Philosophy
To Have or To Be
CevvelaPhilosophy
To Have or To Be
Erich Fromm · Say Yayınları · 1976
8
Cevvela Score
7.9 (1.501 oy)
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Summary
A psychoanalytic examination that divides modern humans’ relationship with the world into two basic categories: “Having” (focused on consumption, status, and material possessions) and “Being” (focused on experience, production, and growth). It explains how capitalism has transformed the human being into an object of consumption.
Quotes from Cevvela
“Consuming has become a precondition for being human in our age.”
“In the having mode, things possess the person.”
“In the being mode, sharing increases a person’s strength rather than diminishing it.”
“Knowledge should not be stored like property but lived as an activity.”
“Whoever defines themselves by things loses their identity when they lose those things.”
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Reader Score: 7.9 / 10(1.501 votes)
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Fromm once again strikes your mind like a sledgehammer. He shakes the “become a unicorn, reach millions of dollars” culture of the entrepreneurial ecosystem to its core. Someone driven by the urge to “possess” actually corrodes their own soul. If your existence depends solely on how much you possess, you are nothing when you lose it. “To be,” on the other hand, is to refine one’s own essence, to be knowledge itself, to be action itself. This is the point where, in Cevvela’s manifesto, we state: “Being useful is not an image—it is a way of being.” It strips modern humanity—obsessed with what it projects to the outside world—bare. Your wealth is determined not by material possessions, but by your own inner depth.