Further to a piece titled, “Word Casualties,” that I wrote some time ago, I’m going to focus on one noteworthy example, the term “character.” Among the victims of semantic elasticity and ambiguity that I previously noted as commonplace phenomena in the discourse of human psychology, this word is particularly aggrieved. As much as any among my pet “word casualties,” the term “character” falls victim to a pervasive imprecision as to what it fundamentally represents, how it operates dynamically and how it impacts our social environment. I intend to consider character beyond its customary ‘placeholder’ function, something vaguely, consensually taken as “understood” by participating parties to psychological and political conversations, to instead lend greater specificity to its meaning via a clearer understanding of its formation, its dynamic functioning and its impact.

I consider understanding the origins and operations of our character’s complex mechanisms absolutely key to comprehending how we human beings operate among ourselves; in fact our character could be considered the primary determinant of the very course of our lives. It largely determines our presence in the world, influencing how we choose to live, how we affect our environment, and how we are perceived and are regarded by others. Yet character is particularly difficult to define as a distinct psychological component, as its presence is intertwined with an array of other factors contributing to our identity and behavior.

Yet, our failure of specificity as to what determines human character and how it functions carries substantial real-life consequences. Above all, a lack of distinct comprehension of what the term character represents seriously undermines our ability to effectively reckon with the challenging, sometimes burdensome and often, toxic manifestations of character in others and in ourselves. Such a clear understanding of character has never been more critical in our society than now.

As abstract as all this consideration may at first seem, paradoxically, we do routinely encounter specific references to character within the common working vocabulary that describes human affairs. We regularly hear references to a person’s having “character,” or displaying good or bad “character;” to “character building.” We speak of things as being a matter of “character,” or of situations in which one’s “character” is revealed. Entire narratives of fiction and drama are described as “character studies” or “character driven.” All the while, it seems to me that a basic question remains hanging in the air: Just what is character?

Is it something reflecting one’s level of discipline or integrity? Is it the degree of one’s moral rectitude? Does it represent one’s awareness of, and rigor in relation to ethical concerns or standards? Responses to any of these generally unasked questions proposing to define character will ultimately suggest just one commonality: It is that character is an attribute produced by certain psychological faculties or processes operating within us that are ultimately manifest primarily in our behavior; that our character in some way generates the behavioral choices we make at any of the infinite decision points that we encounter in the span of a single day.

By describing something of the essential nature of its workings, I hope to both disambiguate the meaning of the word “character” from an array of closely associated terms (among them, “temperament,” “personality” and “integrity”), and to better delineate the unique, central role that our character plays in psychologically directing our lives and defining our presence in the world. However, my framing of this gnarly term does require that we first accept two basic premises of our human condition:

The first is that all human beings are fundamentally and naturally self-centered (Egocentric); that gradually we all come to recognize, consciously or otherwise, that we are the primary guarantors of our own survival, as well as the primary stewards of the quality of our life experience.

My second premise is that while we operate on behalf of whatever may be our perceived best interests, we rarely, if ever, do so in a total vacuum, devoid of other beings or entities. Thus, each and every one of an infinitude of decisions that we (largely unconsciously) make in navigating the course of even a single day, has some impact, however subtle or stark, on someone or something outside of ourselves.

Thereby, against this backdrop of our natural Egocentricity – of the imperatives and priorities that we attend to on our own behalf, a matrix of continuous, complex calculations operate within our unconscious mind in order to mediate between the demands of our self-interest, the stewardship of our survival and quality of life, and our consideration of those persons and things outside ourselves that we inevitably impact. As I see it, these faculties of calculation and navigation produce the decisions and behaviors that together constitute and manifest our character to others (and if we are so inclined, to ourselves!).

The question of what factors inform each individual’s view of his/her self-interest, what values order its priorities and shape how it must be actualized and defended in the world, brings us to the very complex dimension that is each person’s life experience (nurture). The cornerstone element in that experience, the underlying map that locates and guides our Self in the larger picture of life and determines the demands of its survival and best interests, can be identified as our “worldview.” The following link provides a discussion on my website of what comprises and shapes the worldview at the foundation of each individual’s experience of “Self.” (Ego): https://marcspetalnik.com/performers/#worldview

To my thinking, the key psychological faculties that are essential contributors to our weighing our Self-interest against the consideration of the “other,” and that thereby reflect our character, operate within our unconscious mind, simultaneously, as  two levels of processing: The first of the character-producing processes draws specifically upon the quality and the degree of our awareness of the “other.” It is determined by the depth and breadth of our attunement to another (or others) as other “Selves” who, like us, possess a full range of human feelings, perceptions and needs. An inability to construe others in such a dimensioned way inclines an individual to what we often call “objectification,” the narrowing down of our perception of the other to some instrumental function, to the other’s usefulness to some aspect of our Self, its interests and priorities. Our having and maintaining a full awareness of others as human beings who can be fully likened to ourselves depends largely upon our capacity for empathy – the ability to viscerally experience the feelings of another as if they had been our own.

Empathy can, to some extent, be cultivated (nurtured) in a way that’s demonstrated by the following vignette: A young boy sitting in a sandbox playing with his pail and shovel spots another toddler’s toy truck and impulsively reaches for it. At this moment this child’s attentive parent may or may not intervene to point out that the truck belongs to the other child, gently suggesting that he return the truck to its rightful owner, and further putting this question to him: “How would you feel if that kid took your pail and shovel from you?”

The second active dimension of the mental faculties contributing to character involves the degree to which an individual’s capacity for empathic attunement influences how that individual comes to think and act – not only primarily on behalf of his/her own best interest, but in consideration of the impact, however great or minute, upon the “other” or “others.”

Together, these processes represent both nature (our capacity for empathic attunement) and nurture (our worldview and acquired sense of how to guide and protect our place in the world). Thereby, they determine how each of us navigates in the social landscape, how we locate ourselves within the larger scheme of life, by constantly mediating between our fundamental egocentricity and our recognition of the other in our social environment. The continual calculations by which, at any given moment, we balance the imperatives and dictates of our Self and its interests against our consideration of the other as an equivalent Self, will express our character by way of our communications, decisions and behaviors. As they connect over time, these coordinates produce an essential profile that we can specifically designate as our character – that most critical element in defining how we relate to the world outside ourselves and how we are regarded within it, underscored by the famous quote attributed to Heraclitus: “Character is destiny.”