How to Develop our Personality
We are all familiar with the word “ge” (格) at first glance, but upon closer inspection, we may become confused about it.
There are several expressions related to the character “ge” in Chinese, such as “fengge” “gediao” (風格, 格調style), “geju” (格局, pattern), “xingge” (性格, character), “renge” (人格, personality, or personal character), and even “guoge” (國格, national character). In Confucianism, the important term “gewu” (格物), meaning “investigate the nature of things”, is well considered as the starting point and core of cultivating oneself and becoming virtuous. In this sense, it is worthwhile to take this opportunity to reflect deeply on life.
In this era, especially when we are young, we all feel the strong need to live in our own “style”, to “be ourselves”, to be different from others, and to stand out. Our manners, daily behaviors and speeches should have our own style. But as getting on years, it seems that we become more and more like the others. The Danish philosopher Soren Aabye Kierkegaard (1813—1855) said that social trends will make us dissolve our unique subjects in abstract objects, which, to put it bluntly, is “the universally recognized scale of behavior” among social groups. However, this so-called “scale of behavior” that limits each other is essentially just a conceptual existence within a group. When we are dissolved by this objectivity, our subjectivity and uniqueness disappear. In existentialist terms, it means that humans become an “unreal existence” without truly being “living”.
Humans have a tendency to pursue an individual character, one’s own style, and would like to be different from others. At first glance, it seems that their words are eccentric and their behaviors are weird. But if we look at the deep essence of life, it is nothing but a behavior that emerges when humans pursue their “true subjectivity”.

However, at the most of time, the majority of us can only stay at this superficial level. In our heart, we yearn for uniqueness, however, for the lack of deep thinking, we cannot realize that this pursuit of uniqueness is actually a pursuit of the truth, the freedom, the self-domination, and subjectivity of our lives. We should be the masters of our own lives.
The manifestation of this subjectivity lies in our ability to “consciously create value”. In this way, rather than being closed and flowing, we can lift our mind up to a state of cohesion and development to achieve a higher value both internally and externally. It can be a concrete work or a career, but more importantly, a better version of oneself, more cultured behavior, higher vision and aspiration, and so on. In the words of Professor Huo Taohui (霍韜晦, 1940-2018, the contemporary thinker and educator), it means “growing life”. Huo further states that the reason why modern people struggle on the path of growth is due to a lack of “emotion”. In the modern life, the world of emotions is desolate, closed, and pale. The modern Western existentialism puts forward the theory of human existence and nothingness because it has truly felt that there is a problem with the current state of human existence. The existentialist ideology, which grows out of the Western cultural traditions, seems to be in the middle between finding and not finding the ways out of life.
Chinese culture has an independent and comprehensive tradition regarding the issue of human life. The subject of life is to understand human nature, to pursue the realization of higher values and has its tendency towards infinite transcendence. More importantly, our ancestors accurately realize that the subject of human life is to understand the “nature” physically. However, if we want to understand the “nature” practically, we have to resort to “emotion”, which arises from the root of life and is beyond the control of the heart. With a driving force in it, the power can only be achieved in practice. This is the specific grasp of the existence of “human” in Chinese culture.
Now, let’s go back to our topic: how can a person have a “personality”? It means “being able to do something and not to do something”. The standard between doing and not doing is the value that the human heart pursues and establishes as a person. Referring to the Analects (《論語》), Mencius (《孟子》), and other Confucian classics, one can clearly see that each chapter is teaching us “what to do and what not to do”. Only when we have a clear and solid source of value in our lives can we have principles in the impermanent life, to get, to give up, and to know the direction. Only by consciously realizing one’s own life in this way can we live a life with personality. This is also why we need to read Chinese classics.
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