To be, to do, and to have

To be, to do, and to have names three interrelated categories through which concrete human desire is expressed. The distinction matters because a desire that appears to concern an action or an object may, on closer examination, be directed toward possession or toward becoming someone. Doing is therefore not a final category in its own right: it mediates the projects of having and being, while revealing how human reality relates to objects and possibilities in the world.

Desire and its worldly objects

Desire is not merely an abstract effort to become a self-grounding being. It also concerns concrete existents in the world: bread, an automobile, a woman, or an unrealized work of art. These objects give desire a worldly direction, but the phrase “desire for something” compresses several different relations into one. Wanting a picture may mean wanting to buy and appropriate it; wanting to write a book or take a walk may mean wanting to perform that activity; dressing up may express a wish to be well-groomed; training may serve the project of becoming a scientist. Across these examples, desire takes the forms of having, doing, and being.

The examples are not interchangeable. Their point is that the object named by a desire does not by itself disclose what the person seeks. A picture can be wanted as something to possess; a book or a walk can be wanted as something to make or carry out; a mode of dress or a course of training can be oriented toward a desired way of being. The three categories consequently describe different dimensions of a person’s relation to the world, rather than three unrelated kinds of object.

Doing as a route to having

Making is often a means of possession. Cutting a cane from a tree branch is an act of doing, but its purpose is to have the cane. In that familiar case, the activity is intelligible through the object it produces and the relation of ownership it establishes. The apparent independence of doing gives way to having: the action matters because it supplies something that can be possessed.

The same analysis applies even when activity looks gratuitous, as in scientific research, sport, or artistic creation. An artist’s picture, drama, or melody is not simply an action that ends in itself. Creation brings a concrete existence into being through the maker, establishing a particular bond that gives the maker a claim of ownership. The work must exist through its creator, but it must also remain distinct from the creator. If it lacked independence and objectivity, it would be absorbed into the maker’s own being and could not stand as something made and possessed.

That tension shapes the created work’s apparent life. Ideally, the creator might sustain it through continuous creation, as though it issued perpetually from the creator; yet it must also exist in itself and renew its own existence. The work thus appears as continuous creation fixed in an independent object: it bears the maker’s mark, but it does not depend on the maker’s present act of thinking. An artwork can be conceived as meaning and as an idea, yet it persists when its maker is not actively thinking it. Creation seeks to establish precisely this double relation: the maker conceives the work and also encounters it as an existence that stands apart. The category of having is needed to explain how those two relations are joined.

Being as the aim of play

Play initially seems to offer a counterexample to the reduction of doing to having. A player originates the activity, establishes its rules, and accepts consequences only within those rules. In play, a person can apprehend and exercise freedom by setting the conditions of action rather than simply submitting to a given natural order. Sports, games, and pantomime may therefore seem to have no worldly possession as their purpose; their apparent aim is to discover oneself as free through action.

Yet the account reclassifies play rather than treating doing as irreducible. In play, action’s function is to make freedom manifest to the person acting. Its deeper aim is a particular way of being: the player seeks to present absolute freedom to oneself as the person’s own being. The desire to play is thus fundamentally a desire to be. This project is singled out as distinct from other projects because freedom is both its foundation and its goal; a fuller account would require an ethical inquiry into the nature and role of purifying reflection and a position on the values that confront the self.

The two ultimate categories

The framework ultimately reduces the three categories to two: being and having. Doing is transitional, though it remains significant as the way a person pursues possession or gives expression to a desired mode of being. The reduction does not erase differences among actions. It asks what each action is for: making a cane aims at having it, while playing aims at being a person whose freedom is manifested in the activity.

Nor is play wholly free of appropriation. A sportsperson may seek a good performance or a record, and may also wish to have a handsome body or harmonious muscles by appropriating an objective image of the self as it appears to others. These aims are not always present and are not treated as fundamental, but sport retains an appropriative component. Its environment becomes a supporting element of action, and the transformation of that environment makes sport creative in a way comparable to art. Thus even where play turns toward being, having remains close at hand: action can disclose freedom while also organizing the world as something to appropriate.