Personality: Is It Real?︱Philosophy
Is Our Whole Life A Lie? Most likely.
By JackonReality
Personality. It’s one of the many concepts cooked up in the human brain that gets thrown around quite a bit in our society, without much pause for the fact that it is, at its core, just a concept. Now, some of these concepts, like honesty, are real and obvious. Yet personality, one of the most used concepts in modern humanity, does not exist.
Personality is defined as “the combination of characteristics or qualities that form an individual's distinctive character.” There are two false parts to this definition. The first is the idea that we are compelled by characteristics or qualities. These qualities are non-existent in nature. They only exist in the hubris of the human mind. This is because all the qualities and characteristics that individual humans possess contradict each other. If you say someone’s personality traits are agreeableness, humility, reliability, then these traits will one day be contradicted when the individual acts unagreeable, egotistical, and unreliable. No human acts one way all the time. And the definition of personality doesn’t say anything about the duration of these traits, so we must assume that “personality” means the traits that humans have all the time, which don’t exist. Therefore, “personality” doesn’t exist.
The second impossible section of the definition is that humans have distinctive qualities that form a distinctive character. Since the qualities within an individual include every single quality possible in a human being, then there is no uniqueness in character from human to human. The qualities within us; humility and egotism, creativity and dullness, extraversion and introversion, are all human qualities that are seen in all humans. Every human on this planet shares every single quality possible, so every human’s personality is, essentially, the same. There is no uniqueness in personality between humans. There is no “personality.”