Introduction

Having and being: ‘refer to two fundamental modes of existence, to two different kinds of character structure the respective predominance of which determines the totality of a person’s thinking, feeling, and acting’ (Fromm, 1978: 33).

Fromm’s ‘sociological imagination’ (Mills, 1959/1976): the bringing together of insights from Marx and Freud:

For Freud … the person concerned with having and possession is a neurotic, mentally sick person; hence it would follow that the society in which most of the members are anal characters is a sick society.

(Fromm, 1978, 88)

‘The sick society’, its symptoms and its cause ‘The difference between being and having is …

between a society centred around persons and one centred around things’ (Fromm, 1978: 28).

‘The nature of the having mode of existence follows from the nature of private property’ (Fromm, 1978: 82).

Why is inclusion important? Being included

The significance of our inclusion turns on the significance of our

being.

From having to being

‘In the having mode of existence my relationship to the world is one of possessing and owning, one in which I want to make everybody and everything, including myself, my property’ (Fromm, 1978: 33).

In the being mode of existence, we must identify two forms of being. One is in contrast to having … and means aliveness and authentic relatedness to the world. The other form of being is in contrast to appearing and refers to the true nature, the true reality of a person or a thing in contrast to deceptive appearances …

(Fromm, 1978: 33).

How might we include persons within educational institutions?

Learning to be

From learning to have: passive consumption

Students in the having mode must have but one aim: to hold onto what they have learned, either by entrusting it firmly to their memories or by carefully guarding their notes. They do not have to produce or create something new.

(Fromm 1978: 37-8)  To learning to be: active engagement

The process of learning has an entirely different quality for students in the being mode…Instead of being passive receptacles of words and ideas, they listen, they hear, and most important, they receive and respond in an active, productive way … Their listening is an alive process.

(emphasis in the original, Fromm 1978: 38)

Here Fromm points to the responsibility of the university student to include themselves in learning.

Although he accepts, ‘Of course, this mode of learning can prevail only if the lecture offers stimulating material’ (Fromm, 1978, 38).

From the passive to the active educational setting

The ‘fundamental characteristic’ of being:

is that of being active, not in the sense of outward activity, of busyness, but of inner activity, the productive use of our human powers… It means to renew oneself, to grow, to flow out, to love, to transcend the prison of one’s isolated ego, to be interested, to give.

(Fromm, 1978: 92)

‘passivity excludes being’ (Fromm, 1978: 93).

Fromm takes us beyond inclusion for shallow participation in learning to inclusion for deep contribution.

From ‘Having knowledge’ to ‘knowing’

‘Having knowledge is taking and keeping possession of available knowledge … (Fromm, 1978: 47)

Being and knowing

[M]ost people are half-awake, half-dreaming, and are unaware that most of what they hold to be true and self-evident is illusion produced by the suggestive influence of the social world in which they live. Knowing, then, beings with the shattering of illusions …

(Fromm, 1978: 47)

‘Knowing does not mean to be in possession of the truth; it means to penetrate the surface and to strive critically and actively in order to approach truth ever more closely’ (Fromm, 1978: 47-48).

‘Optimum knowledge in the being mode is to know more deeply. In the having mode it is to have more knowledge’ (emphasis in the original, Fromm 1978: 48)

To learn to include ourselves and others is to learn to live more deeply.

What does it mean to be excluded within and from educational

institutions?

The reduction to property of education and knowledge, persons, the self and the

body

1. The reduction of education and knowledge to property:

Our education generally tries to train people to have knowledge as a possession, by and large commensurate with the amount of property or social prestige they are likely to have in later life … In addition they are each given a ‘luxury –knowledge package’ to enhance their feeling of worth … the schools are the factories in which these overall knowledge packages are produced …

(Fromm, 1978: 48)

2. The reduction of persons to property

‘The having mode excludes others …. It transforms everybody and everything into something dead and subject to another’s power’ (Fromm, 1978: 82).

Indeed, to exclude another is always to exclude the self: exclusions are always plural and never singular.  

‘In the having mode, there is no alive relationship between me and what I have… it makes things of both object and subject’ (emphasis in the original, Fromm, 1978: 83).

3. The reduction of the self and the body to property

People who discuss their health do so with a propriety feeling, refereeing to their sickness, their operations, their treatments … their property relationship to their bad health is analogous, say, to that of a stockholder whose shares are losing part of their original value in a badly falling market.

(Fromm, 1978: 79)

The individualising of disability is a consequence of this privatisation of the body and its experiences.

What sort of educational settings do we wish to include ourselves

and others into?

Including knowing,

persons, and the enriched self

1. Including knowing

‘to increase the sector of being means increased insight into the reality of one’s self, of others of the world’ (Fromm, 1978: 102).

2. Including persons

To include another is to include relation and mystery:

[T]he total me, my whole individuality, my suchness that is as unique as my fingerprints are, can never be fully understood… Only in the mutual alive relatedness can the other and I overcome the barrier of separateness, inasmuch as we both participate in the dance of life. Yet our full identification with each other can never be achieved.

(Fromm, 1978: 91)

But we must attempt ‘to overcome the illusions, the irrationally distorted picture’ (Fromm, 1957: 31).

Like Buber, to include one is to include all:

‘The true lover loves the whole world, in his or her love for a specific person’ (Fromm, 1978: 105).

‘He feels responsibility for his fellow men as he feels responsibility for himself’ (Fromm, 1957: 28).

3. Including the enriched self

‘Immature love says: “I love you because I need you.” Mature love says: “I need you because I love you” (emphasis in the original, Fromm, 1978: 41).

‘Respect means the concern that the other person should grow and unfold as he is’ (Fromm, 1957: 28).

Having Being

Property ‘loving, sharing, giving’ (Fromm, 1978: 86)

Passive Active

‘refers to things’ (Fromm, 1978: 91)

‘refers to experience’ and to persons (Fromm, 1978: 91)

Alienated Non-alienated

Repressed truth and illusions

Deepening critical, insight

References

Mills, C. Wright (1959/1976) The Sociological Imagination  (New York:  Oxford University Press)

Fromm, E. (1957) The art of loving (London: Bradford & Dickens)

Fromm, E. (1978) To have and to be (London, Abacus)