From Boredom to Joy and Everything in Between

If we accept that most of life is suffering and we are goal seeking entities, then inquiries naturally follow about what sorts of goals and activities let us avoid boredom and suffering while experiencing joy. A recent conversation and extensive bout of reading has driven me to explore these questions in more deeply than I have previously. Below is my attempt to develop answers in which I will find recourse to extensive quotes from my most recent reading.

Boredom

In The Reasons of Love, Harry G. Frankfurt describes boredom and its connection to goals and joy in the most beautiful manner I’ve seen to date. He paints boredom as not just an uncomfortable state of being, but as essentially an attack on our vitality and the death of our self:

It is an interesting question why a life in which activity is locally purposeful but nonetheless fundamentally aimless— having an immediate goal but no final end— should be considered undesirable. What would necessarily be so terrible about a life that is empty of meaning in this sense? The answer is, I think, that without final ends we would find nothing truly important either as an end or as a means. The importance to us of everything would depend upon the importance to us of something else. We would not really care about anything unequivocally and without conditions.

Insofar as this became clear to us, we would recognize our volitional tendencies and dispositions as pervasively inconclusive. It would then become impossible for us to involve ourselves conscientiously and responsibly in managing the course of our intentions and decisions. We would have no settled interest in designing or in sustaining any particular continuity in the configurations of our will. A major aspect of our reflective connection to ourselves, in which our distinctive character as human beings lies, would thus be severed. Our lives would be passive, fragmented, and thereby drastically impaired. Even if we might perhaps continue to maintain some meager vestige of active self-awareness, we would be dreadfully bored.

Boredom is a serious matter. It is not a condition that we seek to avoid just because we do not find it enjoyable. In fact, the avoidance of boredom is a profound and compelling human need. Our aversion to being bored has considerably greater significance than a mere reluctance to experience a state of consciousness that is more or less unpleasant. The aversion arises out of our sensitivity to a far more portentous threat.

The essence of boredom is that we have no interest in what is going on. We do not care about any of it; none of it is important to us. As a natural consequence of this, our motivation to stay focused weakens; and we undergo a corresponding attenuation of psychic vitality. In its most characteristic and familiar manifestations, being bored involves a radical reduction in the sharpness and steadiness of attention. The level of our mental energy and activity diminishes. Our responsiveness to ordinary stimuli flattens out and shrinks. Within the scope of our awareness, differences are not noticed and distinctions are not made. Thus our conscious field becomes more and more homogeneous. As the boredom expands and becomes increasingly dominant, it entails a progressive diminution of significant differentiation within consciousness.

At the limit, when the field of consciousness has become totally undifferentiated, there is an end to all psychic movement or change. The complete homogenization of consciousness is tantamount to a cessation of conscious experience entirely. In other words, when we are bored we tend to fall asleep.

Any substantial increase in the extent to which we are bored threatens the very continuation of conscious mental life. What our preference for avoiding boredom manifests is therefore not merely a casual resistance to more or less innocuous discomfort. It expresses a quite primitive urge for psychic survival. I think it is appropriate to construe this urge as a variant of the universal and elemental instinct for self-preservation. It is related to what we commonly think of as “self-preservation,” however, only in an unfamiliarly literal sense— that is, in the sense of sustaining not the life of the organism but the persistence and vitality of the self. (p. 53-55)

Naturally, if we understand accept Frankfurt’s description of boredom, we would want to figure out a way to prevent it and at the same time find a method for selecting a non-local goal (i.e. a final end). Thankfully, he doesn’t make us wait long, as he immediately turns to answering this question:

There must be certain things that we value and that we pursue for their own sakes. Now it is easy enough to understand how something comes to possess instrumental value. That is just a matter of its being causally efficacious in contributing to the fulfillment of a certain goal. But how is it that things may come to have for us a terminal value that is independent of their usefulness for pursuing further goals? In what acceptable way can our need for final ends be met?

It is love, I believe, that meets this need. It is in coming to love certain things— however this may be caused— that we become bound to final ends by more than an adventitious impulse or a deliberate willful choice. Love is the originating source of terminal value. If we loved nothing, then nothing would possess for us any definitive and inherent worth. There would be nothing that we found ourselves in any way constrained to accept as a final end. By its very nature, loving entails both that we regard its objects as valuable in themselves and that we have no choice but to adopt those objects as our final ends. Insofar as love is the creator both of inherent or terminal value and of importance, then, it is the ultimate ground of practical rationality. (p. 55)

This too makes a lot of sense, but we should investigate what Frankfurt means by love and the use he applies to it here. He does this most brilliantly in a separate work discussing the value of truth.

Love and Joy

In On Truth, which looks at the nature of truth and why we as humans should value it, Frankfurt finds it useful to build on the work of Spinoza, one of the first humanist philosophers in spirit:

Spinoza explained the nature of love as follows: “Love is nothing but Joy with the accompanying idea of an external cause” (Ethics, part III, proposition 13, scholium). As for the meaning of “joy,” he stipulated that it is “what follows that passion by which the…[individual] passes to a greater perfection” (Ethics, part III, proposition 11, scholium).

I suppose that many readers will find these rather opaque dicta quite uninviting. They do truly seem forbiddingly obscure. Even apart from this barrier to making productive use of Spinoza’s thoughts, moreover, one might not unreasonably question whether he was qualified, in the first place, to speak with any particular authority about love. After all, he had no children, he never married, and it seems that he never even had a steady girlfriend.

Of course, these details concerning his personal life have no plausible relevance except to questions about his authority with respect to romantic, to marital, and to parental love. What Spinoza was actually thinking of when he wrote about love, however, was none of these. In fact, he was not thinking especially of any variety of love that necessarily has a person as its object. Let me try to explain what I believe he did have in mind.

Spinoza was convinced that every individual has an essential nature that it strives, throughout its existence, to realize and to sustain. In other words, he believed that there is in each individual an underlying innate impetus to become, and to remain, what that individual most essentially is. When Spinoza wrote of “that passion by which the…[individual] passes to a greater perfection,” he was referring to an externally caused (hence a “passion”—i.e., a change in the individual that does not come about by his own action, but rather a change with respect to which he is passive) augmentation of the individual’s capacities for surviving and for developing in fulfillment of his essential nature. Whenever the capacities of an individual for attaining these goals are increased, the increase in the individual’s power to attain them is accompanied by a sense of enhanced vitality. The individual is aware of a more vigorously expansive ability to become and to continue as what he most truly is. Thus, he feels more fully himself. He feels more fully alive.

Spinoza supposes (plausibly enough, I think) that this experience of an increase in vitality—this awareness of an expanding ability to realize and to sustain one’s true nature—is inherently exhilarating. The exhilaration may perhaps be comparable to the exhilaration that a person often experiences as an accompaniment to invigorating physical exercise, in which the person’s lungs, heart, and muscular capacities are exerted more strenuously than usual. When working out energetically, people frequently feel more completely and more vividly alive than they do before exercising, when they are less fully and less directly aware of their own capacities, when they are less brimming with a sense of their own vitality. I believe it is an experience something like this that Spinoza has in mind when he speaks of “joy”; joy, as I think he understands it, is a feeling of the enlargement of one’s power to live, and to continue living, in accord with one’s most authentic nature (emphasis added).

Now, if a person who experiences joy recognizes that the joy has a certain external cause—that is, if the person identifies someone or something as the object to which he owes his joy and on which his joy depends—Spinoza believes that the person inevitably loves that object. This is what he understands love to be: the way we respond to what we recognize as causing us joy (emphasis added). On his account, then, people cannot help loving whatever they recognize as being, for them, a source of joy. They invariably love what they believe helps them to continue in existence and to become more fully themselves. It seems to me that Spinoza is at least on the right track here. Many paradigmatic instances of love do exhibit, more or less straightforwardly, the pattern that he defines: people do tend to love what they feel helps them to “find themselves,” to discover “who they really are,” and to face life successfully without betraying or compromising their fundamental natures.

To his account of the essential nature of love, Spinoza adds an observation about love that also seems accurate: “One who loves necessarily strives to have present and preserve the things he loves (emphasis added)” (Ethics, part III, proposition 11, scholium). The things that a person loves are manifestly and necessarily precious to him. His life, and both his attainment and his continued enjoyment of personal authenticity, depend on them. Therefore, he naturally takes care to protect them and to ensure that they are readily available to him. (p. 38-45)

The above account is perhaps the single best explanation of joy and love that I have come across. I have added emphasis to three points above because the first two resonate deeply with me, but the third point on “necessarily striving to have present and preserve” does not. In fact, this having orientation to life in which we feel possessive towards the things that bring us joy is described in great depth by Erich Fromm in his landmark work, To Have or To Be, as one of the prominent causes of suffering in our world due to the fear and insecurity that it engenders.

Insecurity

By attaching our self to the things we have or can possess, such as Spinoza (Frankfurt) describes above, we live with the fear of losing those possessions and with them our identity and sense of self. Fromm describes this magnificently below where he contrasts the having mode of existence with the being mode:

If I am what I have and if what I have is lost, who then am I? Nobody but a defeated, deflated, pathetic testimony to a wrong way of living. Because I can lose what I have, I am necessarily constantly worried that I shall lose what I have. I am afraid of thieves, of economic changes, of revolutions, of sickness, of death, and I am afraid of love, of freedom, of growth, of change, of the unknown. Thus I am continuously worried, suffering from a chronic hypochondriasis, with regard not only to loss of health but to any other loss of what I have; I become defensive, hard, suspicious, lonely, driven by the need to have more in order to be better protected. Ibsen has given a beautiful description of this self-centered person in his Peer Gynt. The hero is filled only with himself; in his extreme egoism he believes that he is himself, because he is a “bundle of desires.” At the end of his life he recognizes that because of his property-structured existence, he has failed to be himself, that he is like an onion without a kernel, an unfinished man, who never was himself.

The anxiety and insecurity engendered by the danger of losing what one has are absent in the being mode. If I am who I am and not what I have, nobody can deprive me of or threaten my security and my sense of identity. My center is within myself; my capacity for being and for expressing my essential powers is part of my character structure and depends on me. This holds true for the normal process of living, not, of course, for such circumstances as incapacitating illness, torture, or other cases of powerful external restrictions.

While having is based on some thing that is diminished by use, being grows by practice. (The “burning bush” that is not consumed is the biblical symbol for this paradox.) The powers of reason, of love, of artistic and intellectual creation, all essential powers grow through the process of being expressed. What is spent is not lost, but on the contrary, what is kept is lost. The only threat to my security in being lies in myself: in lack of faith in life and in my productive powers; in regressive tendencies; in inner laziness and in the willingness to have others take over my life. But these dangers are not inherent in being, as the danger of losing is inherent in having. (p. 109-110)

Earlier in To Have or To Be, Fromm does take the time to explain with a few examples just what types of activity might be included in “expressing our essential powers”.

Essential Powers

It is easy to notice that all of the powers below “grow by practice” as Fromm describes above and so it is not difficult to use them as guideposts for other activities that are not included. The critical difference between activities that are classified as having or being modes of existence is the resultant “awareness of a more vigorously expansive ability to become and to continue as what we most truly are. Thus, feeling more fully ourselves. We feel more fully alive,” as Frankfurt described with reference to Spinoza above.

Fromm uses the Shabbat and Hebrew prophets as examples:

On the Shabbat one lives as if one has nothing, pursuing no aim except being, that is, expressing one’s essential powers: praying, studying, eating, drinking, singing, making love (emphasis added). The Shabbat is a day of joy because on that day one is fully oneself. (p. 51)

The point with the Shabbat as described here is not that people have nothing, but that “one lives as if one has nothing”. These experiences cannot be taken from us because they are not “possessions” which we can be deprived of. Fromm continues on to describe the manner in which “being” was taken up after the loss of “everything the Jews had”:

The real successors to the Hebrew prophets were the great scholars, the rabbis, and none more clearly so than the founder of the Diaspora: Rabbi Jochanan ben Sakai. When the leaders of the war against the Romans (A.D. 70) had decided that it was better for all to die than to be defeated and lose their state, Rabbi Sakai committed “treason.” He secretly left Jerusalem, surrendered to the Roman general, and asked permission to found a Jewish university. This was the beginning of a rich Jewish tradition and, at the same time, of the loss of everything the Jews had had: their state, their temple, their priestly and military bureaucracy, their sacrificial animals, and their rituals. All were lost and they were left (as a group) with nothing except the ideal of being: knowing, learning, thinking, and hoping for the Messiah (emphasis added). (p. 53)

Moreover, Fromm later describes exactly what does differentiate pleasure from joy as he understands it, relying on none other than the same person Frankfurt did earlier - Spinoza:

Yet the distinction between joy and pleasure is crucial, particularly so in reference to the distinction between the being and the having modes. It is not easy to appreciate the difference, since we live in a world of “joyless pleasures.”

What is pleasure? Even though the word is used in different ways, considering its use in popular thought, it seems best defined as the satisfaction of a desire that does not require activity (in the sense of aliveness) to be satisfied. Such pleasure can be of high intensity: the pleasure in having social success, earning more money, winning a lottery; the conventional sexual pleasure; eating to one’s “heart’s content”; winning a race; the state of elation brought about by drinking, trance, drugs; the pleasure in satisfying one’s sadism, or one’s passion to kill or dismember what is alive.

Of course, in order to become rich or famous, individuals must be very active in the sense of busyness, but not in the sense of the “birth within.” When they have achieved their goal they may be “thrilled,” “intensely satisfied,” feel they have reached a “peak.” But what peak? Maybe a peak of excitement, of satisfaction, of a trancelike or an orgiastic state. But they may have reached this state driven by passions that, though human, are nevertheless pathological, inasmuch as they do not lead to an intrinsically adequate solution of the human condition. Such passions do not lead to greater human growth and strength but, on the contrary, to human crippling. The pleasures of the radical hedonists, the satisfaction of ever new cupidities, the pleasures of contemporary society produce different degrees of excitements. But they are not conducive to joy. In fact, the lack of joy makes it necessary to seek ever new, ever more exciting pleasures.

In this respect, modern society is in the same position the Hebrews were in three thousand years ago. Speaking to the people of Israel about one of the worst of their sins, Moses said: “You did not serve the Lord your God with joy and gladness of heart, in the midst of the fullness of all things” (Deuteronomy 28: 47). Joy is the concomitant of productive activity. It is not a “peak experience,” which culminates and ends suddenly, but rather a plateau, a feeling state that accompanies the productive expression of one’s essential human faculties. Joy is not the ecstatic fire of the moment. Joy is the glow that accompanies being.

Pleasure and thrill are conducive to sadness after the so-called peak has been reached; for the thrill has been experienced, but the vessel has not grown. One’s inner powers have not increased. One has made the attempt to break through the boredom of unproductive activity and for a moment has unified all one’s energies— except reason and love. One has attempted to become superhuman, without being human. One seems to have succeeded to the moment of triumph, but the triumph is followed by deep sadness: because nothing has changed within oneself. The saying “After intercourse the animal is sad” (“ Post coitum animal triste est”) expresses the same phenomenon with regard to loveless sex, which is a “peak experience” of intense excitation, hence thrilling and pleasureful, and necessarily followed by the disappointment of its ending. Joy in sex is experienced only when physical intimacy is at the same time the intimacy of loving.

Spinoza gives joy a supreme place in his anthropological ethical system. “Joy,” he says, “is man’s passage from a lesser to a greater perfection. Sorrow is man’s passage from a greater to a less perfection” (Ethics, 3, def. 2, 3).

Spinoza’s statements will be fully understood only if we put them in the context of his whole system of thought. In order not to decay, we must strive to approach the “model of human nature,” that is, we must be optimally free, rational, active. We must become what we can be. This is to be understood as the good that is potentially inherent in our nature. Spinoza understands “good” as “everything which we are certain is a means by which we may approach nearer and nearer to the model of human nature we have set before us”; he understands “evil” as “on the contrary … everything which we are certain hinders us from reaching that model” (Ethics, 4, Preface). Joy is good; sorrow (tristitia, better translated as “sadness,” “gloom”) is bad. Joy is virtue; sadness is sin.

Joy, then, is what we experience in the process of growing nearer to the goal of becoming ourselves. (p. 116-119)

The only thing then left to consider is the “goal of becoming ourselves” and the “model of human nature we have set before us”. I believe this is best taken up by Nel Noddings’ in her work Caring, which lays out an ethical ideal predicated on just the type of loved described above by Frankfurt from which interest, joy, and our truest selves can spring forth.

​The Ethical Ideal and Self

What is this “ethical ideal” I have referred to? When I reflect on the way I am in genuine caring relationships and caring situations— the natural quality of my engrossment, the shift of my energies toward the other and his projects— I form a picture of myself. This picture is incomplete so long as I see myself only as the one-caring. But as I reflect also on the way I am as cared-for, I see clearly my own longing to be received, understood, and accepted. There are cases in which I am not received, and many in which I fail to receive the other, but a picture of goodness begins to form. I see that when I am as I need the other to be toward me, I am the way I want to be— that is, I am closest to goodness when I accept and affirm the internal “I must.” Now it is certainly true that the “I must” can be rejected and, of course, it can grow quieter under the stress of living. I can talk myself out of the “I must,” detach myself from feeling and try to think my way to an ethical life. But this is just what I must not do if I value my ethical self.

This “goodness” to which I have referred is an assessment of the state of natural caring. I am not arguing that what is is of necessity good. I am arguing that natural caring— some degree of which each of us has been dependent upon for our continued existence— is the natural state that we inevitably identify as “good.” This goodness is felt, and it guides our thinking implicitly. Our picture of ourselves as ethical inevitably involves a consideration of this goodness.

The ethical self is an active relation between my actual self and a vision of my ideal self as one-caring and cared-for. It is born of the fundamental recognition of relatedness; that which connects me naturally to the other, reconnects me through the other to myself. As I care for others and am cared for by them, I become able to care for myself. The characteristic “I must” arises in connection with this other in me, this ideal self, and I respond to it. It is this caring that sustains me when caring for the other fails, and it is this caring that enables me to surpass my actual uncaring self in the direction of caring.

As my receiving the other enables the “I must” to arise with respect to the other, so receiving the vision of what I might be enables the “I must” to arise with respect to the ethical self. I see what I might be, and I see also that this vision of what I might be is the genuine product of caring. My acceptance and affirmation of this caring for self will not tell me exactly what to do, of course. Neither does caring in and of itself tell me what to do in behalf of the other. But as caring for another engrosses me in the other and redirects my motivational energy, so caring for my ethical self commits me to struggle toward the other through clouds of doubt, aversion, and apathy.

Am I, then, suggesting that the answer to the question, “Why should I behave morally?” is “Because I am or want to be a moral person"? Roughly, this is the answer and can be the only one, but I shall try to show how this interest in moral behavior arises out of our natural impulse to care. At every level, in every situation, there are decisions to be made, and we are free to affirm or to reject the impulse to care. But our relatedness, our apprehension of happiness or misery in others, comes through immediately. We may reject what we feel, what we see clearly, but at the risk of separation not only from others but from our ideal selves.

It seems to me that a large part of the anguish that existentialist philosophers associate with our apprehension of freedom springs from our awareness of obligation and the endless claims that can be, and will be, made upon us. We feel that we are, on the one hand, free to decide; we know, on the other hand, that we are irrevocably linked to intimate others. This linkage, this fundamental relatedness, is at the very heart of our being. Thus I am totally free to reject the impulse to care, but I enslave myself to a particularly unhappy task when I make this choice. As I chop away at the chains that bind me to loved others, asserting my freedom, I move into a wilderness of strangers and loneliness, leaving behind all who cared for me and even, perhaps, my own self. I am not naturally alone. I am naturally in a relation from which I derive nourishment and guidance. When I am alone, either because I have detached myself or because circumstances have wrenched me free, I seek first and most naturally to reestablish my relatedness. My very individuality is defined in a set of relations. This is my basic reality. (p. 48-50)

By now we can see a somewhat hazy picture breaking through. In order to preserve the self and not allow boredom to destroy us, we must cultivate final ends. These final ends are found in love resulting from joy, which is “what we experience in the process of growing nearer to the goal of becoming ourselves”. This calls for us not to pursue pleasure and possession, but to make choices that favor relations of caring, our “basic reality”.

Obligation

​In the pursuit of caring relations, we necessarily develop obligations to those we care for. Noddings does an equally marvelous job of elucidating how these obligations arise and where the boundaries ought to be formed:

Now, this is very important, and we should try to say clearly what governs our obligation. On the basis of what has been developed so far, there seem to be two criteria: the existence of or potential for present relation, and the dynamic potential for growth in relation, including the potential for increased reciprocity and, perhaps, mutuality. The first criterion establishes an absolute obligation and the second serves to put our obligations into an order of priority.

If the other toward whom we shall act is capable of responding as cared-for and there are no objective conditions that prevent our receiving this response— if, that is, our caring can be completed in the other— then we must meet that other as one-caring. If we do not care naturally, we must call upon our capacity for ethical caring. When we are in relation or when the other has addressed us, we must respond as one-caring. The imperative in relation is categorical. When relation has not yet been established, or when it may properly be refused (when no formal chain or natural circle is present), the imperative is more like that of the hypothetical: I must if I wish to (or am able to) move into relation.

The second criterion asks us to look at the nature of potential relation and, especially, at the capacity of the cared-for to respond. The potential for response in animals, for example, is nearly static; they cannot respond in mutuality, nor can the nature of their response change substantially. But a child’s potential for increased response is enormous. If the possibility of relation is dynamic— if the relation may clearly grow with respect to reciprocity— then the possibility and degree of my obligation also grows. If response is imminent, so also is my obligation. This criterion will help us to distinguish between our obligation to members of the nonhuman animal world and, say, the human fetus. We must keep in mind, however, that the second criterion binds us in proportion to the probability of increased response and to the imminence of that response. Relation itself is fundamental in obligation. (p. 86-87)

What these two criteria clearly outline is a method for how and when to enter more deeply into caring relations - the ultimate source of joy, love, and growth of our truest selves. This is important because we are otherwise left to the tragic logic of utilitarianism with its impartiality and concern for all. That path quickly and dangerously leads us to become “happiness pumps” for all other sentient creatures in which we can quickly become depressed due to our helplessness: the belief that suffering personal, permanent, and pervasive.

Instead, we can engage actively with others on the basis of their presence in our lives in the here and now and the “dynamic potential for growth in relation, including the potential for increased reciprocity and, perhaps, mutuality”.

Self-actualization

​This valuing of caring as the preeminent method to achieving “self-actualization”, the highest form of “being” as Maslow put it, must always be done by keeping in “in mind, however, that the second criterion [of caring] binds us in proportion to the probability of increased response and to the imminence of that response,” as Noddings writes above. This is seconded quite clearly in another of Fromm’s passages from To Have or To Be:

The most relevant example for enjoyment without the craving to have what one enjoys may be found in interpersonal relations. A man and a woman may enjoy each other on many grounds; each may like the other’s attitudes, tastes, ideas, temperament, or whole personality. Yet only in those who must have what they like will this mutual enjoyment habitually result in the desire for sexual possession. For those in a dominant mode of being, the other person is enjoyable, and even erotically attractive, but she or he does not have to be “plucked,” to speak in terms of Tennyson’s poem [about a beautiful flower], in order to be enjoyed.

Having-centered persons want to have the person they like or admire. This can be seen in relations between parents and their children, between teachers and students, and between friends. Neither partner is satisfied simply to enjoy the other person; each wishes to have the other person for him- or herself. Hence, each is jealous of those who also want to “have” the other. Each partner seeks the other like a shipwrecked sailor seeks a plank— for survival. Predominantly “having” relationships are heavy, burdened, filled with conflicts and jealousies.

Speaking more generally, the fundamental elements in the relation between individuals in the having mode of existence are competition, antagonism, and fear. The antagonistic element in the having relationship stems from its nature. If having is the basis of my sense of identity because “I am what I have,” the wish to have must lead to the desire to have much, to have more, to have most. In other words, greed is the natural outcome of the having orientation. It can be the greed of the miser or the greed of the profit hunter or the greed of the womanizer or the man chaser. Whatever constitutes their greed, the greedy can never have enough, can never be “satisfied.” In contrast to physiological needs, such as hunger, that have definite satiation points due to the physiology of the body, mental greed— and all greed is mental, even if it is satisfied via the body— has no satiation point, since its consummation does not fill the inner emptiness, boredom, loneliness, and depression it is meant to overcome. In addition, since what one has can be taken away in one form or another, one must have more, in order to fortify one’s existence against such danger. If everyone wants to have more, everyone must fear one’s neighbor’s aggressive intention to take away what one has. To prevent such attack one must become more powerful and preventively aggressive oneself. Besides, since production, great as it may be, can never keep pace with unlimited desires, there must be competition and antagonism among individuals in the struggle for getting the most. And the strife would continue even if a state of absolute abundance could be reached; those who have less in physical health and in attractiveness, in gifts, in talents would bitterly envy those who have “more”. (p. 111-113)

So while interpersonal relations are the source of our love, interest, joy, caring, and ultimately our final ends, we must be constantly vigilant as to not turn them into our greatest sources of misery as well. Striving to have others and possess those we love is not love at all, merely an appearance of it.

The above passage does give a quiet hint as to why people might pursue possessive having love over true, meaningful, being love. That is fear. However, whereas Fromm posits that fear of losing our “possessions” drives us to fortify our positions by gaining ever more and thereby driving competition and antagonism, fear also drives us to avoid being.

In order to be, we must “unmask” ourselves in front of others and allow them to see us as we really are. “This concept of being as ‘unmasking,’ as is expressed by Eckhart, is central in Spinoza’s and Marx’s thought and is the fundamental discovery of Freud” (p. 97). This unmasking requires “daring greatly” as Brene Brown has written about extensively.

Daring greatly can be threatening because we expose ourselves and open our inner worlds to others who are able to judge us, accept us, or reject us and possibly trample on our vulnerability. In seizing this mode of being, Noddings explains:

One under the guidance of an ethic of caring is tempted to retreat to a manageable world. Her public life is limited by her insistence upon meeting the other as one-caring. So long as this is possible, she may reach outward and enlarge her circles of caring. When this reaching out destroys or drastically reduces her actual caring, she retreats and renews her contact with those who address her. If the retreat becomes a flight, an avoidance of the call to care, her ethical ideal is diminished. Similarly, if the retreat is away from human beings and toward other objects of caring— ideas, animals, humanity-at-large, God— her ethical ideal is virtually shattered. This is not a judgment, for we can understand and sympathize with one who makes such a choice. It is more in the nature of a perception: we see clearly what has been lost in the choice. (p. 89-90)

And while the ethical ideal may be “shattered” and we may “see clearly what is lost”, Fromm assures us that:

The only threat to our security in being lies in ourselves: in lack of faith in life and in my productive powers; in regressive tendencies; in inner laziness and in the willingness to have others take over my life. But these dangers are not inherent in being, as the danger of losing is inherent in having. (p. 109-110)

Conclusion: Making the Change

​Much of modern society is a never ending roller coaster of boredom, excitement, pleasure, and fear as discussed in depth above. None of these states and experiences need be innate to our existence. We can choose a radically different mode of living and being. We can choose to pursue activities that enlarge our capacities and inner powers towards “a greater perfection”, that form deeper, caring connections to others, that result in joy and love and ultimately a sense of vitality and exhilaration.

Ultimately, everything above requires a change of character. This change in character is possible. Not only is it the premise of the entire modern day field of positive psychology that character change is possible, but Fromm outlined the path to personal change quite perfectly over 40 years ago in 1976, when he drew on the Four Noble Truths from Buddhism, Marx, and Freud to write the following in To Have or To Be:

I suggest that human character can change if these conditions exist:

1. We are suffering and are aware that we are.
2. We recognize the origin of our ill-being.
3. We recognize that there is a way of overcoming our ill-being.
4. We accept that in order to overcome our ill-being we must follow certain norms for living and change our present practice of life. (p. 168)

In following the above four step process of becoming a new person, Fromm held that the following qualities would be exhibited:

• Willingness to give up all forms of having, in order to fully be.
• Security, sense of identity, and confidence based on faith in what one is, on one’s need for relatedness, interest, love, solidarity with the world around one, instead of on one’s desire to have, to possess, to control the world, and thus become the slave of one’s possessions.
• Acceptance of the fact that nobody and nothing outside oneself give meaning to life, but that this radical independence and no-thingness can become the condition for the fullest activity devoted to caring and sharing.
• Being fully present where one is.
• Joy that comes from giving and sharing, not from hoarding and exploiting.
• Love and respect for life in all its manifestations, in the knowledge that not things, power, all that is dead, but life and everything that pertains to its growth are sacred.
• Trying to reduce greed, hate, and illusions as much as one is capable.
• Living without worshiping idols and without illusions, because one has reached a state that does not require illusions.
• Developing one’s capacity for love, together with one’s capacity for critical, unsentimental thought.
• Shedding one’s narcissism and accepting the tragic limitations inherent in human existence.
• Making the full growth of oneself and of one’s fellow beings the supreme goal of living.
• Knowing that to reach this goal, discipline and respect for reality are necessary.
• Knowing, also, that no growth is healthy that does not occur in a structure, but knowing, too, the difference between structure as an attribute of life and “order” as an attribute of no-life, of the dead.
• Developing one’s imagination, not as an escape from intolerable circumstances but as the anticipation of real possibilities, as a means to do away with intolerable circumstances.
• Not deceiving others, but also not being deceived by others; one may be called innocent, but not naive.
• Knowing oneself, not only the self one knows, but also the self one does not know— even though one has a slumbering knowledge of what one does not know.
• Sensing one’s oneness with all life, hence giving up the aim of conquering nature, subduing it, exploiting it, raping it, destroying it, but trying, rather, to understand and cooperate with nature.
• Freedom that is not arbitrariness but the possibility to be oneself, not as a bundle of greedy desires, but as a delicately balanced structure that at any moment is confronted with the alternative of growth or decay, life or death.
• Knowing that evil and destructiveness are necessary consequences of failure to grow.
• Knowing that only a few have reached perfection in all these qualities, but being without the ambition to “reach the goal,” in the knowledge that such ambition is only another form of greed, of having.

Happiness in the process of ever-growing aliveness, whatever the furthest point is that fate permits one to reach, for living as fully as one can is so satisfactory that the concern for what one might or might not attain has little chance to develop. (p. 170-172)

Any world in which the above qualities make up the majority of individuals’ beliefs and values is a world that would be radically different than our current reality. We desperately need this positive change. The above has been an outline focused on providing direction for change based on some of the brightest minds and their findings over the past century. So stop chasing the excitement and pleasure that ultimately leads to boredom and contraction of the self and instead choose to pursue joy and the ever enlargement of your capacity to be more fully human.