Two Ways of Seeing a Flower #065
Erich Fromm on Eastern and Western views of the world
Dear all, I had a few nasty doctor visits in the past week that took up a lot of time — thus the delay in updating this page. You can always find the newest video on the YouTube channel, and I will add the videos and transcripts here, too — but sometimes this may be a day or two late. Thank you for your understanding!
Hello, welcome back to Every Dawn where we are trying to find inspiration for our day in a little bit of philosophy. My name is Andy and I'm a philosophy lecturer. In the past few episodes, we have been talking about the philosophy of Erich Fromm, who was a psychoanalyst, philosopher, and writer famous from the 1950s to about the 1970s. He died in 1980.
An important part of his philosophy is the distinction between having and being. He says there are these different ways of how we can relate to life: we can relate to life in the mode of having, as he calls it, or in the mode of being.
What does this mean exactly? Fromm tries to explain it by giving us the example of two poems, and these are two very simple poems about a flower each, one Western and one Eastern. The Western poem is from Alfred Lord Tennyson, a British poet who lived from 1850 to 1892. The Eastern poem is from a Japanese poet, Matsuo Basho, who lived from 1644 to 1694.
Let's compare these two ways of being that are expressed in these two poems. Tennyson writes:
"Flower in a crannied wall,
I pluck you out of the crannies,
I hold you here, root and all, in my hand,
Little flower—but if I could understand
What you are, root and all, and all in all,
I should know what God and man is."
In contrast, the Japanese poet's poem is very short:
"When I look carefully
I see the nazuna blooming
By the hedge!"
You see immediately the difference between the two. The Western poet wants to pluck the flower, he kills the flower, he makes it into an object of study and he holds it there with its roots, which means that this plant is now dead. This is exactly how Western Sciences operate: we try to find the truth about the World by destroying things, by cutting them up, by killing them, by collecting thousands of insects in big displays which we then analyze.
In contrast, the Japanese poet does not touch the flower. He's just looking at it carefully. Even the look might perhaps damage the flower or might somehow destroy the magic of the flower.
These are two very different ways of relating to the flower. Fromm writes about this: "The difference is between a society centered around persons and one centered around things. While Tennyson wants to possess the flower, picking it out of the place it lived and killing it in the process, the Japanese poet is merely looking carefully at it."
Fromm says that this is the difference between the mode of having and the mode of being. The Western poet wants to have the flower, wants to possess the flower, wants to analyze it and learn from it. While the Eastern poet is happy to be in the presence of the flower, he doesn't try to possess it.
This appears later in many other situations in life where perhaps we want in a loving relationship to possess the other person, to make sure that they are ours forever. While in the mode of being, we might be just happy to be together without the need to possess the other person.
This is what Fromm wants us to take away from the difference between these two poems.
Thank you and see you again tomorrow.