I found this section of Escape From Freedom, by Erich Fromm very interesting. I’m sharing it without comment because it speaks so well for itself.
Link to Chapter 1 -Freedom as a Psychological Problem
Chapter One introduces Fromm’s concept of “Social Process” and this in essence describes this sentence from the longer quote below.
He is shaped by this experience which is also in many ways shaped by him.” (Logic of Limitless)
Link to Downloadable Luther_1 PDF
Link to Chapter Conclusion and Appendix
Personality and Social Reality
From the Logic of Limitless
“To form an accurate idea of what personality really is we need to examine where it comes from and how it develops. Personality has its origin in atoms combining into things that get their structure from the atoms they consist of. For a concrete example let’s look at Socrates. The abstract personal entity which is Socrates’ personality has organized itself within and as a result of the physical entity that is Socrates’ body.”
“The human being, Socrates, began developing in his mother’s womb and has been moving through time since then. The life of Socrates has been a bodily process coincident and corresponding with the processes of his homeostatic personality. Within Socrates’ body, as it grew, the conscious personality of Socrates developed.”
“Individual human life is a single unified process involving both physical and non-physical aspects of being. The subconscious personality of Socrates regulates and is regulated by bodily functions. The homeostatic personality and the homeostatic bodily processes corresponding to it maintain the balances necessary to his physical and psychological life. On the conscious level Socrates experiences the universe as an individual human being moving bodily through time and space. He is shaped by this experience which is also in many ways shaped by him.”
“Being a conscious person what he feels about his experiences has a crucial role in shaping his own personality. Alongside every bodily experience is a conscious mind, heart and will interfacing with itself and the world. The conscious personality processes the details of life while the homeostatic personality operates the organism.”
“The abstract inner realities of personality emerge from embodied experiences and so do complex social realities. Socrates, son of Sophroniscus, being the physical offspring of Sophroniscus, relates to his father physically before anything else. All the social realities of their relationship emerge from the physical relationship of their embodied beings. All the social realities of our very complex cultures emerge from the relationships of embodied human beings to one another. Our understanding of every social phenomenon must be grounded in the realities of embodied beings to be meaningful. Embodied human beings are the atoms of social reality.”
“The non-physical processes of Socrates’ being are coincident with and correspond to physical processes. Thus, the physical bodies development, all the life processes of Socrates’ body and its movement through spacetime are the primary means by which the conscious personality of Socrates comes to be. The crucial reality in the creation of Socrates, the human being, are the lifelong processes of embodied being. The same processes in another body created Alcibiades and both of you are individual personalities by reason of your separate physical beings and separate life processes.”
61
“The individual self is shaped by many diverse processes resulting in an individual human personality, a strangely hard-edged non-physical thing. As a hard-edged abstraction conscious human personality is unique because it is the opposite of one single thing. Structure is structure, number is number, and other hard-edged abstract entities are likewise one consistent thing but not personality. Conscious human personality is a world of disparate cognitions continuously self-organizing into an individual personal identity characterized by mind, heart and will. There are reflective aspects of our conscious personality that play a small role but these are only a tiny part of the self-organization that operates within our being.”
“Personality structure is a special form of purposeful organization which in operation creates an individual identifiable self that has a discernable outline.”
“I’ll never struggle to see where the personality of Socrates ends, and the personality of Alcibiades begins. The complex processes that make this possible are the mysterious personality organizing operations of Emergent Wholeness.”
“We see the results of this organizing principle in all the various instances of personality. The self-organizing processes of personality formation operate similar to practical omniscience, where a greater than sum objective whole operates by subjective awareness of the parts.”
“Thus, limited personality is formed into a greater than sum whole from a limited set of parts, while the universal process forms Limitless Personality from a limitless set, that is from everything in all time. From this perspective the distinction between Limitless and limited personality is seen in substantial empirical terms. The holistic operations of personality emergence are informed by function emerging from every atom of the beings physical aspect and the organizational principle that I have been calling personality operates using that. Personality is a very small common word for something vast and incomprehensible when we begin thinking of it in this way, but it’s the only word we have for it.”
“Function is at the heart of being. Every inert thing exists to be what it is. Every living thing strives homeostatically to be what it is. Every conscious being strives to be the individual that it is. We see the rudiments of this in animals and it finds its fuller expression in conscious human personality. As operations of Emergent Wholeness, being and personality emerge from processes operating at the particle level. That may sound simplistic but in operation it’s infinitely and eternally complex.”