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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
by SanderNL 3y ago
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'm fun at parties by the way.
- squarepizza 3y ago> 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.
- akprasad 3y agoFor 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. — Brihadaranyaka Upanishad
- EugeneOZ 3y agooligarchs who were killing, stealing, raping and betraying their whole lives, now are laughing on this joke so hard, on their super-yachts.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- Aerbil313 3y agoThis is exactly why for karma to work an afterlife with proper punishment and rewards need to exist.
- mikrl 3y agoI try to live virtuously in a way Russian oligarchs might laugh at. No yacht, but no enemies either. Never have to worry about novichok or a drone hitting me. It’s not bad at all.
- berniedurfee 3y agoAnd a mostly clean conscience! Not something everyone has to deal with, but some of us do.
- EugeneOZ 3y agoDoesn't matter. their experience disproves that bullshit about "karma", that's all.
- achenet 3y agoIt doesn't. they live in constant paranoia of being assassinated. Their super-yacht comes at the price of their peace of mind.
- lennxa 3y agoI 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.
- barrenko 3y agoAnother way to think about this and the parent comment is that karma is instant.
- SeanAnderson 3y agoReminds me of, "Luck is just when preparation meets opportunity."
- dr_dshiv 3y agoAt my summer camp, we used to hear: “Sow an act, reap a habit Sow a habit, reap a character Sow a character, reap a destiny”
- akprasad 3y agoThat'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.). [1]: https://www.jstor.org/stable/2709649 https://www.jstor.org/stable/2709649 (edit: replaced [1] with a better link.)
- andorov 3y agoSimilar quote from Lao Tzu. I like the inclusion of thoughts -> words -> actions. "Watch your thoughts, they become your words; watch your words, they become your actions; watch your actions, they become your habits; watch your habits, they become your character; watch your character, it becomes your destiny."
- hsjqllzlfkf 3y agoThis is excellent, thank you.
- cyrillite 3y agoThe 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.
- ineedasername 3y agoRarely do people get what they deserve. The idea of Karma only "works" when embedded in a spiritual belief system that adheres to some form of iterative life cycle, e.g., reincarnation.
- dzolob 3y agoThat’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.
- Slow_Hand 3y agoI 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.
- dr_dshiv 3y agoYes. 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.
- Aerbil313 3y agoNo. 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.
- e1g 3y agoWebster [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. [1] https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/word-history-of-character-origins#:~:text=Character%20can%20be%20traced%20back,shared%20by%20the%20Latin%20character https://www.merriam-webster.com/words-at-play/word-history-o...).
- birdyrooster 3y agoI 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.
- renewiltord 3y agoIt's more a poetic association than etymology. That's an all right way to link the two.
- dr_dshiv 3y agoSocrates 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.
- deleted 3y ago[deleted]
- ry4nolson 3y agothis could be a nuance/difference of "a character" of a story and a real person's "character"
- deleted 3y ago
- ly3xqhl8g9 3y agoA 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 https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Stigmergy [2] 2023, Michael Levin, Bioelectric networks. The cognitive glue enabling evolutionary scaling from physiology to mind, https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10071-023-01780-3 https://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s10071-023-01780-3 [3] Michael Levin and Wayne Frasch (2023) From molecular physiology to anatomical form, https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3l8I4gJ6D0w https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=3l8I4gJ6D0w, at 27:32 the hybrid agent frog cells + scientists + AI exploring morphospace.
- FreakLegion 3y agoA 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.
- cbsmith 3y ago> 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.
- epiccoleman 3y agoMy 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.
- runeks 3y ago> Virtue & vice are kind of an arbitrary way to device up those "grooves", and what constitutes virtue or vice varies by context/perspective. Would you care to provide a few examples?
- cbsmith 3y agoSorry for the typeoh in the above. Examples: compassion, loyalty, endurance/perseverance, social/independence, love/hate, trusting, cynicism/optimism, etc.
- tobr 3y agoFunny 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”.
- johnnyworker 3y ago> 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. -- Henry David Thoreau
- tracerbulletx 3y agoThat's pretty interesting, also makes the direct connection to the other use of the word character.
- npsimons 3y agoI'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