Deep Down You’ll Know This Is You

FORGING A PERSONALITY?

“personality, n. Being a person; personal existence or identity;distinctive personal character.” The Concise Oxford Dictionary

This raises an interesting philosophical question, one which has been asked for many years. What constitutes a person? On what grounds is one’s identity based? Can one, in fact, “forge an identity” at all and if so, just who is doing the forging?

To say that one “forges a personality” presupposes some further person or identity who does the forging. Of course, this opens the door to the problem of infinite regress since the person or identity who does the forging must, in his turn, also be forged and so on down the line. To escape the philosophical black hole of infinite regress we must be able to give the concept of the actual real – world person some substantive content if he is not to assume some evanescent, transitory and diaphanous character. In a word, how are we to conceive the person? What makes him who he is and, of course by extension, what makes us who we are?

There have been several answers to this question but they can be grouped, generally speaking, as falling into two broad categories. The first category posits the person passively. A person is conceived as one who possesses a set of distinctive memories. You are who you are because of your recollections, of your previous experiences. But this is to throw the concept of the person into a passive posture. He is the product of previous experiences which have originated outside himself. He is, in effect, the creature of his environing circumstances.

The second category posits the person in active terms. He is not the passive recipient of experiences having their origin outside in his social environment but rather he is to be seen as an agent, as one who actively generates his own person. But this brings us back to the poster’s (ungrounded) assumption, that while the person “forges his personality” the issue of the one doing the forging remains in murky abeyance. In other words, is there some pre-experiential entity, one lying behind one’s actual experience so to speak, who processes such experience in his unique fashion?

Ultimately, the question of course is one of ontology, one gesturing to different levels of reality in which the “real-world” person is but the visible manifestation of an “other-worldly” entity, the one “pulling the strings” so to speak. Can that entity be named? Some have called it the “soul” but does this term fly in the modern age? Is there another which might do duty or are we condemned as a consequence to a uni-dimensional existence? For if we have no word for that entity then we do not have the concept of that entity and if we do not have the concept of that entity then, as a consequence, it is unreal to us. For we swim in a sea of language, one which defines us for who we are. One cannot “get behind” language.

A pleasure as always.

Cheerio!