.
Here we need to clarify a difference between an individual and a personality. Personality is not the same as an individual: individuals form the population, personalities form the culture-society. Personality is “a special quality that an individual acquires in society” (Leontiev 1983, vol. 1, p. 385).
“Personality is not a genotypically determined integrity: one is not born a person, one becomes a person. Therefore, we do not speak of the personality of a newborn or the personality of an infant, although personality traits appear no less clearly in the early stages of ontogenesis than in later age stages” (Leontiev 1983, vol. 2, p. 196).
We wrote above that meaning as an activity creates culture-society. The part of the aggregate activity that is performed by an individual shapes his personality. The reproduction of culture-society in the population becomes the reproduction of personality in the individual:
“…The real basis of an individual’s personality lies not in the genetic programs inherent in him, not in the depths of his natural makings and inclinations, and not even in the skills, knowledge and abilities he has acquired, including professional ones, but in the system of activities implemented through his knowledge and skills” (Leontiev 1983, vol. 2, p. 202).
We could probably say that personality is active knowledge. “Knowledge is action, because the correction of knowledge entails the renovation of ourselves” (Frisina 2002, p. 76). From this point of view, the increase of the subject—both of a culture-society and of a personality—consists in the increasing complexity of knowledge, its division, addition and multiplication. When Hayek introduced the concept of the “division of knowledge,” he wanted to go beyond the “division of labor” as a collection of existing activities. The division of knowledge, according to Hayek, is the set of all possible activities in a given state of the culture-society, that is, a set of counterfacts:
“Knowledge in this sense is more than what is usually described as skill, and the division of knowledge of which we here speak more than is meant by the division of labor. To put it shortly, ‘skill’ refers only to the knowledge of which a person makes use in his trade, while the further knowledge about which we must know something in order to be able to say anything about the processes in society is the knowledge of alternative possibilities of action of which he makes no direct use. It may be added that knowledge, in the sense in which the term is here used, is identical with foresight only in the sense in which all knowledge is capacity to predict” (Hayek 1988-2022, vol. 15, p. 73).