To Have or To Be

by conquering nature, by transforming it to our own purposes until the conquest has become more and more equivalent to destruction.

o be” requires giving up one’s egocentricity and selfishness, or in words often used by the mystics, by making oneself “empty” and “poor.”

This is to say, we call a glass “blue” precisely because it does not retain the blue waves. It is named not for what it possesses but for what it gives out

The moment that I express what I experience exclusively in thought and words, the experience has gone: it has dried up, is dead, a mere thought. Hence being is indescribable in words and is communicable only by sharing my experience. In the structure of having, the dead word rules; in the structure of being, the alive and inexpressible experience rules

Its fundamental characteristic 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

The mode of being has as its prerequisites independence, freedom, and the presence of critical reason

the total me, my whole individuality, my suchness that is as unique as my fingerprints are, can never be fully understood, not even by empathy, for no two human beings are identical.

Being refers to experience, and human experience is in principle not describable

The difficulty does not lie in marriage, but in the possessive, existential structure of both partners and, in the last analysis, of their society. The advocates of such modern-day forms of living together as group marriage, changing partners, group sex, etc., try, as far as I can see, only to avoid the problem of their difficulties in loving by curing boredom with ever new stimuli and by wanting to have more “lovers,” rather than to be able to love even one.

But love to them is not an expression of their being; it is a goddess to whom they want to submit. They necessarily fail with their love because “love is a child of liberty” (as an old French song says), and the worshiper of the goddess of love eventually becomes so passive as to be boring and loses whatever is left of his or her former attractiveness.