I found it interesting to learn about the etymology of the word "character". It comes to us from Latin which took it from the Greek (χᾰρᾰκτήρ) which comes from kharasso (χαράσσω) - I scratch or engrave.
Our character can be thought of as the result of a long process of engraving or scratching. I tend to see it as a solid metal shield full of scratches from long battles. The resulting grooves tend towards virtue or vice. A sustained habit of wise choices makes it easier to do the right thing - even when it is hard - when the time comes and it will come. A marriage, a deathbed, a career. Life has its fair share of hard choices and having grooves in your soul that guide your choices towards the virtuous helps immensely.
That's also useful to know for when you have unimportant tasks to complete. For some people this may comprise the majority of their career and/or life. However, those "unimportant" tasks still scratch your soul and those scratches ultimately matter. Even seemingly mundane things like taking out the garbage can be done with virtue in mind.
I'll just toss this in, since I haven't seen someone else put it out out there yet:
Excellence is an art won by training and habituation: we do not act
rightly because we have virtue or excellence, but we rather have these
because we have acted rightly;
'these virtues are formed in man by his doing the actions';
we are what we repeatedly do. Excellence, then, is not an act but a habit:
'the good of man is a working of the soul in the way of excellence in
a complete life... for as it is not one swallow or one fine day that
makes a spring, so it is not one day or a short time that makes a man
blessed and happy'
-- Will Durant, "The Story of Philosophy: The Lives and Opinions of
the World's Greatest Philosophers" (1926), Ch. II: Aristotle and
Greek Science; part VII: Ethics and the Nature of Happiness
For a similar idea from another culture, see the ancient definitions of karma:
Now as a man is like this or like that,
according as he acts and according as he behaves, so will he be;
a man of good acts will become good, a man of bad acts, bad;
he becomes pure by pure deeds, bad by bad deeds;
And here they say that a person consists of desires,
and as is his desire, so is his will;
and as is his will, so is his deed;
and whatever deed he does, that he will reap.
The only thing I would change here is “watch your thoughts, thoughts become words” and reverse it.
Your words are so often careless attempts at thought. First approximations of ideas. All too often, however, they are spoken to oneself and heard by oneself as truth. Be very careful about your words, they will go on to constrain oh so much.
Now, strictly speaking thought may come first. But, it’s that thinking about words which becomes so trapping, not the initial conditions that give rise to the words. Interrogate your language, distrust it, scrutinise it.
That's a nice way to phrase it! Google tells me this quote is from Ralph Waldo Emerson, who himself was deeply influenced by ancient Indian thought (see [1], e.g.).
That’s a common misunderstanding. Karma is not a “restoring force”. Karma is habit. Act with kindness and your life will become one of kindness. Act with rage and your life will become one of rage.
Karma is not there to get you. Is the law of cause and effect. If you seed rage, you will get rage. No other result can become from rage than rage.
I doubt this is a novel thought, but as a non-believer in the Christian afterlife I’ve always considered Hell to be the place that one ends up in (while still alive) after a lifetime of bad choices.
It is the terrible reality that you find yourself in, full of demonic people and meager circumstance, as a consequence of your bad choices. Not a literal dimension of pain and suffering, but a manifestation of all the rejection and shunning by others that your terrible behavior warrants.
Unworthy of love, or forgiveness, or pity. Untrusted and unhelped by others because of your untrustworthy reputation.
I consider the independence of self to be an illusion. Instead, our self is composed by our influences. In that sense, “reincarnation” happens all the time as we influence each other and upload our selves. From this view, karmic influences are even more pronounced, as we create heaven and hell for our extended selves.
This is a common Western misunderstanding of karma.
Karma isn't about guaranteeing consequences/rewards. It's about actions increasing the odds of one or the other.
While it certainly has been used as a part of cosmological frameworks involving reincarnation, it can also be used in a secular framework within the context of a single life without relying on notions of a metaphysical force.
No. Reincarnation leads to a paradox: How would the last life before the universe’s end’s deeds and sins be karma’ed?
It actually only works in a religion with a proper afterlife. Not one in which everyone is saved regardless and go to heaven no matter what. One in which punishment is one-to-one to the sins in this life, like Islam.
Why “no”? I was literally describing the framework in which the spiritual idea of karma is commonly found: religion with the belief of cyclical rebirth.
What you go on to describe does not match up to “karma” as found- using that term- in religions.
I agree. But the message here is not an external occurring but rather internal. One's acts determine one's internal state. If you act virtuously by your definition, your judgement of yourself will be good/not corrupt, which is good. The key point here is that it's your own personal defination.
I'm not praising the oligarchs, of course. I'm saying that the "karma" bullshit just doesn't work. Yeah, I don't want to be like these bad guys, but I have no illusions that some magical "karma" will reward me or punish them - that's naive.
I don’t believe in karma or in the words of Johnny Cash “god almighty is gonna cut em down” but the world does work in funny ways.
Such behaviour is not sustainable and even if your network of nasties shields you from consequences, you’re making a giant gamble relying on that forever without some meaner network coming along and pop! with no moral issue.
I agree. The quote I shared above has nothing to do with external systems that dole out rewards and punishments. Ancient definitions of karma are very different from the mainstream definition in vogue today (edit: with the usual caveat that ancient concepts have multiple interpretations, and I'm sure there are contemporaries of the view I shared that are more in line with what you imagine).
A somewhat modernized version is to say: it's not nature, nor nurture, it's stigmergy [1]. Or another way: the organism is larger than the collection of the cells [2] [3].
[1] "mechanism of indirect coordination, through the environment, between agents or actions. The principle is that the trace left in the environment by an individual action stimulates the performance of a succeeding action by the same or different agent", https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigmergy
[3] Michael Levin and Wayne Frasch (2023) From molecular physiology to anatomical form, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3l8I4gJ6D0w, at 27:32 the hybrid agent frog cells + scientists + AI exploring morphospace.
Webster [1] traces the source of the word “character” to theater where it was used as an emblem of the reputation of someone or a group of people, similar to how you would recognize the brand name engraved into a thing. The interpretation that character is a result of “engraving” through repeated behavior (at the individual level) is fascinating, but doesn’t seems as supported from original usage for centuries.
The article itself says that there are multiple meanings of "character". One of which refers to a persons reputation and can be traced back to "the Greek charassein, meaning “to sharpen, cut in furrows, or engrave.”
So perhaps this is convergent evolution? "Character" can also mean symbol, like a key on a typewriter. That would make more sense as a descendant from "engraving".
I'd hazard a guess it's that multiple words which sounded vaguely similar were merged into the most dominant form as a result of people being too lazy to differentiate them by minor nuances of pronunciation.
I don’t think Webster is always right or writes complete etymology. Perhaps there is a more charitable way to interpret the PC. But PC should provide sources, that would be nice.
Socrates was famous for his loose etymologies. He describes the etymology of techne (design, craft, basis of technology) as coming from “echo” and “nous” (mind). I love the idea of the echos of mind in technology!
His interlocutor said something like: “your etymology is like pulling a heavy boat up a steep ramp.” Ha! Yay for the playful side of Plato.
> The resulting grooves tend towards virtue or vice.
Virtue & vice are kind of an arbitrary way to device up those "grooves", and what constitutes virtue or vice varies by context/perspective.
I would argue there are a LOT more dimensions to character, and some are arguably more important than that one, but I otherwise agree with your metaphor.
I wear a platinum wedding ring for much the same reason. While it's really hard to break a platinum ring, they accumulate scratches quite easily. A ring that endures but carries with it scratches and grooves from the life you've lived seems like a pretty good metaphor for marriage.
My ring is just a little bit loose on my finger. It could slip off and be lost if it's not paid some attention. I initially found this supremely annoying, but realized that the metaphor is so good that I wouldn't have it any other way.
> I know of no more encouraging fact than the ability of a man to elevate his life by conscious endeavor. It is something to paint a particular picture, or to carve a statue, and so make a few objects beautiful. It is far more glorious to carve and paint the very atmosphere and medium through which we look. This morally we can do.
Funny that you bring this up. Just the other day I looked uo the etymology of “character” vs “caricature”. Surprisingly, considering the close similarity both in meaning and sound, they are completely unrelated. You already described “character”; “caricature” apparently comes from Italian for “load” or “exaggerate”, and is related to English “charge”.
A surprising number of words trace back to some form or other having to do with carving, cutting, boring into. See also analuein and krinein. It makes for some fantastic one-liners, like Foucault's C'est que le savoir n'est pas fait pour comprendre, il est fait pour trancher: Knowledge isn't made for understanding, it's made for cutting.
> Even seemingly mundane things like taking out the garbage can be done with virtue in mind.
Poet Jane Hirshfield, reflecting on her time at a monastery that ritualized waking up at ~0300 by splashing freezing water on one's face, said that her training was reducible to being more mindful when doing the dishes.
Our character can be thought of as the result of a long process of engraving or scratching. I tend to see it as a solid metal shield full of scratches from long battles. The resulting grooves tend towards virtue or vice. A sustained habit of wise choices makes it easier to do the right thing - even when it is hard - when the time comes and it will come. A marriage, a deathbed, a career. Life has its fair share of hard choices and having grooves in your soul that guide your choices towards the virtuous helps immensely.
That's also useful to know for when you have unimportant tasks to complete. For some people this may comprise the majority of their career and/or life. However, those "unimportant" tasks still scratch your soul and those scratches ultimately matter. Even seemingly mundane things like taking out the garbage can be done with virtue in mind.
I'm fun at parties by the way.