Essay on Relationship between Society and an Individual's Self Understanding

Introduction

The relation of the plurality of persons with the natural person whom we call "individual," as well as of the singular person with the plurality is a complex phenomenon. The concept of "individual" refers to the singular human being as an entity that exists in complete isolation. The term "society" on the other hand is understood as the accumulation, a total or a collection of many unstructured individual persons. The individual level of self-awareness, as a specific psychological subject, is what determines the course of their experiences through their social interactions with the rest of the society.

In the discussion of positivist science, there is an idea of the individual that is functional for the maintenance of the capitalist mode of production, for, in the name of the autonomous and independent individual, relations of political domination and economic exploitation are disguised, social ties on the psyche and makes it impossible to understand the individual as eminently social, concrete and historical. In her graphic memoir, Alison Bechdel explores her parent's role in her life and how it has influenced her as an individual. This perspective materializes the antagonism between individual and society, with emphasis on the singular and natural aspects, which do not express what these realities are in their essence.

Psychology, in this trajectory, assumes the character of an individualistic science, privileging a fragmented conception of the individual, masking the centrality of social relations. Historically, when dealing with the study of the independent, "free," autonomous individual, this conception materializes in the affirmation of individualism and the dichotomy between objective reality and subjective reality. "The psyche disconnected from the social dialectic, taken in the abstract , in itself, and placed under the magnifying glass, admirably fits as an 'object' of 'inquiry' into a society that 'introduces' subjects as mere reference point of the abstract workforce "( ADORNO, 1991, p. 168). Alison's father, Bruce, had a shaky and often violent relationship with his family, notwithstanding his self-obsessive behavior. It can be argued that he was dealing with conflicting sexuality as an individual in a society that was non-receptive of homosexuality.

Alexander Pope, an English poet, argues that the due study of humanity is the man and that our wisdom as individuals consists of how much precise and profound is our knowledge. At a certain level, Christianity has nothing to argue against this analysis, if one keeps in mind that the Self-knowledge always involves a reciprocal and personal knowledge with the God who made us that knowledge of God will always include the recognition of our personal need and salvation that only he brings. What Christianity denies is that it is possible to know ourselves without taking consideration of God; in other words, without taking into account the revelation that God has made of himself to our minds and consciences. It is true that we can know a lot about the man, understanding as such both male and female. We can study our chemical and emotional composition. We can observe how we work, but we cannot know what man is in him. We cannot determine what is what we have to be or why we are repeatedly short of achieving that ideal, regardless of its revelation.

The highest characteristic of being a human being is its reasoning faculty; the person must be understood first of all from that particularity. The human being thinks or reasons; and that, according to Plato, Aristotle and others Greek thinkers, is what differentiates it from the rest of the visible world. In Plato, the nous (thinking capacity) is the highest characteristic of the soul. But in both thinkers reason is the crucial element, where lies the uniqueness of women and men.

The consequences of having given such a singular value to reason are well known. First, that emphasis it tends to deify reason, converting it into the divine element in the human being. The justification for said Deification rests on the essential characteristic of reason: its ability to rise above what it observes, to evaluate, criticize, train, and create. Each of these characteristics can be visualized as having a "Godlike" character. A second consequence of the classical supremacy of reason is the resulting dualism, where the body becomes a bad thing. If the mind is good, the matter is bad; thus, the eternal conflict between spirit and mind on the one hand, and flesh and matter on the other; giving shape to the clearest expressions of Greek art, theater, and philosophy. Another aspect of Greek thought manifested more clearly in the religions of mystery, conceived the human nature in materialistic, mechanistic terms - but this was not the predominant view of the antiquity (Blackwell, 2006).

The theme of the Meaning of Life is one of the classic themes of Ethics and other branches of Philosophy, Psychology and other social and human disciplines. It originates in the concerns about the so-called '' problem of man '' and its existence as a human individual, in the reflection about: Who am I? Where do I go? Why are we here? What is the use of my life? What is the meaning of my whole existence? Theme linked to the search for happiness, the origin of life and its end, death, etc. Often treated from the general, abstract and ahistorical perspective, as a general human condition, the theme of the meaning of life has been formalized categorically, introducing previously forgotten or unfocused dimensions of the human existence but, in turn, has been limited in precision.

Fun Home unravels the story of a child's inquest into the fears, motivations, and emotions of her gay father who commits suicide possibly to escape from a society intolerant to his lifestyle choices. The issue is in the fundamental relationship between society and society in the construction of its subjectivity. The epistemological basis of the conceptualization of the Meaning of Life goes through the analysis of the subjectivity-objectivity relationship in which the limits and degrees of freedom of the construction of the individual as the subject of the social action. In a more concrete plane of the social and individual expression of the Sense of Life, it can focus on the set of objective, subjective constitutive relations within the framework of individual experience within the context of dominant structures of daily activity and social praxis.

The sense that things have for the subject is mediated by their reflection and position towards them (Gonzalez, F., 1997, 74). It is important to consider here specific human individuals, as persons that, in addition to being distinguished by certain degrees of functional unity and content of their psychological processes in individualized configurations - which are expressed in different levels of self-awareness and self-direction - work in a socio-cultural context specific standards, values and a system of institutions and areas of social activity, in which they assume responsibilities and citizen commitments, they manifest roles executed from their social position, they build their life projects and they maintain specific lifestyles in diverse social relationships (Gray, 2008). Alison is on a journey of self-discovery where she learns of her attraction towards women and her masculinity feelings, which later announces her as a lesbian in college.

The meaning of personal life lacks real content if it is constrained to the scope existential exclusively individual. The individual is not encapsulated in his subjectivity. Or better, his subjectivity is inevitably a construction social as personal. It is important to consider human individuals here concrete, as people who, in addition to distinguishing themselves by certain degrees of unity functional and content of their psychological processes in configurations individualized - which are expressed in different levels of self-awareness and self-direction-, operate in a specific socio-cultural context of norms, values and a system of institutions and spheres of social activity, in which they assume responsibilities and citizen commitments, manifest roles executed from their social position, build their life projects and maintain specific lifestyles in the various social relationships (Leonardo, 2001).

The meaning of personal life lacks real content if it is constrained to the scope existential exclusively individual. The individual is not encapsulated in his subjectivity. Or better, his subjectivity is inevitably a construction social as personal. The importance of the analysis of the subject for the construction of the meaning of life takes us to the question of autonomy and social praxis, on the one hand, and, on the other, to the problem of alienation against the possibilities of self-realization (Gail, 2003). The individual constructs his identity, revealing his vital sense, from this cultural-social macro context and the closest everyday environment in which express. It is here that the problem of social alienation and autonomy, as a theme related to the meaning of life. The 'experience of meaning' is built on a specific self-perception of Individual-social identity.

The construction of Identity itself, as a category of subjectivity, requires its contextual interpretation in objective-subjective relationships, but also within the framework of other dimensions of relations constitutive social praxis. It is so that the individual Identity is not conceivable without the analysis of collective Identity. The sense of individual life is, therefore, the other face of the construction of the collective sense of life, framed in the defining cultural context of life daily and the structure of social relations and consciousness. The graphic memoir shows a man (Bruce) who commits suicide to avoid the shame of being gay, in a society that holds different views and practices.

The concept of identity (personal, group, cultural, national) is, of course, a multidimensional concept that refers to multiple aspects of social reality, institutional, material and spiritual. Instead, the term "identical" refers to similarity, rather than difference, to the common rather than the strange, the homogeneous rather than the diverse. So, from a limited perspective, it may seem that the allusion to the concept of identity, at any level that is treated, would point to the similar, universal, homogeneous, of a person, culture, etc. and this is the somewhat simplistic treatment that it sometimes receives. The meaning of life is built in the dimension of integration vs. fragmentation-alienation. It has to do, primarily with the possibility of exercise control over human relationships and things.

Social situations derived from the contexts of power, the functioning of the bureaucracy as a system, of the manipulation of consciences through the media mass and ideologies, uncontrolled mercantile relations, religious fundamentalisms, they are all typical of various types of contemporary societies. If individuals fail to be autonomous authors of their lives, this is because specific social objects assume the role of subjects, and make up the life of the people, rising before them as reified entities that dominate and subjugate them.(Acanda J.,1978). Human sociability is a fact of collective experience. The social appears as a characteristic of human life that implies a plurality, union, and coexistence.

Christians argue that nothing in modern life can explain our nature other than the truths of Christianity since greatness like the tragedy of man exceeds the understanding of our culture. We feel that we are more than matter. Christians feel they have been made in the image of God, to be his companions but are also aware that they have lost that im...