/tag/having

19 quotes tagged 'having'

How Our Lives Become Stories: Making Selves

Author: Paul John Eakin

Publisher: Cornell University Press (1999)

The Quiet American

Author: Graham Greene

Publisher: Penguin Classics (2004)

The Illuminatus! Trilogy

Author: Robert Shea and Robert Anton Wilson

Publisher: Fine Communications (1998)

816

Every ideology is a mental murder, a reduction of dynamic living processes to static classifications, and every classification is a Damnation, just as every inclusion is an exclusion. In a busy, buzzing universe where no two snow flakes are identical, and no two trees are identical, and no two people are identical- and, indeed, the smallest sub-atomic particle, we are assured, is not even identical with itself from one microsecond to the next- every card-index system is a delusion. 'Or, to put it more charitably,' as Nietzsche says, 'we are all better artists than we realize.' It is easy to see that the label 'Jew' was a Damnation in Nazi Germany, but actually the label 'Jew' is a Damnation anywhere, even where anti-Semitism does not exist. 'He is a Jew,' 'He is a doctor,' and 'He is a poet' mean, to the card indexing centre of the cortex, that my experience with him will be like my experience with other Jews, other doctors, and other poets. Thus, individuality is ignored when identity is asserted. At a party or any place where strangers meet, watch this mechanism in action. Behind the friendly overtures there is wariness as each person fishes for the label that will identify and Damn the other. Finally, it is revealed: 'Oh, he's an advertising copywriter,' 'Oh, he's an engine-lathe operator.' Both parties relax, for now they know how to behave, what roles to play in the game. Ninety-nine percent of each has been Damned; the other is reacting to the 1 percent that has been labeled by the card-index machine.\n \n Certain Damnations are socially and intellectually necessary, of course. A custard pie thrown in a comedian's face is Damned by the physicist who analyzes it according to the Newtonian laws of motion. These equations tell us we want to know about the impact of the pie on the face, but nothing about the human meaning of pie-throwing. A cultural anthropologist, analyzing the social function of the comedian as shaman, court jester, and king's surrogate, explains the pie-throwing as a survival of the Feast of Fools and the killing of the king's double. This Damns the subject in another way. A psychoanalyst, finding an Oedipal castration ritual here, has performed a third Damnation, and the Marxist, seeing an outlet for the worker's repressed rage against the bosses, performs a fourth. Each Damnation has its values and uses, but is nonetheless a Damnation unless its partial and arbitrary nature is recognized. The poet, who compares the pie in the comedian's face with the Decline of the West or his own lost love, commits a fifth Damnation, but in this case the game element and the whimsicality of the symbolism are safely obvious. At least, one would hope so; reading the New Critics occasionally raises doubts on this point.

In My Own Way

Author: Alan Watts

Publisher: New World Library (2007)

To Have or to Be?

Author: Erich Fromm

Publisher: Continuum Impacts (2005)

Marx wrote (in the Economic and Philosophical Manuscripts) that 'free conscious activity' (i.e., human activity) is 'the species character of man.' Labor, for him, represents human activity, and human activity is life. Capital, on the other hand, represents for Marx the amassed, the past, and in the last analysis, the dead (Grundrisse). One cannot fully understand the affective charge which the struggle between capital and labor had for Marx unless one considers that for him it was the fight between aliveness and deadness, the present versus the past, people versus things, being versus having. For Marx the question was: Who should rule whom - should life rule the dead, or the dead rule life? Socialism, for him, represented a society in which life had won over the dead.\r\n \r\nMarx's whole critique of capitalism and his vision of socialism are rooted in the concept that human self-activity is paralyzed in the capitalist system and that the goal is to restore full humanity by restoring activity in all spheres of life.

Only to the extent that we decrease the mode of having, that is of nonbeing - i.e., stop finding security and identity by clinging to what we have, by 'sitting on it,' by holding onto our ego and our possessions - can the mode of being emerge. 'To be' requires giving up one's egocentricity and selfishness, or in words often used by the mystics, by making oneself 'empty' and 'poor.

Having refers to things and things are fixed and describable. Being refers to experience, and human experience is in principle not describable. What is fully describable is our persona - the mask we each wear, the ego we present - for this persona is in itself a thing. In contrast, the living human being is not a dead image and cannot be described like a thing. In fact, the living human being cannot be described at all. Indeed, much can be said about me, about my character, about my total orientation to life. This insightful knowledge can go very far in understanding and describing my own or another's psychical structure. But the total me, my whole individuality, my suchness that is as unique as my fingerprints are, can never be fully understood, not even by empathy, for no two human beings are entirely alike.

In the having mode, there is no alive relationship between me and what I have. It and I have become things, and I have it, because I have the force to make it mine. But there is also a reverse relationship: it has me, because my sense of identity, i.e., of sanity, rests upon my having it (and as many things as possible). The having mode of existence is not established by an alive, productive process between subject and object; it makes things of both object and subject. The relationship is one of deadness, not aliveness.

The sentence 'I have something' expresses the relation between the subject, I (or he, we, you, they), and the object, O. It implies that the subject is permanent and the object is permanent. But is there permanence in the subject? Or in the object? I shall die; I may lose the social position that guarantees my having something. The object is similarly not permanent: it can be destroyed, or it can be lost, or it can lose its value. Speaking of having something permanently rests upon the illusion of a permanent and indestructible substance. If I seem to have everything, I have - in reality - nothing, since my having, possessing, controlling an object is only a transitory moment in the process of living.

The nature of the having mode of existence follows from the nature of private property. In this mode of existence all that matters is my acquisition of property and my unlimited right to keep what I have acquired. The having mode excludes others; it does not require any further effort on my part to keep my property or to make productive use of it. The buddha has described this mode of behavior as craving, the Jewish and Christian religions as coveting; it transforms everybody and everything into something dead and subject to another's power.

Perhaps the most striking example of today's consumer-buying phenomenon is the private automobile. Our age deserves to be dubbed 'the age of the automobile,' four whole economy has been built around automobile production, and our whole life is greatly determined by the rise and fall of the consumer market for cars.\n\n 'To those who have one, their car seems like a vital necessity; to those who do not yet own one, especially people in the so-called socialist states, a car is a symbol of joy. Apparently, however, affection for one's car is not deep and abiding, but a love affair of somewhat short duration, for owners change their cars frequently; after two years, even after just one, an auto owner tires of the 'old car' and starts shopping around for a 'good deal' on a new vehicle. From shopping around to purchase, the whole transaction seems to be a game in which even trickery is sometimes a prime element, and the 'good deal' is enjoyed as much as, if not more than, the ultimate prize: that brand-new model in the driveway.\n\n 'Several factors must be taken into account in order to solve the puzzle of the seemingly flagrant contradiction between the owners' property relationship to their automobiles and their so-short-lived interest in them. First, there is the element of depersonalization in the owner's relationship to the car; the car is not a concrete object that its owner is fond of, but a status symbol, an extension of power - an ego builder; having acquired a car, the owner has actually acquired a new piece of ego. A second factor is that buying a new car every two years instead of, say, every six increases the buyer's thril of acquisition; the act of making the new car one's own is a kind of defloration - it enhances one's sense of control, and the more often it happens, the more thrilled one is. The third factor is that frequent car buying means frequent opportunities to 'make a deal' - to make a profit by the exchange - a satisfaction deeply rooted in men and women today. The fourth factor is one of great importance: the need to experience new stimuli, because the old stimuli are flat and exhausted after but a short while. In an earlier discussion of stimuli, I differentiated between 'activating' and 'passivating' stimuli and suggested the following formulation: 'the more 'passivating' a stimulus is, the more frequently it must be changed in tensity and/or in kind; the more 'activating' it is, the longer it retains its stimulating quality and the less necessary is change in intensity and content.' The fifth and most important factor lies in the change in social character that has occurred during the past century and a half, i.e., from the 'hoarding' to the 'marketing' character. While the change does not do away with the having orientation, it does modify it considerably.

Our ego is the most important object of our property feeling, for it comprises many things: our body, our name, our social status, our possessions (including knowledge), the image we have of ourselves and the image we want others to have of us. Our ego is a mixture of real qualities, such as knowledge and skills, and of certain fictitious qualities that we build around a core of reality. But the essential point is not so much what the ego's content is, but that the ego is felt as a thing we each possess, and that this 'thing' is the basis of our sense of identity.

During courtship neither person is yet sure of the other, but each tries to win the other. Both are alive, attractive, interesting, even beautiful - inasmuch as aliveness always makes a face beautiful. Neither yet has the other; hence each one's energy is directed to being, i.e., to giving to and stimulating the other. With the act of marriage the situation frequently changes fundamentally. The marriage contract gives each partner the exclusive possession of the other's body, feelings, and care. Nobody has to be won over any more, because love has become something one has, a property.

God, originally a symbol for the highest value that we can experience within us, becomes, in the having mode, an idol. In the prophetic concept, an idol is a thing that we ourselves make and project our own powers into, thus impoverishing ourselves. We then submit to our creation and by our submission are in touch with ourselves in an alienated form. While I can have the idol because it is a thing, by my submission to it, it, simultaneously, has me. Once He has become an idol, God's alleged qualities have as little to do with my personal experience as alienated political doctrines do. The idol may be praised as Lord of Mercy, yet any cruelty may be committed in its name, just as the alienated faith in human solidarity may not even raise doubts about committing the most inhuman acts. Faith, in the having mode, is a crutch for those who want to be certain, those who want an answer to life without daring to search for it themselves.'

While the having persons rely on what they have, the being persons rely on the fact that they are, that they are alive and that something new will be born in only they have the courage to let go and to respond.'

A noun is the proper denotation for a thing. I can say that I have things: for instance that I have a table, a house, a book, a car. The proper denotation for an activity, a process, is a verb: for instance I am, I love, I desire, I hate, etc. Yet ever more frequently an activity is expressed in terms of having; that is, a noun is used instead of a verb. But to express an activity by to have in connection with a noun is an erroneous use of language, because processes and activities cannot be possessed; they can only be experienced.

The difference between being and having is not essentially that between East and West. The difference is rather between a society centered around persons and one centered around things...It is not that Western man cannoth fully understand Eastern systems, such as Zen Buddhism (as Jung thought), but that modern Man cannot understand the spirit of a society that is not centered in property and greed.'

The Brothers Karamazov

Author: Fyodor Dostoyevsky

Publisher: Penguin Classics (2003)

Each now strives to isolate his person as much as possible from the others, wishing to experience within himself life's completeness, yet from all his efforts there results not life's completeness but a complete suicide, for instead of discovering the true nature of their being they lapse into total solitariness. For in our era all are isolated into individuals, each retires solitary within his burrow, each withdraws from the other, conceals himself and that which he possesses and ends by being rejected of men and by rejecting them. He amasses wealth in solitariness, thinking: how strong I am now and how secure, yet he does not know, the witless one, that the more he amasses, the further he will sink into suicidal impotence. For he has become accustomed to relying upon himself alone and has isolated himself from the whole as an individual, has trained his soul not to trust in help from others, in human beings and mankind, and is fearful only of losing his money and privileges he has acquired. In every place today the human mind is mockingly starting to lose its awareness of the fact that a person's true security consists not in his own personal, solitary effort, but in the common integrity of human kind.

The world has proclaimed freedom, particularly of late, and yet what do we see in this freedom of theirs: nothing but servitude and suicide! For the world says: 'You have needs, so satisfy them, for you have the same rights as the wealthiest and most hihgly placed of men. Do not be afraid to satisfy them, but even multiply them' - that is the present-day teaching of the world. In that, too, they see freedom. And what is the result of this right to the multiplication of needs? Among the rich solitariness and spiritual suicide, and among the poor - envy and murder, for while they have been given rights, they have not yet been afforded the means with which to satisfy their needs. Assurance is offered that as time goes by the world will become more united, that it will form itself into a brotherly communion by shortening distance and transmitting thoughts through the air. Alas, do not believe in such a unification of men. In construing freedom as the multiplication and speedy satisfaction of needs, they distort their own nature, for they engender within themselves many senseless and stupid desires, habits and most absurd inventions. They live solely for envy, for love of the flesh and for self-conceit. To have dinners, horses and carriages, rank, and attendants who are slaves is already such a necessity that they will even sacrifice their lives, their honour and philanthropy in order to satisfy that necessity, and will even kill themselves if they cannot do so. Among those who are not rich we see the same thing, and among the poor envy and the frustration of needs are at present dulled by drunkenness. But soon in place of alcohol it will be blood upon which they grow intoxicated - to that they are being led. I ask you: is such a man free? ...How can he desist from his habits, this slave, where can he go, if he is so accustomed to satisfying his countless needs, which he himself has invented? Solitary is he, and what concern can he have for the whole? And they have reached a point where the quantity of objects they amass is ever greater, and their joy is ever smaller.