“It was miraculous. It was almost no trick at all, he saw, to turn vice into virtue and slander into truth,
impotence into abstinence, arrogance into humility, plunder into philanthropy, thievery into honor,
blasphemy into wisdom, brutality into patriotism, and sadism into justice.
Anybody could do it; it required no brains at all. It merely required no character.”
― Joseph Heller, “Catch-22”
In a piece I wrote some time ago titled “Word Casualties,” I discussed the problem of vagueness and ambiguity that often surrounds key terms in our discourse on matters of human identity and behavior. One particularly aggrieved victim of this phenomenon, the word “character,” will be my focus here. Even in the context of the passage quoted above, in Heller’s shrewd and eloquent delineation of its stark impact, the precise nature of character itself remains obscure.
It is as much the case of “character” as with any word related to human psychology that its meaning is left to general inferences drawn by speakers/writers and listeners/readers mainly from the context in which it appears. Like other “word casualties” it thereby serves as a convenient ‘placeholder’ for some presumed, consensual understanding among participants; often it’s framed by references, like Joseph Heller’s, to its absence in the personalities and behaviors of certain individuals. Observations of character frequently revolve around a person’s having or lacking it or possessing a good or bad version of it. All the while, despite its omnipresence, the distinct psychological attributes represented by the word “character” remain nebulous; matters of what specifically constitutes it, what processes contribute to it, and how it operates dynamically within all individuals, are largely bypassed. Character thereby retains its particularly hazy profile in writing and conversation across milieus.
My primary intent therefore is to take the word “character” beyond its customary placeholder role, to dispel some of the thick fog of ambiguity surrounding its distinct identity among the psychological mechanisms that determine how we human beings operate amongst ourselves. I hope that my attempt to better delineate character will not only identify it more distinctly but also demonstrate its unique and key role in determining how all individuals navigate their moment-to-moment interpersonal interactions, ultimately defining their presence and impact within their respective cultures and societies. I see no exaggeration in suggesting that a rigorous understanding of the distinct structure, origins and operations of our character is indispensable to a coherent analysis and effective resolution of most of the dilemmas, conflicts and crises that beset our relationships. In its ubiquity and in its impact upon our individual and collective experience, character emerges as the primary defining factor in how we choose to live and interact with others and are regarded by them; thereby it directs the very course of our lives.
Nonetheless, the vagueness enveloping use of the term, “character,” is persistent, perpetuated by those common, offhand evocations of the word that fail to shed any light on the specific psychological processes that shape the thinking, behavior and impact of individuals operating in the social environment. Ultimately, while troubling workings of individuals’ character underlies much of the conflicts, confusion and pain in interpersonal relations, on a broader plane, confusion about its nature frequently undermines our society’s capacity to comprehend and confront its most extreme and toxic manifestations in the exercise of power in public life and politics. A clearer understanding of the specific essence of character has therefore never been more critical in our society than now.
Let’s first review how character is commonly evoked within discourse that concerns human affairs, as these are rife with generality: We regularly hear references to a person’s having or lacking “character,” or displaying good or bad “character.” We speak of a person’s choice of conduct in certain situations as being a matter of “character,” of situations that are conducive to “character building,” or those that reveal a person’s “character.” In clinical/psychoanalytic circles the adjective “characterological” is still commonly evoked, and in the modern culture of Recovery there is much emphasis upon individuals’ recognizing and dealing with their “character defects.” Entire narratives of fiction and drama are described as “character studies” or “character driven.” All the while, a basic question remains hanging in the air: Just what is character?
Taken as a whole, references to “character” in these contexts carry connotations as to an individual’s level of discipline, integrity, or degree of moral rigor. They may further reflect a person’s awareness of, or diligence in relation to, ethical concerns and standards. While such common usage delineates something of our character by way of observable manifestations in our personalities and choices of behavior, it bypasses any recognition of its distinct psychological essence, its origins and its processes. My intent therefore is to delineate the structure upon which the character of all individuals is based, to identify its specific psychological origins and the mechanisms by which it continually functions. This, at very least, will disambiguate character from a range of closely associated concepts and terms with which it is so freely conflated, among these, “integrity,” “temperament,” “personality,” “ethics,” and “morality.”
My approach to a more rigorous understanding of character will reflects its central role in human affairs by locating it within a framework of mental processes that are universally human, that form a “through line” in human psychology and that are present in individuals within all cultures or societies – irrespective of their distinct values and ideologies. In that spirit I can broadly outline character as the manifestation of an aggregate of continuous calculations within the human psyche that draw upon the component psychological mechanisms of feeling/emotion and awareness/cognition. These processes are programmed and operate primarily within our unconscious mind and are then manifest in our personality and choices of behaviors. Character itself functions continually as a complex instrument of measurement, a scale that registers and weighs our awareness of Self, its needs and dictates, and simultaneously, our awareness of all beings and things external to ourselves. On that basis it organizes and channels our motivation, weighing the pursuit of our Self-actualization and our Self-concerns against its impact upon others.
The continuous internal calculations that render our character draw upon the full range of our psychological apparatus: They engage faculties rooted in our Nature (our heritable bio-psychological constitution), as well as those continuously shaped and modified by Nurture (our life experience and acquired perspectives and knowledge). The aggregation of this very complex array of psychological mechanisms comprising character ultimately determines our level of awareness of ourselves in relation to others as well as our capacity for accountability to ourselves and to others for our choices of behavior and their impact upon all things beyond us. This is reflected in all behavioral choices we make on behalf of ourselves within the social sphere at any of the many decision points we encounter in the span of even a single day.
To further explain my understanding of the specific components contributing to the development and operation of character, I propose that we first consider and accept two very basic premises concerning human nature and how it operates within the social environment:
The first is that all human beings may be accurately understood as fundamentally and naturally self-centered (Egocentric): We all gradually come to recognize, consciously or otherwise, that we are the primary guarantors of our own survival, and the primary stewards of the quality of our life experience. Moreover, our most direct, immediate and impactful experience is that of our own internal physical/mental processes – our own feelings and thoughts.
The second premise is that while we do operate primarily on behalf of whatever may be our perceived best interests, we rarely, if ever, do so in a social vacuum devoid of the presence of other beings or entities. Thereby, each one of the innumerable decisions that we make (largely unconsciously) while navigating the course of even a single day will have some degree of impact, however imperceptible or obvious, subtle or stark, on someone or something outside ourselves.
Thereby, against the backdrop of our natural inclination to maintain competent stewardship of our own survival and quality of life, to attend to the priorities of our Self-interest, there are continuous calculations within our unconscious mind that weigh these basic existential concerns against the consideration of our impact upon persons and things outside ourselves. Over time, these complex reckonings of each moment produce our choices of behavior that connect like coordinates on a map to delineate our character.
In service to the continuum of character the human psyche draws upon the two tiers of psychological resources commonly recognized as the foundation of the living identity of all individuals. The first is that of Nature – of our innate psychological constitution, largely genetically predetermined, and sometimes termed our “temperament” or popularly described as our “basic wiring.” Among the diverse attributes of identity attributable to our psychological constitution, the two that most directly impact our character are our capacity for empathic connection, and the range and intensity of our internal emotional experience, particularly that of anxiety.
Empathy – the ability to viscerally register the feelings of others as though their internal experience were our own – has a key role in determining the degree and quality of our awareness and consideration of the “other.” It provides a dimensioned link to others as full human beings in whom we can recognize something of ourselves. Thereby, the quality of our empathic connection to another or others, of our capacity for experiencing others as complete “Selves” who, like us, possess a full range of human feelings, perceptions, and needs, is a key factor in the calculations of our character. Those individuals with limited capacity for empathy, for experiencing others through some sense of deep commonality, instead have a greater tendency toward what is commonly described as the “objectification of the other.” This entails a person’s narrowed feeling for, and perception of, the other as an “object,” as it were: someone or something framed by their instrumental function, their utility in serving an individual’s wants and interests, or in validating some aspect of his/her Self-concept (Ego).
Nature, our inherited bio-psychological constitution, is responsible for yet another key factor in character formation: It determines both the intensity level of the anxiety continually present within each of us, as well as the timing and flow of its onset and dissipation under fraught circumstances. Thereby, the more elevated our general level of anxiety, or the more intense the anxiety we feel in moments we experience vulnerability or threat, the more our attentional priorities are automatically directed toward meeting our own immediate needs. Conversely, the less intense anxiety’s encroachment upon our emotional equilibrium, the freer we are to engage our capacity for empathic connection, and thereby, the greater our attention to, and depth of our consideration of the “other.”
Research has produced strong evidence suggesting that the capacity to experience empathy is in particular a reflection of genetic predetermination, and that it is not equally apportioned at birth among individuals. Nonetheless, and particularly in early life, empathy can also be instilled and cultivated. This engages the second-tier contributor to our character formation and operation – that of Nurture, of life experience – in a way demonstrated by the following vignette:
A young boy sitting in a sandbox playing with his pail and shovel spots another toddler’s toy truck, takes interest in it, 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. The parent may further put this question to his/her child: “How would you feel if that kid took your pail and shovel from you?”
Nurture draws upon our entire history of life experience and received knowledge, all of which is recorded, stored and continuously recalled from within us. Nurture draws our internal map of reality and defines our understanding and expectations of our environment. It thereby determines how we interpret and navigate the demands of our Self-care and Self-defense within the world as we understand it.
Further to this view, modern psychoanalytic theories have come to recognize that key aspects of the broad range of elements present in each moment of a person’s life history are retained in memory and maintained in the unconscious mind within a broad organizing framework sometimes termed a “Self-narrative” – our continuously evolving life story. The cornerstone of this narrative is our “worldview” which in the context of this analysis can be understood as a deeply held overall perspective that frames our sense of place within the world at large. It is primarily acquired and set early in life; and acts as a model deep in the background of our present operations that continually informs our expectations for ourselves within the broad scheme of life in our cultures and societies.
Embedded in the foundation of our unconscious mind, our worldview entails our sense of how the world essentially is – generous or withholding, welcoming or hostile, of what possibilities it holds for us, and what place we may have in it. Thereby, it serves as our most basic and enduring reference point in our understanding of the demands of life and of the priorities that will best serve our Self’s story. The following link provides a fuller discussion on my website of the origins and formation of our worldview: https://marcspetalnik.com/performers/#worldview
Throughout the course of a lifetime, as we navigate the social landscape according to that map, which is our world view, we are continually guided by whatever feelings of existential insecurity may arise within us at any given moment. That is to say that in any situation or endeavor in which we sense our vulnerability to failure or to imminent or anticipated danger, an alarm in the form of anxiety will sound internally. Moreover, such feelings of momentary vulnerability are linked to and intensified by whatever enduring sense of basic deficiency or defect may be embedded in our experience of ourselves. The presence of any such fundamental insecurity – of which we may be entirely unconscious, yet acutely vulnerable to – is the very essence of what we can term, “chronic shame.” Feelings of shame/vulnerability, signaled to us internally through fluctuations in anxiety (fear) can range from the ephemeral to the persistent and chronic. They present both as a constant low-level “tremor” within us, and as a more strident presence under fraught circumstances. (For a fuller discussion of shame see https://marcspetalnik.com/performers/#shame).
The dynamic coordination of this array of complex psychological components, rooted both in Nature and Nurture, continually yields our character. It determines both the degree and quality of our connection to others, and how and in what contexts we are able and inclined to access these connections. Installed at the heart of our subjective universe, our character acts as a psychological “clearinghouse,” a key faculty within our unconscious mind that mediates between tending to the safety and best interests of our Self, and our consideration of the other as an equivalent Self. Its workings are also reflected in the quality of our capacity for a full range of self-awareness, as well as our sense of accountability to both ourselves and to others for our impact within all social interactions.
Throughout our lifetimes, an infinitude of moment-to-moment psychological reckonings thereby delineate our character, placing us at some point within the broad spectrum of this distinctly human attribute. At one of its extremes, we may surrender our appropriate oversight of our well-being, the rights of our legitimate personhood; instead, we primarily favor our perception of the needs of others and prioritize meeting their needs and demands. At the other extreme of this spectrum, we ruthlessly pursue the fulfillment of our appetites, and we primarily serve the realization of our own idealized Self-concept, our Ego, heedless of the full humanity of others whom we inevitably impact. Whatever may be the essence of our character, it is continuously revealed to the world through our complex personalities – through our affect, our body language, our communications, and our choices of behaviors.
As character firmly directs our navigation through life in the social environment, it is the true cornerstone of our identity in the world. It positions us within the shared human experience, determining precisely how we relate to ourselves, to others, to the world at large, and thus, how we are regarded within it. Its absolute sovereignty over the course of our lives is captured in the famous quote attributed to Heraclitus:
“Character is destiny.”
