October 27, 2007
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Human Uniqueness
Sometimes, when I feel like my life hasn’t changed in years, I start to think about the unoriginality of every human.
During my normal stream of life, that which is undisturbed by reflective thoughts, I subconsciously accept the idea that I have a fundamentally unique identity. To an extent, we all assume the same thing. After all, in the relative framework of my life I am, for the most part, generally unlike the people around me. We all have different personalities and quirks, so it seems natural to assume that we are each, in a way, our own unique idea of a person.
But somewhere along the way I got lost in a thought. The immensity of humanity stretches much further geographically and chronologically than the mere dot and moment I have been exposed to. And within this thought the foundation for my belief in the uniqueness of humans began to break down.
We think of people as more than clumps of matter that eat, sleep, and breathe. We think of people in terms of their personalities. And what is a personality? When you analyze it, a personality is an assemblage of different qualities that come from a finite set of adjectives. Thus a person could be funny, spontaneous, irascible, or any number of other qualities, that when consolidated form their personality, in other words, who that person is.
Here is what confounded me concerning the individuality of me or any other human. In history, I thought, all these things have surely been done. Every single quality a person can have, like the ones I mentioned or any you can think of, has in all probability already been exemplified in greater degree by persons in history than in persons I see around me today. Think of a quality that one can possess, and then think about whether or not another person has already had this quality. It seems as if there is no exception to the result of this thought experiment.
Suddenly, as this thought occurred to me, I felt the confidence I once had in the idea of human uniqueness vanish. My existence is made of qualities, and there are no original qualities. Everything has been done. Any emotion, interest, or defining feature I have has already been had. Human beings seemed like sticks on a forest floor; certainly the sticks are different slightly in size and color, but nothing makes them ultimately unique.
This thought troubled me greatly for some time, and perhaps you can see why (I’m not assuming everyone will be as anxious as I was about this thought). But in time two thoughts arrived that remedied this contradiction between the appearance of human individuality and people being the sum of unoriginal qualities, but seeing as this post already has the height of a doddering skyscraper, I’ll save them for next post.
Do you see any solutions to the problem? Or is there even a problem?
Comments (4)
Well, “problem” indicates something that, techincally speaking, has a solution. I don’t know that there’s much possibility for a solution for what you described.
But even though every feeling has been felt before, every act has been performed before, every character trait has been utilized before, I still believe that every person is unique. Even if you could find two people with the same personality traits (and the odds of finding the same combination of traits have got to be rather minimal), there is no way those two people could own the same set of cirumstances. There’s no way they’ve made the same choices or loved the same things. There’s no way their parents raised them the same. There’s no way they’ve had the same disappointments or the same successes.
Every piece of life and every direction we choose makes us who we are. It is the uniqueness of our lives that gives us our uniqueness as people. Isn’t it cool?
Awaiting the recordation of the two thoughts….
One could argue that we all possess different qualities in varying degrees, and so the individuality of someone is assured by the fact that they possess these or those qualities in a different degree then all other people, and so they possess a different personality, or sum total, of their qualities then any other person does. I’ve always thought this to be rather uncomforting, however, for I am then little different from anyone else.
If you include circumstances in the list of things that determine personality, then I supose you could have a nearly infinite set of personalities, in the sense that humanity can’t be expected to discover all of them. For someone who sees such broad catagories in life like me it’s hard to see any real uniqueness.
I don’t know, but I’m interested in reading what your solution is.
Somewhat of a conundrum, no?
I like to think that the reason humans may share personality traits is that those are the things God has placed in us to make us like Him. If we’re made in His image, that means that His traits are reflected in us. Maybe the creative traits are reflected more strongly in some, the loving traits in others, and so on. It’s how those traits are reflected that makes the individual unique.
if you lived in ca, youd want to go to their upcoming concert in late november. my brother got his tickets already.