The Sankhya Conception of Personality

The word ‘personality’ has been used in different senses and different meanings have generally been assigned to it. But the truth seems to lie in this: The essential characteristic of a person id self-consciousness; but self-consciousness is not a bare or undifferentiated unity of an essence or of a substance, but a complex or differentiated unity of a system or a world. Thus, a person is a self-conscious system, or world of diversified elements. Again, this system or world is not stationary, but progressive, so that a better definition would be that a person is "an active form of the whole" –a unique living center of activity on the part of Absolute unity and completeness by absorbing and assimilating, through an infinite process. The apparently foreign element of multiplicity. He is a free voluntary agent in so far only as his freedom and initiative is nothing but "the inherent effort of mind, considered as a ‘world’, in the direction of unity and self-completeness, i.e., individuality." Next, the Sankhya view with regard to the other forms of personality has been considered. It has satisfactorily proved that the Sankhya view with regard to the personality of Isvara and the evolution of the world inevitably leads one of the conclusion that all things in the manifested world are spirits possessing self-consciousness in different degrees and revealing it in widely diverse ways. They, therefore, may also be called ‘Persons,’ but they are more imperfect forms of person than beings. Thus, the sankhya System speaks of three forms of personality: The Super human Personality: The Super –human Personality, which is possessed by God or Isvara; the human personality, which is possessed by jives called men, and the sub-human personality, which belongs to all other being and things. Therefore, according to the sankhya, the universe is a system of different grades of persons, in which isvara or God is the Super-person or the persons, and all other persons –men and other beings and things –are his individualsations, modes or moments.