Review on ege's weblog

Book Review: To Have or to Be?

Mon, 20 Jul 2026 16:44:15 +0300

The Frankfurt School has a special place in history. It’s an object of hatred for both ends of the political spectrum. Leftists, especially Marxists, hate them for diluting revolutionary thought and creating a version of the Left that is “compatible” with the capitalist ruling class. Rightists hate them for giving birth to identity politics and political correctness. However, it’s a mistake to think of the Frankfurt School as a single harmonious entity. While it’s true that the school consisted of thinkers on the left side of the spectrum, their thoughts were diverse and not always compatible with each other. Nevertheless, they shared an ethos of human emancipation and mostly had the same view on why it kept failing to happen: “The revolutionary promise of the 19th century has failed and the reason is the culture.”

Erich Fromm was one of the youngest members of the Frankfurt School. Fromm, a German Jew, fled the Nazis and settled in the United States in 1934. He was a psychoanalyst, a democratic socialist, and a radical humanist. He died in 1980. To Have or to Be?, published in 1976, might have been his last book before he passed away.

I was not aware of this book until I read Manuel’s announcement for the IndieWeb Book Club. It’s one of those titles that immediately tells you the stance of the author. Without reading a single page, you know that Fromm will argue for “to have is wrong and to be is right”. Therefore I started reading the book with a positive bias, thinking that I’d agree with Fromm along the way. Not that I disagreed with Fromm, especially about his thoughts on the superiority of the being mode. But I didn’t enjoy how he presented his ideas, how far his analysis went, and his conclusions.

I said that the Frankfurt School’s ethos was human emancipation. To Have or to Be? is Fromm’s last attempt to incite a societal change to realize this ethos. However, the book kinda reverses the classical Marxist doctrine that human nature is a totality of societal relations and that to change human nature you need to change societal relations. I’m saying kinda because Fromm is not wholly consistent with this notion. At the beginning he says “that ‘religious’ impulses contribute the energy necessary to move men and women to accomplish drastic social change, and hence, that a new society can be brought about only if a profound change occurs in the human heart—if a new object of devotion takes the place of the present one” [emphasis mine]. Towards the end he claims “… I do not believe anything lasting can be achieved by persons who suffer from a general ill-being and for whom a change in character is necessary, unless they change their practice of life in accordance with the change in character they want to achieve. For instance, one can analyze the dependency of individuals until doomsday, but all the insights gained will accomplish nothing while they stay in the same practical situations they were living in before arriving at these insights.” The new society requires a new subject to emerge. But this new subject can’t really emerge unless the daily practices of the subject change first. Changing the daily practices requires a new society. You see where it goes, right?

I think at some level Fromm was aware of the vicious cycle he got caught in. He doesn’t really offer a praxis to the new subject who is supposed to change the society. As if he doesn’t expect the society to change in response to the actions of the new man. The new society will emerge naturally once everyone—or at least the majority—changes. Also, sadly, he’s aware of the impotence of his weapon: “One cannot construct submarines by reading Jules Verne; one cannot construct a humanist society by reading the prophets.”

I believe Fromm has his heart in the right place. He believes that people can’t really be subjects in the struggle for emancipation until they have a change of heart. But the capitalist society molds people into the having mode. The features of the man who’s stuck in having mode—greed, selfishness, egotism—prevent him from genuinely loving others and participating in the common struggle. Someone needs to convince people to change. And what better example does history provide us to mediate the relations in a society than religion itself? or so Fromm’s reasoning seems to go.

Yes, To Have or to Be? is a deeply religious book. Fromm spends 2/3 of the book drawing religious examples to prove the superiority of the being mode. He references Buddha, Jesus, and Meister Eckhart abundantly. Although he leans on classical religious sources, for him religion “does not refer to a system that has necessarily to do with a concept of God or with idols or even to a system perceived as religion, but to any group-shared system of thought and action that offers the individual a frame of orientation and an object of devotion.” The new society needs a religion of being and Fromm unapologetically preaches that. His preaching turns the problem of having vs. being into a moral problem. Rather than a structural analysis of society, Fromm makes the individual responsible for their mode of living. Herbert Marcuse, another member of the Frankfurt School, also criticized Fromm on this point, saying that while Fromm’s early work is indeed radical, his later psychology is essentially conformist in character.

I was not satisfied with Fromm’s analysis mostly because there’s nothing of substance that tries to explain how the having mode became the dominant mode of our society. Sure, there are fragments here and there that accuse capitalism of cultivating a society of having, but it feels incomplete without also analyzing how the being mode also exists in the very same society. Should I believe that the being mode is thinkable thanks to the buddhists and christians of the 20th century who had a deeper insight into the mode of being? Is that even plausible when Fromm himself doesn’t count the christianity actually practiced by most of the world as real christianity? This dichotomy of having vs. being felt too binary and antagonistic to me; I couldn’t find a real dialectical movement in it.

This doesn’t mean the book is without substance though. There are plenty of insights in it. Fromm’s analysis of the newly emerging “marketing character” that describes how the living being becomes a commodity in the “personality market” is impressive foresight into the times we live in right now. His criticism of the “cybernetic religion” where men “have made the machine into a god and have become godlike by serving the machine” feels eerie when you think about it in light of today’s AI mania.

Another thing I appreciate in the book is that Fromm provides a concrete list of features the new man and the new society ought to have. This level of concreteness is not something I see often. However, I think it’s not unfair to say his expectations are naive. He has a long list of items including things like “people should take personal responsibility for societal problems” and “rich countries need to be responsible for the prosperity of poor countries”. Reading those, and the book in general, I couldn’t help but think of the old Tumblr meme:

Everyone will not just

If your solution to some problem relies on “If everyone would just…” then you do not have a solution. Everyone is not going to just. At no time in the history of the universe has everyone just, and they’re not going to start now.

Book Review: The Time Regulation Institute

Wed, 08 Jul 2026 15:42:10 +0300

Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar’s The Time Regulation Institute is a novel about a (fictional) Institute founded to synchronize every clock in Istanbul, and then in all of Turkey. The book is generally read as a satirical allegory of modernization in Turkey. The Institute is bureaucracy par excellence with its preference for the appearance of work over the work itself and its founder’s motto that “The Institute as a modern organization is going to create its own work instead of working on something concrete.”

Reading The Institute reminded me of a blog post about Ludwig Klages and Nick Land. The author was talking about Klages’ definition of Geist as the adversary of soul (Seele). According to Klages, Geist seeks to capture Seele by counting, measuring, digitizing life. Time is at the core of this dichotomy. Klages distinguishes two types of time: Rhythm and Takt. Rhythm is the time form of living experience; it’s regular as in breathing. Ezan, the call to prayer in Islam, is rhythmic. It occurs five times a day but the times are not fixed. They move with the cosmos. Takt, on the other hand, is punctual. It’s the tick of the clock, the beat of the machine, the sound of industrial production. It’s almost impossible to ignore the parallel with Tanpınar’s Institute¹. Its primary goal is to ensure Takt’s reign over a society that for centuries lived according to rhythmic cycles of the sun.

For Klages, Geist is the desire to measure. The apperceptive cut that severs the moment. The Institute is the embodiment of Geist and the watch is its apparatus. So which comes first, the desire or the apparatus? For the Institute, the answer is the latter. The synchronization of time is not desired as something meaningful. The watch, as technology, is the source of meaning for the Institute. In this context, the Institute can be seen as a Kittlerian reversal of Klages. Friedrich Kittler argues that media precede and produce the ‘spirit’ that imagines it commands them. The Institute fabricates a narrative (“a modern well-ordered society requires synchronized clocks”) and a myth (“Sheikh Ahmet Zamani”) all based on the technology: the watch. There is no primordial will-to-measure; the apparatus produces its own desire. The desire requires a discourse network, and the Institute’s innovation is building that network around a device that previously lived peacefully inside Seele.

The book resists Klages’ prelapsarian nostalgia. The binary distinction of Geist as bad and Seele as good is not found in the book. The time before the Institute, the “old world”, is not pristine Seele. The main protagonist, Hayri İrdal, lives a life full of delusion, superstition, poverty and cynicism before the Institute. Klages was right in his diagnosis of Geist’s onslaught but was there ever a paradisiacal soul to mourn for? The orientalist idea was “the West is the world of Geist and the East is the world of Seele”. Ahmet Hamdi Tanpınar, being a Turkish author, is in the perfect position to reject this naive distinction. Turkey is adjacent to both East and West while refusing to be assimilated into either.

The best explanation of Hayri’s character might be found in one of Tanpınar’s most famous poems: “I’m neither inside time nor wholly outside.” He feels like a surplus wherever he stands. It’s possible to sense this as we read the story directly from his mouth. He’s unable to believe in the fiction while not being able to face reality either. He’s a great example of Lacan’s “les non-dupes errent"—he’s the one who errs the most because he’s unable to fully get caught in the fiction. Even before the Institute, whether in the Spiritualist Society or among treasure hunters, he’s never all in. Halit Ayarcı, the founder of the Institute and Hayri’s benefactor, is his complete opposite. Halit knows the power of the narrative and the effect of discourse. With Halit Ayarcı, the story takes a post-modern turn. With him everything becomes volatile. He doesn’t care if the Institute stands on stable ground or not. For him everything is about controlling the discourse and regulating the optics.

If a modern, well-ordered society requires clocks to be synchronized, then let’s regulate them and fine unsynchronized clocks. Clocks-to-be-regulated immediately cease to be indicators of a modern society and turn into targets in themselves. Halit Ayarcı understands that the metric was always detachable from reality and uses the detachment as his business model. Thus he weaponizes Goodhart’s Law. He also understands that a societal system is not made of people but of communications. The Institute’s purpose is to perpetually produce communications. It only outputs more institute. The Institute, in Luhmann’s terms, is autopoietic. Ayarcı is a cynical dupe—he knows what he’s doing but does it anyway because he never doubts why he’s doing it. He’s cynical in his means but not in his ends.

Ayarcı genuinely believes the Institute is a facilitator of modernization. His problem is that he’s too caught in the fiction. From all this chasing the metric and perpetual communications, a new type of person is supposed to emerge. But the Institute’s only real output is more of itself. The Institute’s projects—even the most useless and excessive ones—are applauded by its members and supporters until the time comes to design houses for its members. Then everyone around Ayarcı turn their backs on novelty. They want something traditional, something safe. Hayri explains this to him: “They’ll support everything as long as it’s someone else’s money we waste.” The Institute is a fun spectacle until it reaches the place they sleep in. They refuse to be objects of the Institute. This devastates Halit Ayarcı and leads him to shut down the Institute.

The harmony produced by the Institute instantly disintegrates at this news. Halit Ayarcı disappears and everyone turns against each other. The harmony is restored when Ayarcı reappears and creates a perpetual liquidation committee. Thus the system metabolizes its own negation. The permanent liquidation committee is autopoiesis at its peak. The system produces a new component to keep going. Dissolution is a task that doesn’t need to be completed; you can always keep liquidating. The committee might be seen as Geist’s machinic repetition or the system’s autopoietic desire to reproduce itself.

I’m aware of the canonical reading of the book through a Bergsonian lens. I’m not going down that road for the sole reason that I know nothing about Bergson. ↩︎