From the 8th to the 6th century, social change led to a gradual weakening of the oikos and the phratria in favour of the polis. At the same time, the citizen was encountered more and more as an individual with personal rights and responsibilities, rather than a member of a broader group. Personality emerged, and ability could be valued above other factors such as breeding and property (even if this remained the exception and not the rule). These preconditions permitted the awakening of individual consciousness. Greater and more significant steps in this direction took place during the Classical period, but we can already clearly discover its roots in the Archaic period. It involved the definition of the place of the individual in the city. The presence and self-assertiveness of separate 'types' of human beings diverging from the norm permitted the attribution of a sanctity to the uniqueness of the individual. The interrelation of the individual with groups of his choice strengthened the feeling of freedom and responsibility.

In the area between private and public life a whole series of practices connected with education, love, social intercourse, and burial customs found room to develop. These practices expressed the individual's desire to leave a mark on time by means of the power that personality acquires in the collective memory. In this period personality was uncaged from the conditions of myth and for the first time appeared under its own name as a factor shaping the historical process. The rapid spread of the use of writing allowed specimens of a tendency to the individualization of creation to come down to us; and they were certainly not the only ones. In the field of art, the named artists proclaim their belief in individuality by signing their work. In literature of the period, the personalities of the poets "clothe themselves in the first person" and do not hesitate to promote the "I", an innovation when compared with the Homeric tradition.

The individual face to face with the world attempts at first to perceive it and define it, long before being led to study himself. Philosophy in Ionia opened up the relation of "I to it", and without doubt contributed to shaping the idea of 'the other'. It did not recognize, and nor did philosophy in Classical times, the form of self-awareness of the inner world in Cartesian terms, that is, as individual personality is seen by the contemporary Western world.