The Evolution of Character : Part 1

The Foundations of Personality
by Abraham Myerson, M.D.

(Page 12 of 28)

with Especial Reference to the Growth of Purpose and Personality

There have been various philosophies dealing with the purposes of man. Man seeks this or that - the eternal good, beauty, happiness, pleasure, survival - but always he is represented as a seeker. A very popular doctrine, Hedonism, now somewhat in disfavor, represents him as seeking pleasurable, affective states. The difficulty of understanding the essential nature of pleasure and pain, the fact that what is pleasure to one man is pain to another, rather discredited this as a psychological explanation. I think we may phrase the situation fairly on an empirical basis when we say that seeking arises in instinct but receives its impulse to continuity by some agreeable affective state of satisfaction. Man steers towards pleasure and satisfaction of some type or other, but the force is the unbalance of an instinct.

When we speak of man as a seeker, we are not separating him from the rest of living things. All life seeks, and the more mobile a living thing is the more it seeks. A sessile mussel chained to a rock seeks little but the fundamentals of nutrition and generation and these in a simple way. An animal that builds habitations for its young, courts its mate, plays, teaches and fights, may do nothing more than seek nutrition and generation, but it seeks these through many intermediary "end" points, through many impulses, and thus it has many types of satisfaction. When a creature develops to the point that it establishes all kinds of rules governing conduct, when it establishes sanctions that are eternal and has purposes that have a terminus in a hereafter which is out of the span of life of the planner, it becomes quite difficult to say just what it is man seeks. In fact, every man seeks many things, many satisfactions, and whatever it may be that Man in the abstract seeks, individual men differ very decidedly not only as to what they seek but as to what should be sought.

Our viscera, our tissues, as they function, change by the using up of energy and the breaking down of materials. That change brings about sensory disturbances in our body which are not unpleasant in moderation, which we call hunger, thirst and fatigue. To relieve these three primitive states we seek food, drink and rest; we DESIRE food, drink and rest. Desire then is primitive, organic, arising mainly in the vegetative nervous system, and it awakens mechanisms that bring us food, drink and rest. A feeling which we call satisfaction results when the changes in the viscera and tissues are readjusted or on the way to readjustment. Here is the simplest paradigm for desire seeking satisfaction, but it is on a plane rarely found in man, because his life is too complicated for such formulae to work.

Food must be bought or produced, and this involves cooperation, competition, self-denial, thrift, science, finance, invention. It involves ethics, because though you are hungry you must not steal food or give improper value for it. Moreover, though you are hungry, you have developed tastes, manners, etc., and you cannot, must not eat this or that (through religion); you mast eat with certain implements), and would rather die than violate the established standards in such matters. Thus to the simple act of eating, to the satisfaction of a primitive desire set up by a primitive need, there are any number of obstacles set up by the complexities of our social existence. The sanction of these obstacles, their power to influence us, rests in other desires and purposes arising out of other "needs" of our nature. What are those needs? They are inherent in what has been called the social instincts, in that side of our nature which makes us yearn for approval and swings us into conformity with a group. The group organizes the activities of its individuals just as an individual organizes his activities. The evolutionists explain this group feeling as part of the equipment necessary for survival. Perhaps this is an adequate account of the situation, but the strength of the social instincts almost lead one to a more mystical explanation, a sort of acceptance of the group as the unit and the individual as an incomplete fragment.

What is true of hunger is true of thirst and fatigue. Desires in these directions have to accommodate themselves, in greater or lesser degrees, to the complexities in which our social nature and customs have involved us. It is true that desires upon which the actual survival of the individual depend will finally break through taboo and restriction if completely balked. That is, very few people will actually starve to death, die of thirst or keep awake indefinitely, despite any convention or taboo. Nevertheless there are people who will resist these fundamental desires, as in the case of MacSwiney, the Irish republican, and as in the case of martyrs recorded in the history of all peoples. It may be that in some of these we are dealing with a powerful inhibition of appetite of the kind seen in anhedonia.

The elaboration of the sex impulses and desires into the purposes of marriage, the repression into lifelong continence and chastity, forms one of the most marvelous of chapters in the psychological history of man. The desire for sex relationship of the crude kind is very variable both in force, time of appearance and reaction to discipline and unquestionably arises from the changes in the sex organs. Both to enhance and repress it are aims of the culture and custom of each group, and the lower groups have given actual sexual intercourse a mystical supernatural value that has at times and in various places raised it into the basis of cults and religions. Repressed, hampered, canalized, forbidden, the sex impulses have profoundly modified clothes, art, religion, morals and philosophy. The sex customs of any nation demonstrate the extreme plasticity of human desires and the various twists, turns and customs that tradition declares holy. There have been whole groups of people that have deemed any sexual pleasure unholy, and the great religions still deem it necessary for their leaders to be continent. And the absurdities of modesty, a modified sex impulse, have made it immoral for a woman to show her leg above the calf while in her street clothes, though she may wear a bathing suit without reproach.

Whatever a desire is basically, it tends quickly to organize itself in character. It gathers to itself emotions, sentiments, intelligence; it plans and it wills, it battles against other desires. I say IT, as if the desire were an entity, a personality, but what I mean is that the somatic and cerebral activities of a desire become so organized as to operate as a unit. A permanent excitability of these nervous centers as a unit is engendered, and these are easily aroused either by a stimulus from the body or from without. Thus the sex impulse arises directly from tensions within the sex organs but is built up and elaborated by approval of and admiration for beauty, strength and intelligence, by the desire for possession and mastery, by competitive feeling, until it may become drawn out into the elaborate purpose of marriage or the family.