(1) Anthony T. Kronman, Living in the Law, 54 U. Chi. L. Rev. 835, 869-870 (1987):

Our characters reveal themselves in all we do and are open to view, on the public surface of our lives, for everyone to see. Indeed, a person's character is often the first thing we feel with any confidence that we know about him. The reason is that our characters (unlike our beliefs and intentions, which are more easily concealed) have a dispositional dimension--more exactly, they consist in a set of dispositions or habitual desires. What we desire is generally harder to hide than what we think or intend, and the most difficult desires to conceal are those that have congealed into habits. The character a person possesses constitutes his habit of living, and though he may be intermittently successful in keeping it from view, it is likely to show through in most of what he does. Living out of character for any period of time is like living out of one's own skin, and about as difficult.

(2) James Wm. McClendon, Biography as Theology 30-31 (Nashville: Abingdon Press, 1974):

To have character...is to enter at a new level the realm of morality, the level at which one's person, with its continuities, its interconnections, its integrity, is intimately involved in one's deeds. By being the persons we are, we are able to do what we do, and conversely, by those very deeds we form or re-form our own characters. Only a man of (some) generosity will act generously, as a general rule; but also as a general rule the man who acts generously on this occasion is shaping himself along generous lines. Thus, character is paradoxically both the cause and consequence of what we do.

A man's character is formed by the way he sees things, by his vision.... It is shaped by the way he does things, by his style. It is coincident with his deepest and most dearly held beliefs, his convictions. But we know that our convictions, though tenacious, do sometimes change, that style can be both acquired and modified, that the total vision by which one lives can sometimes be made over again.

(3) Maxine Greene, Landscapes of Learning 152 (New York: Teachers College Press, 1978):

The moral life is not necessarily the self-denying life nor the virtuous life, doing what others expect of one, or doing what others insist one ought to do. It can best be characterized as a life of reflectiveness and care, a life of the kind of wide-awakeness associated with full attention to life and its requirements. I have an active attention in mind, to life in its multiple phases, not the kind of passive attention in which one sits and stares-nor the kind of focalized attention that permits one only to see the track ahead of one or the distant light or the clasping hand. In active attention, there is always an effort to carry out a plan in a space where there are others, where responsibility means something other than transcending one's own speed, or one's own everyday life.

(4) Michael Novak, Ascent of the Mountain, Flight of the Dove: An Invitation to Religious Studies 44 (New York: Harper & Row, rev.ed., 1978):

Humans grow, like oaks, in silence and almost imperceptibly. We invent our identities and fashion our characters through hundreds and thousands of tiny gestures, intonations, acts. People often look alike, seem all the same, appear as if of equal substance; but then tragedy, calamity, or necessity strikes and thin surfaces are sheered away. We see, then, who stands on a base of thousands of repeated acts, fashioned hard, firm, unyielding, and who stands on the crumbling fungus of appearances.

(5) Roberto Mangabeira Unger, Passion: An Essay on Personality 98-99 (New York: The Free Press, 1984):

The power to treat a character as more than a fate, to open it to revision, counts for much in determining what you can hope for in life. Your character, left undisturbed, ties you to a limited repertory of dealings with others as well as with yourself; if your character is indeed an irrevocable fate, then you can hope for no breakthrough in coming to terms with other people and your material and moral vulnerability to them.

But this revision of character must in turn be brought about by a subjection of the self to situations and encounters that shake the routines of your outward life and the routinized expression of your passions. If the reinterpretation and the reconstruction of character is possible at all, then it is possible by laying your self open to the surprise and pressure of circumstances in which your habits of personal connection and of self-presentation are at stake--whether these circumstances be lived out in actual episodes of conflict and reconciliation or played out in memory and imagination. The movement of character toward an acknowledgment of enlarged possibility in self-expression and reconciliation depends upon the results of these deliberate or involuntary experiments in accepted and heightened vulnerability: both responses of other people and the lessons we draw from these responses make the difference.

Whenever the transformative experiences of faith, hope, and love take a strictly secular form, their common ground becomes this expanded sense of opportunity in association. Nobody rescues himself; the path to those experiences necessarily passes through situations of aggravated risk in the life of the passions, and success in this pursuit requires that others not attack you at your moment of increased defenselessness; that is to say, it requires acts of grace by other people.

(6) William May, "Professional Ethics: Setting, Terrain & Teacher," in Daniel Callahan & Sissela Bok (eds.), Ethics Teaching in Higher Education 205-241, 230-231 (1980):

Important to professional ethics is the moral disposition the professional brings to the structure in which he operates, and that shapes his or her approach to problems. The practitioner's perception of role, character, virtues and style can affect the problems he sees, the level at which he tackles them, the personal presence and bearing he brings to them, and the resources with which he survives moral crises to function another day. At the same time, his moral commitments, or lack of them, the general ethos in which he and his colleagues function, can frustrate the most well-intentioned structural reforms.

Unfortunately, contemporary moralists have been much less interested than their predecessors in the clarification and cultivation of those virtues upon which the health of personal and social life depends. Reflection in this area is likely to seem rather subjective, elusive, or spongy...as compared with the critical study of decisions and structures. And yet, especially today, attention must be paid to the question of professional virtue. The growth of large-scale organizations has increased that need. Although bureaucracies offer increased opportunity for monitoring performance (and therefore would appear to lessen the need for internalized virtue), in another respect they make the society increasingly hostage to the virtue of professionals who work for them. Huge organizations wield enormous defensive power with which to cover the mistakes of their employees. Further, and more important, the opportunity for increased specialization which they provide means that few others--whether lay people or other professionals--know what any given expert is up to. He had better be virtuous. Few may be in a position to discredit him. The knowledge explosion is also an ignorance explosion; if knowledge is power, then ignorance is powerlessness. Although it is possible to devise structures that limit the opportunities for the abuse of specialized knowledge, ultimately one needs to cultivate virtue in those who wield that relatively inaccessible power. One test of character and virtue is what a person does when no one else is watching. A society that rests on expertise needs more people who can pass that test.

7) Michael Maccoby, The Gamesmen: The New Corporate Leaders (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976):

The corporation is of course not fully responsible for the character development of those who work there. Character is formed first in family and school, and the type of person who chooses to work in a corporation has some idea of what to expect. He or she enters with character traits common to young Americans who pass all the exams and get high grades at colleges and universities. The corporate individual must be competitive and highly intelligent in terms of intellectual problem-solving. But most young people are a mixture of still-malleable attitudes. Upon entering the corporation, they still have the chance to become more idealistic and just or they could become disillusioned and self- serving. The traits stimulated in the corporation will in many cases have a decisive effect on the kind of people they become, not only as managers, but as citizens, husbands, wives, fathers, and mothers.

(8) William Frankena, "Toward a Philosophy of Moral Education," in J. Strain (ed.), Modern Philosophies of Education 316, 325-27 (1971):

It seems clear that morality is a guide to life of a peculiar sort in that it allows the individual to be, indeed insists on his being, self-governed in the sense, not only of determining what he is going to do, but of determining what it is that he should do.

* * * *

But to say that a developed moral agent must make up his own mind what is right, and not simply accept the dictates of an external authority, is not to say that he can make a course of action right by deciding on it, or that whatever life he chooses or prefers to live can be claimed by him to be ipso facto morally right or good; any more than to say that a developed rational man must make up his own mind what is true, and not merely accept the declarations of another, is to say that he can make a statement true by believing it, or that whatever system he chooses or prefers to believe can be claimed by him to be ipso facto intellectually justified. Being autonomous does not mean being responsible to no transpersonal standard in morality any more than in science. In both cases one is involved in an interpersonal enterprise of human guidance (in morality of action, in science of belief) in which one is self-governing but in which one makes judgments ("This is right," "That is true") which one is claiming to be warranted by a review of the facts from the impersonal standpoint represented by that enterprise and shared by all who take part in it--a claim which is not merely an assertion of what one chooses or prefers, and may turn out to be mistaken.

In morality, then, as in science, we must impart to those who come after us a certain difficult but qualified independence or self-reliance of judgment.

(9) Stanley Hauerwas, Vision and Virtue 2-3 (Notre Dame, Indiana: Notre Dame University, 1974):

Once ethics is focused on the nature and moral determination of the self, vision and virtue again become morally significant categories. We are as we come to see and as that seeing becomes enduring in our intentionality. We do not come to see, however just by looking but by training our vision through the metaphors and symbols that constitute our central convictions. How we come to see therefore is a function of how we come to be.... How we come to see therefore is a function of how we came to be since our seeing necessarily is determined by how our basic images are embodied by the self--i.e., in our character.

The moral life is fundamentally the life of vision, for the task is to see accurately the nature of the world, self, and others without illusion.... [T]ruthful vision, however does not come without discipline. The self must be transformed if we are to attend honestly to how we are to live justly in a contingent world. Such discipline is not a code of conduct but rather the willingness to stand and accept the reality of the other without neurotic self-regard or the comfort of convention.

Character is the qualification of our self-agency formed by our having certain intentions rather than others. Our character is the orientation that gives unity and direction to our lives by forming our intentions into meaningful configurations by our dominant convictions.

(10) Ernest Becker, The Denial of Death 56 (New York: Free Press, 1955):

The defenses that form a person's character support a grand illusion.... He is driven away from himself, from self-knowledge, self-reflection. He is driven toward things that support the lie of his character, his automatic equanimity. But he is also drawn precisely toward those things that make him anxious, as a way of skirting them masterfully, testing himself against them, controlling them by defying them.

(11) Michael Maccoby, The Gamesmen: The New Corporate Leaders 159-162, 167, 170, 171-173, 175-176 (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1976):

People think of qualities of the heart as opposite to those of the head. They think heart means softness, feeling, and generosity, while head means toughminded, realistic thought. But this contrast is itself symptomatic of a schizoid culture, in which the head is detached from the rest of the body. In pre-Cartesian traditional thought, the heart was considered the true seat of intelligence and the brain the instrument of thinking. It is more precise to say that some kinds of knowledge require both the head and the heart. The head alone can decipher codes, solve technical problems, and keep accounts, but no amount of technical knowledge can resolve emotional doubt about what is true or what is beautiful. No amount of technique can produce courage. The head alone cannot give emotional and spiritual weight to knowledge in terms of its human values. The head can be smart but not wise.

The view that heart is opposed to head is also a symptom of the socioeconomic system. Getting ahead in school and organizations requires head but not heart, and it often happens that the people with the most concerned hearts are craftsmen-farmers or not careerists. It is not that they lack intellectual capacity, rather that society does not encourage them to think critically, to analyze and invent. They cannot move up the hierarchies of schools and corporations to gain access to technical, theoretical knowledge. And those few who do move up the hierarchies develop the head and not the heart.

Thus, it appears that we must choose between head and heart or at best find an unstable balance between them. Conventional wisdom states that the individual who remains in his head at school or work should act from the heart at home, as though it were possible to switch character like suits of clothing. But we would draw a different conclusion if work and education were organized to develop the individual's fullest creative and critical capacities.

Considered as not separate from but integrated with the head (and the rest of the body), the development of the heart determines not only compassion and generosity, but also one's perception-experience, the quality of knowledge, capacity for affirmation (of truth or sham, beauty or ugliness), and the will to action (courage).

The quality of perception depends on our openness to experience. We can "see" that another person is sad or happy, but if our hearts are open to him, we also experience with him. Empathy and compassion, or experiencing together with another person, are activities of an open, listening heart.

Intellect alone organizes data from and about other human beings but it does not experience them. The knowledge available to the detached head is laundered of emotion. The head knows by inference, like a computer; sense data are filed into programmed categories. The intellect may examine human problems but they are abstracted, weightless. It must be emphasized, in a world where thought is detached from the heart, that affirmation is not just an emotional reaction, but an act of reason. The more we can experience reality, inner realities as well as the external one, the more information we have to understand the world, ourselves, others. We use our heads fully only if our hearts are strong. This is true about knowledge of the self as well as of the outer world, because with a detached heart we do not experience inner strivings directly, but can only deduce our motives.

Unlike the head, the heart is not neutral about knowledge. The heart wills and strives. Thus, the quality of the heart...affects how and what we know. If our hearts are full of childish strivings, our knowledge, especially about people, will be confused and distorted. If our hearts are weak and fearful, we will not want to know something that confronts us with our cowardice. If our hearts are envious, we will want to hide from the experience of "eating our hearts out." Thus, the heart is the seat of consciousness, in contrast to conceptualization, which is in the head. One reason why we detach head from heart is to avoid painful or confusing experiences of fear, greed, envy, anger, powerlessness, but we do so at the expense of remaining only half aware.

The detached head can neither affirm nor will. It thinks but it cannot act. Affirmation of convictions and rejection of evil must come from a strong and courageous heart, one that can experience the difference between truth and sham. But the will to destroy and to exploit others is also rooted in the heart, a hardened or anesthetized heart, which may be connected to a technique-oriented, option-seeking, neutral-knowledge head.

Affirmation is not a contradiction to a critical attitude. To the contrary, a critical attitude makes us either more sure of our affirmation or causes us to doubt it and to look for possible reasons why we have been taken in....

Neither openness to experience nor courage to act means that a stronghearted person is always right. The individual who can affirm life and truth may make mistakes. We may be fooled by illusions and wishful thinking, by a seductive, charming person, or by misleading events. The opposite of doubt is not certainty, but rather faith in our experience and the willingness to risk being wrong, and worse, gullible. It is easier to take this risk if we know that with effort we can think/experience ourselves back to the truth. In contrast, certainty implies control and predictability. For both the detached intellectual and the hard-hearted fanatic, it is the facsimile of conviction. The fainthearted look for someone else who can affirm life for them as a substitute for their missing faith and capacity for critical reason. The fanatical embraced idolatrous causes.

To affirm an unconventional perception or feeling and to act courageously, independently, is based on the experience, the conviction, that it is life-enhancing, harmonious, and right. Note Webster's New International Dictionary's first definition of courage, with its root in the Latin or and French coeur: "The heart, as the seat of intelligence or of feeling...."

With a detached heart, an individual may be motivated by "guts," appetite, or fear. Although we sometimes use the term as a synonym for courage, guts seems to imply the capacity to risk oneself for a goal, whether or not it is good or just. In this sense, both courage and guts require bravery, but courage also implies more human qualities. Hardhearted fanatics or amoral secret agents might have guts. Unlike the root of courage, the concept of guts has a quality of adolescent toughness, like a strong stomach.

* * * *

The exercise of the heart is that of experiencing, thinking critically, willing, and acting, so as to overcome egocentrism and to share passion with other people (justice-compassion) and respond to their need with the help one can give (benevolence-responsibility). It requires discipline, learning to concentrate, to think critically, and to communicate. The goal, a developed heart, implies integrity, a spiritual center, a sense of "I" not motivated by greed or fear, but by love of life, adventure, and fellow feeling. A strong heart is generally merry, with a sense of humor (another trait little stimulated in the corporation).

* * * *

The most malignant reason why the heart does not develop is because the individual hardens his heart or, as in myths and dreams, replaces it with stone. The heart becomes perverted as the will is directed toward power.... Other people are used as objects or as puppets. Even if they wanted to, hardhearted people could not "listen" to the emotions of others because they would find it unbearable to experience the fear, envy, hatred, revenge they have provoked. They must surround themselves with admirers, and admiration becomes a drug for them to blunt the self-disgust they must repress.

For such people, repentance requires a total change of heart. They must change their minds, intentions, and actions. This requires the willingness to experience full self-disgust and turn to a new path.

* * * *

From the moment a person starts treating his life as a career, worry is his constant companion. Careerism can begin at age five, fifteen, or later. Why do children become careerists? Parents start the ball rolling by evaluating all their children's actions in terms of usefulness to career. Is he smart enough? Is her personality right? Can he sell himself? The parents, themselves careerists, threaten the child not with punishment, but with failure in the career market of school and workplace. In cases of extremely anxious careerist parents, children become so frightened they cannot learn in school.

* * * *

Careerism results not only in constant anxiety, but also in an underdeveloped heart. Overly concerned with adapting himself to others, to marketing himself, the careerist constantly betrays himself, since he must ignore idealistic, compassionate, and courageous impulses that might jeopardize his career. As a result, he never develops an inner center, a strong, independent sense of self, and eventually he loses touch with his deepest strivings....

* * * *

Careerism demands detachment. To succeed in school, the child begins to detach himself from crippling fear of failure. To sell himself, he detaches himself from feelings of shame and humiliation. To compete and win, he detaches himself from feelings of empathy and compassion. To devote himself to success at work, he detaches himself from family feelings. Ultimately, to gain his goals, he is detached from social responsiveness.

The psychological meanings of detachment require explanation. Detachment is sometimes a self-protective necessity.... Detachment also allows us to stand back from pain and humiliation and take stock of ourselves objectively. In this sense, detachment implies a temporary expedient; the individual is still capable of full experience and is not alienated from himself.

In one form of spiritual development written about by mystics, detachment has a totally different meaning; it implies not being attached to things and images, including self-images. In contrast to the careerist goals of the detached corporate manager the spiritual aim is to overcome greed and fear and thus strengthen the heart. Free from possessive attachments, the mystic experiences self and others even more deeply; he is able to enjoy life more because he is not fearful of losing what he has.

* * * *

In a fundamental sense, the goals of the careerists reflect their tendency to construct a protective enclave for their emotions, themselves, and their families. The corporate career becomes the means to avoid anguish and uncertainty. But the goals of intellectual stimulation and material comfort do not lead to development of the heart. They tend to make the person intellectually active but spiritually passive, emotionally stingy, and, at the core, flabby.

(12) Jon Moline, Classical Ideas About Moral Education, 2(8) Character (June,1981):

The world is a complicated place in which confusing moral situations inevitably arise. Instead of being preoccupied with moral decisions appropriate to such complex situations, we may do better to shift our attention from the situations themselves to the people acting in them. In particular, we should attend to the personal traits needed to cope with moral situations that are too complex to anticipate. And when we study those traits, we will discover that we have a better idea of the character traits needed for good judgment than we do of what is good judgment about a particularly vexing moral dilemma. We have a better grip on what it takes to be a moral problem-solver than on what a solution to some dilemma should be.

We have greater facility in determining who has good judgment than in deciding which judgment is right in a problematic case. This pattern is not unique to moral matters. Aristotle remarked that in every area, that which appears to be so to the good person--the serious person--is thought to be really so. Aristotle says not that the good person sees things as they are (though he would not deny this); he says rather that things are as the good person sees them. And this is as true in physics or botany as in morality.

It has been enormously popular to say that there are no moral experts. But this is said thoughtlessly. Even those who say it seek advice about hard cases; and even they regard some people as typically foolish and others as not foolish. These critics notice there are a few people who have a certain knack for finding their way through very difficult moral situations without doing the sorts of wrongs which the rest of us find so easy to do. Indeed, the critics of the supposed established wisdoms are themselves typically uttering the wisdom or findings of other persons, whom they implicitly regard as their gurus. The reality is that each of us has probably known at least one wise person--perhaps a parent, relative, pastor, priest, rabbi, teacher, or neighbor. Such people strike us as knowing what they are doing when the rest of us do not. They impress us not simply as lucky, but as having unusual insight into moral situations and unusual ability to put their insight into practice. They are good people. They have something enviable. We might call it judgment. Aristotle called it practical wisdom. And he thought this trait so important that he mentioned it in his famous account of what he virtue is. He remarked that virtue is "settled disposition of the mind determining choice, and it consists in observing the mean relative to us, a mean which is determined by reason, as a person of practical wisdom would determine it.

* * * *

How then does a person of practical wisdom--one who is judicious--see things? A person of good moral judgment sees things, as it were, through a certain lens. This lens puts into focus some alternatives which otherwise escape notice. What are these alternatives? Aristotle's implicit answer is that practical wisdom puts into focus the extreme mistakes between which lies the excellent--or right--range of acts. This proposition suggests that the person of practical wisdom is typically on the lookout for what acts to avoid. Good judgment is evidently a matter of mistake-avoidance.

There is no doubt that this sounds a bit negative. However, part of our contemporary difficulty about character is that we have forgotten the power of negative thinking. We have all heard people sneer at the view that there are some things that are plainly wrong; things that simply must be avoided. In our time, this view is treated as evidence of a "hang-up" or a childish reverence for "No-no's." Such sneering, if it has an intellectual foundation, may rest on the view that thinking of certain things as plainly wrong and to be avoided interferes with our freedom. But this view is deeply mistaken. Why?

Paradoxically, it is just by being essentially negative, by trafficking in "no-no's," that morality avoids becoming a tyranny. Only such an approach leaves room for personal freedom and variation from person to person. The philosopher Immanuel Kant assuredly knew this. And the late Gilbert Ryle did also. Ryle remarked,

People sometimes grumble at the Ten Commandments on the score that most of them are prohibitions, and not positive injunctions. They have not realized that the notice "Keep off the grass" licenses us to walk anywhere else we choose, where the notice "Keep to the gravel" leaves us with almost no freedom of movement. Similarly to have learned a method is to have learned to take care against specified kinds of risk, muddle, blind alley, waste, etc. But carefully keeping away from this cliff and that morass leaves the rest of the countryside open to us to walk lightheartedly in.

Notice that Ryle's point is not restricted simply to the teaching or learning of moral precepts. It has to do with the precepts guiding any disciplined activity whatever. He remarks,

If I teach you twenty kinds of things that would make your sonnet a bad sonnet or your argument a bad argument, I have still left you an indefinite amount of elbow-room within which to construct your own sonnet or argument....

Learning English grammar is not a matter of learning what precisely to say. Instead, it is more a matter of learning what precisely not to say if one wishes to communicate effectively. But this negative leaves one great latitude in deciding what one does wish to say, and even in deciding how to say it. This feature is typical of avoidance systems, morality included.

We are only profoundly constrained or smothered when we are enmeshed in a system which tells us not what to avoid, but what to do. Such a system leaves us no room. But traditional negative morality does leave room--for freedom, for autonomy, for one's own personal style and preference. But it is room within boundaries, space in limits set by potential mistakes, which we avoid if we display good judgment in practice.

Return to: Character

 

Course Readings      Home Page