Longevity

The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life
by James Hillman, Ph.D.

In his powerful bestseller The Soul's Code, James Hillman brilliantly illuminated the central importance of character to our spiritual and emotional lives. Now, in this magnificent new book, Hillman completes his exploration of character with a profound and revolutionary reflection on life's second half.

"Character requires the additional years," declares Hillman. "The last years confirm and fulfill character." Far from blunting or dulling the self, the accumulation of experience concentrates the essence of our being, heightening our individual mystery and unique awareness of life. Drawing on his grounding in Jungian psychology, Hillman explains here the archetypes and myths that govern the self's realignment in our final years.

The Force of Character follows an enriching journey through the three stages of aging - lasting, the deepening that comes with longevity; leaving, the preparation for departure; and left, the special legacy we each bestow on our survivors. Along the way the book explores the meanings and often hidden virtues of characteristic physical and emotional changes, such as loss of memory, alterations in sleep patterns, and the mysterious upsurge in erotic imagination.

Steeped in the wisdom of a lifetime, radiant with Hillman's reading in philosophy, poetry, and sacred texts, charged with a piercing clarity, The Force of Character is a book that will change - and affirm - the lives of all who read it.

Chapter 1

Moving, and being himself, Slow, and unquestioned, And inordinately there, O stoic!

- D. H. Lawrence, "Tortoise Family Connections"

In our competitive societies, "lasting" has come to mean outlasting. "I've outlived my father and both grandfathers!" "According to my doctor, I should have been dead three years ago." "My insurance company is losing money on me. I've beat my pension plan and cashed in on Social Security, far more than I ever put in." Surely goodness and mercy shall follow me all the days of my life, because my life has outlasted the expectancy curve.

Not only have I defeated my genetic inheritance, my childhood schoolmates, and the actuaries, I've held off death itself. Life: a contest with all others and with death, so that living longer becomes a victory, repeating each year on my birthday that famous passage from St. Paul: "Death is swallowed up in victory.... O death, where is thy sting?"

Our experience of aging is so embedded in numbers of years left to live, as given by longevity tables, that we can hardly believe that for centuries late years were associated not with dying but with vitality and character. The old were not mainly thought of as limping toward death's door, but were regarded as stable depositories of customs and legends, guardians of local values, experts in skills and crafts, and valued voices in communal council. What mattered was force of character proven by length of years. Mortality was associated with youth: stillbirth and death in infancy; battle wounds, duels, robberies, executions, and piracy; the occupational hazards of farming, mining, fishing, and of childbirth; family feuds and jealous rages; epidemics and plagues that carried off populations in the prime of life. Cemeteries were dotted with the short graves of children.

The intimate coupling of longevity and mortality, that link which monogamously marries the archetype of old with the idea of death, takes hold of our minds only in the nineteenth century, with the advance of demographics. In France, positivist philosophy promoted the statistical study of populations, which moved death from the realm of the private and spiritual to that of sociology, politics, and medicine. The statistics on life span gave evidence of a falling death rate, which was read to indicate the progress of civilization. Society as a whole could prove its improvement by advancing longevity figures, and longevity could be advanced by new medical methods (vaccination, pasteurization, sterilization) and programs of public health (potable water; sewage treatment; ventilation).

Demographics took an even firmer grip when Emile Durkheim, one of the fathers of sociology, analyzed suicide statistics, showing that each district in France had a suicide rate that hardly varied from decade to decade. A predictable number of people in any given district could be expected to commit suicide in the coming year. When the incidence of suicide dissolves into the sociology of class, occupation, heredity, religion, age, and so on, then the act of suicide becomes a fact of sociology quite apart from the psychology of the individual who commits it. The statistical fact becomes a societal force, dooming a definite percentage in each district to die by their own hands. Data become destiny.

The life expectancy curve carries a force of its own. If you place yourself on it as a female teenager, say, you may have a life expectancy of at least seventy. At sixty, you find your expected longevity has risen; it may now be seventy-eight, or more. Once you arrive there, the statistical tables may place your life term at eighty-six. And so on. Even if you reach one hundred, actuarial statisticians speak of the "conditional probability" that there are a few more months or years ahead. Statistics confirm that the longer you last, the longer you will last, so that with each day of aging you may expect another day on the "actuarial curve to infinity." The curve cannot predict when your longevity will end; instead, it seems to bear you interminably forward. Rather than carrying you toward death and revealing the bare fact of your mortality, the curve functions as a statistical annunciation of immortality!

If "lasting" means more than outlasting statistical expectations, then what is it that lasts? What is the "it" that persists and endures? What could possibly last through all the events of a long life, remaining constant from start to finish? Neither our bodies nor our minds stay the same; they cannot avoid change. What does seem to hold true all along and to the end is an enduring psychological component that marks you as a being different from all others: your individual character. That same you.

But what does "same" mean? I have changed so much and am so different, and yet despite all changes something continues to assure me of being the same. I could lose my social identity, my physical configuration, and my personal history, yet something will remain the same, outlasting these radical vicissitudes. This book maintains that the idea of character provides this lasting core.

If sameness is the philosopher's term for what we experience as our character, we will have to discover more about this deep principle "sameness" - what it is and how it works. No small job, since philosophers have been thinking about sameness ever since Plato made the Same and the Different two of the most basic ideas to enter into the existence of things, form our thinking about them, and even make them possible.1

Philosophers play with the riddle of sameness. Take, for instance, your favorite pair of wool socks. You get a hole in a heel and darn it. Then you get a hole in the big toe - and you darn that, too. Soon the darned holes are more of the sock than the original wool. Eventually, the whole darned sock is made of different wool. Yet it's the same sock. In relation to its looks and in relation to its partner on your other foot, it is still the same sock. They go out together and lie together in the drawer; and even in relation to itself, its identity, it is the same sock, though it is different.

Here philosophers can apply Plato's archetypal ideas of Sameness and Difference. The sock is entirely different from the original as far as the wool goes, but its shape has remained the same. It never becomes a different sock, despite the radical material alteration. Its material is different; its form is the same.

By "form," philosophers mean the look of the sock, by which you recognize it as a sock. (Tube socks raise conceptual problems!) When can a sock not look like a sock and still be a sock? Philosophers also mean by "form" the sock's function as a match to its partner and to your foot (form following function). A third meaning interests us most: form as the active principle governing the way the new wool integrates into the old sock. Form is thus visible shape, and the shaping force of the visible. Do you see that we are getting closer to the notion of character?

A human body is like that sock, sloughing off its cells, changing its fluids, fermenting utterly fresh cultures of bacteria as others pass away. Your material stuff through time becomes altogether different, yet you remain the same you. Not one square inch of visible skin, not one palpable ounce of bone is the same, yet you are not someone different. There seems to be an innate image that does not forget your basic paradigm and that keeps you in character, true to yourself. The idea of DNAseems too tight to hold the psychic dimensions of our unique image. To embrace our complexity we need a larger idea.

© 2000 by James Hillman, Ph.D.

About the Author

James Hillman is a psychologist, scholar, international lecturer, pioneer psychologist, and the author of more than twenty books, including The Soul's Code, Re-Visioning Psychology, Healing Fiction, The Dream and the Underworld, Inter Views, and Suicide and the Soul. A Jungian analyst and originator of post-Jungian "archetypal psychology," he has held teaching positions at Yale University, the University of Chicago, Syracuse University, the University of Chicago, and the University of Dallas, where he cofounded the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture. After thirty years of residence in Europe, he now lives in Connecticut.