"Know Thyself" was the inscription on the temple of Apollo at Delphi. Easier said than done. We all want to know who we are, but we cannot always agree. First we "contain multitudes," as Walt Whitman noted. Then again we are always changing over time and place depending on the circumstances, like chameleons, so we are always trying to know different people. It's so hard to keep up with ourselves.
And what will be our methodology? How do we know how to know ourselves? From our parents and friends? But they are biased. So are our enemies, though they may be less tactful and more truthful. From our therapists? By introspection? Perhaps from personality tests?
Again, we not only try to understand ourselves, we have to try to understand others—which we do mostly by experience, as well as self-knowledge; but self-knowledge is unreliable since sometimes others seem to know us better than we know ourselves. So it gets complicated. And sometimes we surprise even ourselves by what we do. So it gets more complicated.
Our efforts to describe, compare, classify, categorize, crystallize, judge—effectively, to box in—are endlessly fascinating and even illuminating, though they may also limit and over-simplify these complex and multitudinous chameleons. Still, we do our best. I started wondering about all this when I found some personality tests and took them and discovered that I did indeed have a personality, which is reassuring - though what sort of personality was not so clear.
One test was in Winnie Dunn's "Living Sensationally" (2008) which demonstrates what sort of sensory type you are: a Seeker, Avoider, Sensor or Bystander—and suggests who might make the best partner, sensory-wise, and also what the major irritants will be. This is a matter of weighting rather than exclusively only one type; but we found that out a bit too late, and she is spot on about the irritants. Then I read Helen Fisher's "Why Him? Why Her?" (2010), which is subtitled: "How to Find and Keep Lasting Love" (good value for about $18), with a test at the end on mate choices for the four different personality types: Explorers, Builders, Directors and Negotiators. Find out who you are (probably one trait will dominate) and who would be most suitable for you. There is some overlap between these two tests: Seekers and Explorers seem similar, but further research will no doubt clarify the correlations.
But I figure that matching the 4x4 personality types and even more subtypes will be an arithmetical feat to baffle Einstein, especially if we try to factor in the personality changes over time and place. Still the search for one's personality, and lasting love too, is well worth the effort.
The first scientific taxonomy was proposed by Linnaeus in 1758 when he described the species Homo as sapiens—wise. This was perhaps not his wisest move, particularly since he flatly contradicted the entire pre-Socratic tradition of Greek philosophy as well as the lesson of the Fall in Genesis. In the Iliad, Homer had quoted Zeus, an unimpeachable source, lamenting the futility of the 10 year Trojan war: "Of all creatures that breathe and creep about Mother Earth, there is none so miserable as man" (422). Bias, one of the Seven Sages of ancient Greece, inscribed his philosophy at the same temple: "Most men are bad" (De Crescenzo, 1990:4). Heraclitus and Democritus were both deeply impressed by our stupidity (no, not yours, of course, they did not speak for you, but for humans in general. Don't take this personally, please), but they reacted differently: the former was known as the laughing philosopher, the latter as the weeping philosopher: one was amused, the other upset, poor chap. Still, miserable, bad and stupid are rather different evaluations of human nature than wise: totally opposite in fact. I suppose Linnaeus was an incurable optimist—or blind to reality.
Similarly in the Judaeo-Christian tradition, Genesis tells us that God admired his creations and found them "good", including Adam and Eve, and then he rested. These two first humans may have been good, but they were both apparently flawed: not quite good enough for God; and for being bad or stupid (or both) they were both cursed and expelled from the Garden of Eden. Whether you blame one or the other (and how people argue about that) God evidently considered them both equally responsible and in their decision-making equally unwise.
Linnaeus was probably deeply influenced by Plato, who had described three types of people in the Republic: men and women of gold, silver and bronze—and he, being a philosopher and a lover of wisdom and truth, and ruled by the head was—quite coincidentally—the best type, and just made to rule: the philosopher king. O happy chance! But Plato also discussed two other types, also defined by their moral values and loves: lovers of honor (fit for warriors, and ruled by their hearts, considered the seat of bravery) and lovers of gain, (sensory or material, ruled by their bellies and genitals, below the navel). This threefold division of humanity is evident in the structure of the body: the head is separated from the heart by the isthmus of the neck, and the heart from the stomach and genitals by the isthmus of the waist; true, the waist often curves out rather than in these days, but that was then and this is now. So here we move from the pre-Socratic theories of human nature (miserable, bad or stupid) to personality theory—which integrated body parts (biology), personal values (psychology), and social structure (sociology) in a tight knot of (almost) everything. The gold, silver and bronze are still reflected in the Olympic medals, but the gold and bronze personality types have been reversed. It is the lovers of gold, money and power who are golden these days, and it is the lovers of truth who take the bronze.
A medical paradigm was formulated by the Greek physician Hippocrates (ca. 460-370 BCE) and others through to the Roman physician Galen (129-199/217). The Greeks believed that the body was dominated by four humors: blood, yellow bile, black bile and phlegm; an imbalance between them resulted in disease and ill-health; but they also determined the four main personality types which were: the sanguine (optimistic, cheerful), choleric (angry, bad-tempered), melancholic (sad, depressed) and phlegmatic (calm, stoic). The Greeks were also great believers in the doctrine of correspondences: the idea that all is holistic, all is connected, all is one. So they linked the four humours and personalities to the four elements: air, fire, earth, water; and then to the four seasons: spring, summer, fall, winter; then it became more complicated linking all this to the four qualities: hot and cold, wet and dry. Humoral theory and the doctrine of correspondence were later discredited, but the four personality types still remain with us.
The rise of Christianity added a spiritual paradigm to the secular philosophical perspective of Plato (three types) and the humoral medical theory of Graeco-Roman culture (four types). Personalities are simple and binary: the good and the bad, the sheep and the goats, those who seek the kingdom of heaven and those who do not, those who are seated on the right hand of God at the Last Judgement and those who are cast down. Maybe these are not personality types; they do not feature in most tests. Your call.
A competing paradigm was astrology: personalities were and are (by some) thought to vary with, or depend upon, one's astrological and planetary signs. Many people do believe in the signs of the Zodiac: they read their horoscopes, have their futures read based on the date and exact time of their births (it's all computerized now, so it is an exact science), and they always say "I knew it!" if you tell them your sign before you make them guess it. John Gray has touched a nerve in his portrayal of men from Mars and women from Venus, from different planets. The Ancients offered more options, clarifying the influence of the seven (known) planets and the days of the week named after the Sun, the Moon, Mars (mardi),Venus (vendredi) and Saturn (with the Scandinavian Woden (Wednesday),Thor (Thursday) and Frigg or Freya (the wife of Odin or Woden for Friday) to remind Anglos of the Roman,Viking and French influences on the English language and history—and conquests, (but we do not mention that). These influences are still with us as we talk of sunny personalities and lovers mooning around. (The other meaning of mooning presumably derives less from astrology and more from the similarity of the pale, gleaming spheres of Caucasian bums to the full moon.)
