On Having and Being

12 Jul, 2026

In the mid-20th century, the philosopher Erich Fromm developed a useful distinction between having and being, by which he referred

to two fundamental modes of existence, to two different kinds of orientation towards self and the world, to two different kinds of character structure the respective predominance of which determines the totality of a person’s thinking, feeling, and acting.¹

On this view, I have an ego, an idea and image of myself in which I am invested – an ideal ego, as Freud sometimes called it. But I am not this ego, this mental object. Rather, I am the subject-activity that reflects upon the objects that enter my field of consciousness, an agency that superintends all my experience from a distance. Without this distance, there would be no reflection, no deliberation or critique – just an unthinking flatness, a machinic automaticity. But this productive distance also creates an unbridgeable gap between the "I" and its objects. The "ego," however familiar, remains an alien thing.

To be oriented toward having is to over-identify with the ego, a recipe for misery. For one can never live up to the image, can never achieve identity with it. No matter what one does, it remains out of reach. Thus, over-identifying with the ego leaves one feeling like a fraud. And frauds are always stuck with the unenviable choice between frantically covering up their fraud or neurotically confessing to it, preemptively signaling their failure to others.

Of course, it is vital to have ideals, including an ideal ego, to strive toward. But the vitality itself is produced in the striving, the doing of the "I," which is its mode of being. To be oriented toward being, then, is to take one's eyes off the ego-object and embrace the non-alienated activity of the "I" – that is, to actively exercise one's critical and creative powers to engage with the world, to reflect and act upon it. It is to recognize the reality "that I and my activity are one."²

The task is to positively identify with and take pleasure in this activity, the doing and striving, which is also, necessarily, trying. But we don't like to be seen trying, as it indicates our lack, our incongruity with the ego that we project into the world. It can be very embarrassing, this not measuring up.

However, this embarrassment rests on the ego's fraudulent pretense, not the reality of the "I." In fact, there is only dignity in trying, in striving, working hard to achieve a worthy goal in the pursuit of an ideal. Relaxing one's identification with the ego – which is not quite letting go of the ego, but shifting one's focus toward living itself – means relinquishing the desire to appear to have achieved something and, instead, inhabiting the activity of pursuit.

This is how José Ortega y Gasset, in Revolt of the Masses (1930), described nobility as a psychological orientation. As he writes, "nobility is synonymous with a life of effort, ever set on excelling oneself, in passing beyond what one is to what one sets up as a duty and an obligation."³ A life of effort, driven by a sense of duty, obliged to an ideal that inevitably eludes one's grasp.

There is no final achievement, no possibility of passing into that ideal. Nowhere to rest. That is our tragic condition, which sometimes leads to melancholy, mourning the imagined loss of self-identity, an originary non-alienated condition.

But to reckon with reality is to transform it into a positive condition of existence. Nobility, then, figures as a spiritual remedy to the tragic condition, a spur to gather up one's own capacities, to continually hone and discipline them and put them to work in pursuit of a higher project. In other words, to rise above present conditions in order to intervene in them, to realize certain potentials that lie dormant in the world. It is a question of actively bringing a future into being rather than submitting to the mute operation of arbitrary forces.

If nobility seems unduly grand to us now – all this talk of striving and ideals – it is because ours is not a culture of being, but of having; a culture in which identity is triangulated through the objects we possess and consume, the images we project online, our self-fashioning after a type.

We have relaxed into a kind of nihilism administered by a system in which practically every sphere of activity has been subsumed by a narrowing economic logic, a logic of having and accumulating. Even our "leisure activity" has been captured and re-made by this logic, reduced to the passive consumption of others' self-presentations, images of ego, crystallized in photos, videos, and posts delivered in never-ending feeds.

There is nothing living in these streams. The rushing surface merely distracts from the stagnant water beneath. This culture of having, which today is bent on attention-capture at all costs solely to promote consumption, is the basis for a spiritual malaise that is now turning into something darker and more dangerous.

One way to combat this malaise is to participate in the construction of a counter-culture oriented toward being, understood as doing and striving. A culture in which one is encouraged to aspire toward the highest, toward what is best, without embarrassment. A culture in which trying is a virtue, passivity a vice, and nobility of spirit a living ideal.