From Soul to Self to Annihilation of Self.2

(Cont'd)

Fromm thinks that because contemporary capitalist society is devoted to acquiring property and making profit, most of the people we see live in the "having" mode of existence and may see that as the most natural and even the only acceptable way of life and to that extent, it is that much more difficult for them to understand that the "having" mode is just one only of their possible orientations to the world and that the "being" mode of existence ( one more conducive to their true happiness) is also possible. There are some subtle yet important differences between the way we live in the "having" mode and the way we live in the "being" mode which it pays to learn. Fromm gives a number of concrete examples of how the two modes of existence work out in practice in the way we learn, remember,talk, read, exercise authority, "have" faith and love.

True Learning

According to Fromm, students in the "having" mode of existence will listen to a lecture, hear the words, understand their global structure and meaning and do the best they can to write every word in their loose-leaf notebooks so that they become fixed clusters of thought or whole theories which they store up and memorize and later reproduce in the examination. However, the contents of what they thus copied down and memorized do not form part of their own individual system of thought so as to enrich and widen it. They merely become the owner of a collection of statements made by somebody else (who had either created them or taken them over from another source). They only got one aim: to hold on to what they have thus "learned" either by carefully guarding their notes or by committing them to memory. They do not produce or create something new. On the contrary, they become fidgety and most fearful if they hear something different because that would disturb the fixed amount of information which they have carefully garnered! A student in the "being" mode of relatedness to the world will be truly interested (In its original Latin meaning, the root :"inter-esse", means "to be in or among" something else to which one is actively related) in the topic of the relevant lecture, will go there with a number of questions in mind, will listen respond to what they hear in an active, productive way, allow it to stimulate their own thinking, raise new questions and assimilate any new ideas and perspective into their own thought system and allow what it to change the way they think and live but only IF  the lecture itself is stimulating and thought provoking. If the lectures themselves are not challenging, the students in the being mode will concentrate on their own thought processes instead. They do not simply "acquire knowledge" that they can take home and then memorize.

True Remembering

Someone remembering things in the "having" mode will do so only passively, mechanically by committing to their memory the relevant connections through the frequency of their constant associations or do so purely logically through using such concepts as divergence and convergence, similarity and difference under categories of time, space, size, color or position within a given system of thought. In the "being" mode, one will actively recall words, ideas, sights, paintings, music etc. which may only be distantly connected to the particular datum to be remembered or connected to it in novel and unexpected ways. The connections made are not passive, mechanical or merely logical but are alive, productive, creative and often positive or negative feelings are actively triggered and engaged.  As in learning, one must have an emotional "interest" in the subject to be remembered before one can easily "remember" it in the "being" mode e.g. some particularly "memorable" experience in the past with a person, place, sight, or smell i.e. it must be "alive" and "meaningful" to the person doing the recall.  For people in the "having" mode, a photograph for example will serve merely as an aid to their memory in identifying a person or a scene with no particular emotional "interest" and is merely an alienated memory. In the same manner, the "notes" one has committed to paper or in digital form to discs, fingers or the hard drive of the computer which one has in the "having" mode, will often have become an externalized part of our memory bank so that once we lose our "notes", we will have lost the "memory" of the relevant information too. Today, most sales clerk will rarely do any mental addition of even relatively simple numbers but will automatically move their fingers across the keyboard of their machines. Students who write down every word of the lecture on paper will often remember less of the essentials of the lecture than those who try to understand what is being said. Likewise, musicians will tell you that those who sight-read a score most easily will have most difficulty in remembering the music without the score and illiterate people will often have memories far superior to those fluently literate people in a modern industrial society. Thus literacy may paradoxically impoverish our capacity to "experience", to "imagine",  to "remember" and to "live"!

True Dialogue (Talking with or talking to)

In a conversational debate between two persons A and B both operating in a "having" mode in which each is committed to his own opinion, what matters to each is to find better or more reasonable arguments to defend their own opinion, neither expecting to change his own or his opponent's opinion as each is consumed by fear precisely because their "opinion" is one of their possessions such that "change" will means loss or impoverishment thereof. If however, the conversation is not meant to be a debate but a dialogue or discussion, the situation will be completely different. If we are about meet a person distinguished by fame, power, authority or by real qualities or a person from whom we want something e.g a good job, to be loved or admired, most people will be at least mildly anxious and often will "prepare" ourselves for the important meeting: we may think of "topics" we think might interest the other, how to start the conversation or even map out the entire conversation as far as our part is concerned or we may think of how to bolster ourselves by concentrating on what we have: our past successes, our charming/intimidating personality, our social status, our connections, our dress or appearance etc.If we do it skilfully, others may be impressed although a great deal really depends on how well we actually "perform" and not a little may be due to the others' poverty or lack of judgment. If we are not a good performer, then the meeting will appear wooden, contrived, boring and will not elicit much interest. We may also not deliberately prepare ourselves, forget ourselves, our position, our knowledge and respond spontaneously and productively to others' ideas so that we may get some new ideas to enrich our own life. We rely not on what we have but on what and who we are and on fact that what the others are. To do so, we must have the courage to "be", the courage let go of our "self" and to respond instead of stifling our "self" with what we have. Often our own spontaneity and our own aliveness will become infectious and help the others lower their "defences" and "transcend" their own egocentricities. The conversation will then cease to be an exchange of commodities (data, information, knowledge, status etc.) and there will be a genuine flow of true dialogue in which it does not matter any more who is "right" and the initial "duellists" may begin to dance together and part not with either triumph or defeat or sorrow, all equally sterile, but with joy. Fromm, himself a psychoanalyst, says that "No amount of psychoanalytic interpretation will have an effect if the therapeutic atmosphere is heavy, unalive and boring" because the essential quality of the psychoanalytic therapy is this "enlivening" quality of the therapist. Carl Rogers, the father of what has been called "humanistic psychology", has said almost exactly the same thing. To Rogers, what is important in a psycho-analysis is the quality of spontaneous emotional resonance which is built up in the course of the psycho-analytic sessions between the psychotherapist and his "patients" whom he must react to not coldly, clinically and completely objectively as just an "object" of the therapy but warmly, spontaneously, and engage himself also actively, empathetically and treat the other as another suffering human being .

True Reading

Fromm thinks that what holds true in a conversation is equally true for reading which he says "is--or should be--a conversation between the author and the reader." This has always been my attitude. When we read, we should "see" in the theatre of our imagination, the relevant author as a person, though from a different age, often living in a vastly different society with different problems, concerns, hopes and fears, struggling with various questions of how to deal with certain difficulties they  or their society faced in their lives and times and having reflected deeply thereon and having come to certain tentative conclusions about how to tackle them. But he warns us to be careful about "who" and "what" we are reading. He says: "Reading an artless, cheap novel is a form of day dreaming [which] does not permit productive response" because "the text is swallowed like a television show, or the potato chips one munches whilst watching TV," Cheap novels do not deepen our insight into ourselves nor enhance our knowledge of human nature in general. At the end of the emotional experience, we "have" the story, the outcome of the plot and the fate of the hero or heroine, that is all. it is the same with books on philosophy or history. Fromm thinks that the way we read a philosophy or history book has been "deformed" by education. He elaborates: "The school aims to give each student a certain amount of 'cultural property' and at the end of their schooling certifies the student has having at least the minimum amount.Students are taught to read a book so that they can repeat the author's main thoughts. This is how students 'know' Plato, Aristotle, Descartes, Spinoza, Leibniz, Kant, Heidegger, Sartre. The difference between various levels of education from high school to graduate school is mainly in the amount of cultural property that is acquired, which corresponds roughly to the amount of material property the students may be expected to own in later life. The so-called excellent students are the ones who can most accurately repeat what each of the various philosophers had to say. They are like well-informed guide at a museum." Students do not learn to question the philosophers, to talk to them, to be aware of the philosopher's own contradictions, their evasions, their oversights, to distinguish between what was new and what the authors could not help thinking because it was the "common sense" of their time, nor to find out when the philosophers were merely speaking through their brain or when they speak both from their brain and their heart or whether they are authentic or not. But in a "being" mode, a reader may often conclude that even a highly praised book may be without any real merit or of only very limited value or even that they may have understood a book even better than the author because they have considered matters the author did not take into account.

(To be cont'd)
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