Understanding the Essence of Human Personality
What Is Personality?
Personality encompasses all doctrine and civilization, stating the primacy of the individual's material needs and the collective mechanisms underlying their development.
Profiles of Human Personality
The person is an independent spiritual being. They maintain their livelihood through adherence to a hierarchy of values, freely adopted, assimilated, and lived in a responsible commitment and constant conversion. This structure consists of three dimensions:
- Vocation: The dimension of transcendence, which is open beyond the given, the acquired, and the past.
- Incarnation: The descending dimension, which represents the commitment to mundane realities.
- Communion: The horizontal dimension, which involves detachment from oneself and connection with others.
The Person as Incarnate
The person is defined by integration, communication, commitment, and donation, whereas the individual is defined by dispersion, separation, escape, and selfishness. A person is an incarnated being who progressively unifies all their acts, situations, and characters within their own individuality.
The Person as a Free Being
Personal freedom is not merely a social conquest; it is the true freedom of every individual.
The Person as a Community Being
The realization of man as a person takes place within the field of community. The opposite of a personal community is the mass—an undifferentiated, faceless agglomeration where individuals are similar but not close. Loneliness is the price paid for the process of personalization. Society faces deepening isolation; one must live halfway between solitude and community.
The Person as a Transcendent Being
When a person endorses certain values, they feel overwhelmed by them and never reach absolute fulfillment. The ultimate value is the Christian God, who manifested as a person in history.
Personal Manifesto
- Economy: The capitalist economy tends to be organized outside the person, with the exclusive end of gain.
- Culture: It is an indispensable means of personal transformation.
- Democracy: It is a partnership based on social maturity, ethics, and rights, carried out through moral capacity and strong authority.
- Labor: Labor has priority over capital. Money should be earned only in direct connection with work. The right to authority or management of a company pertains only to responsible and organized labor.
- Institutions: They must be at the service of man to encourage freedom and creativity. It is necessary to review depersonalized structures and values.
- Family: It is irreplaceable as a link between the private and the public, serving to discover and enhance the personal vocation of each member.