosophy from the pre-Socratics to the present goes beyond the scope of this book, I will remind only the most important thing - the role and place of concepts: process, formation, movement and activity within existence itself. As Georg Simmel emphasized, the idea that being implicitly involves change (that is, that being equivalent formation), is associated with the names of two of the greatest and most uncompromising thinkers in the history of Western philosophy - Heraclitus and Hegel.

The position formulated by Parmenides and Plato and shared by the scholastic “realists” that being is a constant, eternal and unchanging substance, the opposite of becoming, makes sense only if we proceed from the idealistic idea that the highest form of reality is thought or idea. If idea of love(in Plato’s understanding) is more real than the experience of love, then it can be argued that love as an idea is constant and unchanging. But if we proceed from the existence of real people - living, loving, hating, suffering - then we can conclude that there is no existence at all that is not both becoming and change. All living things can exist only in the process of becoming and only by changing. Growth and change are integral aspects of life itself.

The concept of Heraclitus and Hegel, according to which life is a process and not a substance, echoes the Buddhist philosophy of the East, in which there is no place for ideas about frozen and unchanging substances, either in relation to objects or in relation to the human “I”. Nothing is real except processes. The modern scientific worldview has contributed to the revival of philosophical ideas about “thinking as a process,” primarily in the natural sciences.

Possession and consumption

Before discussing the two modes of existence - having and being - on the basis of some simple illustrations, mention should be made of one more manifestation of having, namely about consumption in the sense of assimilation. To consume by eating and drinking is a certain archaic form of possessing what a person consumes. Thus, a baby at a certain stage of its development expresses its preferences for various objects by dragging them into its mouth.

This purely childish form of the thirst for possession, which is characteristic of the period when physical development the child does not yet allow him to exercise other forms of control over property. We observe a similar situation of confusion between consumption and possession in many varieties of cannibalism. For example, by eating a strong person, the cannibal believed that he was gaining his strength (therefore, cannibalism can be considered as a kind of magical equivalent of acquiring slaves). The cannibal believed that eating the heart of a brave man would give him courage, that by eating a sacred animal, he would take on its properties and himself would turn into a creature pleasing to God.

Of course, most objects are not suitable for physiological consumption (and those for which this is possible quickly disappear in the process of dissimilation). However, there is also symbolic And magical assimilation(assignment). If I believe that I have internalized (absorbed) a certain image - be it the image of a sacred animal, or a father, or God himself - then no one can ever take it away from me. I seem to symbolically absorb this object and believe in its symbolic presence in me. For example, Freud explained the essence of the concept of “superego” as an introjected sum of paternal orders and prohibitions. In the same way, introjection of authority, idea, image, social structure occurs. The thinking pattern is as follows: this is mine, I have learned this, I am I have, it has become mine forever, it is inherent in me, it sits within me and is inaccessible to any external encroachment. (The words “introjection” and “identification” are often used as synonyms, but it is difficult to say whether they really mean the same process. In any case, the term “identification” should be used with great caution, because in some cases it would be more correct to say about imitation or subordination.)

There are many other forms of appropriation that are not associated with physiological needs, and therefore with no restrictions. The ideology of consumerism is the desire to consume the entire world. The consumer is an eternal baby demanding a pacifier. This is clearly confirmed by such pathological phenomena as alcoholism and drug addiction. We especially highlight these two addictions because their influence negatively affects a person’s performance of his social duties. (Although smoking is no less a harmful habit, a heavy smoker is not so harshly condemned, because smoking does not prevent him from performing his social functions, and, perhaps, “only” shortens his life.) In my previous works, I have already described more than once numerous forms of everyday consumerism and I will not repeat. I would just like to point out that in the leisure sector the main objects of consumerism are the car, television, travel and sex. And although we are accustomed to consider such pastime an active form of recreation, it would be more correct to call it passive.

To summarize, consumption is a form of possession, and perhaps in industrial societies characterized by “overproduction”, it is the most important form of possession today. Consumption has contradictory properties: on the one hand, it reduces the feeling of anxiety and restlessness, since what has become mine cannot be taken away from me; but, on the other hand, this forces me to acquire more and more, since any acquisition soon ceases to bring satisfaction. Modern consumers can define themselves using the following formula: I am what I possess and what I consume.

“To have” and “to be” in everyday life

In the society in which we live, built on property and the desire for profit, we rarely meet people value orientation which is existential “being” in our sense of the word. For most people, an existence aimed at “possession” seems natural and the only conceivable one. All this especially complicates our problem of explaining the features of consciousness with an existential orientation toward “being.” And it is almost impossible to do this abstractly, purely speculatively (as is always the case when it comes to human experience).

Therefore, a few simple examples from everyday life should help the reader understand the concepts of “being” and “owning” and relate them to his own life.

Students focused on “possession”, listening to lectures, perceive words, grasp logical connections and general meaning; they try to take as detailed notes as possible so that they can then memorize the notes and pass the exam. But they do not think about the content, about their attitude to this material; it does not become part of the student’s own thoughts. The content and the student remain strangers to each other (except that each of the students becomes the owner of some facts obtained from the lecture, in which the lecturer often communicates not his own, but someone else’s thoughts).

The goal of such students is to retain what they have “learned” in their heads or on paper. They don't need to create anything new. Consciousness of the “possession” type really does not tolerate new ideas about a specific topic, because anything new calls into question the amount of information that it already possesses. Thoughts that do not fit into the system of familiar categories cause fear in such people, like everyone else, what grows and changes and thus gets out of control.

For students who think in mode of being, the learning process is completely different. Firstly, they themselves do not come to the lecture in a state of “tabula rasa”; they already have an idea of the topic that will be discussed. They already have some interest in the topic and some questions and doubts.

Instead of passively swallowing words and ideas, they listening, and not just listening, but also perceive And react actively and creatively. What they hear stimulates their own thinking, helping them formulate questions, generate new ideas, and see new perspectives. Perception of a lecture occurs as a living process: the student hears the words of the lecturer and spontaneously reacts to what he hears. He acquires not ready-made knowledge, which he can take home and memorize. He feels personally involved, after the lecture he became a little different than he was before it, he himself changed in this process. This kind of learning is only possible where the lecture contains material that is relevant and exciting to the audience. You should not expect a lively reaction to empty chatter.

I would like to briefly touch on the word “interest”, which has been worn out like an old coin. In origin, the word goes back to the roots of the Latin “inter-esse”, that is, literally: “to be in the middle.” In Middle English this active interest was expressed by the word "to list" and meant: to be truly interested. Today “to list” has only a spatial meaning (“a ship lists” - “the ship has tilted”, and the original use in the sense of a psychological “inclination towards something” (in the sense active and free interest or aspiration) has disappeared. And it is quite remarkable that today in the English language this root has been preserved only in negative word formation, “list-less” (uninteresting in the meaning of sluggish, apathetic, indifferent) - this is another symptom of the changes that have occurred in the spiritual life of society over seven centuries, from the 13th to the 20th centuries.

Memory, memories

Memories can occur in mode of possession, or can take place in mode of being. Moreover, they differ greatly from each other in the nature of their connections. IN mode of possession memory records clearly mechanical connections: either according to the principle of frequency of use of words, or according to the principle purely logical associations based on opposing concepts or space-time or some other generality.

For a person living in mode of being, memory is active activity, in which a person revives words, ideas, images, pictures, music, etc. in his mind. Connections arise between that individual fact that is remembered and many other facts related to it. That is, this type of thinking remembers things not mechanically and not formally logically, but actively and very vividly, when both the mind and feelings are involved. A simple example. If, when I hear the word “pain,” I have an association with the word “aspirin” or the concept of “headache,” then I follow the path of mechanical and logical connections. If at the same time I mentally come up with the concepts of “stress”, “anger”, “excitement”, then I associate this fact with numerous possible reasons. And such a memory in itself represents an act of productive thinking. We find interesting examples of such a living manner of memories in Freud in his “free associations”.

It has been noted that memory is closely related to the immediate interest(in crisis situations, a person remembers words from a long-forgotten foreign language).

I myself, without having a special memory, at the time of a psychoanalytic session I can remember such details about the patient as the dream he told (2 weeks or 5 years ago), because at this moment I concentrate myself extremely on the patient’s personality. And even 5 minutes before the start of the session, I would never have remembered this dream.

If a person functions in mode of being, then the memory is organically woven into his consciousness, and pictures of life emerge by themselves. Almost everyone can recall in their memory images of people and nature that they once contemplated. It's not always easy. But if you concentrate, then all the pictures will appear with almost the same richness of colors and details as in reality.

Memories in mode of possession pale and dry, these are alienated memories that are reduced to the identification of a person or a fact. A typical example Such memory is the manner of looking at photographs. A photograph serves as an aid to identifying a person or landscape. In this case, the subject’s reaction is very characteristic. The owner (or author) of photographs, looking at them, says the same thing every time: “Yes, it’s him (name) ...” or “Yes, but here I am standing.” Photography in this case is only an excuse for alienated about memories.

We encounter another type of alienated memory when a person writes down in a notebook what he must remember. I wrote it down and calmed down with the words: “This information I have" Why strain your brains? I am confident in my possession, my notes are something divorced from me, a database, objectified thoughts.

Due to the huge amount of information that a modern person must remember, it is impossible to do without notebooks. But everything must have its limits, because nowadays no one can perform even simple calculations without a calculator. A striking example of this is sellers. The tendency towards memory replacement is limitless. The more we write down, the less memory is trained. Everyone can check this for themselves. But still I will give a few more examples. Teachers have long noticed that students who write everything down understand less and remember less after lessons. Musicians who excel at sight-playing have difficulty playing without sheet music. (A good example of a musician living in existential mode, was Toscanini: his brilliant musical memory was accompanied by myopia.)

Living in Mexico, I had the opportunity to notice many times that illiterate people and people who do not keep notebooks have better memories than literate people in industrialized countries. This fact, along with many others, suggests that the ability to read and write is not uniquely a blessing and salvation, as is commonly believed, especially if literacy serves to absorb texts that impoverish the imagination and ability to experience.

In conversation, the difference between the two main types of thinking becomes immediately obvious. Here is a typical conversation between two men, of whom A has an opinion X, A IN– opinion Y. Each of them identifies himself with his own opinion, and each knows more or less exactly the point of view of the other. What each of them is trying to do: bring the most apt argument in defense of their point of view. Neither of them is going to change their mind and does not expect this from the enemy. Everyone is afraid to give up their opinion, because they consider it one of their wealth and therefore do not want to lose it.

In a conversation that is not thought of as an argument, things are somewhat different. We all have experience communicating with a person who is endowed with fame, glory or has special personal qualities, we also know how a person feels when communicating with someone from whom he needs something - good job or love and admiration. In such a situation, many experience an unpleasant feeling of excitement and fear, “preparing themselves” for such an important meeting. They think about what topics might be of interest to the interlocutor, plan in advance the start of the conversation, some make notes of the entire conversation (or write down their part of this conversation). Some people, encouraging themselves, gather all their will into a ball and mentally put their entire arsenal of communicative influence “on alert.” He recalls his previous successes and personal charm, his position in society and his ability to look good and dress with taste. (Someone, perhaps, will remember other successful situations related to the ability to intimidate the interlocutor.) In a word, a person mentally estimates his price in advance and, based on it, lays out his product in the subsequent conversation. If he does this skillfully, then he is indeed capable of impressing many people, although this impression is only partly the result of his artistry, and to a greater extent a consequence of the inexperience of his partners and their inability to understand people. A less refined performer of a rehearsed role will not achieve the necessary interest from the interlocutor, because he will look squeezed, constrained and boring.

The behavior of a person who has not prepared for a meeting will be completely different: it will be spontaneous and creative. Such an interlocutor forgets himself, his education, his position in society, his “I” does not interfere with him, and therefore he can focus his attention on his opponent and his arguments. New ideas are born to him, because he does not keep ready-made cliches in his head. While a person of the “having” type hopes that he It has, a person of the “existential” type hopes that he There is that he lives and thinks and can create something new if he has the courage to relax and answer questions. He behaves lively in conversation, because his spontaneity is not constrained by concern for what he has.

His inherent liveliness is contagious and often helps the interlocutor overcome his own egocentrism. Thus, from a kind of exchange of goods (where the goods are information and the status of partners), the conversation turns into a dialogue in which it no longer matters who is right. The duelists no longer strive to defeat each other, but turn into a dancing couple; and, receiving equal satisfaction from communication, they part, carrying away in their souls a feeling of joy, and not the triumph of victory and not the bitterness of defeat (feelings are equally fruitless). By the way, in psychoanalytic practice huge role plays the doctor’s ability to cheer up the patient and awaken his interest in life. This ability to create a favorable atmosphere can be considered the most important factor in psychotherapy. No recipes or prescriptions will bring results if treatment takes place in a difficult, soulless and dull environment.

Everything that has been said about conversation is also true for reading, because reading is a conversation between the author and the reader (or at least it should be). Of course, in reading (as in personal conversation), “what” I am reading (or who my interlocutor is) is important. Reading a mediocre, cheap novel is like a daydream. Such reading does not provoke a productive reaction; the text is simply swallowed, like a television show and crispy potatoes that we chew while staring mindlessly at the TV are swallowed. If we take, for example, Balzac’s novel, then reading it can be productive and evoke inner empathy if it occurs in mode of being. Meanwhile, even such books in our time people often read on the principle of consumption (that is, in mode of possession). As soon as the curiosity of the reader-consumer is aroused, he is overcome by the desire to find out the plot of the novel: will the hero live or die, will he seduce the heroine or will she be able to resist, he wants to know the answers to all the questions. The novel itself in this case plays only the role of a prelude; the “happy” or “unhappy” ending is the climax of the reader’s experiences. Having learned the end, he feels joy possession the whole story, which becomes almost as real to him as if it lived in his own head. However, his knowledge did not become broader from such reading: the characters in the novel remained distant, their motives were incomprehensible, and therefore the reader was not able to penetrate deeper into the essence of human nature or get to know himself better.

All of the above also applies to philosophical or historical works. The way of reading books on philosophy or history is formed during education. The school tries to convey to each student a certain amount of knowledge about " cultural values", and at the end of the training the graduate receives a certificate certifying that he " mastered» some minimum of these cultural samples. Therefore, schoolchildren and students are taught to read a book so that they can remember and repeat the main ideas of the author. It is in this spirit and in this manner that the student " knows» Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, etc., up to Heidegger and Sartre.

Various degrees of study from intermediate to high school they differ from each other only in the amount of material reported (we can compare these data with the amount of material property that our student will own in the future). An outstanding student is considered to be the one who can most accurately repeat what each individual philosopher said. He looks like a well-versed museum guide. But he is not taught anything that goes beyond this store of knowledge. He is not taught to doubt the position of this or that philosopher, to talk with him, to catch moments in which he contradicts himself, to pay attention to the fact that he passes over certain problems in silence, does not touch on many topics at all; he does not know how to distinguish the authentic views of the author from those that were imposed on him by his era, he cannot determine the real contribution of this or that author (the new thing that he brought to science); he does not feel when the author speaks to him at the behest of the mind, but when he connects all of himself - heart, brain, and soul; he does not notice which author is original and which is superficial and simply rose to the top thanks to circumstances or fashion.

The “existential” reader is completely different. He himself may come to the conclusion that even the book that is praised everywhere is nothing special. He is often able to grasp more in a book than the author himself, to whom everything in the book seems equally important.

This area is also a clear example of distinguishing between two types of existence. The watershed runs along the line of finding out who has authority, and who is it is. Almost every person at some point in his life acts as an authority. Those who raise children know that this is necessary, if only to protect them from dangers. In patriarchal societies, for most men, the object of authority is women. In bureaucratic and hierarchical systems (like ours, for example), most members of society have their own sphere of authority (with the exception of the lowest strata of the population, who are objects of subordination).

To understand the differences among authorities in mode of possession and in mode of being, it should be remembered that the concept of “authority” is very broad and even to the very first approximation has two opposite meanings; authority can be either “rational” or “irrational”.

Rational authority is based on competence and promotes the development of the being who trusts it. Irrational authority relies on the means of power and serves to exploit subordinates. (This is discussed in detail in my book Escape from Freedom.)

In primitive societies (hunters and farmers), authority is exercised by the one who is generally recognized to be the best at the task at hand. Which qualities are valued most depends on the circumstances, but, as a rule, among these qualities the first place is occupied by: life experience, wisdom, generosity, dexterity, courage and external attractiveness. Often in such tribes there is no permanent authority; in specific situations, this position is occupied by the person most suitable for resolving pressing problems: leadership in war requires certain personal qualities, to pacify disputes - others, and the performance of religious rites requires completely different qualities. If a leader loses the property on which his authority was based, then he ceases to be a leader. A very similar situation with authority can be observed in primates, where physical strength does not always become the basis for the promotion of a leader, but often such qualities as experience, “wisdom”, and competence are important. J. M. R. Delgado in 1967 proved in an experiment with monkeys that the leader of a pack, who even for a moment allows his fellows to doubt his worth (that is, is unable to confirm his compliance with the role of leader), immediately loses authority and ceases to be a leader .

Existential (being-oriented) authority is based not only on the ability to perform certain social functions, but equally on the personal qualities of a person who has achieved a high degree of personal perfection. Such a person radiates his authority; he does not need to use threats, orders or bribery; we are simply talking about a highly developed individuality, which by its own existence demonstrates excellence and shows how it can be a person, no matter what he says or does. The greatest thinkers (teachers) have been distinguished by such authority in history, but examples can often be found among ordinary people different levels of education and culture.

And this is the main problem of education. If the parents themselves were developed accordingly, there would be no dispute about the type of upbringing (authoritarianism or permissiveness). The child reacts very sensitively to “existential” authority, he needs it; on the contrary, he rebels and resists when he is forced, pampered or overfed, and especially when this is done by people who are themselves far from ideal and do not meet the requirements that are presented to the growing child.

With the emergence of hierarchical societies, authority based on competence was replaced by authority based on social status. This does not mean that now the leadership positions of authority are necessarily in the hands of incompetent people. No, it just means that competence is no longer a necessary prerequisite. Are we dealing with a monarchical system, where authority, the ability to rule, depends on the lottery of the location of genes, or are we dealing with an unscrupulous criminal who achieved a certain power at the cost of bribery or murder, or are we talking about an authority who rose to prominence thanks to his photogenic appearance? or a tight wallet (as is often the case in modern democratic systems) - in all these cases, authority and competence have nothing in common. But even in cases where authority is asserted on the basis of a certain competence, there are still serious problems.

First, a leader can be competent in one area and weak in others: for example, a head of state who is outstanding as a commander-in-chief in war turns out to be very far from perfect in peacetime. Or some politician who at the beginning of his career was honest and courageous, but could not stand the test of power and lost these qualities. Age and physical limitations may have affected his abilities. And, finally, we must remember that it is easier for representatives of a small tribe to judge the behavior of an authoritative person than for the multi-million population of our time, which has very limited ideas about its candidate and knows only what it sees in the distorting mirror of modern media and election posters, prepared by Public Relations specialists.

So, abstracting from the reasons for the loss of competence of the ruling elites, we can say that in most large hierarchically structured systems there is a process alienation of authority. The place of real or fictitious competence is taken by a title or uniform. When a leader puts on a uniform corresponding to his rank, then soon these external signs become more important than the essence (the real competence of the leader and his personal qualities). The king (as a symbol of this type of authority) can be stupid, vindictive, evil, that is, completely unsuitable for be authority, but he It has; and while he bears this title, it is tacitly assumed that he also possesses those qualities which make him competent. Even if the king is naked, everyone tends to believe that he is wearing a beautiful royal dress.

The replacement of competence with titles and uniforms did not happen spontaneously. The holders of authority and those who benefit from it try to convince the people of the authenticity of this fiction and lull their ability for realistic, that is, critical thinking. Every thinking man I am familiar with propaganda methods that fool people, completely destroy the ability to critically judge and lull the consciousness, reducing it to a one-dimensional level. The fictitious reality they believe in obscures the real reality, which they are no longer able to understand and appreciate.

The first difference between mode of possession And mode of being in the field of cognition, it is striking in the formulations “I have knowledge” (result) and “I know, I learn” (process).

To have knowledge means both to acquire some accessible information and to have it at one’s disposal. Knowledge in the sense of “I know” is associated with the concept of “to be”; it is functional and represents only a means in the process of productive thinking.

Let us recall the attitude towards knowledge of the great thinkers of the past, such as Buddha, Jesus, the prophets, Meister Eckhart, Sigmund Freud and Karl Marx. In their understanding, knowledge begins where a person realizes the insufficiency (unreliability) of the so-called common sense not only in the sense that our mental (subjective) reality does not correspond to “existing reality” (objective reality), but especially in the sense that most people live half asleep and are not aware that a huge number of phenomena that they consider not subject to doubt, are actually illusions that grow under the influence of the social environment. Therefore, knowledge begins with the destruction of deception and delusion. Knowledge means penetrating from the surface to the roots and then to the causes of things; to know means to get to the bottom of reality in its purest form. Knowing does not mean “possessing the truth,” but means, by thinking critically, actively striving to penetrate into the depths of phenomena, gradually approaching the truth.

To denote this quality - creative penetration into depth - there is an independent word in Hebrew ( jadoa), which means to recognize and love in the sense of sexual penetration of a man. The Enlightened Buddha urged people to awaken and free themselves from the illusion that power over things leads to happiness. The prophets also called on people to wake up and realize that they had created idols for themselves. Jesus says, “Only the truth will set you free.” Meister Eckhart says that knowledge is not a specific idea, but what a person receives when, freed from every shell, he, naked and free, runs towards God in order to touch him and see the truth. From Marx's point of view, illusions must be destroyed in order to destroy the circumstances that give rise to these illusions. Freud's concept of self-knowledge is based on the idea that illusions (“rationalizations”) must be destroyed in order to give way to unconscious truth.

All of these thinkers cared about the liberation of man, and they all questioned the stereotypes of thinking recognized in society. For them, it was important to understand the goal: not the achievement of absolute and unchangeable truth, but the process of the movement of the human mind towards triumph. For cognizer a negative result of cognition is just as important as a positive one, for these are two sides of the cognitive process that distinguish an inquisitive person from a lazy person. For a person of the “existential type” the main thing is deepening knowledge, for a person of the “possessing type” the main thing is know more.

Our education system is universally aimed at stuffing a person with knowledge as property in proportion to his property and social status. They receive a minimum of knowledge as the amount of information necessary to perform their job functions. And, in addition, everyone receives a certain package of “additional knowledge” (as a luxury item) for elevation in their own eyes and in the eyes of others. Schools are factories that produce packages of ready-made knowledge, although teachers sincerely think that they are introducing students to the highest achievements of the human spirit. Many colleges are very good at feeding these illusions. They manage to offer students a giant sandwich (from Indian philosophy and art to existentialism and surrealism), from which the student can take a bite in one place or another, and they are supposedly encouraged to freely choose a topic, do not insist on any textbook, etc. ... (Radical criticism of our school system is given by the famous philosopher Ivan Illich in his book “Liberation of Society from School.”)

In the religious, political and personal sense, the concept of “faith” has at least two completely different meanings depending on the type of thinking in which it is used: in mode of possession or mode of being.

IN mode of possession faith is the presence of a ready-made solution for which there is no rational evidence. In this case, faith consists of formulas that are created by others (usually a bureaucracy) and which are accepted by everyone else who submits to that bureaucracy. Faith forms in a person a sense of reliability on the basis of the real (or imagined) power of the bureaucracy. Faith is the entrance ticket that gives a person the right to belong to a large group of people, this ticket frees a person from the difficult task of making decisions on his own. He now feels included in the community beati possidentes– happy owners of true faith. For a person of the possessive type, faith gives a feeling of strength: it seems to him that he is transmitting absolute and unshakable truths, which should be believed simply because the power of those who defend this faith is inviolable. And who would want to voluntarily give up such confidence, which requires almost nothing from you, except perhaps to give up your own independence?

God, the original symbol of the highest value, to whom we want to join with all our being, in mode of possession turns into an idol. From the perspective of the prophets, this means that a person, having created with his own hands a certain “ thing", transfers his own forces to her and thereby weakens himself. He subordinates himself to the creation of his hands and sees himself in an alienated form (not as the creator of his idol, but as its admirer). I can have an idol, since he is a thing, but since I worship him, we can say that at the same time he has me.

When a god is made into an idol, his imaginary qualities have as little to do with personal experience, as well as alienated political doctrines. Although the image of God is associated with kindness, all cruelty is committed in his name, just as the alienated faith in human solidarity does not prevent any crime from being committed. IN mode of possession faith is a support, a crutch for all those who want to gain self-confidence and understand the meaning of life, but do not have the courage to seek it on their own.

In the case of “existential” faith, we are dealing with a completely different phenomenon. Can a person live without faith? Can a baby “not believe in the mother’s breast”? Should we trust our fellow citizens, those we love, ourselves? Can we exist without faith in the justice of the basic norms of our lives? Without faith, a person is overcome by hopelessness and fear. IN mode of being faith is not belief in any specific ideas(although this is not excluded), but this is primarily conviction, internal position, installation.

It would be more correct to say that a person abides in a state of faith than he It has belief. (Theologians in this sense distinguish fides quae cre ditur And fides gua creditur, which corresponds to the distinction between content faith and act beliefs.)

You can believe in yourself and other people, a religious person can believe in God. God in the Old Testament always implies the denial of idols or gods with which a person can have. The concept of “god” in Eastern religions is transcendental from the very beginning (even if it is created by analogy with the Eastern ruler). God cannot have a name, he cannot be depicted, drawn or copied.

Subsequently, with the development of Judaism and Christianity, attempts are made to achieve the complete liberation of God from the status of an idol, or, more correctly, attempts are made to prevent idolatry, this is expressed in the fact that any statements about the qualities of God are prohibited. We find an even more radical position in Christian myths (from Pseudo-Dionysius the Areopagite to the unknown author of the treatise “The Cloud of Unknowing” and further to Meister Eckhart, where the concept of God extends to some abstract “deity” (some single something), which is very similar to the ideas , found among the Neoplatonists or in the Vedas. Such faith in God is accompanied by a subconscious desire to transfer divine properties to oneself; such faith results in a constant active process of self-improvement.

Existential faith (in mode of being) carries faith in oneself, in another person, in humanity, in the ability of people to show true humanity. This faith also includes a factor of reliability and confidence. However, this confidence rests on my own knowledge, and not on submission to an authority that dictates and prescribes to me who and what I should believe. This belief rests on the conviction that truth exists, and I know that truth exists because it is confirmed by my subjective experience, and I do not necessarily need other evidence. (In Hebrew there is a word for the concept of faith " emunah”, which means confidence, and the word “ amen" means "of course", "of course", "truth", "truly".)

When I am confident in the spiritual integrity of a person (in his decency in the highest sense), I still cannot empirically “prove” that he will remain so until his death (from a positivist point of view, strictly speaking, is not excluded from consideration and the fact that he might have changed his principles if he had lived longer). My confidence is based on my personal knowledge of people and life experience in which I myself understood and felt what love, decency and honesty are. This way of knowing depends on how much a person is able to detach himself from his own “I” and see another person as he is, to understand his character in its entirety, both as an individual and as a part of all humanity. Only then does it become clear what can be expected from him. By this, of course, I do not mean that it is possible to accurately predict all of his future behavior, but nevertheless certain important character traits can be seen in advance, such as honesty, a sense of responsibility. (See the chapter “Faith as a Character Trait” in Psychoanalysis and Ethics.)

So, existential faith rests on facts, and in this sense it is rational, but still these facts cannot be “proven, verified” by the methods of traditional positivist psychology. Only I myself know how to “catch” and “register” these facts thanks to my knowledge, instinct and life experience.

The word "love" in mode of possession And mode of being has two completely different meanings.

Is it possible have love? If this were possible, then love would be a thing, a substance. To be fair, it should be said right away that there is no such thing as “love.” Love is an abstraction: someone will say that love is some kind of higher being, a deity that no one has ever seen. In reality, love only exists process. To love is to exercise productive activity, which implicitly includes the need to care for another being or object, to try to know it, to strive for it, to enjoy it, be it a person, a tree, a picture or an idea. To love someone means to worry about him, to awaken him to life, to strengthen his desire to live; and at the same time love is a process of self-rebirth and self-renewal.

Possessive love (of the “have” type) declares its property rights and seeks to control its object; it suppresses, fetters and suffocates, that is, it kills instead of reviving.

In this case, the word “love” is simply used inappropriately; it veils the opposite feeling. The question still remains open as to how many parents love their children. Stories about the monstrous cruelty of parents towards their children - from physical to mental abuse, from tolerance to complete ignorance and even outright sadism (and we have a lot of such facts over the last 2000 years of the development of our industrial West) incline me to the idea that loving parents are an exception to the general rule.

The same applies to marriage: an alliance is concluded out of love or convenience - it doesn’t matter, anyway, spouses who really love each other are an exception. In marriage, the word “love” expresses everything: social expediency, tradition, mutual material interest, common concerns for children, bilateral dependence, fear and even hatred; this is done consciously until one of the two (or both) discovers that they do not love each other and never have. Today, there has been some progress in this regard: people have begun to look at things more soberly and realistically, and therefore many no longer confuse sexual attraction with love and do not take joyful and bright periodic meetings as the equivalent of love. This new attitude led to more honest behavior and more frequent partner changes. However, as a result, we cannot say that the feeling of love has become more common - neither with old nor with new partners.

It is interesting to trace in detail the transition from the beginning of falling in love to the moment when the illusion arises that you are already “ owner" this wonderful bird of love. (In my book “The Art of Loving,” I already drew attention to the fact that the expression “being in love” is wrong from the very beginning. To love means to show productive activity, being in a state of love is a passive form.) At the moment of courtship, partners are not yet sure of each other each other, they are trying to conquer each other. They are livelier than usual, more active, more interesting in conversation, even more beautiful - after all, animation always makes the face more beautiful. Neither one nor the other can say that he is already took possession partner, so everyone directs their efforts to be(that is, express yourself more clearly, give more to others and provoke reciprocal activity).

With marriage, the situation changes radically. The marriage contract gives both the exclusive right to own the object: his body, his feelings, his inclinations. There is no need to conquer anyone, because love has turned into something comparable to property, to property.

Both parties no longer try to awaken love in their partner; they become boring and, as a result, even lose their external attractiveness. Disappointment sets in. Have they themselves changed? Or did they make a mistake at the very beginning? Usually everyone looks for the reason for change in the other and feels deceived. And everyone does not understand that both of them are not the same people who were recently visited by love, they cannot understand that what led to the loss of the ability to love them was a delusion, a mistaken idea that love can have. They both settled down at this level of understanding and, instead of loving, began to perceive each other as their property: as money, social status, house, children, etc. Therefore, a marriage that begins with love sometimes turns into a community of two owners, in which they united two egoists, and the name of this community is “family”. In other cases, the participants yearn to revive old feelings, and now one or the other indulges in the illusion that the other partner can quench his thirst. It seems to them that they don’t need anything else in life except love. But love for them is a goddess, an idol that they want to worship, and not a way be I, self-expression. Their defeat is inevitable, for “love is the child of freedom” (as the old French song says), and those who worship it as a deity plunge into the mire of passive contemplation and inaction. Eventually he loses the remnants of his former charm and becomes boring and unbearable to his partner.

All this discussion does not mean that marriage is never the best option for loving people. The essence of the problem is not in marriage as such, but in the impersonal-existential structure of both partners, and finally, the society in which they live. Supporters modern forms living together (group marriage, changing partners, group sex, etc.), as far as I understand, they are simply trying to get around the difficulties of true love, offering to fight boredom by introducing more and more new incentives and increasing the number of partners, instead of truly loving one. (Cf. the difference between actively and passively acting stimuli. Chapter 10 “Anatomy of Human Destructiveness.”)

Having and being in the Old and New Testaments and in the writings of Meister Eckhart

Old Testament

One of the leitmotifs of the Old Testament sounds like this: leave what you have, free yourself from all bonds: be!

The history of all Jewish tribes begins with the order to the first Jewish hero - Abraham, who was commanded to leave his country and his clan: “Get thee out of thy country, from thy kindred, and from thy father’s house, unto the land that I will show thee” (Gen. 12:1). Abraham must leave what he has—his land and his family—and go into the unknown. However, his descendants developed new lands and took root in new soil, created new families and clans - and what came of it? They found themselves under a new burden - they became victims of property: as soon as the Jews in Egypt became rich and powerful, they fell into slavery; they lost the idea of a single God, the God of their ancestors, the nomadic nomads, and began to worship the idols of profit and wealth, which later became their idols.

The second Jewish hero - Moses. God instructed him to free his people, lead the Jews out of the land that had become their home (even though they were ultimately slaves in that land), and go into the wilderness to “rejoice.” Reluctantly and with great fear, the Jews followed their leader Moses into the desert.

The desert is keyword, is a symbol of freedom. The desert is not at all like the homeland: there are no cities, no wealth; this is the region where nomadic nomads live, who have only the most necessary things, only what is required to maintain life. Historically, the lifestyle of nomadic nomads served as the basis for the legend about the ideology of rejection of all forms of non-functional property, and life in the desert became the ideal of free existence. However, these historical reminiscences only strengthen the meaning of the desert as a symbol of a free life, not bound by any bonds or property. Indeed, many ritual concepts of Jewish holidays are associated with the desert. Matzo (bread without yeast) is the bread of those who are ready to quickly get ready for their pilgrimage; this is the bread of strangers. “Suka” (“tabernacle” - hut) is a house of wanderers, an analogue of a tabernacle - a tent; such a dwelling can be quickly built and easily disassembled. In the Talmud, such a dwelling is called a “temporary house” (they simply live in it); and it is different from a "permanent home" which is owned.

The Jews yearned for the Egyptian “meat pots,” for a stable, permanent home, for meager but guaranteed food, for visible idols. They were afraid of the unknown and the miserable life in the desert. They said: “Oh, it would have been better if we had died by the hand of the Lord in the land of Egypt, when we sat by the meat pot and ate our fill of bread! For you brought us out into this wilderness to starve us all” (Exodus 16:3). God - throughout the history of liberation - condescendingly forgives people for their weaknesses. He promises to feed them: in the morning - “bread”, in the evening - quails. But he adds two important orders to this promise: everyone must take for himself as much food as he needs, and no more. “And the children of Israel did so, and gathered some much, some little. And they measured it by an omer, and the one who gathered a lot had nothing left over, and the one who gathered a little had no shortage. Each one gathered as much as he could eat” (Exodus 16:17–18). This was the Lord's first command.

In fact, it was the first to formulate the principle that became widely known thanks to Karl Marx: to each according to his needs. The right to be fed was established without any restrictions. God acted as a mother-nurse, feeding her children. And children don't have to prove anything to earn the right to be fed. The second order of the Lord is directed against hoarding, greed, and possessiveness. The people of Israel were forbidden to leave food out until the morning.

“But they did not listen to Moses and some of them left it until the morning; and worms infested, and it stank; and Moses was angry with them. And they gathered it early in the morning, each one as much as he could eat, but when the sun warmed it, it melted” (Exodus 16:20-21).

In connection with the collection of food, the rule of observing Shabbat (Saturday) is introduced. Moses tells the children of Israel to gather twice as much as usual on Friday: “...gather six days, and the seventh day is Sabbath; there will be no work that day" (Exodus 16:26).

Keeping the Sabbath is the most important biblical principle and, later, the most important rule of Judaism. This is the only religious commandment in the narrow sense of the word from the Ten Commandments, the observance of which even those prophets who opposed ritualism insisted; celebrating the Sabbath has been the most strictly observed commandment throughout the 2,000 years of Diaspora life, although it has often been a difficult ordeal. It is easy to imagine that Shabbat is “a ray of light in a dark kingdom”, a symbol of faith and hope for Jews scattered around the world, disadvantaged, often despised and persecuted. Shabbat is a way of preserving the self-awareness of the people, self-esteem and pride in their people, who know how to celebrate the Sabbath like a king. And what is Saturday if not a day of rest in the worldly sense of the word, a day of freeing people from the burden of work, at least for 24 hours? Of course this is true, and this function of the Sabbath makes it one of the great innovations in the development of all mankind. However, this reason is not enough, and it is not the reason why the Sabbath became a key moment in Jewish life.

To better understand the role of the Sabbath, we must delve deeper into the essence of this institution. It's about not about rest as such in the sense of the absence of any effort, both physical and mental. It's about relaxation in the sense restoration of complete harmony of people with each other and with nature. You can’t destroy anything and you can’t build anything: Shabbat is a day of truce in the battle that a person wages with the whole world. Even pulling a stalk of grass from the ground or lighting a match will mean a violation of this harmony. And socially there should be no changes. It is for this reason that it is forbidden to carry anything along the street, even if it is no heavier than a new scarf (typically, in your own garden you are allowed to carry any weight). And the point is not at all that it is prohibited to carry out any actions, but that it is not allowed to move objects from one private ownership to another, because such a movement amounts, in essence, to a change in property relations. On Shabbat a person lives as if he has nothing, he does not pursue any goals, with the exception of one - “to be,” that is, to express his original abilities in the pursuit of science, in eating, drinking, prayer, in singing and love.

Shabbat is a day of joy, because on this day a person remains entirely himself. This is why the Talmud calls the Sabbath the anticipation of the messianic era, and the messianic era the never-ending Sabbath; “this will be a time when property and money, sorrow and sorrow will be prohibited; pure Being, having won victory over time, will become the highest goal.” The historical predecessor of the Sabbath is Babylonian Shapatu– was a day of sadness and fear. Modern Sunday is a day of entertainment, consumption, escape from oneself. One may wonder: is it not time to restore the Sabbath as a day of universal harmony and peace, a day that will foreshadow the future of humanity? The image of the messianic era is also a contribution Jewish people to world culture, a contribution comparable in significance to the Sabbath holiday. The vision of the messianic era, like the Sabbath, embellished the lives of the Jewish people, who never gave up despite the severe disappointments and suffering inflicted by false prophets, from Bar Kokhba in the second century to the present day. Like the Sabbath, this concept of the messianic era presupposes a way of life when fear and war will end, when there will be no place for greed and acquisitiveness, when the accumulation of property will lose all meaning, and the purpose of life will be the realization of our essential powers.

The story of the Exodus ends tragically. Israelis cannot stand life without property, without possessions. And although they are already accustomed to doing without a permanent home and without food, being content only with what God sends them daily, they cannot bear to live without a constantly present presence. "leader", without his idol.

And when Moses disappears on the mountain, the Jews, in desperation, force Aaron to make them a visible idol that they can worship, such as a golden calf. We can say that the hour of reckoning has come for the mistake of God, who allowed the Jews to take gold and jewelry with them from Egypt. Along with this gold they brought a terrible virus of profit; and, finding themselves at a crossroads, unable to make decisions without a leader, unable to resist the awakened thirst for possession, they become carriers of a possessive orientation. Aaron makes a calf from their common gold, and the people exclaim: “Behold, O Israel, this is your God, who brought you out of the land of Egypt!” (Exodus 32:4).

End of introductory fragment.

Erich Fromm

To have or to be
Fromm Erich

To have or to be
Erich Fromm

To have or to be

The founder of neo-Freudianism E. Fromm talks in the works collected in this book about how the inner world person.

The patient comes to the doctor and together they wander through the recesses of memory, into the depths of the unconscious, to discover hidden secrets. A person’s entire being goes through shock, through catharsis. Is it worth forcing the patient to relive life’s cataclysms, childhood pains, and the beginnings of painful impressions? The scientist develops the concept of two polar modes of human existence - possession and being.

The book is intended for a wide audience.

Content

To have or to be?

Preface

Introduction. Great Hopes, their collapse and new alternatives

The end of the illusion

Why did Great Expectations fail?

The Economic Necessity of Human Change

Is there any alternative to disaster?

Part one. Understanding the difference between having and being

I. First look

THE MEANING OF THE DIFFERENCE BETWEEN HAVING AND BEING

EXAMPLES FROM VARIOUS POETIC WORKS

IDIOMATIC CHANGES

Old Observations

Modern usage

ORIGIN OF TERMS

PHILOSOPHICAL CONCEPTS OF EXISTENCE

POSSESSION AND CONSUMPTION

II. Having and being in everyday life

EDUCATION

MEMORY

CONVERSATION

READING

POWER

POSSESSION OF KNOWLEDGE AND KNOWLEDGE

FAITH

LOVE

III. Having and being in the Old and New Testaments and in the writings of Meister Eckhart

OLD TESTAMENT

NEW TESTAMENT

MEISTER ECKHART (c. 1260-1327)

Eckhart's concept of possession

Eckhart's concept of being

Part two. Analyzing the Fundamental Differences Between the Two Ways of Existence

IV. What is the mode of possession?

THE SOCIETY OF ACQUISITORS IS THE BASIS OF THE MODUS OF OWNERSHIP

THE NATURE OF POSSESSION

Possession - Power - Rebellion

OTHER FACTORS ON WHICH POSSESSION ORIENTATION IS BASED

POSSESSION PRINCIPLE AND ANAL CHARACTER

ASCETISM AND EQUALITY

EXISTENTIAL POSSESSION

V. What is a mode of being?

TO BE ACTIVE

ACTIVITY AND PASSIVITY

Activity and passivity in the understanding of great thinkers

BEING AS REALITY

DESIRE TO GIVE, SHARE WITH OTHERS, SACRIFICE YOURSELF

VI. Other aspects of having and being

SAFETY - DANGER

SOLIDARITY - ANTAGONISM

JOY - PLEASURE

SIN AND FORGIVENESS

FEAR OF DEATH - AFFIRMATION OF LIFE

HERE AND NOW - PAST AND FUTURE

Part three. New man and new society

VII. Religion, character and society

FUNDAMENTALS OF SOCIAL CHARACTER

Social character and social structure

SOCIAL CHARACTER AND "RELIGIOUS NEEDS"

IS THE WESTERN WORLD CHRISTIAN?

"Industrial Religion"

"Market character" and "cybernetic religion"

HUMANISTIC PROTEST

VIII. Conditions for human change and traits of a new person

NEW PERSON

IX. Features of the new society

NEW SCIENCE ABOUT HUMAN

A NEW SOCIETY: IS THERE A REAL CHANCE TO CREATE IT?

The greatness and limitations of Fromm himself

Erich Fromm (1900-1980) - German-American philosopher, psychologist and sociologist, founder of neo-Freudianism. Neo-Freudianism is a direction of modern philosophy and psychology that has become widespread mainly in the United States, whose supporters combined Freud's psychoanalysis with American sociological theories. Some of the most famous representatives of neo-Freudianism include Karen Horney, Harry Sullivan and Erich Fromm.

Neo-Freudians criticized a number of provisions of classical psychoanalysis in the interpretation of intrapsychic processes, but at the same time retained the most important components of its concept (the doctrine of the irrational motives of human activity, initially inherent in each individual). These scientists shifted the focus to the study of interpersonal relationships. They did this in an effort to answer questions about human existence, how a person should live and what he should do.

Neo-Freudians believe that the cause of neuroses in humans is anxiety, which arises in a child when faced with a hostile world and intensifies with a lack of love and attention. Later, this reason turns out to be the inability for an individual to achieve harmony with the social structure of modern society, which creates in a person feelings of loneliness, isolation from others, and alienation. It is society that neo-Freudians view as the source of universal alienation. It is recognized as hostile to the fundamental trends in the development of personality and the transformation of its value, practical ideals and attitudes. None of the social devices that humanity has known has been aimed at developing personal potential. On the contrary, societies of different eras put pressure on the personality, transformed it, and did not allow the best inclinations of a person to develop.

Therefore, neo-Freudians believe that through the healing of the individual, the healing of the entire society can and should occur.

In 1933 Fromm emigrated to the USA. In America, Fromm did an extraordinary amount for the development of philosophy, psychology, anthropology, history and sociology of religion.

Calling his teaching “humanistic psychoanalysis,” Fromm moved away from Freud’s biologism in an effort to clarify the mechanism of the connection between the individual’s psyche and the social structure of society. He put forward a project to create, particularly in the United States, a harmonious, “healthy” society based on psychoanalytic “social and individual therapy.”

The work "The Greatness and Limitations of Freud's Theory" is largely devoted to the disengagement with the founder of Freudianism. Fromm reflects on how cultural context influences the researcher's thinking. We know today that the philosopher is not free in his creativity. The nature of his concept is influenced by those ideological schemes that dominate society. A researcher cannot jump out of his culture. A deeply and originally thinking person faces the need to express new idea the language of his time.

Every society has its own social filter. Society may not be ready to accept new concepts. The life experience of any individual community determines not only the “logic”, but to a certain extent also the content of the philosophical system. Freud produced brilliant ideas. His thinking was paradigmatic, that is, it gave birth to a revolution in the minds of people. Some cultural scientists, for example L.G. Ionin, believe that three radical revolutions in thinking can be distinguished in European history.

The first revolution is the Copernican revolution in consciousness. Thanks to the discovery of Copernicus, it became clear that man is not at all the center of the universe.

The vast immeasurable spaces of space are completely indifferent to the feelings and experiences of man, for he is lost in the depths of space. Of course, this is an exclusive discovery. It decisively changes human ideas and entails a revaluation of all values.

Another radical discovery belongs to Freud. For many centuries, people believed that the main gift of a person is his consciousness. It elevates man above the natural kingdom and determines human behavior. Freud destroyed this idea. He showed that the mind is just a strip of light in the depths of the human psyche. Consciousness is surrounded by a continent of the unconscious. But the main thing is that it is these abysses of the unconscious that have a decisive impact on human behavior and largely determine it.

Finally, the last radical discovery is that European culture is not at all universal, unique. There are many cultures on earth. They are autonomous and sovereign. Each of them has its own destiny and immeasurable potential. If there are a huge number of cultures, then how should a person behave in the face of this fact? Should he seek his own cultural niche and keep himself in it? Or maybe these cultures overlap and are close to each other?

Cultures have long ceased to be hermetically sealed areas. An unprecedented migration of people, as a result of which exotic spiritual trends swept over the world, circling many times Earth. Enormous cross-cultural contacts.

Interethnic marriages. Ecumenical waves. Preaching calls coming from the screen. Experiences in interreligious universal dialogue. Perhaps these trends should be resisted? This is exactly how fundamentalists reason. They warn of the corruption of great covenants. They insist that splinters and fragments of heterogeneous cultural trends will never form an organic whole*. What is a person in this strange world? Not only is he now left to his own devices, having lost his previous theological support, he not only finds himself a victim of his own irrational impulses, but has lost the very ability to deeply identify himself with the cosmos of heterogeneous cultures. Under these conditions, a person’s internal well-being is undermined.

Fromm rightly points out the greatness and limitations of Freud's concept.

She, of course, proposed fundamentally new thinking patterns. But, as E. Fromm notes, Freud still remained a captive of his culture.

Much of what was significant for the founder of psychoanalysis turned out to be just a tribute to the times. Here Fromm sees the line between the greatness and limitations of the Freudian concept.

Yes, Fromm is our contemporary. But less than two decades have passed since he passed away, and today we can say that when discussing Freud, Fromm himself demonstrates a certain time limitation. Much of what seemed indisputable to Fromm today seems far from obvious. Fromm repeatedly repeated that the truth saves and heals. This is ancient wisdom. The idea of the salvific nature of truth turns out to be common to Judaism and Christianity, to Socrates and Spinoza, Hegel and Marx.

In fact, the search for truth is a deep, acute human need.

The patient comes to the doctor, and together they wander through the recesses of memory, into the depths of the unconscious, to discover what is hidden, buried there. At the same time, when revealing a secret, a person often experiences a shock, painful and painful. Of course, sometimes repressed dramatic memories lurk in the layers of the unconscious, deeply traumatizing the human soul. So is it necessary to awaken these memories? Is it worth forcing the patient to relive past life cataclysms, childhood grievances, excruciatingly painful impressions?

Let their souls lie at the bottom, undisturbed by anyone, forgotten... However, something amazing is known from psychoanalysis. It turns out that past grievances do not lie at the bottom of the soul - forgotten and harmless, but secretly control the affairs and fate of a person. And vice versa! As soon as a ray of reason touches these long-standing mental traumas, a person’s inner world is transformed. This is how healing begins... But is the search for truth really a very obvious human need?

It can be said that Fromm does not look entirely convincing here. In the 20th century different thinkers moving towards understanding human subjectivity came to the same conclusion.

Truth is not at all desirable for man. On the contrary, many are satisfied with an illusion, a dream, a phantom. A person does not seek the truth, he is afraid of it, and therefore is often happy to be deceived.

The huge changes taking place in the country, it would seem, should return us to prudence, sobriety of reason, and ideological non-partisanship. One would expect that the collapse of monoideology would lead to the establishment of free thought everywhere. Meanwhile, there is no more common word now than “myth.” It denotes not only the previous ideologization of consciousness. The current illusory nature of many social projects is also associated with the myth. The same sign is used to mark supporters of the market and those who are nostalgic for socialism, Westerners and Slavophiles, adherents of the Russian idea and admirers of globalism, heralds of personality and statists, democrats and monarchists. And if this is so, then what is a myth anyway?

Myth is an outstanding property of human culture, the most valuable material of life, a type of human experience and even a unique way of existence. Myth embodies the secret desires of man, in particular, his hallucinatory experience and the dramaturgy of the unconscious. The individual is psychologically uncomfortable in a torn, split world. He intuitively reaches out to an undifferentiated worldview.

Myth sanctifies human existence, gives it meaning and hope. It helps to overcome the ruthless, critical orientation of consciousness. That is why people so often retreat from sober thought, giving preference to the world of dreams.

Of course, Fromm understood the specifics of myth. Myth, as is obvious, is not strictly analytical knowledge, but at the same time it is not chaotic. It has a peculiar logic that allows us to master the enormous material of the unconscious and irrational accumulated by humanity. K. Jung and E. Fromm, turning to the language of symbols that was so clear to the ancients, began to read the deep, inexhaustible and universal meaning in the myth.

Let us turn, for example, to the role played by myth in the brilliant literature of Latin American countries. This or that character often experiences an amazing, constantly renewing fate. It is as if he is condemned to reproduce a certain archetype of life, repeatedly played out on the stage of history. But in this whirling of times, something universal is visible, which cannot be called just a mirage. On the contrary, a certain indivisible truth is revealed; behind the instability and diversity of what is happening, an immeasurably deeper secret reality and... truth emerges. Does a person flee from truth into myth, but in myth finds truth? Or vice versa? A person searches for the truth, but finds a myth?

Today we cannot unambiguously answer the question of what is a person’s deepest aspiration - the search for truth or a secret attraction to a dream, to a dream.

Yes, Freud's greatness lies in the fact that he extended the method of finding truth to that sphere in which man had previously seen only the realm of dreams. Using rich empirical material, Freud showed that the way to get rid of painful states of mind consists in penetrating a person into his own psychic depths. However, let us add on our own, Freud, like Fromm, did not answer the question of how this is combined with a person’s deep attraction to phantasmagoria, illusions, dreams, and rejection of the truth.

Fromm explores the uniqueness of Freud's scientific method. He rejects as simplistic the idea that the truth of a theory depends on the possibility of its experimental verification by others, provided that the same results are obtained. Fromm shows that the history of science is the history of erroneous but fruitful statements, fraught with new unexpected guesses.

Fromm's discussions of the scientific method are interesting, but they often do not take into account new approaches to the theory of knowledge. Over the past decades, fundamentally new positions have emerged on these issues, different from those occupied by Fromm, which reveals the scope of applicability of Fromm’s methodology.

One could say, first of all, about the specificity of humanitarian knowledge, that is, knowledge about man, humanity. When, for example, we study society and comprehend its laws, we have to immediately admit that the laws of nature, which seem universal, are clearly not suitable here. We immediately discover a fundamental difference between the concrete sciences and the humanities.

Natural laws express the constant interconnection and regularity of natural phenomena. They cannot be created. One madman said: "I am the author of the forty laws of nature." These are, of course, the words of a madman. Natural laws cannot be invented or broken. They are not created, but discovered, and even then only approximatively.

Social laws are fundamentally different in nature. They are caused by human activity. In their activities and communication, people are guided by the goals that they are trying to realize. A person has needs that he seeks to satisfy. He is guided by his own life and practical attitudes. There can be no constant interconnection and regularity of phenomena here. The guidelines that guide people in life are constantly changing. They may be broken. They can be converted, canceled. In society, events often develop unpredictably.

Today we are aware that psychoanalysis is not only a scientific theory. This is a philosophy, a therapeutic practice. Freudian philosophy is concerned with the healing of the soul. It cannot be reduced to experimental scientific knowledge.

Fromm talks about the scientific method, but psychoanalysis, as we know, is moving closer to ethically oriented concepts and schools of East and West:

Buddhism and Taoism, Pythagoreanism and Franciscanism.

A. M. Rutkevich notes: “Today, psychoanalysis is a kind of surrogate for religion for Europeans and Americans who have lost their faith and been knocked out of the traditional culture. Together with exotic eastern teachings, occultism, bioenergy and other “fruits of enlightenment,” psychoanalysis takes a place in the soul of Western man, liberated by Christianity"*.

So, we see, on the one hand, Fromm’s attempt to present Freud’s method as purely scientific, i.e., correlated with reason, consciousness, logic, and on the other hand, Freudianism as modern mythology. But Freud himself called his meta-psychology a myth. K. Popper and L. Wittgenstein, comparing psychoanalysis with the requirements scientific rationality, also assessed Freud’s theory as a myth.

In this case, the argument boiled down to the following theses. The propositions and conclusions of psychoanalysis are unverifiable, unverifiable either through facts or through rational procedures. They should simply be taken on faith. Moreover, the main purpose of psychoanalysis is psychotherapy, just like ideology or religion.

In a letter to A. Einstein in 1932, Freud wrote: “Perhaps it will seem to you that our theories are a kind of mythology, and in this case also discordant. But doesn’t every science eventually come to this kind of mythology? Can't the same be said about your physics today?"*.

Indeed, many modern researchers today believe that science does not produce truth at all...

From the point of view of modern theory, psychoanalysis cannot be accused of allegedly being insufficiently scientific, because different images of the world are also determined by socio-psychological, cultural, and cognitive factors.

But psychoanalysis is also accused of not being completely mythological. The doctor deals with one patient and invades his purely inner world.

The psychoanalyst does not appeal to tradition; it splits the spiritual world into phenomena, but at the same time does not provide a real synthesis of the soul. Psychoanalysis, seeking to provide a psychological explanation, for example, of religion, ultimately eliminates the highest guidelines, without which it is impossible to fully understand the phenomenon of personality. French esotericist R.

Guenon therefore sees in psychoanalysis a “satanic art.”

So, the scientific status that Fromm is trying to defend in relation to Freud’s concept turns out to be shaky. For many, Freudianism is unscientific. However, today psychoanalysis is equally accused not only of being unscientific, but also of being unmythological, and also... of being scientific and mythological. This theory is focused on the knowledge of truth and the interpretation of meaning. The strategy of scientific reason is recognized in him as an experimental method**. This is one side of Fromm's analysis of Freud's legacy. But Fromm does not stop there.

M., 1994.] Fromm reproaches Freud for being deeply influenced by bourgeois consciousness. The founder of psychoanalysis reproduced certain patterns of thinking that were dictated by the capitalist way of life. But isn’t it possible to blame Fromm himself for this? Yes, he is an insightful social critic of capitalism, a supporter of humanistic socialism. This explains his enormous interest in Marx and his high appreciation of Marx's expertise in capitalist society.

Like Marx, Fromm proposes the concept of a “healthy society”. However, what does it look like if you look closely at it? This is socialism with a “human face”.

“Straightening” the human essence, removing the destructive consequences of capitalism, overcoming alienation, refusing to deify the economy and the state - these are the key theses of Fromm’s program. It is not only utopian, like Marxist, but also extremely far from modern reality.

Time turned out to be merciless to this utopian dream. One can, of course, blame Freud for being limited in time, but one cannot blame him for trying to impose this limitation on the world as a global utopian project.

Fromm's position on this issue is much more vulnerable.

Finally, Fromm reproaches Freud for following bourgeois authoritarian-patriarchal attitudes. Freud, by analogy with how in society the majority is controlled by the ruling minority, put the soul under the authoritarian control of the Ego and Super-Ego. However, according to Fromm, only an authoritarian system, the highest goal of which is the preservation of the existing state of affairs, requires such censorship and a constant threat of repression.

Fromm challenges Freud's personality structure. However, this structure is still the object of psychoanalytic reflection. Freud's followers present the dramaturgy of the conscious and unconscious in different ways, but retain this structure as the foundation of the theory. Of course, the different levels of the psyche can be viewed, as Jung did, as complementary rather than hierarchically subordinate. But these levels of the psyche in a certain dimension are really not equivalent. In the psychoanalysis of E. Fromm, a distinction is made between the principle of “to be” and the principle of “to have”. The mode of being has as its prerequisites independence, freedom and a critical mind. Its main characteristic human activity, but not in the sense of external employment, but in the sense of internal asceticism, the productive use of his human potential. To be active means to allow one’s abilities, talent, and the entire wealth of human talents to manifest themselves, with which, according to E. Fromm, a person is endowed, although to varying degrees.
part 1

Read online fromm to be or to have. To have or to be

Preface

Introduction The collapse of great hopes and new alternatives

The end of one illusion

Why Great Expectations Didn't Realize

The Economic Necessity of Human Change

Is there any alternative to disaster?

* * *

Introduction
The collapse of great hopes and new alternatives