I love these issues that crop up when someone utters about someone else - who is usually misbehaving or tripping out: "that is not like him/her at all."
Well, if you are doing something or acting a certain way, then that is certainly you.
When you are drunk and raging and mean, that is still you, just infused with the merry spirit of beer. When you are in a highly stressed state and acting a certain way, that is still you.
But we just get so confused. We are so used to referring to people as these delineated particulars, when in fact we are really these bundles of potentialities, walking multitudes which do eventually reach a certain homeostasis - that which "defines" a person's character - but which is also subject to change, especially from extreme external events.
Yep. There exist certain stable bodies of characteristics that we can use to designate a given person, and at the same time those characteristics are subject to chemical, physical, biological, and psychological modulation at any time. But in an individualist culture, we just have no clear way to talk about things that way.
