Somebody told me there was no individuality in the middle ages and that people only had a "communal self". I found this hard to believe because a group of psychologists argue that:
"Personality traits are complex and research suggests that our traits are shaped by both inheritance and environmental factors. These two forces interact in a wide variety of ways to form our individual personalities. "(1)
Extraversion and introversion etc must have been individual traits that people were aware of right? And like the friendly one, the funny one? People kinda were aware of that of themselves and others right?
I did some research and found that Plato and Aristotle had personal psychology theories and Hippocrates had his 4 humor theories. Wich implies that people were aware of this things in my eyes. (2)
But then the theory mainly proposed by Jacob Burkhardt in his "The civilization of the renaissance in Italy" conflicts this :
"According to Burkhardt, the personality of the individual was awakened by the political activities of the medieval Italian state. The tyrants and condottiere provoked the individuation of themselves and their followers through their Christianity, love of knowledge and classically derived belief in perfection.
Before the Renaissance, Burkhardt argued that human consciousness “lay dreaming or half-awake beneath a common veil.” He wrote that that veil was “woven of faith, illusion and childish prepossession, through which the world and history were seen clad in strange hue”. The veil meant that most people were only aware of themselves as members of a class, race, party, family, corporation or other general categories. In Italy, Burkhardt writes, “this veil first melted into air.” The new desire to distinguish yourself from your neighbour formed the inward appetite to develop a unique demeanour. " (3)
I see many scholars proposing this as an established fact, but yet again it makes no sense to me. Luckely their are others who dispute this.
What are your thoughts on this?
Thanks for helping my mini-existential crisis
Some of my sources:
(1)https://www.verywellmind.com/are-personality-traits-caused-by-genes-or-environment-4120707
(2) http://blog.motivemetrics.com/A-History-of-Personality-Psychology-Part-1#:~:text=The%20history%20of%20personality%20psychology%20dates%20as%20far%20back%20as%20Ancient%20Greece.&text=Though%20much%20of%20the%20work,be%20influenced%20by%20humoral%20imbalances.
(3) https://reaction.life/jacob-burckhardt/
https://doc-research.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/83_188-wpfdcbulletin_2004v2(2.1)_gurevich.pdf
http://www.nhinet.org/humsub/bengt10-2.htm
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Personality#Developmental_biological_model (where the conflict between biology and culture presents itself)
"According to Burkhardt, the personality of the individual was awakened by the political activities of the medieval Italian state. The tyrants and condottiere provoked the individuation of themselves and their followers through their Christianity, love of knowledge and classically derived belief in perfection."
Burkhardt has been dead for over 100 years. Academics from the 19th century aren't exactly the most up to date sources of information, and were thoroughly in the mindset of thinking everything before the Renaissance was a dark age, which isn't accurate. I don't know of a single serious academic who still subscribes to that kind of thinking, because it's demonstrably wrong and we've known that for decades.
As for individuality before the Renaissance, a library of books could be read about it. Individuality could be expressed through appearance, like clothing and hairstyle choices, which we have entire sections of the FAQ for. Or through art, like monks deciding to doodle jousting snails into manuscript art, which you can read a bit about here. Or through religious attitudes, like belonging to or sympathising with a heretical belief or, like Emperor Frederick II, just thinking the pope is a pretentious knob and being vocal about it. Then there's music, where troubadours with stage names like Reutbeof (meaning "Boisterous Beef") wrote songs about how they're the wittiest musician or their opinions on political and cultural topics of the day. The display of individualism and personal sense of identity through cultural expression is all over the Middle Ages. Of course people had individual personalities.