Is an individual a person?

Since the earliest times, the minds of the best philosophers have occupied the theme of a person's place in life and society. With the acceleration of scientific progress, it has become even more urgent, especially in our time, when each person becomes involuntarily dependent on anthropogenic factors.

So, what is man and how does he differ from the rest of the animal kingdom?

A person is called a person belonging to a mammal, which, apart from the biological principle, also has a spiritual, social and moral essence.

The problem of identifying a person is one of the most important in the system of the humanities. Personality can not be fully learned from without, for this requires mechanisms of self-knowledge. In philosophy there is a whole section dealing with the issues of its investigation - the so-called "personalism".

The individual and the personality are concepts completely different, although they belong to the same category. But they are sometimes confused with each other.

An individual is a definition with several meanings. In particular, it implies any individual representative of the human race, regardless of his personal qualities and experience. Thus, an individual is not always a person. He may not have the necessary knowledge, experience, skills.

On the other hand, sometimes an individual is treated equally with a person. After all, from the point of view of jurisprudence, a person is any person, even a newborn.

But a professional psychologist, teacher and philosopher look at this definition differently. For them, the newborn is only the potentiality of the future personality, he still needs to reach this level.

From the above, it is easy to understand that each discipline has its own interpretation of this concept.

Do not confuse the concept of "individual" with the term "individuality". In general, individuality refers to the totality of qualities that distinguish people from each other. However, this term can mean a person who differs from other people in any qualities that underline his uniqueness and uniqueness. And the individual is, as already said, any individual, without taking into account his qualities.

Personality is a much narrower concept than both of the above. A person is a person who has consciousness, has the ability to cognize the world and the ability to transform it, building relationships with society and individuals. From the point of view of philosophy and psychology, not every individual can be considered a person. This must be preceded by the process of development, and it is impossible without the education of the individual in society, since man is a biosocial being.

So, the concept of "individual" is not equivalent to the notion of "personality". You can prove this by the following example.

There have been cases when a person grew up outside society - for example, lost in infancy by parents, found and nurtured by wild beasts. In this case, he had only biological needs. And, since the foundations of personality development are laid at the earliest age, at maturity, they could no longer teach him to speak.

However, those "skills" that he had been vaccinated with animals (meowing, hissing, wailing, climbing trees, etc.) remained with him for life. Consequently, such an individual is not a person, since he did not go through the process of socialization and he lacks consciousness.