Human Experience John Russon\'s \"Human

Human Experience

John Russon's "Human Experience"

When attempting to define "identity" in a personal manner, "what" may be more important than "who;" and what a person is can be characterized as the sum of the person's experiences. In his book Human Experience, John Russon attempted to define identity in terms of a person's experiences and the prejudices that come from them. As a person grows and interacts with more and more people, they develop a personal identity that is replete with certain prejudices which have formed as a result of those experiences. These prejudices affect people's behavior as well as their interactions with other people and, if they have acquired mistaken prejudices, can be problematic.

Individual prejudices are the result of a lifetime of personal experiences, but they are also a result of the way that people interpret what they experience. In attempting to explain how people interpret experiences, Russon stated, "we typically start by recognizing ourselves as discrete agents facing a world about which we must make choices." (Russon 9) in other words, one must accept that experiences are created by the way an individual interprets them. Another element of traditional prejudices is the body and the awareness that a person's body is theirs, but still needs to interact with others. While a person has absolute control over themselves, they do not have control over others and must develop ways to interact; and these ways of interacting are based on the individual's interpretation of their past experiences. Then the experiences of the past are stored in a person's memory, or the third element of traditional prejudices. How a person remembers things or events is at the core of how they will react in another situation. A person's memory is the central nexus in the development of their identity and prejudices.

The prejudices that a person naturally develops as a result of their experiences come from a number of sources, but primarily from their interpretation of others, their families and their social interactions. In any interaction between two people there is always something each seeks to obtain from the other, and ultimately individuals have an inherent need to be recognized as the important factor in the relationship. As Russon explained, "what people want to win from one another is the acknowledgement that they are the ones whose decision-making, whose subjectivity, counts as the most important." (Russon 58) and the need to be recognized as the important factor is the source of people's prejudices. But people learn this behavior from their interactions with their families, another source of their prejudices. Traditional family structure maintains a system where the adults in the family have a more important place; and their wants and desires hold more sway. Children begin their lives in a system where their wants are inferior to others, particularly their parents, and learn to adapt this interpersonal interaction to other non-family individuals. Then, children take their experiences with their families and use them as the basis for their interactions with other individuals in society. The superior/inferior system that they experienced in their childhood becomes the manner in which they develop their personal identities and the way they interact with others. They become the important factor in relationships by making their wants more important than the wants of others.