Person and possibility

In her book Sartre, Iris Murdoch writes (p.91-92):

Serious reflexion about one's own character will often induce a curious sense of emptiness; and if one knows another person well, one may sometimes intuit a similar void in him. (This is one of the strange privileges of friendship.) But usually one views other people as compact finished products to whom labels ('jealous', 'bad-tempered', 'shrewd', 'vivacious') are attached on the strength of their conduct; and [...] we inevitably think of the person as composed of psychic forces which issue in the performances that justify the names.

I think this ia very lucid description of something we do all too easily: we make other people into things, and we make ourself into a thing too. Instead of persons, we become characters: the abstract core is clothed in characteristics, and suddenly our life is determined to follow a certain path.

But we are never determined. We are never our actions, nor our thoughts, nor even our dispositions to act or think in a certain way. What makes a person a person is that he or she is a radical possibility. We are all our possible futures. We are not the choices we have made, we are the naked fact of choice itself.

I once looked upon a dead body, and was overcome with horror and revulsion: what lay there was not a human being, was not the man I had talked to only a few days before - it was a thing. Death destroys all possibilities.

The finished life is but a story.