Character: ‘The mental and moral qualities distinctive to an individual’, according to The Oxford Dictionary. It seems obvious that individuals have their own, different, characters. Among the medley of characteristics that compose each and every one of us, it is improbable to the extent of impossibility to find two similar constitutions. Therefore, the claim that each person is unique is, allegedly, incontrovertible. But what is uniqueness? Within a bulk of pebbles, is every pebble unique simply for differing slightly from the common denominator of the bunch? In a way, yes, albeit that is hardly a satisfying answer. A more adequate demonstration of uniqueness would be to throw a gemstone amongst the pebbles, an article far more bizarre and attractive. While it is far from an uncommon allegory, the gemstone within the pebbles illustrates another meaning of uniqueness, that of being of a different kind, made from a different material than the multitude.
Applying the allegory to people, what makes an individual truly unique, truly stand out amongst the common crowd? What makes one ‘a person of character’?
The answer to this question is extremely subjective, all the more evidently for stimulating historians, authors and thinkers to provide different solutions. Having encountered various such attempts, the question of character has intrigued me for a while. In this post I will review some of the different ideas I’ve come across, and attempt to produce my own opinion on the matter.
Character as self-assertion
Men at some time are masters of their fates:
The fault, dear Brutus, is not in our stars,
But in ourselves, that we are underlings.
Michael Henchard, the main character in Thomas Hardy’s The Mayor of Casterbridge, is a rough, powerful, and passionate man. Although throughout the novel some of his virtues are exposed to us, we are ever reminded of his impulsiveness, violence, and inflexibility. Our very first impression of him is of his intoxicated behaviour to his wife, followed by an actual offer to sell her away to the highest bidder. Later in the novel we observe his quarrelsome, envious treatment of his adversary Donald Farfrae, his lies to Elizabeth-Jane, and his inevitable downfall. Although I have felt sympathy for Henchard as I watched his decline, I couldn’t deny the fact that he brought his fate upon himself, and deserved every hardship he endured, till he could wish for nothing but to be forgotten.
And yet, the novel is subtitled A Story of a Man of Character. Why would Thomas Hardy, a wonderful judge of character and, in my opinion, of what signifies character, present Henchard as his ‘man of character’? Especially when we compare him with Farfrae, who is an affable, collected, and admired person to whom eventually Henchard loses everything. Michael Irwin perfectly explains Hardy’s choice:
The ultimate triumph of the Man of Character, the reason for Hardy’s tribute to him, is that even in the face of death, even when penning a document of despair, he cannot help but conclude with one more last-ditch assertion of personality which involuntarily negates the attempted self-annihilation: “To this I put my name, Michael Henchard”. Many of Hardy’s major characters… are victims above all, their course of life and their eventual death being determined by forces outside their control. Henchard, the Man of Character, perhaps experiences more than his share of misfortune, but his fate is what he makes it. He takes charge of his own destiny and accepts responsibility for it. In so doing he blazes with the self-defining energy of a human being fully and passionately alive.
Taken from Wordsworth Classics’ introduction
As Hardy himself says within the novel, ‘character is fate’. To mould it yourself, for better or worse, to pave your own path and tread it to the end, that is the mark of character according to Hardy. One might add Machiavelli’s teachings to these ideas: in order to rule Fortuna, one must possess Virtù.
Dostoyevsky develops the model of character as self-assertion to a further extent through the ideals of Raskolnikov. According to Raskolnikov the world is divided to two types of people, ordinary people and extraordinary people. The first are forever bound to be ruled, they are conservative law-abiders, and are incapable of revolutionizing anything. Contrarily, the extraordinary type are innovative by nature, and perniciously so. “For men of pre-eminent virtue there is no law – they are themselves a law.” as Aristotle says. In their attempt to change the world according to their preferences not only will extraordinary people inevitably transgress the rules, but as Raskolnikov views it, they are justified in doing so. “…if the discoveries of Kepler and Newton could not have been made known except by sacrificing the lives of one, a dozen, a hundred, or more men, Newton would have had the right, would indeed have been in duty bound… to eliminate the dozen or the hundred men for the sake of making his discoveries known to the whole of humanity.” One might receive the wrong impression that merely ideas and progress are worth bloodshed, but Raskolnikov doesn’t stop at scientific discoveries. He idolizes Napoleon, whose self-assertiveness terrorized Europe for over a decade. It is as if Raskolnikov argues that extraordinary people, people of character for our cause, must dominantly manifest themselves in the world and tower over less dominant characters who are incapable of standing in their place. Only thus will the world move forward and not remain stationary. In comparison with Hardy’s ideas, the man of character according to Raskolnikov isn’t one who merely makes his own way, but one who determines the fate of others as well.
The interesting thing in Crime and Punishment is that Dostoyevsky himself objects to Raskolnikov’s mode of thought. Raskolnikov wants to prove to himself that he is extraordinary. In committing a murder, he theorizes that extraordinary people would not be hindered by such an act, and therefore if he is extraordinary neither should he be hindered by it. His model is Svidrigaïlov, an infamous oligarch who, quite obviously, murdered his wife Marfa Petrovna and got away with it. Therefore, Svidrigaïlov is truly the type of men who can dominate the world. Dostoyevsky’s moralizing begins when Svidrigaïlov takes his own life, after realizing that his extreme ways have left him miserable at heart. The fact that Raskolnikov finds himself unable to discard his ‘ordinary’ humanity, that he is horrified by the situation of Marmeladov and Katerina and attempts to help such ordinary people is yet another hint that he is far from being ‘extraordinary’, and should be glad for it. Eventually, Raskolnikov falls in love with Sonia, the meek prostitute whose suffering and love mark her as the sign of Christianity. His strive for greatness has happily come to an end.
Before moving on there is one more thinker whose opinion on self-assertiveness I ought to include, John Stuart Mill:
“The same strong susceptibilities which make the personal impulses vivid and powerful, are also the source from whence are generated the most passionate love of virtue, and the sternest self-control. It is through the cultivation of these, that society both does its duties and protects its interests: not by rejecting the stuff of which heroes are made, because it knows not how to make them. A person whose desires and impulses are his own – are the expression of his own nature, as it has been developed and modified by his own culture – is said to have a character”. These thoughts could be said to represent Henchard well, although John Stuart Mill adds ‘self-control’ to our formula of character. He develops it further:
“‘Pagan self-assertion’ is one of the elements of human worth, as well as ‘Christian self-denial’. There is a Greek ideal of self-development, which the Platonic and Christian ideal of self-government blends with, but does not supersede. It may be better to be a John Knox than an Alcibiades, but it is better to be a Pericles than either; nor would a Pericles, if we had one in these days, be without anything good which belonged to John Knox”. To put it simply, one cannot be a man of character with self-assertion alone, even if that self-assertion is powerful enough to dominate others. To be a person of character one must first control oneself, and then others.
Character as non-conformism
In this age the mere example of nonconformity, the mere refusal to bend the knee to custom, is itself a service.
A discussion of character is improper without an inquiry into Nietszche’s Übermensch, a model which has arguably made the greatest contribution to the subject of character. Although the Übermensch, whose traits are never fully listed in any of the works of Nietszche, is definitely a self-assertive person, I think it is more fitting to regard him firstly as a non-conformist.
According to Nietszche a person of character is one who creates new values, who can envision a new and better path to humanity and dare tread it alone: “It seems to me more and more that the philosopher, being necessarily a man of tomorrow and the day after tomorrow, has always found himself and had to find himself in contradiction to his today: his enemy has always been the ideal of today… By laying the knife vivisectionally to the bosom of the very virtues of the age they betrayed what was their own secret: to know a new greatness of man, a new untrodden path to his enlargement.”
While the previous passage deals with thinkers alone, demonstrating the differences between conformistic thinkers, who can only discuss the manifold aspects within the current paradigm of thought, and groundbreaking thinkers who challenge the very paradigm itself, it can also shed a light on the prominence of people whose interests aren’t in the field of thought. Essentially, it is the ability to set aside the accepted values of the age and to judge yourself what you deem worthy or not, and act accordingly. “The noble type of man feels himself to be the determiner of values, he does not need to be approved of, he judges ‘what harms me is harmful in itself’, he knows himself to be that which in general first accords honour to things, he creates values. Everything he knows to be part of himself, he honours: such a morality is self-glorification.”
But how can one create values without first rejecting contemporary ideals? More importantly, and this is something Nietzsche doesn’t allude to, perhaps for taking it as a given, one cannot create values without first rejecting contemporary customs. John Stuart Mill produced a passage relating to this which, in my opinion, conveys Nietzsche’s idea of ‘slave morality’ even better than Nietzsche himself could:
“In our times, from the highest class of society down to the lowest, every one lives as under the eye of a hostile and dreaded censorship. Not only in what concerns others, but in what concerns only themselves, the individual, or the family, do not ask themselves – what do I prefer? Or, what would suit my character and disposition? Or, what would allow the best and highest in me to have fair-play and enable it to grow and thrive? They ask themselves, what is suitable to my position? What is usually done by persons of my station and pecuniary circumstances? Or (worse still) what is usually done by persons of a station and circumstances superior to mine? I do not mean that they choose what is customary, in preference to what suits their own inclination. It does not occur to them to have any inclination, except for what is customary. Thus the mind itself is bowed to the yoke: even in what people do for pleasure, conformity is the first thing thought of; they like in crowds; they exercise choice only among things commonly done: peculiarity of taste, eccentricity of conduct, are shunned equally with crimes: until by dint of not following their own nature, they have no nature to follow: their human capacities are withered and starved: they become incapable of any strong wishes or native pleasures, and are generally without either opinions or feelings of home growth, or properly their own”. This passage perfectly conveys the impossibility of congruence between character and conformity. As Oscar Wilde put it in greater brevity: “Most people are other people. Their thoughts are some one else’s opinions, their lives a mimicry, their passions a quotation.”
While there is much more to be quoted from Nietzsche and John Stuart Mill on the matter, allow me to take over and to hazard my own opinions about conformity and its relation to character. Conformity is acting according to prevailing social standards. However, don’t we all act according to society’s expectations to some extent? We certainly do talk in the same fashion (regardless of language), dress according to current codes, and consciously or not, we respect social norms of behaviour. Anyone not abiding by the most basic rules of society is immediately ostracized and branded a lunatic. One must surrender at least some ground to society in order to advance within it. However, surrender any more than the mere basic demands of society, and you become a conformist.
Picture to yourselves the plethora of people who dress entirely according to current trends, listen to nothing but popular music, spend much of their time on social media etc. Would you consider such people as leaders, as active minds, as people of character? For what do these people demonstrate to their surroundings but a complete and unconditional surrender to social norms? These conformists sacrifice individuality for approval, they are but a log adrift upon the stream of society, bereft of any will or power to resent it. Moreover, it seems to me that people today have discarded an old maxim – nil admirari. Easily enthused, they profess that it doesn’t take much for them to be swept away, and hence the rapid change of trends.
Some of you would charge me with baseness for judging people thus. ‘What if somebody just happens to like popular music?’ Sadly, that is never the case. Whether you are unaware of it or unwilling to admit it, our preferences are subject to our will. One subconsciously wishes to belong to a certain group, to become a certain type of person, and acts accordingly. Is it a coincidence that such people can be so easily labelled? For what truly differs a ‘metal-head’ or an ’emo’ from a ‘hipster’? Don’t they simply express their deep, religious (for religion is the epitome of conformism) desire to belong in different ways? They say to society, even if to a specific part of it: ‘I shall do as you please, if you would only accept me’. In their illusory attempt to become ‘special’ they are simply affiliated into smaller groups with more distinct characteristics. It is solitude that they fear the most.
“Today, being noble, wanting to be by oneself, the ability to be different, independence and the need for self-responsibility pertains to the concept ‘greatness’; and the philosopher will betray something of his ideal when he asserts: ‘He shall be the greatest who can be the most solitary, the most concealed, the most divergent, the man beyond good and evil, the master of his virtues, the superabundant of will; this shall be called greatness: the ability to be as manifold as whole, as vast as full'”. How completely does Nietzsche clarify that character shouldn’t be sought amongst conformists. Those who dare defy social norms despite exclusion, who refuse to compress themselves into the “moulds which society provides in order to save its members the trouble of forming their own character”, those persons of character must pay the price of solitude. It is not that they remain friendless and unloved, but that they lack the common denominator of the crowd, and others might find their individuality too terrifying to handle. Unlike others, they don’t rely on others’ opinions in order to define themselves.
Yet another word on non-conformism. I imagine that some would claim that abstaining from conformism is but a different expression of one’s relation to it, for how can deliberate, planned and manifested non-conformism be a mark of character? And indeed, I agree with such claims. It is not defining yourself in relation, and that includes opposite relation, to society’s expectations that is the sign of character that we seek. It is genuine individuality, so seldom seen in our era, that I cherish. As Emerson puts it: “Nothing is more rare in any man than an act of his own.”
Catharsis
What then makes one a person of character? Much could still be said about the subject which has not been included in this discussion. Impulsiveness, honesty, severity, clemency, all of these are worth touching upon, and are all disputed amongst writers. Which of these traits constitute character? The question of honesty, for example, an important trait which has received no recognition here, would have sparked a very interesting argument between Machiavelli and Kant. It is exactly these disputes which I find intriguing. While Alcibiades is frowned upon by John Stuart Mill for his lack of self-denial, Nietzsche celebrates him and even considers him an example of self-control. Perhaps I shall return to these traits and others in the future, but for now I think that the most important components of character have been displayed.
Firstly, and although Dostoyevsky would disagree, I cannot but side with Raskolnikov in claiming that great persons are first of all self-assertive and dominant. I am yet to be shown a great figure whose chief characteristic was meekness. Nevertheless, John Stuart Mill’s addition of self-control is necessary. Although I would rank Alcibiades above John Knox, for self-denial in itself is nothing but ‘slave morality’, I agree that it is an important part of character. As is written in Pirkei Avot, ‘Who is a hero? He who conquers his urges’. The greater the urges, the greater the conqueror. If only Henchard would have lived accordingly.
Secondly, as I have already revealed, I am a great mocker of conformism. To be so yielding negates possession of a truly unique character. However, like self-denial, non-conformism is not enough unaccompanied. It is easily achieved by elders who rant about current norms, ironically unaware of the fact that they were once just as yielding, when it was more comfortable. Conformism itself hasn’t changed, only the direction of its tide. No, for one to possess character one must also be innovative. A person of character wouldn’t shy away from creating new ideals and living by them, even alone. Although I have given only extreme examples of conformists above, how many of you and your associates dare live differently from the rest? Financially, for example, I am always greeted with a raised eyebrow when I challenge consumerism. How many of those around you work until nightfall only to afford an extravagant lifestyle just like everybody else? As you may see, conformism is a spectrum, and rare are those who are completely free from its tyranny.
However, the precise quantity of individuality required to maintain a balance between detachment and conformity is far from being scientific and is somewhat subjective. To listen to popular music requires no character at all, but on the other hand one who could enjoy the music of Stockhausen has lost any relation to the standards of society and cannot be considered one of its components. As in all things, a temperate medium must be sought.
A person of character then, is one who can combine self-assertion with independence of values. Like conformism, ‘character’, or ‘greatness’ if you will, is also a spectrum. Where on that spectrum is one considered ‘great’? The answer to that is completely subjective, but even the most allowing of judges would have to admit that uniqueness is a rarity, and that not everybody could be considered a person of character.
You would now request some examples of people of character, and it is certainly a just request. As Karl Popper would demand, one must take a risk, must hazard something of oneself in order to make a point: in the case of science, a prediction. In the case of art and literature, an example.
And so I may be asked: are the writers whom you have presented, and with such confidence, people of character? Observe, it is precisely the thinkers who have been shunned, who have acquired social denunciation – the likes of Malthus, Machiavelli, and Nietzsche – who profess the greatest non-conformism, and deserve to be acknowledged for that. How naïve, for example, does the celebrated Godwin look beside the all but mocked Malthus. Yes, those writers are people of character, but they are only midway on the path to greatness. It is exactly their unpopularity that gives them away. Their character brought them only to the point of walking against the stream, but it wasn’t strong enough to make it change its route in their wake. Where is their self-assertion? How low do they stand beside truly great characters like Napoleon and William Pitt. And for yet another risk, I will add that perhaps Malthus conceived an idea, but it was Hitler’s terrible self-assertion that made the Lebensraum a reality. It is these men who can truly ‘take the weight of the world on their shoulders’, to quote Simone de Beauvoir.
It is now left for each to judge their surroundings according to these standards, or others if it so pleases them. However, one must first judge oneself. The inevitable question is, am I a man of character? Although I believe myself to be far from the low end of the spectrum of character, if I were to compare myself with my ideal of greatness, I would sadly have to conclude – non omnia possamus omnes.