QUALITIES OF TRUE CHARACTER

 WHAT IS CHARACTER?

Character is nature and nurture. It is nature cultured and disciplined, so that natural tendencies are brought under the sway of the moral motive. His natural individuality marks off a man from his fellows by clear and specific differences. But this individuality may be non-moral. To produce character it must be brought under discipline, and organized into the structure of a true moral being.

THE 3 QUALITIES OF TRUE CHARACTER

1. MORAL DISCIPLINE

Moral discipline is also a quality that not only allows a man to bear hardship stoically, but even to actively seek out a rougher, more austere life,one that eschews the kind of indulgence that deprives character of needed training and leads to softness.

We cannot differ as to the need in our national character of those qualities of self-control, of quick and unquestioning obedience to duty, of joyful contempt of hardship, and of zest in difficult and arduous undertakings which, rightly or wrongly, we consider soldierly, which we attribute in such rich measure to our forefathers, and which the moral exigencies of our national task to-day as peremptorily demand. To put these primary and elemental needs as sharply as possible, let us call them discipline and austerity. Our American character needs more of both.

2. MORAL ATTACHMENT

The pursuit of character does not have as its sole end the cultivation of self. Susman notes that it is in fact “a group of traits believed to have social significance and moral quality,” and he found that the most popular quote related to character during the nineteenth century was Ralph Waldo Emerson’s definition of it as: “Moral order through the medium of individual nature.” This is to say that the choices each single person makes influences the world around him, and that the existence of a virtuous society is predicated on the virtue of each of its individual members. Moral attachment means being committed to a set of higher ideals and to acting, and if need be, sacrificing, for the greater good of one’s community. Speer beautifully explains the meaning of this essential quality of character.

3. MORAL AUTONOMY

Character cannot develop in an environment in which ethical decisions are forced upon the individual. Character is a product of judgment, discretion, and choice born from a man's free agency. A decision that is coerced cannot be a moral decision, and thus cannot be a decision of character.

 Character in a classic sense, manifests itself as the autonomy to make ethical decisions always on behalf of the common good and the discipline to abide by that principle.

source: https://www.artofmanliness.com