Feb 15, 2010 21:38
A couple nights ago, someone asked me how I studied "character".
My response was "by reading biographies and by reading good novels". "Observation," I continued, "is too slow, and too mean." I'm paraphrasing now. "It's good for setting a baseline, to check the obvious exaggerations against the backdrop of actual reality and actual possibility," totally paraphrasing for eloquence here, "but ultimately it doesn't give you a sense of what to reach for."
Understanding "character" isn't about knowing what it is. It's knowing how it fits together in a person and how it can be developed. It's seeing how people react in extreme situations and extremely normal situations.
I've mostly wrapped the idea of character as a matter of integrity; I treat the two as synonyms even though they are not. Or, more to the point, I treat integrity as a measure of character. Integrity, I have previously laid out, is a matter of choosing rightly at the cusp. The quality of that choice and the frequency of that quality is the measure of character.
Essentially, though, what I'm talking about is the positives of being human. We have heard the maxim, "To err is human." I can't stomach that. Yes, it is true; a crucial part of being human is the capacity to make a real, full-fledged, unwarranted mistake. That's absolutely crucial. But it is not the whole of being human, and I think we too often forget that the reason we err is so that we can limit our choices towards the better ones more and more often.
That is "character development". That's not a term reserved for the literary technique of a character's personality shifting and changing over the course of some plot. The term was introduced into literature as a way of describing its description of reality! The plot is here, now; we are the characters; development is essential!
integrity,
philosophy