The Person from Arendt's Perspective
04-16-2012
“Person” - ego - character
“Persona”: mask, originally, the role chosen by the ego for the game among and with human beings, the mask that it holds in front of itself in order to be non-identifiable.
Person: can also, though, be the role or the mask that we are born with, the one given to us by nature in the form of the body and the gifts of the mind, and by society in the form of our social status.
Person in the first sense is actually character, insofar as the person is here and is the product of the ego. The question of identity arises in both cases, in case of the character, in such a way that the ego remains the sovereign master of the character, its product. In the second case, in such a way that the person conceals something else, something apparently deeper, and the ego becomes no more than the formalistic principle of the unity of body and soul, on the one hand, [and] of the coherent relatedness of multiple gifts, on the other.
In contrast: “persona” as “per-sonare” – to sound through.
-Hannah Arendt, Denktagebuch (freely translated by Stefanie Rosenmüller )
Are we not, especially as adolescents, urgently in search of our own personality? The young human being, or at least that of my recollection, attempts to discover his or her own personality, the pure ego of the person, like an inner core within, like a treasure or a talisman that enables the individual to shine brightly and which equips one to confront and encounter the people and things in the world outside.
Arendt would probably have seen this as a futile enterprise. The person is not the same as the thinking ego, and attempting to find the person through pure introspection would surely, in her eyes, have been a form of psychologism. The person is not the pure ego: it represents an interface between me and the others, the place where the two sides confront one another.
Young people do spend a remarkable amount of time in front of the mirror and, although we can certainly point to quite simple reasons of vanity to explain this, most people would probably agree that there is more to all this experimenting and checking of hairstyles, creams, cosmetics and caps than mere fashion, and that it involves the search for one’s own identity and the possibilities of presenting one’s own person to others. Presentation, in this sense, includes not only all types of styling and concealment, but also the features of the face itself - yet my own features do not seem to want me to read them and although the mirror may (nearly) reflect the perspective of the others, I cannot find my ego there, the gap remains, and my person is not to be found in the mirror. But why (leaving Lacan aside for the present) do people search for their personality in the mirror’s reflection?
The “persona,” which was the mask shown to the audience in the Roman theatre, defines the character of the person it conceals. Standing in front of the mirror might symbolize my attempt to tear off my own mask, to gaze, for a moment at least, at what lies behind, to see into and through myself and then to decide whom or what facet I want to show to others – unfortunately, though, this undertaking will not succeed. The person is not an entity behind the mask, but an interface between me and the others: the personality will appear only in the concealing by the mask.
The person, as Arendt describes it, is seen only by the others, and it is only in the gaze of those others that I can, at most, catch a reflection of it. I cannot remove the mask of my own face, and were I to do so, there would be nothing to see but bones and sinews. The face shows the person and although the eyes are said to open a view right through to the soul, to myself that view remains opaque.
“On the contrary, it is more than likely that the ‘who,’ which appears so clearly and unmistakably to others, remains hidden from the person himself, like the daimon in Greek religion which accompanies each man throughout his life, always looking over his shoulder from behind and thus visible only to those he encounters.“ (Hannah Arendt: The Human Condition)
-Stefanie Rosenmüller