Can You "Have" Happiness? #064

Erich Fromm on Having and Being

Hello, welcome back to Every Dawn. I'm Andy, philosophy lecturer, and today we want to talk about this distinction between having and being. This is a thing that psychoanalyst and philosopher Erich Fromm talks about a lot, and I think this is a great way of seeing life, of seeing one of the problems of life.

Fromm says that many of us are stuck in the mode of having, and the mode of having is this mode of living in which we concentrate on what we can acquire, what we have, and where we get the meaning of our life and our value from our possessions. So you say this person is more valuable, he has a better life because he is richer, he has a bigger car, he has a bigger house, and so on.

And then we get used to that, and we apply this mode of having also to things where having is actually not so appropriate. So we would say "I have a happy family," "I have good health," "I have a happy life." But if you think of these, the use of "have" is actually not really correct, right? I don't have a family in any real sense. I don't have life satisfaction. I cannot possess it, I cannot own it, I cannot keep it. These are things that are in flux. I'm doing them, I am receiving them from the world at some point in my life, but I can equally well lose them.

So the problem with having generally is that when I have something, I can always lose it. It can be stolen, can be destroyed, and then I don't have it anymore. And Fromm says there is a better way of seeing one's life, and this is to focus on the being instead of the having.

So instead of saying "I have an education," we can say "I am educated." And this seems like a very little, very small difference, but Fromm says there is a huge difference in meaning between these two ways of seeing oneself. Because first, when I study, when I educate in the mode of having, I will just try to acquire as many books as possible and take notes and keep my notes somewhere safe, and then I think that I have this knowledge. And then I go to the exam, I get a paper, I get some kind of diploma, and then I have this diploma, and this shows that I have this education. So the education is in the diploma, and if I don't get the diploma or if I get a bad grade, then you know, I don't have this education.

But this is not entirely true because there are many people, you know, who are very educated without having PhDs or professor jobs. So there is a sense in which also having knowledge is kind of a dead knowledge, because if I cannot use it, then what's the good of it? I can have the diploma, but if I am not educated, then this diploma is not doing much good to me.

So Fromm says we should rather try to be educated, which means to not focus on these external signs of possession of knowledge, but instead to focus on how this knowledge changes us as human beings. When I am educated, I act differently. I am a different person now. My actions are informed by my knowledge. And so it's not so much that I have this education, but I am, I live this education. I represent this education with my being.

And the same is true, even more, Fromm says, with human relations. I can have a wife, I can have a family in the sense that I try to possess them, but I can also live a happy family life. I can be in love with my wife, which is a living relationship. It is something that I am always doing rather than having the sense of possessing another person.

And if you think about losing things, I can lose my family that I try to possess, I can lose my education if I lose my diploma, but I cannot lose the things that I am. I cannot lose if I am an educated man; this can never be lost. If I am a loving husband and father, this can never be lost, right? Because these are properties of me that are not things that I own and that are separate from me.

And so perhaps, I think we should have a look if we can in our lives identify situations where we are stuck in this mode of having, of accumulating, you know, things that we own, rather than being the beings that we want to be. And then perhaps try to change that, try to focus more on how we can be better people, how we can incorporate these things in a living way into our personality, our knowledge, our family, our feelings, instead of just possessing things.

Tell me what you think in the comments! Thank you, and goodbye.