The Call of Character

Living a Life Worth Living

Mari Ruti

• Publisher: Columbia University Press
• Year: 2013
• ISBN:
  9780231536196
• Topic: Psychologie
• Subtopic: Angewandte Psychologie

Should we feel inadequate when we fail to be healthy, balanced, and well-adjusted? Is it realistic or even desirable to strive for such an existential equilibrium? Condemning our current cultural obsession with cheerfulness and "positive thinking," Mari Ruti calls for a resurrection of character that honors our more eccentric frequencies and argues that sometimes a tormented and anxiety-ridden life can also be rewarding.

Ruti critiques the search for personal meaning and pragmatic attempts to normalize human beings' unruly and idiosyncratic natures. Exposing the tragic banality of a happy life commonly lived, she instead emphasizes the advantages of a lopsided life rich in passion and fortitude. She also shows what matters is not our ability to evade existential uncertainty but our courage to meet adversity in such a way that we do not become irrevocably broken.

We are in danger of losing the capacity to cope with complexity, ambiguity, melancholia, disorientation, and disappointment, Ruti warns, leaving us feeling less "real" and less connected and unable to process a full range of emotions. Heeding the call of our character means acknowledging the marginalized, chaotic aspects of our being, and it is precisely these creative qualities that make us inimitable and irreplaceable.

PART I

THE ART OF SELF-FASHIONING

1

The Call of Character

Some things are in some real sense really you, or express what you are, and others aren’t.

—Bernard Williams

1

The question of how to live a life worth living has an illustrious history in our society, for leading philosophers, psychologists, theologists, and artists have grappled with it at least since Socrates. But what sets our era apart from earlier ones is that our relationship to this question is deeply ambivalent. On the one hand, we are no longer sure if it’s worth asking. We know (or strongly suspect) that God is dead,¹ that Truth with the capital T is difficult to attain, that the universe is a chaotic place, that the world is a violent mess, and that there may not be any final purpose to our lives. What, then, would be the benefit of dwelling on the overall validity of the life path we have chosen (or been thrown into)? And given the enormous trials faced by the world—war, hunger, poverty, social inequality, environmental damage, and so on—isn’t there something fairly selfish about such navel gazing to begin with? Wouldn’t it be better to spend our energies on trying to solve problems that actually have a solution?

What is more, the utilitarian ethos of our culture can make us a little ashamed of squandering our resources on something as purely speculative as the question of what constitutes a life worth living: we are supposed to be productive rather than contemplative. We are asked to embrace the practical concerns of our lives, such as professional goals, family matters, and trips to the mall, without worrying too much about their ultimate significance. Indeed, many of us have internalized the idea that feeling too ardently about anything—including the merit of our existence—is a waste of time in the sense that nothing we do makes much of a difference. We are beyond grand ideals, grand passions, as well as personal or political acts of courage. Whenever we catch ourselves getting too stirred up about anything—even if it’s just the thrilling date we had on Saturday night—we back away, for we know that irrational ardor is … well, irrational. In a way, level-headed pragmatism has replaced the enthusiasm of higher aspirations so that many of us spend our lives trying to enjoy the ride as long as it lasts without investing ourselves too strongly in anything. Investments, after all, are never entirely reliable.

On the other hand, many of us yearn to feel fully alive. We want to feel “real” and “authentic,” connected to the deepest recesses of our being; we want to feel that there is a point to our existence. Even the utilitarian tenor of our society cannot entirely banish the little voice inside of us that keeps asking about the meaning of it all. This voice may not trouble us too often. But it tends to surface at key moments in our lives—for example, when something goes drastically wrong, when things seem unusually difficult, when someone we love dies or faces hardship, when the dismal state of the world jolts us out of our complacency, or when we get a vivid reminder of our own mortality. During such times, it is easy to feel helpless, for our society does not offer much guidance.

Those who are religious may draw strength from their faith, but the rest of us find ourselves on a desperate quest for meaning in a world that seems hopelessly devoid of it. There are those who turn to the self-help or New Age shelf for answers. Others pledge allegiance to Western “tradition,” in some cases through a return to the classics of art, music, literature, and philosophy, in others through a conservative turn to “timeless” values. Yet others immerse themselves in political action, trying to change the world one step at a time. And a large portion of us bury ourselves in our work, families, relationships, private worries, and television screens so as to avoid the question altogether. Yet it persists: it silently but stubbornly nibbles at the edges of our consciousness.

In this book, I would like to give this voice a fair hearing. And I would like to show that heeding its summons—what I have chosen to conceptualize as the call of our character—is not antithetical to social responsibility, but rather an essential component of our ability to care for others as well as for the world at large. That is, the seemingly personal question of how we are going to live our lives is inherently ethical so that whenever we ask it, we are automatically concerned about our relationship to the complex backdrop of our existence; we are by default interested not only in the self, but also in the self’s attitude toward what surrounds and sustains it. Perhaps most fundamentally, I would like to illustrate that, contrary to what one might expect, our inability to find the ultimate meaning of our lives is not an existential tragedy, but rather an asset of enormous proportions.

By existential, I am not referring to anything too esoteric. I am simply talking about the basic building blocks of human life—about how we go about making pivotal decisions about the contours of our existence. Existential, in other words, is an umbrella term for indicating that we are dealing with the fundamentals of human experience: where we seek meaning and value; what we find important and worthy of our effort; how we meet life’s inevitable challenges, adversities, and bursts of agony; how we respond to the obstacles and opportunities we encounter; how we determine which goals, activities, ambitions, or people warrant our attention and which do not; how we love, hate, or simply ignore those close to us; how and where we find pleasure, enjoyment, fulfillment, or a sense of self-actualization; what satisfies us and what does not; and where (or to whom) we turn when all else fails. According to this account, more or less anything having to do with how we opt (or feel compelled) to live our lives is “existential.” But there is perhaps nothing more so than our questions about why we are here, what we are supposed to accomplish, and where we, in the final analysis, are headed. The question “How should I live?” may seem simple. But in many ways it represents the pinnacle of human endeavors to make sense of their lives as well as of the world in which they struggle to carve out their individual destinies.

2

When I say that our inability to find the ultimate meaning of our lives is an existential asset, I am not trying to trick or frustrate you. Rather, I am trying to shift your perspective so that you come to see that it is precisely the lack of clear-cut answers to life-defining questions that makes human existence so fascinating. For one thing, it is because we do not know what the best way to live is that we keep trying to figure it out; it is because we cannot solve the conundrum of human experience that we feel motivated to give it our best shot. If the meaning of our lives were handed to us on a silver platter, we would quickly lose interest in it. Chances are we might even rebel against it, insisting that there must be something “else” out there. As humans, we are designed to be curious: we are driven to peek over the fence, gaze into outer space, peer into the deepest abyss, wind our way around a barricade, stake our flag on a mountain-top, and investigate what eludes our grasp. We are, in sum, fated to want what we can’t quite have (which is why our neighbor’s grass is always greener). One might in fact argue that desire (wanting what we can’t have) is the motor of human life, so that when desire comes to an end, so does life. Or, to be more precise, life in its innovative, forward-moving form requires the energizing nudge of desire.

This brings us to an interesting observation—namely, that many of the world’s most powerful religions, from Christianity to Buddhism, deem desire highly problematic. In Christianity, the original sin of humankind is the birth of desire (Eve and the apple). In Buddhism, desire is the root cause of pain and suffering. Moreover, the main goal of many strands of Western popular spirituality is to get rid of the ego and its selfish desires. But why should this be? Why does spirituality so often take the shape of trying to extinguish desire? Why is religiosity routinely accompanied by a revulsion toward desire?

One obvious reason is that desire tends to lead to gluttony. We don’t always know where the line between satisfaction and greediness resides. And even when we do, we may find it hard to keep ourselves from crossing that line. Once our desire is in full swing, arresting its momentum can be virtually impossible, so that we never have enough of what we want: we want more food even though we have just had dinner; we want more money even though we have plenty of it; we want a bigger house even though our current one is spacious enough; we want more books even though our study is overflowing with ones we haven’t had time to read. And we definitely want more love. No matter how much affection we get, we cannot quite seem to get enough of it. There is an endlessness to desire that is difficult to manage or curtail, which is why it is sometimes easier to kill it altogether than to temper its voraciousness; it is easier to slay the beast than to tame it. What many spiritual approaches have figured out is that the best way to restrain desire is to starve it to the point that it no longer has enough strength to raise its insatiable head.

In this restraint, spirituality finds a strange bedfellow in Western rationalism, which also aims to divest human life of the excesses of passion. From the tenets of scientific objectivity to disinterested principles of justice, rationalism relies on the notion that we must be able to expunge desire from our lives at those moments when we make decisions about true or false, right or wrong.² Desire, in short, is the enemy of both clear-headedness and evenhandedness. It muddles our judgment, making us see only what we want to see so that our knowledge claims cannot be trusted. And, even worse, it elevates those we love to a special status so that our ethical choices (about who should live and who can be left to die, who should be respected and who can be mistreated, who should receive assistance and who can be neglected, and so on) lose their impartiality, thereby becoming more or less useless. After all, an ethics that does not apply equally to everyone hardly merits being called an ethics.

I don’t disagree with this view. But I would like to complicate the matter by raising three interrelated points. First, desire always has a way of snaking its way back into our lives so that the more we try to ignore, repress, or get around it, the more it tends to gain in intensity; the starvation diet all too easily generates uncontrollable binges so that, for instance, religious asceticism slides into the fanaticism of holy war. Second, desire’s capacity to cloud our judgment is perhaps never as strong as when we pretend that it is not there; there is nothing that corrupts scientific or ethical results more than the claim that we are being objective when we in fact are not. Third, as much as science and justice defend against desire, they also need its vitalizing current to progress: objectivity devoid of passion may be the goal of both science and justice, but without passion there would be no movement toward this goal. The most groundbreaking scientists and lawmakers understand this, as do those politicians, leaders, educators, writers, painters, actors, activists, and other shapers of culture who have “vision” along with common sense. Or, to state the matter in a way directly applicable to this book’s argument, desire is absolutely indispensable for the augmentation of our character.

3

But what does it mean to talk about “character” in the first place? The term easily brings to mind an image of a deep truth that makes a given person who he or she is. We tend to think of a person’s character as his or her authentic self. And we often believe that this authenticity has been buried out of sight, perhaps because the person in question is somehow ashamed of it or because it has been forced into hiding by the hostilities and pressures of the external world. There is, in other words, a crucial distinction between our public “persona” and our “character,” between our socially conformist (obedient) self and the singular (potentially rebellious) core of our identity. On this view, the existential task of each of us is to unveil our personal truth so that we can finally release our character from its prison cell; our mission is to free our suffocating essence from beneath the false (superficial) self-presentations we display to others. Through self-interrogation, we are supposed to become better attuned to the messages of our interiority so that we can learn to differentiate between our true desires and those that merely support our public roles (in the sense of being socially expected and encouraged). The hope here is that we gradually develop the ability to stay faithful to our true desires even when this costs us some of our social standing; the hope is that we come to respect the call of our character even when doing so complicates our lives.

I agree with much of this description, with one notable proviso. I do not believe that our character is a fixed core of being that once and for all dictates who we are. “Authenticity,” in my opinion, is not a function of specific personality traits or attributes, but rather a mode of living and relating to the world; it is not some sort of a permanent truth of our being, but rather a matter of how we enter into the continuous process of transformation that characterizes human life. From this perspective, the quest for authenticity is less an attempt to liberate a hidden kernel of our being from some underground dungeon than a commitment to promote dimensions of ourselves that are still mere potentialities. It is less a question of closing the gap between our false self and the mysterious essence of our repressed character than of bridging the chasm between our current reality and what we have the potential to become.

To be sure, one might posit that pursuing the mysterious essence of our character is the same thing as pursuing our highest potential. But there is a difference in that the first of these approaches presupposes a ready-made and immutable truth of being that is merely a little hard to see (or interpret correctly), whereas the second assumes that our personal truth, and therefore our character, is always in the making; it assumes that our character can never be definitively named for the simple reason that it is continuously in the process of materializing or—as philosophers like to put it—of “becoming.” That is, although our character can certainly be “cultivated” in the sense that it can be raised to a more complex expression (actualized on a more mature level), it is never “done.” It is endlessly deferred, which is just another way of saying that it is never fully realized.

This is not to deny that we have latent qualities that can be profitably rescued from repression and brought into the light of day. It’s just that these qualities do not ever congeal into a stable essence that would determine our character for all times to come. They are merely one component of a mobile and always slightly incomplete private reality. This is why I prefer to talk about authentic existential paths rather than about authentic personalities. Whereas the notion of an authentic personality remains bogged down in the idea of an innate self that never changes, the notion of an authentic existential path caters to the idea of a distinctive spirit (or even a “style”) that makes us who we are—that lends our character its idiosyncratic uniqueness—without arresting us in a rigid definition of who we are supposed to be.

This unique spirit is what renders each of us unexchangeable and irreplaceable so that it is impossible to mistake, let alone substitute, one person for another; it explains why, to return to the words of Bernard Williams, “[s]ome things are in some real sense really you, or express what you are, and others aren’t.”³ Furthermore, it has a historical awareness that recognizes that our past has shaped our present and that our present will impact our future. It makes each of us “us” while simultaneously acknowledging that who we are shifts over time, so that although there may be some continuity between our spirit at the age of sixteen and our spirit at the age of seventy-eight, it is also obvious that this spirit goes through many modifications during the decades that separate immaturity from maturity. If it did not, we would not be capable of cultivating our character; we would not be able to learn from our mistakes, add emotional density to our relationships, or acquire a more nuanced understanding of what really matters to us in life.

4

I have already hinted at the idea that our desire offers an excellent clue to which things are “really” us and which aren’t, for some of our desires come much closer to staying faithful to our spirit than others. If desire is the motor of human life, as I suggested earlier, then no two motors are exactly alike. Some are slower than others; some take time to warm up, whereas others are ready to go at full speed in a matter of seconds. Likewise, where our desire finds satisfaction is highly personal, so that what intrigues us might bore others and vice versa. Once again, this does not mean that our desire is fixed for life—that it is not capable of finding new objects. But insofar as there is a degree of consistency to our spirit, there is also a degree of consistency to our desire so that some things are better at fulfilling our cravings than others. I am not talking here about preferring chocolate ice cream over vanilla, or about liking younger men more than older ones, though these things can also be important. Rather, I am talking about the enigmatic specificity of desire that urges us to follow certain life directions rather than others—that repeatedly induces us to take certain kinds of actions rather than others. I return to this specificity in chapter 3. For now, it is important to realize that when we cannot find a way to honor this specificity—when our satisfactions do not match the uniqueness of our desire—we risk losing our vitality; we risk feeling that our lives have ceased to be meaningful.

Many people these days complain that they do not feel fully alive—that they do not feel sufficiently attached to the world or to their own lives. They complain about a kind of deadness of soul or a dreadful sluggishness of spirit.⁴ They go through the motions of life and may even accomplish a great deal in terms of professional ambitions or solid relationships, yet something is missing. There is an underlying futility to their existence that makes them feel “fake” or not fully “present” in their skins. Much of the time, they sense that the edition of themselves they display to the world and even to themselves is a hollow shell, front, mask, or cloak that may sometimes even dazzle but does not ultimately bring fulfillment. Sometimes this feeling of unreality is physical, having to do with a profound disconnection from one’s bodily actuality. Other times it is psychological and emotional so that even though one may have many thoughts and sentiments, these thoughts and sentiments seem to be separated from the self by some sort of a translucent barrier. They are there, but they are not linked to any real passion. They do not feed the spirit, but rather alienate the self from an authenticity of experience.

This disconnect makes it all the more noteworthy that so many of us are accustomed to approach our lives with a sensible practicality stripped of the disorienting (irrational) impact of desire. We are trained to mistrust desire not only in those areas of life, such as science and justi...