The personal eludes biology in just the way that the face in the picture eludes the theory of pigments. The personal is not an addition to the biological: it emerges from it, in something like the way the face emerges from the colored patches on a canvas.
This quote beautifully captures the complexity and subtlety of human nature by distinguishing the 'personal' from the purely 'biological,' while also describing how the personal arises from the biological in a manner akin to emergent properties in art. It suggests that the essence of individuality — the 'personal' facet of human identity — cannot be fully reduced to biological components, much as a face cannot be exhaustively explained by pigment theory...
