08 • Existential modes

In a world centered around what we have, let’s not get confused about what we need to become.

Finding your meaning in life is a grand project. But meaning, or the lack of it, bleeds into our everyday mundane activities. We don’t even realize how the modern world we live in does not even attempt to support us in finding meaning of any kind. It almost seems as if it wants us to not find it.

There is hardly anything truly meaningful around us in our modern environment, because almost everything has been designed and optimized for mass production and profitable efficiency. We don’t feel connected to anything, because everything around us is generic, anonymous, transactional, replaceable.

Christopher Alexander in The Nature of Order, book III, A Vision of a Living World, 1 Belonging and not belonging:

Much of the emotional misery of the 20th century was caused by the terrible loss of belonging our contemporary processes inflicted on society.

The forms of environment we have learned to create in modern times have caused us to lose the sense of true connection to ourselves and our society. That has happened, in large part, because of the nature of space we have created. It has happened because the public space of our present-day cities, both legally and metaphorically, no longer belongs to us to any deep extent.

One of the most frightening aspects of the 20th-century city was its faceless, nameless character. We saw identical apartments, identical offices, identical apartment windows, identical columns, identical bricks. The individual was hardly visible. Cities do not reflect the idiosyncrasies and human characters of people. They do not reflect the multitudes of differences which are the source of our humanity.

Because they cannot create uniquely adapted centers, and cannot create “inhabited,” “lived-in,” positive space, they bespeak the character of not-belonging. That is the anonymous quality our age has created.

Most of the buildings we live in were not built for us, and almost certainly not built by us, addressing our specific idiosyncratic needs. Most of the products and services we consume, are not designed for us, but for an anonymous shadow of a customer — the idea of a generic fictional person, engaging in a lowest common denominator set of pre-defined use cases, optimized for universal applicability, maximum scalability, and cost efficiency.

We don’t use our skills and our unique perspective to participate in our environment, we are merely following the transactional nature of a defined, anonymous, generalized process provided to us by some company or institution. It doesn’t matter who we really are as long as we conform to the shape of the customer shadow which the product or process has been designed for. As long as we behave as expected, operate “within defined parameters”, we will be able to use the product or service and complete the transaction successfully and efficiently — efficiently, of course, not necessarily for us but certainly for whoever provides it. And if we don’t conform, well, then it gets messy, complicated, and annoying, for everybody involved.

How are we supposed to deeply connect to places, products, and processes, if they don’t even acknowledge us as individuals?

Expressive individuality

Generic products and processes are still useful. Part of why many of us in the Western world are comfortable is because we are privileged to have access to an almost unlimited supply of generic, mass-produced, easily replaceable products. But what makes these things efficient to produce also prevents us from feeling connected to them in any deeper, substantial, non-superficial way. The things we truly love are unique: unique people, unique places, unique things that are impossible to replace. What means a lot to us is special to us in some kind of way.

It doesn’t have to be special in a fancy way. Maybe your favorite coffee cup is special because it has this slightly faded hand-drawn decor and the handle came off once so you had to fix it with super glue. Maybe your smartphone is special to you because you set a photo of your children as the background and the metal frame has these little nicks and scratches, wear and tear; it doesn’t impact its functionality but makes it uniquely yours. And of course, the coffee table you built yourself in your first woodworking class last summer doesn’t look like much, but it is the only one of its kind.

It is like these things grow an identity that we can form an intimate connection with — we identify with them. They are different from meaningless, replaceable, generic things that don’t have that; they become a part of us, they are more real. They are not meaningless “have-ings”, they become meaningful “be-ings”.

Christopher Alexander in The Nature of Order, book III, A Vision of a Living World, 1 Belonging and not-belonging:

Our lives work when we have that kind of intimate personal relationship to the environment. It is there of our making. Or it is there from the making of other individual human beings, we can recognize the human touch of it. It makes us feel something. It is ordinary. It isn’t fancy, it isn’t glitzy, it just makes you feel whole and comfortable.

It has to do with the individual, with individuality, with the private world, the lovely world of individual people, expressing themselves in their funny, sad, intimate, imperfection, living their lives so that we see the imprint of those lives on the streets and in the neighborhood.

The private or individual space which is created by money, in today’s society, is rarely making or fostering belonging. It creates ostentatious things, houses which express wealth and idiosyncrasy, individuality for its own sake, the appearance of uniqueness. That is an immensely different thing.

True belonging — true life — occurs when a penetration of the real into the fabric of the world occurs. This is far simpler. It is almost the very simplest thing a human being needs.

Existential modes — having and being

This distinction between generic, replaceable things on the one hand, and unique, irreplaceable things on the other, and how that distinction impacts our well-being, has been investigated in psychology before.

Vervaeke refers back to Erich Fromm’s To Have or To Be?¹ and Martin Buber's I and Thou²:

[Erich] Fromm talks about two different existential modes that we all face. Again, perennial patterns. They're organized around two different kinds of needs. There are having needs and being needs. […] It's an existential mode. It's a way in which you make sense of the world and make sense of yourself in this process of co-identification. […]

Having mode

Having needs are needs that are met by having something. These are needs that are met by categorizing things efficiently, controlling them effectively. So my understanding of thing is categorical, I put it in the correct category.

Here's a cup. It's like all the other cups. It functions like another cup. I can replace it with a cup if this one gets damaged. It really improves my ability to control things. I have this categorical way of representing it and it's oriented towards me getting very effective, efficient control over things because I need to have water. I need to actually consume it. If I don't, I die.

Being able to categorize my world, manipulate it, and control it so I get water is very important. That means I relate to things in what [Martin] Buber […] called an I-it fashion and "it" is an identity something has when it belongs to a category. And so what I'm mostly relying on here is my intelligence, which is my ability to control and manipulate things, to achieve solving my problems.

There is nothing wrong with the having mode. You need to have water. You need to have food. You need to have oxygen.

Being mode

The being mode is different. The "being needs" are not met by having something, they are met by becoming something. For example, you need to become mature. Or Aristotle might say, you need to become virtuous. It's not met by having something. It's met by becoming, developing. These are developmental needs.

According to Fromm, because of that, these are needs that have to do with a particular kind of meaning that you are creating for your existence. And so you're not relating to things categorically, but (as Collingwood, for example, [would] say) relating to them expressively.

Let me show you what I mean with a concrete example: […] When you're in love with somebody, you are engaged in a being need. You're trying to, if it's love as opposed to just desire or sex, you're trying to become something, and you're trying to afford them becoming something. You're trying to meet your needs of meaning and maturity, growth and development. That's why we pursue love. As opposed to… and I'm not a prude… sometimes you just want to have sex with people. That's not what I'm talking about! I'm talking about when you have said, "No, what I want here is love".

I'm in love with this amazing woman, Sara. And I'm in this relationship with her, this relationship of mutual development, mutual realization. In fact that's a great way of thinking about love: Love is this process, like anagoge, of reciprocal realization.

I don't think of Sara categorically. Remember, how I thought of the cup? This is a good cup because it reminds me of all the other cups that I've ever seen. And I know how to replace this, if this one's damaged. And I can control and manipulate it. If I was to say to Sara, "You know why I'm with you? Because you remind me of every other woman I've been with. And I could easily replace you, if I lose you. And I know how to control and manipulate you", I have not made this relationship better. I've pretty much just destroyed it.

Because I don't interact with Sara from the having mode. I don't understand her categorically, but expressively. I'm not trying to control and manipulate, I'm trying to engage in a process of reciprocal realization. […] I don't assume control or manipulator of an it thing, I have an I-thou relationship with Sara. And here I'm not trying to solve problems. I'm using my reason because I'm not about trying to get rid of my problem. I'm trying to make meaning.

Living process — Reciprocal realization

Alexander is well aware of the bi-directional nature of such a developmental growth process and posits it as the key ingredient to create anything that is beautiful, meaningful, whole. You can’t just make a one-sided plan in advance and then (have other people) execute that plan and whatever it is you’re trying to create will pop out perfectly at the end of that process.

You need to be with your creation in its environment and as you make modifications to it, as you change it, the modifications and their impact on it and in the environment feed back to you — a dynamic feedback cycle of stepwise mutual adaptation you participate in with your creation. You change it and it changes your perception of it — it changes you.

Alexander calls this process of reciprocal realization, this stepwise adaptation where both sides grow with each other, living process.

Christopher Alexander in The Nature of Order, book III, A Vision of a Living World, 2 Our belonging to the world:

All living process does two things. It pays attention to the centers which exist, and creates new centers which enhance them and embellish them.
As a result, it respects the uniqueness of every place, and works to make new structures — roads, houses, offices, gardens, rooms — which are adapted to the particularity of the place. That kind of adaptation makes them lovable, and possible to love; and when we love them, we belong there.

At the same time, any living process, in its nature, also respects us, the users, the persons who live there, or work there, or care for that place. This second kind of adaptation generates a uniqueness which is particular to the people there, and once again establishes the relation of belonging.

But living process, insofar as it affects belonging, also works because it generates a very particular kind of morphological structure, a graininess, a quality that is far, far removed from the shiny image-driven slickness of contemporary architecture and design.

The places which have this belonging have a rubbed-in, used, quality. The quality is rough and ready, not pristine. It cannot afford to be perfect, because life, too, is rough and ready. The Japanese call it “wabi-to-sabi”, or rusty beauty. In so far as it is beautiful, it is imperfect too.

It is this quality which is hardest to accomplish in the formal image-ridden framework we call architecture today, this which is most elusive, and which has been most violently trampled, even eradicated, by the present process we call architecture and design and construction. Yet for human life to be fulfilling it is, in the end, this quality which most desperately needs to be accommodated and created. No building has this quality — exactly — at the time when it is built. But some buildings, some landscapes — invite it, encourage it, foster it.

Living process is different to the processes of mass production and efficient manufacturing we have in place today for shaping our environments and producing most of the things in these environments.

It is also different from the way we usually create software. When was the last time you used an app or website that you thought was lovable and felt like it respected you as a user?

What happened? Why do creators not seem to care about this?

Christopher Alexander in The Nature of Order, book III, A Vision of a Living World, 2 Our belonging to the world:

Our processes of design and building in architecture, as they were in the 20th century, had very little to do with the creation of this sort of belonging. In a sense, indeed, much modern architecture even actually tried to get away from this kind of thing.

The profession encouraged architects to produce a visual character, and pays too little attention to the complex and subtle structure that only living processes create.

This weakness of professional architecture is not helpful to our everyday lives, nor to our inner lives. Yet it is accepted by thousands of professional architects of the “old school”, all over the world, and by hundreds of thousands — perhaps millions — of non-architects whose taste has been shaped to fall in line with such opinions.

In this way the prevailing architectural images in the media have robbed millions of us of our common sense, have taught us to go against our own basic instincts and our knowledge of day-to-day reality as it occurs even in ourselves.

If you ever wondered why most architects either don’t know about Alexander, or don’t like him, there you have it. He criticizes most of contemporary architecture to be systemically unable to create beauty and wholeness. And he does it with such conviction that it takes a lot of energy to confront your life’s work on that basis and not take it personally, so that only very few architects bother to do so. I’m glad I got to know some of them.

The same idea applies to other industries. Everywhere where products and services are designed, created, and offered for people to buy, use, and enjoy them, it’s easy to fall into the same trap and value mass production over adaptation, scalability over individuality, profit over value.

“But look how far we have come! Surely not everything is bad just because we figured out how to be efficient and produce the same things for many people at scale, right?”

Being able to efficiently produce stuff for a large number of people is one thing. Organizing all of our culture around that is another.

Modal confusion

[…] It's not that [one existential mode] is good and [the other] is bad. Fromm's point is: We get mixed up. We try to satisfy our being needs within the having mode. We suffer from modal confusion.

Think about how much our culture is organized around this, because it serves a lot of market interests if I can confuse you, if I can get you to try and pursue your being needs within the having mode. "You need to be mature. Here's a car you can have". "You need to be in love. Here's lots of sex you can have". Notice how we talk about making love but having sex. Modal confusion. Deep existential confusion.

And what happens when you're modally confused is that your need for maturity isn't being met by having the car, your need for love is not being met by having sex. So you pursue it more, buy more cars, purchase more sex. The more the corporate world, the market world, can get you to try to pursue your being needs from the having mode, the more they can induce modal confusion in you, the more they can sell to you.

“Ah, got it! So this is ultimately some anti-capitalist argument.”

Think again.

Each time we are presented with two options, we are primed to fall into a polarized interpretation and attach contrasting values to either side — one good and the other bad. But this is not what this is about.

We need both sides. We have both having and being needs. Some things we need to pursue from the having mode, where we can treat them categorically, replace them, control them effectively and efficiently with intelligence. Other things we need to pursue from the being mode, engage in reciprocal realization, make meaning, grow and mature.

In our modern world with our modern worldview, we have been focused too much on the having mode. We need to remember and recover the being mode. We need to grow and mature, so we can find and make meaning.

Christopher Alexander in The Nature of Order, book I, The Phenomenon of Life, 8 The mirror of the self:

We live in an era where people’s likes and dislikes are controlled by dubious intellectual fashions — often supported by the media. This is only a more extreme form of the way that in all human societies people’s likes and dislikes have always been controlled by the opinions of their supposed betters. It is only with maturity that we learn to listen to our own heart and recognize what we truly like.

I assert, as a matter of fact, that the things which people truly and deeply like are precisely these things which have the mirror-of-the-self property to a very high degree. This implies further that as we mature, and as we get rid of the idiosyncrasies and fears of youth, we gradually converge in our liking and disliking. We find out that what is truly likable is a deep thing that we share with others.

The life in things, or the wholeness in things, is not merely an abstract, functional, or holistic life. The things which are alive are the things we truly like. Our apparent liking for fashions, post-modern images, and modernist shapes and fantasies is an aberration, a whimsical and temporary liking at best, which has no permanence and no lasting value. It is wholeness in the structure that we really like in the long run, and that establishes in us a deep sense of calmness and permanent connection.

The confusion, the gradual separation of preferences from living structure, the difficulty of comparing notes and sorting out cultural bias and opinions foisted on us by others — getting through this maze does pay off in the end. There is a real quality which gradually emerges as the true thing which can be identified and relied upon.

---

If you are new to this series, start here: A secular definition of sacredness

1. Fromm, E. (1976).
To Have or to Be?
Harper & Row.

2. Buber, M., & Kaufmann, W. (1970).
I And Thou.
Amsterdam University Press.