Division of Personality

 

Division of Personality

Asrar Ahmed Khan

It has become a popular belief in the East and the West that a man can lead his private life in a way different from his public life and that double-facedness is not in any way morally objectionable. A man may be a perfect rogue in his private life, yet he can claim to be a thorough gentleman in his public life and the public has no right to question his actions. This fallacious division of private and public, social and political, religious and economic life of an individual arose during the medieval ages of European history when a tug of war for supremacy was going on between the Church and the State. The Church wanted to have perfect control over the life of the people while the state resented it and began to revolt against the totalitarian power of the Church. The kings and their lords evolved the famous theory that neither the Church nor the public has any concern with their private and political life. They should see towards the social and religious life and behaviour only. In their private and political life, they were perfectly at liberty to do whatever they liked. In this tussle, the State emerged successful eventually and the Church was finally defeated. After some time it became an established fact, admitted by all, that a man’s life may be divided into private, public, political, social and religious and that these different parts of life may be regarded as perfect in themselves and independent of each other, not affecting each other in any way. In the long run, this conception was imported in the East also and was taken for granted, not because the Easterners were satisfied with the veracity and utility of this principle but only because this was the rule accepted by their foreign masters. 

Here in these few lines I wish to convey briefly that the division of life, character and personality is as fallacious and basically wrong today as it was in the middle ages. 

To divide a personality into watertight compartments in a way that one may not influence favourably or adversely the other one is not at all possible. As a matter of fact, our life is one indivisible unit and cannot be divided. Personality and character are the products and essence of the whole life of a man and every action plays an important role in developing his personality.

“And in practice”, says Mr McDougall, “every action and every thought and feeling leaves its marks upon the mind, constitutes something to the shaping of personality”.

 

Personality means collective behaviour of a man and not anyone or more than one aspects of his life detached from one another. Personality can never develop properly if a man follows different commandments coming from different and diverse quarters, e.g., in his social life he receives and obeys the orders of a powerful ruler or himself becomes an unscrupulous autocrat, in religious life he tries to conform to the orders of God. Such discordant notes can never produce a harmony of music. Social and moral, religious and political, public and private are all different aspects of one life, one character, and one personality in themselves. To quote Bertrand Russell, “This duality of personal and civic morality which still persists is one of which any adequated ethical theory must take account. Without civic moralities communities perish and no value. Therefore civic and personality morality are equally necessary to a good world”.

 

This is a unanimously accepted the principle of psychology that no normal personality can be divided into various independent personalities and only abnormal personalities are capable of being divided. “Life does not reside”, says Max Schoen, “in any one of the parts more than in any other, but in all of them is so organized as to form one inseparable whole at every moment of existence”.

 

Man is by nature a social animal and he cannot lead a full and successful life without a social structure. His personality can never grow to its full stature without the company of his fellow beings. And a man living in a society of his fellow-being can never honestly divide his life into public and private, social and political, religious and literary. The compactness and the wholeness of our being do not allow this division by its very nature. How can it be possible that division by its very nature? How can it be possible that a hypocrite in private life can prove to be an honest man in his public life? His hypocrisy or any other trait of his bad character in his private life will surely creep into his public life. His hypocrisy or any other traits of his bad character in his private life will surely creep into his public life also. Moreover, his private life can never mean his single life, but at least it comprises and encircles the life of his family, his close friends and his near relations, his subordinates, his officers and his partners in business, etc. will all of these individuals not be influenced by his private life and will all of them not in their turn influence thousands of other people, and will this chain of actions and reactions not go a long way in en-circling a considerable portion of public life. Suppose a man is a government officer and he is in the habit of freely accepting the bribe. He is sure to influence his subordinates, the person who offers him a bribe, his family who shares the bribe in the shape of fine luxuries of life, his friends who are his associates in his happiness and woe? Does this not make quite a big and vicious circle? Consequently, we can safely conclude that a man can never detach his private from his public life absolutely in a way that they may not affect each other. Such detachment can only be practised alone in a mountain cave, his personality is marred and cannot rise to its full height and this sort of life nearly amounts to suicide. “Here the whole life is a harmony”, says Max Schoen, “relevancy, a concordance of the parts, so that a slight deviation in any part breaks up the whole. Group life of any sort, whether based on religious, professional, political or economic grounds, is a case of con-coordination by proximity. The individuals constituting the group form a united whole because they have something common among them. In integration, the constituent parts lose their identity to such a degree that they can become discernible only by a deliberate act of analysis”. A personality is the organized system of habits, dispositions, attitudes, abilities and sentiments and all those tendencies can only come into force in group life.

No doubt a man can divide his activities for convenience into several aspects as political, social, religious, etc. But this division of his personality, behaviour and character. On the contrary, whenever he will be judged as a personality, an individual, or a character, he will be judged as a whole and not piece-meal. “The many selves are irradiations of a central self. Hence while it is true that on the surface, the self appears to be as a multitude selves, the normal person is, nevertheless, a single inner self of which the many out-ward selves are the component parts”. 

As a matter of the fact, some people try to divide their life into private and public, political and religious, etc. to draw curtains over their heinous demoralized and ridicules private life by taking license for all their miss-deeds and claiming their private affairs to be out of the scope of public criticism. Their private life cannot stand the test of morality and ethical principles. The public certainly has every right to test and weigh the character of a man who comes forward to lead them and control their destinies. 

The standard of morality in the life of such hypocritical public leaders is very low. Consequently, they wish to play a trick on the public judgment and reason and try to be-fool them by such jugglery of words. “Social and private life is honeycombed with instances of rationalized (wishful) thinking promoted by a desire to dodge responsibility for the existence of an undesirable situation. It is also resorted to when there is a conflict between the ideal and actual, percept and practice. The rationalization consists in either justifying the practice in the name of necessity or human weakness or in so interpreting the percept as to make it a sanction for the practice”.

If the Qur’an and Hadith are followed in to and not in fragmentation, they bring up a certain type of personality and character which a Muslim ought to possess. God has visualized the character and personality of a Muslim in the Qur’an and the Hadith has explained it in the minutest details. Hence it is not possible for a Muslim to divide his personality and place different parts of it under different rules and regulations. He will have to conform to this Godly visualization as regards every aspect of his life and personality. His loyalty cannot be divided as his personality is a whole, indivisible unit. It is not possible for him to have commandants from God for his religious life and orders from any other lord for his political and social life.