What Makes a Person: The Seven Layers of Identity in Literature and Life - Brain Pickings

Characters portray a set of qualities, without having a core unity inside them. Therefore characters do not have any identity crises.

A character has some easily identifiable qualities, which dominate the whole personality. A person with character behaves in a representative manner, as even the private life of a public character has general significance.

Figures form the narratives of their lives, making choices according to the patterns of their archetypes.

A Figurehead perspective on himself is initially an outward representation, an image portrayed to the world, but it gradually becomes internalized.

A person is an idea of a unified centre of choice, judgement, opinion and action, and is a unit of legal and theological responsibility. A person is bound to stand behind his roles, and be judged according to what choices he makes and what actions he takes to act out his personality.

A person by definition is actionable, liable and responsible.

Our capacity to make choices is our free will, and it is bound by the responsibility of the choices that are made.

Our ability to make the choices deemed right by society defines our personhood. Free will makes the person what he is, as their personhood and integrity of action require certain freedom.

While a person is a primary agent of principle, the logical extreme of personhood moves inward, towards the operations of the mind and choices of the soul.

This gives birth to all kinds of emotions and feelings and introduces the person to the conscience.

Property is the thing which is valued, or protected, and forms the basis of all actions and judgements, whether they are moral, theological, economic or political.

A society gets together and co-creates property, in the form of wealth, rights, possessions and instruments of value.

The continuity of the self is established in our memories, even though people argue that memories are unreliable, and can be distorted.

The faculty of memory is the foundation of what identifies us with ourselves.

The properties of the self give rise to individuality, which begins with conscience and moves towards consciousness. Individuals represent the universal mind of rationality, where figures, characters and artificial identities cannot stand, as individuals are indivisible entities, and cannot be coloured, manipulated or bracketed in a group.

Individuals form a diagrammatically different kind of society than any collective group of people would, as they are autonomous and indivisible. They function out of their own internal values, which are held together by their conscience.

Presence is in a different dimension than the other conceptual identities and is a mode of identity for going beyond achievement, free will or any mode of education. It is beyond imitation, will power or practice.