Erich Fromm - The Essential Fromm: Life Between Having and Being

The Essential Fromm

Life Between Having and Being

Edited and with a foreword by Rainer Funk

CONTENTS

Editors Foreword

Our life is a life between having and being. This is the experience of many people who are moved by Erich Fromms alternative of having or being and who can be motivated to a change in their lives. Erich Fromm formulated the alternative in the book To Have or to Be? in 1976. In 1989, nine years after Erich Fromms death, this book was followed by another that bore the title The Art of Being (Continuum, 1992), which contained chapters from his posthumous writings that he had intended for the book published in 1976 but, for various reasons, did not publish at that time.

The alternative of having or being serves many people as a key to an understanding of what they value consciously, semiconsciously, or unconsciously and of what they actually pursue passionately in their lives. Not only does it allow one to understand conceptually and to diagnose what really goes on within each of us, but it is at the same time a viable guiding notion for changing our lives as well.

Whoever tries to discern his own orientation toward having and to practice an alternative with orientation toward being develops the need to learn even more about the path toward it. The present reader concerning the alternative of having or being hopes to meet this need. It does not seek to replace readings of the two books To Have or to Be? and The Art of Being, but rather to complement them. This results from the selection of the texts collected here as well as from the manner of their compilation. Moreover, The Essential Fromm: Life between Having and Being seeks to reduce the large number of misunderstandings surrounding the alternative of having or being and to pick out those aspects that, after a nearly thirty-five-year-long acquaintance with Fromms alternative, have proven to be especially fruitful and instructive.

Much of what is formulated in well-chosen words in the two books mentioned makes an impact only in the form of the spoken word. Lectures and interviews are thus an important complement and addition. Erich Fromm did indeed write all his books in English, but, when To Have or to Be? was being written during the 1970s, he gave a series of lectures in German and granted numerous German interviews. The transcripts of these interviews and lectures, which are otherwise inaccessible or accessible only with difficulty, make up a considerable part of the present volume.

The alternative of having or being as basic orientations of our passionate strivingsof our characterhad already been occupying Erich Fromm for many years before he dedicated an entire book to it at the end of his life. Prefigured by Meister Eckhart and Karl Marx (cf. E. Fromm, On Being Human, 1992b), he conceived of them in the 1940s as an alternative between nonproductive and productive character orientation, later as an alternative destructiveness, i.e., necrophilia, and creativity, i.e., biophilia (cf. E. Fromm, 1964a). There are statements and lectures about these alternatives as well that illustrate exactly what Fromm means by the being mode of existence. Because they, too, are largely unknown, they were included in this volume.

Finally, this volume contains several key sections from the two books To Have or to Be? and The Art of Being, which are of particular importance for the question of living between having and being and the question of the path to an orientation toward being; this volume also contains a previously unpublished manuscript for To Have or to Be?

The texts for the present volume were selected in such a way that their sequence and entirety constitute a rounded whole. Each selection and compilation of the texts pursues particular interests. One interest was to clarify life between an orientation toward having and an orientation toward being. Thus, the chapter Essentials of a Life between Having and Being is a key part of the present volume. Very definite manifestations are characteristic of the orientation toward having as well as of the orientation toward being. In such cases, distinctions were made between the typical, direct manifestation of the orientation toward having and the compensatory manifestations that are characteristic of it.

In To Have or to Be?, Erich Fromm discussed additional characteristics under the heading Further Aspects of Having and Being.

The last chapter of the present collection, which deals with the Steps toward Being, is another key point. Although important Steps toward Being were described in The Art of Being, that book gives but little attention to the fact that the steps toward being have to do with changing the bent of a persons character structure and its conscious and unconscious aspects. For this reason, the present volume also contains texts pertaining to the question of characterological change and the unconscious.

An especially relevant interest reflected in the selection and compilation of the texts of this volume is the attention drawn to human alienation through the market economy, which has led to the cultivation of the marketing character. It is indeed true that the orientation toward having is characterologically related to an anal-hoarding possessiveness that seeks to acquire things only egoistically and selfishly and that does not want to give or share anything. Yet possessiveness is only one root of the orientation toward having. As Erich Fromm himself shows in part 3 of To Have or to Be?, the orientation toward having is today far more the result of alienation caused by the marketing character. This is characterized by the fact that a person must surrender and lose more and more of his self and his individual being if he wants to be successful in the marketplace. He increasingly perceives himself as a vacuous subject that is then forced to replace his individual and subjective being with the possession of objects.