Human self-development is inseparable from transforming external social relations

Evidence

Man is to be conceived as an historical bloc of purely individual and subjective elements and of mass and objective or material elements with which the individual is in an active relationship. To transform the external world, the general system of relations, is to potentiate oneself and to develop oneself. That ethical “improvement” is purely individual is an illusion and an error: the synthesis of the elements constituting individuality is “individual”, but it cannot be realised and developed without an activity directed outward, modifying external relations both with nature and, in varying degrees, with other men, in the various social circles in which one lives, up to the greatest relationship of all, which embraces the whole human species. For this reason one can say that man is essentially “political” since it is through the activity of transforming and consciously directing other men that man realises his “humanity”, his “human nature” . — Antonio Gramsci, Selections from the Prison Notebooks, 1285

Categorization

• DEFINE: The ‘historical bloc’ of individual and objective forces defines Gramscian man as essentially political.
• XREF: connects to: Conscientization requires reading social power relations and one’s own formation within them — James D. Kirylo (ed.), Reinventing Pedagogy of the Oppressed:…, 271; Identity development is produced by environmental settings, not individual processes alone — Tatiana I. Zamora and Amado M. Padilla, Making sense of conflicting messages of…, 44