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Article 82
December 5, 1991

Entities and People

As I pointed out in Beyond Psychology, the entities of which a person's world is composed are of three types:

1. Phenomena -- Perceivable entities
2. Concepts -- Conceivable entities
3. Facts -- Knowable entities

Or so it seems.

But there appears to be a rather glaring exception to this rule: people (or "beings").¹ A being cannot really be categorized as a phenomenon, a fact, or a concept, unlike a physical or mental object. I may have a concept of myself or a concept of another person, but the concept is not the same as me or as the other person. I can perceive parts of my own body or mind, but these phenomena cannot really be me, or even parts of me at the moment of perception, because I am always that which is looking, perceiving, not that which is perceived. The only way of understanding who or what I am is to realize that I am that which is the center and the source of all the actions I perform, but I am not any entity on which I am acting. I stand on one end of my action with the entity on the other end, and the action is that which both joins me to and separates me from that entity:

                                                                Action

 Specifically, I am not that which I can perceive:

                                                        Perception

 I know I am not this pen because I can perceive it.

What applies to perception also applies to the other two modes of awareness: conceiving and knowing. If I conceive of a concept, I am not that concept:

                                                            Conceiving

 because I stand in a certain relationship to that concept, defined by the action of conceiving. And likewise, if I know something, I am not the fact that I know:

                                                                Knowing

 because, again, that is the relation in which I stand with respect to it. Socrates allegedly said, "Know thyself!", but that is literally impossible. A person can only know the world in which he lives.

Now things are getting interesting. If I am not any phenomenon that I see, concept that I hold in mind, or fact that I know, then it would appear that I do not fit the definition of an entity at all, because an entity must be either a phenomenon, a fact, or a concept, and I am none of those. Neither I nor anyone else can directly perceive, conceptualize, or know me. People can perceive my body, share my concepts, and know many facts about me or my world, but they can in no way have me as an object, event, or state of affairs in their world. As R.D. Laing said, we are all "invisible men".² None of us -- no conscious being -- can be directly apprehended by any conscious act. Rather, we are the source of all conscious acts. If we look at any conscious act, we will find that there is a basic dissimilarity between what lies at one end of the act and what is found on the other end. At one end is always a being; at the other is always something that the being is creating or receiving from its world. This object is not itself a conscious being but an entity:

                                                                    Action

 Yet we conscious beings exist. Or do we? If everything in my world is an entity, how can beings exist for me? And how can I exist?

I think we can extricate ourselves from this riddle by taking a hint from Bishop Berkeley. He said "to exist is to perceive or to be perceived". If for "perceive" you substitute "act" (in the sense of an intentional action performed by a being, such as any of the basic actions given above -- knowing, conceiving, or perceiving) and for "perceived" you substitute "acted upon", his views come close to mine: "To exist is to act or to be acted upon." The implication of this reworded assertion of Berkeley's is that there are two modes of existence. One is applicable to entities (something that can be the object of a being's act) and the other to beings (that which acts). An entity's mode of existence might be termed "extrinsic":

Definition:  Extrinsic existence is the way in which entities exist. Since an entity, by definition, is part of a being's world, it depends for its existence on the being of whose world it is a part. It exists only as the object of a being's intentional act. From the person-centered viewpoint, by definition, entities exist for someone, not in themselves.

Definition:  Intrinsic existence is the way in which beings exist -- as a source of intention and action. Beings exist in themselves and don't require anything else in order to exist.

In making these statements, I realize I may be offending against conventional materialistic thought. From the materialist viewpoint, the modes of existence are reversed for entities and conscious beings. From that viewpoint, it is entities that exist in themselves and beings who exist only as a sort of "epiphenomenon" of certain material objects -- bodies; the body exists intrinsically and the being's existence is extrinsic, derivative from the existence of the body.

But in metapsychology, we are operating from an experiential, person-centered viewpoint. I won't reduplicate here the advantages the person-centered viewpoint has over the materialistic one for our kind of work. They are amply set forth in Beyond Psychology.³ Suffice it to say that we have found the person-centered viewpoint to be crucial in helping people improve the quality of their lives. And that viewpoint demands that the existence of a person be considered to be of a higher order than that of the entities that form part of his world.

And that brings me to practical considerations. What, you may ask, is the point of belaboring this distinction between persons and entities, between intrinsic and extrinsic existence, apart from the pleasure of making fine philosophical distinctions? Just this: a viewer stands in a very different relationship to entities than to other people. Just as entities have a form of existence that is junior to (and derivative from) that of persons, so relationships to entities are junior in importance to interpersonal relationships.

People wish to be powerful in their relationships to entities. That is, they wish to be able to:

• Find pleasure in entities.
• Control entities
• Understand what makes entities tick

• Give him pleasure
• Are ordered in such a way as to enable him to control them
• Afford him learning opportunities

But the situation with beings (people) is quite different. It is not possible to apply the power and empowerment triads to a being as you can to an entity. You can desire an entity (such as money, or even somebody's body), but you can only have affection for a being. To the degree that you start literally desiring another person, you will find that you have begun to look on that person as an object, an entity, not as a conscious being. What one legitimately desires in relation to a being is a certain kind of relationship with that being, one of communion -- affection, communication, and comprehension.⁵ A relationship is an entity -- a state of affairs, so it can properly be an object of desire, and it can be something you can have. But a person, not being an entity, cannot be "had". We like to be in control of objects, to use them to serve our purposes. But one cannot control a person. A person either acts intentionally or not at all. You cannot force a person to act against his intention, because everything a person does is done intentionally -- if he does it. You can move a person's body against his will, but you cannot force him to move his own body. He has to do that for himself. The most you can do is to give him a strong incentive to act in a certain way.⁶ And we cannot really understand a being the way we can understand, for instance, what makes a clock tick. Beings have no parts or mechanisms inside them that can be understood. One can only comprehend the experience of a being, share that being's viewpoint. If we start speaking of understanding what makes a person tick, we are, again, relating to that person as an object, an entity. The reason why people don't like to be labeled and diagnosed is because -- however clearly or dimly -- they know they are beings, not entities.⁷

In summary, the distinction between entities and people is a crucial one. Failure to make this distinction is the principal cause of Man's inhumanity to Man. Cruelties, atrocities, and neglect can only occur when people start thinking of other people as entities, as things. And life is truly empty and pointless to a person -- such as an autistic person or a sociopath -- whose world is devoid of conscious beings and consists only of entities.

But to a person who can distinguish between entities and people, who can consistently look on other people as beings, not as entities, the world is full of opportunities for love and fulfillment.

Frank A. Gerbode, M.D.
Director, IRM

² Laing, R.D. The Politics of Experience (Ballantine Books, New York, 1967), p. 18.

³ See pp. xix, 11-14, 44-53, 475-478, and elsewhere.

⁴ See JOM Article 88 "Power and Empowerment" for more on this subject.

⁵ See Chapter 5 of Beyond Psychology, pp. 197-206, for an in-depth discussion of the communion triad.

⁶ See pp. 84-86 in Beyond Psychology for an elaboration of this point.

⁷ See also JOM Article 81, "Personal Labels".