Man. Personality. Society

To characterize man, the degree of his essence realization, the concepts of an individual, individuality and personality are used.

Man is the broadest category indicating human as a biological species. Man as a species concretely exists in real individuals. The concept of individual points, first, to a separate member of the biological species Homo sapiens, and second, to a single separate member of the social community. This concept de­scribes man as separate and autonomous. The individual as a par­ticular singular integral entity has a number of properties: an inte­gral morphological and psychophysiological organization, stability of interactions with the environment, and activeness. The concept of individual is merely the first condition of designating the domain of the study of man, to be further concretized in the specific concepts of personality and individuality.

The concept of individuality underlines the uniqueness of man in his spiritual qualities, abilities, talents, self-employment, life in general. Man acts as a microcosm, in the unity of his unique and universal properties of life and identity; in realization of his abilities and talents in certain social conditions. Man is the more individual and unique the more developed and realized his natural abilities and talents. The terms "calling" and "talent" express the profound essence of individuality.

The problem of personality is one of the most complicated in philosophy. There are two principal theories of personality: personality as a functional (role-oriented) characteristic of man, and personality as man's essential characteristic.

The first theory relies on the concept of social function or, more precisely, social role. Although this aspect of personality has a great significance for contemporary applied sociology, it cannot bring out man's deep inner world, focusing attention on external behavior only, which does not always necessarily express his real essence.

A deeper conception of personality is formulated on the plane of essence rather than function personality is seen as a concen­trate of regulatory intellectual-spiritual potentials, the focus of self-consciousness, the source of will power and the nucleus of character, the subject of free action and supreme authority in man's inner life. Personality is the individual concentration and ex­pression of social relations and functions of people, the subject of the cognition and transformation of the world, of the rights and obligations, of ethical, aesthetic and all other social norms. Per­sonality traits appear in this case as derivatives from the social way of life, from reason aware of itself. A personality is therefore always a socially developed individual.

Personality is formed in the process of activity, communication or, in other words, of the socialization of the individual. This process is realized through inner formation of the individual's unique image. Socialization requires from the individual productive activity, which is expressed in continuous revision of his actions, behavior, and deeds. In its turn, this necessitates the capacity for self-appraisal, which is connected with the development of self-consciousness. In this process, the mechanism of reflexion, which is characteristic spe­cifically of personality, is developed and polished. Self-conscious­ness and self-appraisal form the core of a given personality, around which the pattern of personality is woven, unique in the wealth and variety of the subtlest and highly idiosyncratic nuances.

Personality is an ensemble of three main components: biogenetic predispositions, the action of the social factors (the environment, conditions, norms, and regulators), and the action of the psychosocial nucleus, the self. The nucleus is, as it were, the inner social ele­ment of personality which has become a phenomenon of the psyche, determining the personality's character, the sphere of motivation manifested in a definite orientation, a mode of correlation of one's own interests with the social ones, the level of ambitions and the basis for the formation of convictions, value orientations and worldview. The nucleus is also the basis for the formation of the social emo­tions: the feeling of personal dignity, duty, responsibility, con­science, moral and ethical principles, and so on. It is the essential element of personality structure, the highest regulative and predic­tive spiritual, intellectual and semantic centre. An individual as per­sonality is not a certain accomplished givenness but a phenomenon demanding incessant work of the soul.

The main property of personality, the resultant of other traits, is the worldview — an indication of a high level of the individual's spiri­tuality. A man asks himself: what am I? What did I come into this World for? What is the meaning of my life, my predestination? Do I live in accordance with the purpose of all being, or not? Only if an individual has worked out a certain worldview can he realize his self-determination in life, acting purposefully and consciously to ful­fill his essence. A worldview is a bridge, as it were, between person­ality and the entire surrounding world.

Simultaneously with the formation of a worldview, a personality's character is mould; character is a person's psychological core which stabilizes his social forms of activity. Only through character does an individual arrive at a firm definiteness.

The word "character", used synonymously with the word "per­sonality", signifies as a rule will power, which is also a generalized indicator of personality. Will power makes a person's worldview stable, integral, and effective. People of strong will also have strong character. They are usually respected and rightly seen as leaders: people know what can be expected of them. It is recognized that he who achieves great goals has great character, as his acts correspond to the requirements of objective, reasonably substantiated and so­cially significant ideals, and serve as a reference point to others.

Without will, neither morality nor the civic spirit nor the social self-assertion of the human individual as personality is possible.

An important component of personality is morality. Social cir­cumstances are often such that a person in a situation of choice does not always follow his own ethical imperatives. At moments like this he becomes a puppet of social forces, which does irreparable damage to his integrity. People react in different ways to such trials: while one is hammered flat by social oppression, another will only be tempered. Highly moral intellectuals will be affected by an acute and tragic sense of "non-personality" in similar situations, i.e. an in­ability to do what their inner self dictates them to do. Only a person­ality that can freely manifest itself is able to retain a sense of per­sonal dignity. The measure of a personality's subjective freedom is determined by its moral imperative and serves as an indication of the degree of development of the personality itself.

Personality is thus a measure of the individual's integrity: there is no personality without inner integrity.

It is important to distinguish in personality not only the unitary and the common, but also the unique and the specific. An in-depth perception of the essence of personality assumes consideration of a personality as a social and at the same time individual and original being. A person's uniqueness is manifested already at the biological level. Nature itself carefully protects in man not only his genetic es­sence but also the particular about him, preserving it in the gene pool. Even the external diversity of human individualities is amazing. But the true meaning of this phenomenon is connected not so much with a person's appearance as with his inner spiritual world, with a unique way of being in the world, the manner of conduct, and communica­tion with people and nature.

The uniqueness of personalities has an important social signific­ance. What would society look like if all its members were all alike, with stereotype brains, thoughts, emotions, and abilities?

A wide variety of individualities is a necessary condition and a form of manifestation of a community's successful life activity. The individual uniqueness and originality of a personality is not simply the greatest social value but also a pressing need in the development of a healthy and reasonably organized society.

Personality. Collective. Society. Man is shaped and modified under the influence of joint labor, being both the subject and the object of the action of social forces and social relations.

The problem of personality cannot be solved without a clear phil­osophical formulation of the question of the relationship between personality and society. Now, in what forms is this relationship manifested?

The connection between personality and society is mediated above all by the primary collective: family, or group of students, or labor unit. Only through the collective does each of its members become a part of society.

In the family an individual abandons some of his specific features to become a member of the whole. The life of the family is related to the division of labor according to sex and age, the carrying on the husbandry, mutual assistance in everyday life, the intimate life of man and wife, the perpetuation of the race, the upbringing of the children and also various moral, legal and psychological relations. The family is a crucial instrument for the development of personality. It is here that the child first becomes involved in social life, absorbs its values and standards of behavior, its ways of thought, language and certain value orientations. It is this primary group that bears the major responsibility to society. Its first duty is to the social group, to society and humanity. Through the group the child, as he grows older, enters society.

Hence the decisive role of the group as an integral social organism, in which the individual is mould spiritually, intellectually, and physically, and in which he absorbs, to some extent or other, what was created by his predecessors — through mastering the language and the so­cially evolved forms of activity. The direct forms of communication which take shape in the collective form social links, molding the image of the person; through the primary collective, the personal is handed over to society, and the achievements of society are passed on to the individual. Just as any personality carries an imprint of the collective, so any collective carries the imprint of its members: being the formative element for the individuals, it is in its turn shaped by the individuals. A collective is not something faceless, solid and ho­mogeneous. It constitutes a combination of various individualities all unlike one another. The individual does not sink or dissolve in the collective but reveals and asserts himself. Performing a definite social function, a person plays his or her individual and unique role - one out of the vast spectrum of various kinds of creativity.

Human society is the highest stage of the organization of living systems. Being a collective of collectives, as it were, it has the high­est social authority. The primary collective is a society in miniature, for it is here that the individual and society directly interact. For the individual, society is simultaneously an ensemble of all the social conditions of his life and the result of the development of all the pri­mary collectives and thus of the individual himself, since he is a member of one of them.

A person’s whole intellectual make-up bears the clear imprint of society as a whole. All his practical activities are individual expressions of the historically formed social practice of humanity.

The wealth and complexity of the individual’s social content are conditioned by the diversity of his links with the social whole, the degree to which the various spheres of the life of society have been assimilated and refracted in his consciousness and activity. This is why the level of individual development is an indicator of the level of development of society, and vice versa. But the individual does not dissolve into society. He retains his unique and independent individuality and makes his contribution to the social whole: just as society itself shapes human beings, so human beings shape society.

The individual is a link in a chain of generations. His affairs are regulated not only by himself, but also by social standards and by collective reason. The true token of individuality is the degree to which a certain individual in certain specific historical conditions has absorbed the essence of society in which he lives.

The key to the mysteries of human nature is to be found in society. Society is the human being in his social relations and every human being is an individual embodiment of social relations, a product not only of the existing social system but of all world history. He absorbs what has been accumulated by the centuries and passed on through traditions. Modern man carries within himself all the ages of history and all his individual ages as well. His personality is a concentration of various strata of culture. He is influenced not only by modern mass media, but also by the writings of all times and every nation. He is the living memory of history, the focus of all wealth of knowledge, abilities, skills, and wisdom that have been amassed through the ages.

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