Is the personality separate from the soul? If you have a true platonic nature – is your personality a mimic of it, or is it a separate object. This has been the discussion of such authors as Karl Popper.
Karl Popper and others such as Karl Marx, came to the
conclusion that the nature of a man, is different to the nature of his core self – the self that comes into existence when we assert the phrase “I think therefore I am” – the source of our true platonic form.
That they hypothesize that the personality itself – our character is an object external to ourselves, the same way that objects are external from ourselves.
That’s assuming that our personality or character is separate from the soul – to achieve this we need to discuss whether a character and its soul that it’s from can become separated.
We are here referring to other forces other than the soul (our ability to reason), that interfere and make up our features;
attitudes, thoughts, behaviours, feelings.
Thinkers such as Hegel; are speaking of an Alienation of man – where Man has become separated from himself – thinkers such as Erich Fromm suppose that the early work on the
‘unconscious’ as defined by Freudian and Post-Freudian thinkers – is that the unconscious forces are the character – the object – that is an internalisation of external conflict in object relations.
In Freud’s earliest theory of the unconscious. (Freud, S. 1905) Drive Theory – unconscious energy becomes attached to objects
– other people – in particular parental influences whilst one is an infant. That, in the case of the parental influences we use our parents as information about the character of our-self – we internalize their features; as we treat ourselves as a version of them or our parents as a version of ourselves.
These mental representations of objects, and other people – come to inform our judgement about new information we encounter;
they become the filter through which we see the world. In Freudian and post Freudian literature they are labelled different names, such as; "Internal objects", "illusionary others,"
"introjects," "personifications," and the constituents of a
"representational world."
According to psychodynamic (Freudian) thinkers; these mental representations of others serve as a method to anticipate the future, as a means of self-preservation; so we learn about likely events, and we from this we have a sense of what is to be expected from people who we meet in the real world.
These mental images of what to expect; and how they influence the self, come to offer a personal experience of what type of character one is, who are his persecutors who are out to destroy him, and what objects are sources of desire or resourcefulness.
In other words we have an internal map of relationships with people that had an important impact on our lives, primarily our attachment figures as an infant – our parents. And these
relationships shape our interpretation of the relationships we form with others later in life.
The judgements about us, the conflicts, the focus of the relationship becomes “‘internalized’ and so come to shape
subsequent attitudes, reactions, and perceptions and so on.”
Greenberg, J. Mitchell, S. (1983:11)
Freud believed that the primarily motivation of a man’s life is to procreate – i.e. sexual stimulation. And this was the force that encourages our desire to continue existence; that is the primarily source of all human wants, needs and desires. This idea of the primarily source of energy being thought of as a sexual
unconscious – became the central focus for critics of the Freudian theory.
One of these critics was Erich Fromm, a philosopher throughout the 20th century. Although he shared the believe that the
personality-character of a self was an object se00parate to the self – he disagreed that it – the unconscious – was caused by deep routed sexual libido (desires) and their interaction with the surrounding environment – in particular the parental-infant relationship was inaccurate.
Erich Fromm was undoubtedly a genius like everyone we’ve mentioned so far in the text. He instead believed that character is not formed by “the phases of libidinal development but is a psychic (interjected energy) entity that is created by the various ways in which man relates to the world.” That we should
understand this internalized personality as a internalisation of its relation to the socio-economic situation. Fromm, E. (1982)
We could take this to mean that the abundance of a certain influence will cause one person to be a certain way. That our wants, desires etc. are a kind of volition sense – a desire to exert power over our “external sphere” to produce something that we are proud of that represents our self onto the external world using the resources available to us.
This thinking that our attempts to control the external
environment & its parts within our personality had already been discussed; in moral philosophy by several philosophers living in the century prior; in order to explain a philosophical account of how we choose; requires we look at: John Stuart Mill and his work on individuality, the work of his father James Mill on Utility theory, Karl Marx social political economic systems, Charles Darwin and his economics of evolution style thinking, and Adam Smith for his work on the advantages gained from building relationships with others.
James Mill explains how motivation to make a decision works according to his utilitarianism – he states “The source of happiness is to affirm oneself” to have some true sense of existence. To make ones “subjective sense of individuality objectified” to have your “specific character turned into some kind of works available for consumption” This is the way to manifest your individuality into the external world.
That it is Man’s essential nature [and source of unconscious energy] to “have their sense of self be objective witnessed, visible, to the senses and hence a power beyond all doubt…
When I look at the object I would have the individual pleasure of knowing that I not only objectively exist in my own mind.
“(James Mill, is John Stuart Mills Father) Blunden, A. Baggins, B.
Ryan, S. Walters, D. Batur, Sertan. Nehru, A. Bismo, M. (1999-2008)
When another person displaying enjoyment or use of my product I would have the direct enjoyment both of being conscious and of having satisfied a human need by my work, that by objectifying my own essential nature, I have thus created an object corresponding to the need of another man’s essential
nature. Blunden, A. Baggins, B. Ryan, S. Walters, D. Batur, Sertan. Nehru, A. Bismo, M. (1999-2008: James Mill)
Erich Fromm states; "When a man is born, the stage is set for him. He has to eat and drink, and therefore he has to work; and this means he has to work under the particular conditions and in the ways that are determined for him by the kind of society he is born. Both factors, his need to live and the social system, in principle are unalterable by him as an individual, and they are the factors which determine the traits of his personality; his thoughts etc." Erich Fromm (2001:14)
According to the philosophy of Kant, A man must always be an end to himself and never a means to an end. He states “Nature has willed that man should, by himself, produce everything that goes beyond the mechanical ordering of his animal existence, and that he should partake of no other happiness or perfection than that which he himself, independently of instinct, has created by his own reason.” Immanuel Kant (1724-1804)
According to Erich Fromm – every man has to make tough decisions – whereby they sacrifice one goal of the self in order to seek another new kind of pleasure. He believes that it is the nature of all men that - because they interpret external objects through the self – then it logically follows that we try to treat others as a means to our own ends. He states “Every man tries to establish his power over others in order to satisfy his own egotistic need” – as we are about to see it is for this reason that Marx sees it necessary to protect the individual man from the government or the industrialists, at risk that he will be exploited for their whim at the expense of his own masculinity.
Erich Fromm believes that because our lack of understanding of the true nature of another – and the impossibility of doing so –
we instead - try to alienate others from their own self of sense (their end) by attempting to encourage them to commit to the duty of producing our own end. We subvert others from their sense of being; because we want them to serve us.
Before the industrial revolution this perhaps would have been impossible – if you were a farmer who all you did for your entire life was produce enough food for you and your family; then other than the intellectual subservience that may occur internally within the household – speaking aside from that, then the farmer or the household wouldn’t be a slave to any other man other than themselves and each other.
If the household happened to produce more than required for the household, they could take this excess supply to the market and it would be bought by a middle man, who would sell it to where it was in demand because of limited supply – because perhaps another household happened to produce too little of the stock, and therefore would be unable to feed themselves.
In the years where the farmer produces too much, he would make enough barter to be able to afford to buy stock during the years where he failed to produce enough. This all sounds very well and good; it sounds like some utopian paradise – but it’s forgetting a few forces. Its forgetting that the value of the currency that the man has kept over time loses its worth; known as inflation, and its forgetting that the middle man has taken a percentage revenue – so in the years when the farmer buys food – he won’t be able to buy as much as he gave away – which one way or another is likely to leave a gap – a period where the farmer didn’t have enough food for his household and therefore consequently will starve.
The socio-political-economic system of external society attempts to fix this problem by using the force of division of labour. We split tasks between one another, where one person specialises in one task, and another in another task, that make up individual parts of the end product; by doing this our output increases dramatically.
Philosophy and perhaps the founder of economics Adam Smith explains the ‘Division of Labour’ - he analysed a Pin factory and noted that by using 10 men who each specialized in making a particular part of the pin led to a 240 or 4800 fold increase in the amount of pin production the factory was capable of than if the men each created a pin each “Each person, therefore, making a tenth part of forty-eight thousand pins, might be considered as making four thousand eight hundred pins in a day.
But if they had all wrought separately and independently, and without any of them having been educated to this peculiar business, they certainly could not each of them have made twenty, perhaps not one pin in a day; that is, certainly, not the two hundred and fortieth, perhaps not the four thousand eight hundredth part of what they are at present capable of
performing, in consequence of a proper division and
combination of their different operations.” Adam Smith (1776)
The obvious problem with this is; is that, the man’s goal initially was to provide him the resources to continue his existence; to increase his wealth of knowledge – his understanding of himself – the nature of the forms – understand virtue, produce himself into the world through – self defined acts – to add external objectivity his nature.
But to solve the issue of lack of production we are giving up our ability to produce works that reflect our nature – instead to
produce the smallest part of a pin, from which we don’t intend to use to continue our existence.
Like in the example of the farmer - the gap created by the market – the inflation – the cut taken by the middle man – leaves a too little supply for the farmer to be able to feed himself and his family, although division of labour seems like a solution to this problem it isn’t because the man was merely interested in choosing his acts, in actualizing his existence.
Erich Fromm; believes that the monetary system is the ultimate way to detach a man to produce excess production that isn’t for his own end – thereby allowing value for others. And he believes as a result of the monetary system we become alienated from our true sense of self – the ends we should be pursuing and instead are “subservient to inhuman, depraved, unnatural, and
imaginary” goals and appetites.
As cities began to grow from Entrepreneurs taking over; and producing cotton and so on; Karl Marx began writing about how this tyranny was immoral – how the workers in the factories were being exploited.
From Marx’s work on the Alienation of the Self – we can
understand some things about what he believed about morality, and the nature of psychology – how a Man is supposed to live;
and how a Man becomes detached from his purpose; the term he created for this was “Alienation”. And he wrote about it as he lived during the industrial revolution in England, which often meant the rich got richer and average worker was reduced almost to slave status.
Marx’s saw that the lives of men who worked in the factories, in the cities that although they were paid better than the farmers in
the countryside – their quality of life was much worse; and that their ability to think for themselves was reduced.
The factories owners disagreed – they believe that if these men – these workers weren’t so lazy they would get up and be
entrepreneurs like the factory owner. But Marx believed that one’s surroundings makes up the personality – that these men had their thoughts reduced by the long hours – the poor pay – the repetitive tasks – they became so far detached from their own end – making profit for someone else’s that they became unable to proceed to innovate an original idea from which they could be in demand for and thus profit like an entrepreneur.
That the environment around the man, creates the soul of the man. Karl Marx recognized that the industrialists were
exploiting their workforce, paying them very little, offering them poor working conditions and lifestyle opportunity, reducing the workforce’s capacity for control of their own destiny – forcing a monopoly over their lifestyle choices.
Marx’s believed that this came from a belief that industrialists believed that the value of “a commodity is determined by the quantity of labour spent on it, the more idle and unskilful the labourer, the more valuable would his commodity be, because more time would be required in its production.” Marx, C. (1863-1878) and therefore the more time spent on the product
production was the only important factor – not the thoughts, personality or soul of the worker – just the amount of hours that he could use his hands to perform basic routines – without ceasing to exist.
Unlike Fordism, a philosophy about human freedom developed by the industrialist Henry Ford, which originated from a philosophy of man called Taylorism developed by Frederick
Taylor whose theories attempted to constrict Man’s freedom by incentivising man through the offering of high wages. It should be noted today that ‘Scientific Management’ his theory that the micromanagement of every aspect of the workers activity will increase the productivity capacity of each worker is still treated as a serious approach to running an organisation by many organisational psychologists.
In response to such a dire view as to call ‘Men lazy’ – the accusation made by Taylor, Ford, and others, Erich Fromm replied “Many thinkers believe that man is lazy. It is wrote in the Jewish faith that when “Moses asked Pharaoh to let the Jewish people go so that they might “Serve God in the desert”, his answer was; “you are lazy, nothing but lazy.” To Pharaoh slave labour meant doing things; worshipping God was laziness. The same judgement of ‘people are lazy’ was adopted by all those who wanted to profit from activity of others and had no use for productiveness, which they could not exploit.” Fromm, E. (1990)
Therefore the factory towns erupted with this goal in mind – to increase output, building tiny houses around the factories or inside of them; and creating restrictions that forced the worker to work as long hours as physically possible as regularly as
possible – with his source of motivation being – to continue being alive – not to run out of money and thus food; with no regard to the unique nature of the soul of the man.
These towns; whether they realize it or not developed to reduce peoples capacity for thought – to express their own unique attributes – and perform them for his own means; to exist only for himself. Marx recognized that it was society’s role to prevent this from happening – from a few industrialists profiteering and
exploiting the masses to produce excess supply for no good reason.
Marx disagreed with the idea that men are lazy; he believed that men might be lazy when producing for another man’s end. But not the end for himself, he states “Man produces even when he is free from physical need…He duplicates himself not only, as in consciousness, intellectually, but also actively, in reality, and therefore he contemplates himself in a world that he has created” Fromm, E. (1990:76). He goes on to argue that estranging man from this free productivity essentially alienates him from his true form.”
He states “A commodity is, in the first place, an object outside us, a thing that by its properties satisfies human wants of some sort or another. The nature of such wants, whether, for instance, they spring from the stomach or from fancy, makes no
difference.” Marx, C. (1863-1878). he continues “The utility of a thing makes it a use value.(4*) But this utility is not a thing of air.” That “This property of a commodity is independent of the amount of labour required to appropriate its useful qualities.”
That “Exchange-value, at first sight, presents itself as a
quantitative relation, as the proportion in which values in use of one sort are exchanged for those of another sort,”
Because Marx recognized that the external environment created a man’s sense of self – and Marx believed the moral thing to do was to allow humans to maximize their own happiness he thus
Because Marx recognized that the external environment created a man’s sense of self – and Marx believed the moral thing to do was to allow humans to maximize their own happiness he thus