Longevity, Part 2

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

(Page 2 of 2)

Some Greek philosophers and thinkers of the medieval church attributed this consistency in the midst of alteration to the idea of form. Some further claimed that form individualizes. What causes each person and each thing to be different from other persons and things is the active force of form. No two forms can be alike. We are each maintained in our specific individual image by the principle of form. To use one of William James's suggestive terms, we are each an "each." As "each"es, we are unique because each of us has, or is, a specific character that stays the same.

It is most important here to grasp that we are unique qualitatively. You have your style, your history, a set of traits, and a destiny. You are essentially different from me by virtue of the lasting sameness of each of our individualized characters.

If the difference between you and all others were defined by physics, logic, politics, economics, and law, we would each be a numerical "one" without any necessary characteristics. The law says, "All are equal under the law"; politics says, "One person, one vote"; physics says, "No two bodies can occupy the same place at the same time"; economics puts all eaches into categories - consumers, workers, owners, employers. When each one is interchangeable with any other one, individuality requires nothing more than a different ID number. Since uniqueness depends on the qualitative differences forming the consistent sameness of your individuality, the idea of character is necessary to keep us different from one another, and the same as ourselves.

Let's go back to the sock. If what outlasts the wool is the form, then a preoccupation with physical decay - with where the sock is wearing thin - misses a crucial point. Sure, the sock is showing holes, and stitching up its weak places keeps it functional. But our minds might more profitably be thinking about the mystery of this formal principle that endures through material substitutions. Surely the lasting strength of character counts as much as the durability of wool.

Sometimes the stitchings and darnings don't take. Medicine watches carefully for rejection after transfusions, organ transplants, and bone grafts. The formal principle that guarantees sameness despite the introduction of exotic material is named by medicine the immune system. This system accepts or rejects replacements in accord with its own innate code. The new materials must be integrated into the integrity of the person. Or, as they might have said in church debates nine hundred years ago, the material must be accommodated to the form. It must fit my innate image. The new part - kidney, hip, or knee - must become my knee. The new wool must become me.

What converts this "it" into "me"?

Modern psychology, regardless of school, understands the assimilation of events into a "me" to be a function of character. The schools of psychology use other words for character, such as "personality," "ego," "self," "behavioral organization," "integrative structure," "identity," "temperament." These substitute terms fail to characterize the styles of assimilation that are the hallmarks of individuality. We each respond to the world differently, handling our lives in a particular style. The word "character" implies a bundle of traits and qualities, habits and patterns; it requires descriptive language such as we find in character references, letters of recommendation, primary school report cards, scripts and novels, performance criticism, obituaries. "Ego," "self," "identity" are bare abstractions, telling us nothing of the human being they supposedly inhabit and govern. At best, these words refer to the unifying sameness of people while neglecting their unique differences.

It is refreshing to discover that some of the oldest and most basic ideas of philosophy - Same and Different, Form and Matter - are actually at work in our daily lives, even in our bodies. I find it a delight that these old-fashioned woolly principles are immediately practical and can be discussed as bodily facts. Why must we be exhorted to build character and strengthen character when character is already a given, the staying power that keeps us who we are and holds our bodies to their form? Imagine the body as an ancient philosopher, the body as a place of wisdom - an idea already announced in the book titles of two medical specialists, Walter Cannon and Sherwin Nuland.

Cannon in the 1930s and Nuland in the 1990s both say the body's physiology knows what it is doing. There is a wisdom at work. The idea of character makes more understandable this governing wisdom. Moreover, if we regard character as more than a collection of traits or an accumulation of habits, virtues, and vices, but rather as an active force, then character may be the forming principle in the body's aging. Aging then becomes a revelation of the body's wisdom.

I am emphasizing form in the organization of matter for two reasons. First, to counter the hustlers of materialism, who ask us to buy the idea that we are complex pieces of biotechnology, best compared with the newest computer chips. Whatever form we show results from underlying biogenetic impulses. Form can be reduced to matter; it obeys matter's laws and is shaped by genetic material. Since matter does the forming, there is no need for a separate idea of form.

A succinct, well-written - and fantastic - passage from one of the world's leading cognitive scientists represents a host of similar statements in similar books.

The mind is a system of organs of computation, designed by natural selection to solve the kinds of problems our ancestors faced in their foraging way of life.... The mind is what the brain does; specifically, the brain processes information, and thinking is a kind of computation.... The various problems for our ancestors were subtasks of one big problem for their genes, maximizing the number of copies that made it into the next generation.2

Why do I call this fantastic? Because this account of foraging ancestors, genes facing problems, and natural selection as deus ex machina leaves the big questions begging. Moreover, the statement is set down axiomatically, not as myth or as reductive simplification, but as self-evident truth, and that allows Pinker to go on blithely saying that psychology is engineering.

To reduce psychology to engineering brutalizes the meaning of form. My shape is more than how I'm put together. We all know that the way to last is to stay in shape, but "staying in shape" means more than working out. Do diet, exercise, and bed before midnight satisfy the needs of your shape? The first meaning of "shape" is "create," which relies upon a force that is invisible and yet makes each creature visible in its own style. The blanket term "information processing" covers over the history of subtle thought carried in the idea of form.

My second reason for insisting upon form is to keep a psychological viewpoint when addressing psychological questions. After all, life to the one who lives it is harassed by psychological perplexities for which biochemistry and brain physiology offer little comfort. Why live, why live long and with the probability of biological impairment are questions irrelevant to these sciences. Even should they remove the impairment and prolong the years, the "why" questions remain which no "how" answers can satisfy.

© 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.