From Soul, to Self, to Annihilation of Self.5

(Con'd)

From Fromm's descriptions what he regards as a "having" mode of existence and attitude of relating to the world and other people as distinct from what he calls a "being" mode of existence and relations to the non-self, we already got some inkling of what he is driving at and what he thinks is the direction of where we should be going. To drive his point home, he consolidates his findings in a chapter of his book "What is the Being Mode?" There he draws our attention to the following essential points:

1. Whilst "having" refers to things which are fixed and describable, "being" refers to experience which is "in principle not describable". As far as our "soul" or "self" is concerned, he says that all that is describable is our "persona", ( a social "mask" of our "ego" which we wear and present to the world for other's consumption) because our "persona" has become a "thing". To him, "a living human being" is not and cannot be a "dead image" although much of insight can be said about the "me" e.g our character, our attitude or orientation to life or our psychic structure etc., the "total me", my "whole individuality" or my "suchness that is as unique as my fingerprints are" and can never be fully understood, and our full identification with one human being "can never be achieved", not even by empathy because no two human beings are identical.  The inseparable barrier can only be partially overcome through a process of "alive mutual relatedness" in so far as both participate in the "dance of life". He says, "One could write pages of description of the Mona Lisa smile" and still "the pictured smile would not have been caught in words" and not simply because it is "mysterious" but because that is impossible in principle."No one can fully describe the expression of an interest, enthusiasm, biophilia or of hate or narcissism that one may see in the eyes of another person or the variety of facial expressions, of gaits, of postures, of intonations that characterize people".

2. The "being" mode of requires as its precondition: freedom, independence, and critical reason which enables one to be active, NOT in the sense of outward
activity or the expenditure of energy which brings about a certain result in the external world or in the sense of "socially recognized purposeful behavior that result in corresponding socially useful changes" or mere "busyness" ( which to him is actually not being active but being passive because one is forced or compelled either by external forces or power or authority e.g. the teacher, parents, bosses or by internal psychological forces like people suffering from obsessive compulsive disorders who merely repeat words, mechanical sub- routines, or other private rituals and in which one is actually alienated from what one is doing) but of inner spontaneous activity  in which "I experience myself as the subject of my experience or my activity"  and in the sense of the "productive use of our human powers" or to give expression to our faculties, talents, our gifts, to give birth to something, to produce something to which we feel that we remain organically related,  to grow, to pour ourselves into the outside world, to flow out, to love, to transcend the prison of our isolated ego, to be "interested" in the world, to give of ourselves to others and from time to time to renew ourselves. The emphasis on "being active" and "being productive" refer, not to the product of our activity, but to its "quality". He  thinks that to be productive in this sense is a character orientation which all human beings are capable of unless they have been emotionally crippled: productive persons animate whatever they touch. They give birth to their own faculties and bring life to other persons and to things. But to him, none of such activity can be fully expressed in words.  He says "the words are the vessels that are filled with experience that overflows the vessels..The words point to an experience; they are not the experience. The moment that I express what I experience exclusively in thought and words, the experience has gone; it has dried up, is dead, a mere thought. Hence being is indescribable in words and is communicable only by sharing my experience. In the structure of having, the dead rules; in the structure of of being, the alive and inexpressible experience rules " although he qualifies this by saying that "Of course, in the being mode, there is also thinking that is alive and productive."

3. To the extent that "we decrease the mode of having" (i.e. non-being) and "stop finding security and identity by clinging to what we have, by 'siting on it', by holding on to our ego and our possession--can the mode of being emerge." He adds, "''To be' requires giving up one's egocentricity and selfishness, or in the words often used by the mystics, by making oneself 'empty' and 'poor'". Here, he thinks a bit like Laotzu (4th-5th century BCE), Buddha (563-483 BCE), A N Whitehead (1861-1947) Wittgenstein (1889-1951) Martin Heidegger (1899-1976), ), Gilles Deleuze (1925-1995) and Jacques Derrida ( 1930-2004)..

4. He thinks that what keeps people from living in the "being" mode is fear of uncertainty. To give up the "having" orientation arouses "intense anxiety": most people find this difficult because it feels like "being thrown into the ocean when one does not know how to swim". But to Fromm, this is an illusion.:"They do not know that when they have given p the crutch of property, they can begin to use their own proper forces and walk  by themselves" but think rather that "they would collapse if they were not supported by things they have." 

5. Fromm says that there is another meaning to the word "being" or "reality" of a person's "true self" in the form of his character structure which motivates his external behavior but which may or may not reflect his true inner "being" (which itself may be unconscious and may not be directly observable) and which Meister Eckhart, Spinoza and Freud helped to "unmask: in Freud's study of one's early traumatic infantile interpersonal relationship, irrational  desires and fears which are repressed and which may surface only in one's dreams, everyday slips of tongue and certain mechanical catatonic frigidities. To Fromm, our conscious motivations, ideas and beliefs are "a blend of false information, biases, irrational passions, rationalizations, prejudices in which morsels of truth swim around and give the reassurance that albeit false, the whole mixture is real and true". In Fromm's words, they are "a cesspool of illusions according to the laws of logic and plausibility" which is supposed to reflect "reality" and which forms the "map" relying on which we organize our daily life, but whose contents are basically various kinds of "fictions" determined by society and which forces the truth to become the "prisoner of the alleged rationality". However, in our society, the "having" mode of existing is "assumed" to be rooted in virtually unalterable "human nature", a view based on the "dogma"(much still used in our educational system) that people are basically lazy, passive and do not want to work unless "compelled" or "forced" to by hopes of material gain or fear of hunger or punishment. But per Fromm, "to the members of many different societies of both past and present, the concept of innate human selfishness and laziness would appear as fantastic as the reverse sounds to us.". Both the tendencies toward "having" and "being" are equally rooted in human nature and it's untrue that selfishness and laziness are the only propensities inherent in human beings. However D. O Hebbs has found from studies on animal behavior, neurological experiments, infantile behavior, learning behavior, work behavior and socio-political  political and social conduct that once given the right kind of motivation which allows people to actively participate in changing their fate, they will show remarkable inventiveness, activity, imagination and satisfaction and if necessary, may even be prepared to endure severe hardship, sacrifice their personal interest or even risk their lives in defense of their own dignity and for the sake of experiencing a sense of common solidarity with others ( experienced in one's ties to mother, an idol, one's tribe, one's
nation, one's class, one's religion, one's fraternity, one's
organization, an ideal or conviction) and that people who "genuinely love"  will show a need to give in contrast people who practise "false love" ( which is really little more than "shared mutual selfishness" ) and that whilst genuine love increases people capacity to love and to give to the others, "false love" make people even more selfish. Fromm finds that whether the "having" mode or the "being mode" predominate is largely determined in particular societies by the relevant social structures, its values and norms. To change the relevant forms, we probably need some radical changes in our socio-economic structures and a radically different view of "human nature."

(To be cont'd)