Philosophers and theologians have discussed the topics of having and being for centuries. Two frameworks have greatly influenced my thoughts on these topics: the sociocultural psychological perspective of Erich Fromm and E-Prime of General Semantics. Drawing upon cultural and theological perspectives, Fromm positioned that mentally well people avoid a having perspective and concentrate on being. Having is a fairly simple construct to define and exemplify. For example, a person who describes and judges one’s existence based on possessed or desired objects approaches the world from a having perspective. Defining and exemplifying being is a much more difficult task. Fromm tended to use theological or past cultures as examples of the being model. Fromm’s arguments for being tended to extend beyond the human reality and into an idealization of certain groups of people. It seems inherent in the human condition that having is inevitable. Fromm recognized this point by stating that having in an existential sense was reasonable whereas anything beyond existential having was an unhealthy having perspective. Existential having, in this case, meant having knowledge, skills, or objects that met basic needs and enabled life. The threshold of crossing over into unhealthy having was unclear and seemingly arbitrary. Achieving being was in large part defined by decreasing the fixation on having superfluous knowledge, skills, objects, etc. Fromm, who was heavily influenced by religion, implied or declared that the having orientation was similar to sinning: e.g., greed, envy, gluttony.
The proponents of E-Prime proposed to eliminate all forms of the word to be (e.g., be, is, are, was, and were) in order to better identify the subject of an action. For example, instead saying that “My friend is happy with her new job” one should say that “My friend Sally seemed happy with her new job when I spoke with her on Saturday.” Some experts have commented that the assumptions of E-Prime are too strict (e.g., eliminating all forms of to be instead simply reducing them). Or stating the last sentence in E-Prime, some experts believe that the strict assumptions within the E-Prime language framework do not allow for effective communication in all cases. E-Prime would therefore counter Fromm’s position in that the use of “have-s” is better than the use of “be-s.”
The common ground of the Fromm and E-Prime perspective is that actor identity is an important part of defining and guiding human experience. Fromm would suggest that it is unhealthy to use an object, such as a car, define his or her personhood. E-Prime explains that a person should perceive himself or herself as an active participant in one’s experiences. From my perspective, reducing the use of have and be as well as associated words would enable people to better express and potentially understand their position in the human experience. For example, stating that I purchased a car for the use of decreasing travel time from place to place stands a more accurate description of the relationship between a person and object than sentences such as I have a car or I am a car owner. The latter statements overly simplify the relationship between an object and a person and lead to exaggerating the importance of an object in defining identity. People, such as myself, however, use have or be words often, in large part because these words make communication quicker and socially acceptable though likely less accurate. For example, if a person asks you describe yourself, how often do you start with something like: “I am a health educator. I have an appointment within the university. I have several publications. I am grant funded so I rarely have free time. etc.”
I think that the issue of having and being is driven in large part by defining the variability in our lives and in this process, we focus on controllable and socially acceptable portions of that variability to define ourselves. We tend not describe ourselves from the perspective of constants or uncontrollable factors. For example, I would not answer the query above by starting with: “Extensive reading supports that experts categorize me as part of the human species. People call me James. etc.” People would perceive you as eccentric at best and insane at worst. However, a moderate position does exist, though the boundaries are fuzzy, which is the same flaw that Fromm could not eliminate. If one starts with the premise that personhood begins the definition of being, then it is absurd for me to state that “I am a health educator.” The problem with this statement is that I am defining my personhood by my employment status and position. From a having perspective, if I make the statement of “I have a job as a health educator,” this statement places oneself in a precarious position. Without appropriate implicit or explicit qualifiers that express that the job is an object that cannot be possessed in its totality and that the construct of job is transient from a global perspective, one leaves oneself to losing a totality of a thing (i.e, a job) that one never truly possessed.
Karl Mark discussed the perceived experiences of the haves and the have nots and believed that quality of being could be altered by what a person had. Marx proposed an association that went beyond the mutually exclusive positions of E-Prime and Fromm. There is some truth to Marx’s perspective; social determinants of health research findings support that the absence of absolute or relative resources leads to having health disparities in different contexts, though these resources do not seem to consistently influence perceived quality of life. However, do shifts in distribution of external objects alter being? It is hard to say because operationalizing having is much easier than identifying being as an object or construct. The closest measure to being as a process and/or an outcome, currently used by social scientists, is quality of life. The proposed measure of being, quality of life, is much more unreliable and therefore less valid measure than the measure of having better or worse health. Additionally, the correlates of quality of life and health differ. Some variables improve health but not quality of life and vice versa. The result of this argument for health educators is the recognition that trade offs between having and being will likely occur and, as a result, they may need to diminish being in order to increase the having of health and vice versa.