Fromm - To have or to be?

To Have or To Be?

TITLES IN THE BLOOMSBURY REVELATIONS SERIES

Aesthetic Theory , Theodor W. Adorno

On Religion , Karl Barth

The Intelligence of Evil , Jean Baudrillard

In Defence of Politics , Bernard Crick

Intensive Science and Virtual Philosophy , Manuel DeLanda

A Thousand Plateaus , Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari

Anti-Oedipus , Gilles Deleuze and Flix Guattari

Taking Rights Seriously , Ronald Dworkin

Discourse on Free Will , Desiderius Erasmus and Martin Luther

Education for Critical Consciousness , Paulo Freire

To Have or To Be? , Erich Fromm

Truth and Method , Hans Georg Gadamer

All Men Are Brothers , Mohandas K. Gandhi

Eclipse of Reason , Max Horkheimer

After Virtue , Alasdair MacIntyre

Time for Revolution, Antonio Negri

The Politics of Aesthetics , Jacques Rancire

An Actor Prepares , Constantin Stanislavski

Building a Character , Constantin Stanislavski

Creating a Role , Constantin Stanislavski

Some titles are not available in North America

To Have or To Be?

Erich Fromm

Bloomsbury Academic

An imprint of Bloomsbury Publishing Plc

www.bloomsbury.com

Copyright 1976 by The Estate of Erich Fromm

First published in 1997 by Continuum

Reprinted 2009, 2010, 2011, 2012

Originally published in The World Perspective Series by Harper & Row

This paperback edition first published in 2013 by Bloomsbury Academic

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying, recording, or any information storage or retrieval system, without prior permission in writing from the publishers.

No responsibility for loss caused to any individual or organization acting on or refraining from action as a result of the material in this publication can be accepted by Bloomsbury Academic or the author.

British Library Cataloguing-in-Publication Data

A catalogue record for this book is available from the British Library.

ePub ISBN: 978-1-4725-0455-5

Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

A catalog record for this book is available from the Library of Congress.

Fromm, Erich, 19001980.

To have or to be?/Erich Fromm.

pages cm. (Bloomsbury revelations)

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-1-7809-3680-2 (pbk.)

1. Personality. 2. Ontology. I. Title.

BF698.F746 2013

128dc23

2013005634

Contents

What this series means

It is the thesis of World Perspectives that man is in the process of developing a new consciousness which, in spite of his apparent spiritual and moral captivity, can eventually lift the human race above and beyond the fear, ignorance, and isolation which beset it today. It is to this nascent consciousness, to this concept of man born out of a universe perceived through a fresh vision of reality, that World Perspectives is dedicated.

My Introduction to this Series is not of course to be construed as a prefatory essay for each individual book. These few pages simply attempt to set forth the general aim and purpose of the Series as a whole. They try to point to the principle of permanence within change and to define the essential nature of man, as presented by those scholars who have been invited to participate in this intellectual and spiritual movement.

Man has entered a new era of evolutionary history, one in which rapid change is a dominant consequence. He is contending with a fundamental change, since he has intervened in the evolutionary process. He must now better appreciate this fact and then develop the wisdom to direct the process toward his fulfillment rather than toward his destruction. As he learns to apply his understanding of the physical world for practical purposes, he is, in reality, extending his innate capacity and augmenting his ability and his need to communicate as well as his ability to think and to create. And as a result, he is substituting a goal-directed evolutionary process in his struggle against environmental hardship for the slow, but effective, biological evolution which produced modern man through mutation and natural selection. By intelligent intervention in the evolutionary process man has greatly accelerated and greatly expanded the range of his possibilities. But he has not changed the basic fact that it remains a trial and error process, with the danger of taking paths that lead to sterility of mind and heart, moral apathy and intellectual inertia; and even producing social dinosaurs unfit to live in an evolving world.

Only those spiritual and intellectual leaders of our epoch who have a paternity in this extension of mans horizons are invited to participate in the Series: those who are aware of the truth that beyond the divisiveness among men there exists a primordial unitive power since we are all bound together by a common humanity more fundamental than any unity of dogma; those who recognize that the centrifugal force which has scattered and atomized mankind must be replaced by an integrating structure and process capable of bestowing meaning and purpose on existence; those who realize that science itself, when not inhibited by the limitations of its own methodology, when chastened and humbled, commits man to an indeterminate range of yet undreamed consequences that may flow from it.

Virtually all of our disciplines have relied on conceptions which are now incompatible with the Cartesian axiom, and with the static world view we once derived from it. For underlying the new ideas, including those of modern physics, is a unifying order, but it is not causality; it is purpose, and not the purpose of the universe and of man, but the purpose in the universe and in man. In other words, we seem to inhabit a world of dynamic process and structure. Therefore we need a calculus of potentiality rather than one of probability, a dialectic of polarity, one in which unity and diversity are redefined as simultaneous and necessary poles of the same essence.

Our situation is new. No civilization has previously had to face the challenge of scientific specialization, and our response must be new. Thus this Series is committed to ensure that the spiritual and moral needs of a man as a human being and the scientific and intellectual resources at his command for life may be brought into a productive, meaningful and creative harmony.

In a certain sense we may say that man now has regained his former geocentric position in the universe. For a picture of the Earth has been made available from distant space, from the lunar desert, and the sheer isolation of the Earth has become plain. This is as new and as powerful an idea in history as any that has ever been born in mans consciousness. We are all becoming seriously concerned with our natural environment. And this concern is not only the result of the warnings given by biologists, ecologists and conservationists. Rather it is the result of a deepening awareness that something new has happened, that the planet Earth is a unique and precious place. Indeed, it may not be a mere coincidence that this awareness should have been born at the exact moment when man took his first step into outer space.

This Series endeavors to point to a reality of which scientific theory has revealed only one aspect. It is the commitment to this reality that lends universal intent to a scientists most original and solitary thought. By acknowledging this frankly we shall restore science to the great family of human aspirations by which men hope to fulfill themselves in the world community as thinking and sentient beings. For our problem is to discover a principle of differentiation and yet relationship lucid enough to justify and to purify scientific, philosophic and all other knowledge, both discursive and intuitive, by accepting their interdependence. This is the crisis in consciousness made articulate through the crisis in science. This is the new awakening.