Activities Shape our Personality

Aristotle, in his Nicomachean Ethics, Book II, Chapter 1, suggests that activities in which we participate shape the characteristics of our personality and our personality determines what we do – an ongoing process of reciprocity. At the time Aristotle wrote this book, in 350 BC, he was well aware of the work of his contemporary, Hippocrates, who had been dead for 20 years. Hippocrates had more pragmatically contemplated the same problem and had divided the human personality into four …showed first 75 words of 511 total…

…showed last 75 words of 511 total…s actions. Aristotle’s Nicomachean Ethics Book 2, Chapter 1 states that character [personalities] arises out of [like] activities. This is why the activities we exhibit [undertake] must be of a certain kind; it is because the states of character correspond to the differences between these. It makes no small difference, then, whether we form habits of one kind or of another from our very youth; it makes a very great difference, or rather all the difference.