Personality as a Stance
Do chickens have personality? Do plants? Do cars? What if personality is a method, not a truth...?
We have backyard chickens.
We easily ascribe personality to other people and to our pets. Anytime you hang around more than one of any species of animal, including bugs, you start to notice the differences in behavior. Since our chickens are a consistent presence in our life, we have gotten to know their personalities: Uno is the top of the pecking order, confidently presuming her right to prominence. Oreo is tentative and timid. Twinkle is quite tame and has even been taught to jump on command.
Every spring, hordes of red-striped beetles descend on our town. They are crawling on all the sidewalks and driveways. If you watch a group of them for long enough, you can start differentiating their behavior: the fast one, the slow one, the one who walks in a straight line, the one who wobbles.
Consider “personality” as the experience of patterned behavior. From that stance, anything with behavior potentially has personality. Our convention of giving proper names to people and pets can be applied to other things as an aide to view them as imbued with personality. For example, my daughter’s bonsai tree “Leavelet” has personality: a tendency to drop leaves, to grow in certain directions.
Even giving pet names to inanimate objects can help imbue them with personality: one of our cars is the “Land Boat”, and one is the “Urbanmobile”. They are different relationships, one a bigger vehicle that is roomy and comfy, but hard to park in the city and more covetous of gas. One smaller but fitting in to all places with ease.
In some sense, apparently unmoving things such as the streets and the sidewalks can be imbued with personality, since they have the “behavior” of differentiated response to my actions: when I walk on the gravel road, it “responds” by poking the soles of my feet and being slippery. When I walk on the concrete sidewalk, it “responds” in contrast to the street, by not responding in these ways.
Viewing things as having personality is a stance. When we interact with something as a living being we activate our capability to be fully in relationship with it, we bring additional, unlimited considerations to bear: in particular, what it means to be kind to it, what it means to want it to change, what it means to grieve its loss.
The world can be a vital, living, buzzing place or a bunch of dead stuff. Taking this as a general philosophy, though, doesn’t change our relationship to things. Rather, by discovering those things we are attracted to engaging with as personified, and engaging that way to whatever degree feels pleasurable, we slowly get to know the delight of a more-and-more living world.