When Sartre is your Computer or when “potentiality” is more important then “personality”

By answering the questions “Who am I?” and “What can I do in life?”, this article will explain the topic of Differential Psychology and the Sartrian notion of Potentiality

We could say that life is composed of cycles in which each cycle is made up of 4 steps which are, exploration, decision-making, power-generation and execution. In the exploring phase, one will want to explore the world, explore themselves and explore others. The goal is to better understand how they fit into the world, how they can improve it and how they can implement their potentiality. The implementation of this phase will lead people into the second phase, the decision-making phase which will help them choosing what to do in their lives. The next phase is called “power-generating” or in simpler terms motivation-building, which also comes with confidence building. Ultimately, if the three first phases are done well, we may believe that the execution will be easy. However, we need to notice that the execution phase also comes with adversity-fighting, perseverance and effort.

The first and second phases - exploration and decision-making - can be summed up into one question” “Who am I?”

Who am I?

To answer the hard problem of what defines me, one way to do it is to identify who I am not, and what makes me different from others. Technically, we’re entering the realms of “differential psychology”.

But differential Psychology may not be as boring as it sounds. In the famous 1966 Clint Eastwood western movie, The Good, the Bad and the Ugly, one of the most important scene is the one in which Clint Eastwood says: “In life, there are two categories of people, those who dig and those who have a loaded gun. And you, you dig! »

In fact, everybody has, at one point or another, in their life, faced differential psychology as, in reality, we do differential psychology each we say “there are two kinds of people...”

In more scientific terms, it’s with the publication of Psychological Types in 1921 that Carl Jung became the founder of that field of modern science. But one reason he wrote it was to prove to Sigmund Freud that it wasn’t possible to apply one psychological paradigm to everyone – as we’re all different. Freud thought that he had found a one-solution-fits-all-problems with he suggested to all mental troubles in adulthood are linked to a sexual abuse in childhood. Carl Jung suggested to identify mental functions disposed as dichotomies like introversion and extraversion, intuition and sensing and thinking versus feeling. This structure came into being as the Myers-Briggs Typology indicator (MBTi) in which was added an extra function, judging versus perceiving. But before the MBTi became aprt of “pop culture”, in an interview given to the BBC in 1955, Carl Jung was clear to point out that his Psychological Types weren’t a categorization to “put people in boxes” but that they were mere indicators. Nowadays, personality is defined as traits that are stable over time, a characteristic clearly stated on MBTi websites. As a result, by identifying people’s personality types, it’s easy to come up with sentences like “he’s the kind of person who...”, “this is how he is”, “he won’t change...” Personality then comes as a justification of people’s mistakes. And it usually sounds like they can’t change as they will be like that all their lives. In his book Free Will, Sam Harris uses the structure of brains to justify what people do, even if it’s a crime. Another book has been titled, « My brain made me do it »[1]. But, is it true that we are what we are and that we can’t change and we’re just gonna be doomed of our misdeeds?

Near the end of the 20th century, Robert Cloninger created the Temperament and Character Inventory in which the temperament traits tend to be more stable over time then the character traits. This differentiation of traits that are more stable than others was quite a progress in differential psychology. And it’s a quite encouraging concept is it allows to believe that we can change – and hopefully – change for the better.

A few steps forward were made in recent times about psychology. One was the discovery by Howard Gardner of Multiple Intelligences explained in his book Frames of Mind published in 1983. But more impactful was Daniel Goleman’s 1995 Emotional Intelligence which, just like Howard Gardner’s Frames of Mind objected on a unidirectional measurement of intelligence which, since 1916, has been the Stanford-Binet intelligence test, otherwise known is IQ. Since the turn of the 21st century, we now believe that to succeed in life, one doesn’t have to score high in IQ tests, but that EQ and other soft skills might be as or even more important. Other breakthroughs have been the confirmation of brain plasticity which, thanks to the use of modern medical imagery which can picture the creation of new synaptic connections throughout our entire lifespan and not only in childhood and the discovery of epigenetics.

Potentiality

The characteristics of epigenetics and brain plasticity can be summed up into one word: potentiality. Eric Le Senne, a French psychologist who, in 1950, wrote Traité de Caractérologie, said that personality could be portrayed as made of two parts: a tool and a product. The difference between Temperament and Character, the part of the personality that doesn’t change versus the part that evolves more, could be compared, for example, to a piano and a music composition, or a typewriter and a poem. One’s vocation lies in the identification if their deepest skills are in music, e.g. the piano, linguistic, e.g. the typewriter, and that our character will then be responsible for composing a great song or writing a great poem. We can call this “potentiality”.

In more technical terms, this potentiality, if someone’s personality can be described as a piano is a song that can potentially be a masterpiece. In scientific terms, this is called epigenetics. We traditionally thought of DNA as something immuable, like a dictatorship whom we were slaves. But another way to describe DNA is as a library. And when we enter a library, we’re not forced to read all the books from A to Z. We choose which books we want to read, and we may even choose which chapters we are mostly interested in. The same happens with our DNA. We don’t use it all. We only use some of it. And how we use it depends on our unique position in the world and our unique set of characteristics. The same can be said of a computer which are an endless line of zeros and ones just waiting to be tuned into something meaningful, something unique and special and hopefully great.

Sartre was famous for one quote in particular which is “existence precedes essence”. This means that we are alive before knowing why. The fact that we are alive is made of an entire set of DNA and biological characteristics that we have the potentiality to use the best possible way. But there’s a twists. Actually, more than one twist as our socio-cultural setting also has a strong impact on what we become. I like to introduce one statement from famous British novelist Aldous Huxley who said that we are 3 things, our biology and our culture – the famous nature-nurture debate- but also of a third thing, which is what we do, ultimately, with the 2 first ones. The last one is a small piece of our existence, but it’s there and it’s what we can call free-will. But free-will is also the juxtaposition of reality, knowledge and objectives. By looking at reality through the lenses of our knowledge, we then can create a strategy to reach our goals.

[1][1] My brain made me do it, Eliezer Sternberg, 2012, Prometheus Books