ForumGarden

“Man cannot evolve beyond his character—Becker

Becker makes the point that the humanization process is one wherein the individual exchanges the natural organismic propensity for a mysterious symbolic dictation. The child in its very essential formative age is faced with denying that which ‘comes naturally’ for what are symbolic dictates that are far beyond its ability for comprehension. The child’s formation of character is dictated by its need to be somebody in the symbolic world.

The child continual loses battles that s/he cannot comprehend. John Dewey learned long ago that “the child continually loses battles he does not understand¦we earn our early self-esteem not actively but in large part passively, by having our action blocked and re-oriented to the parents pleasure.

In the very essential formative years the child develops character traits that in many cases remain with that individual for the rest of their life.

What is character? Character is the network of habits that permeate all the intentional acts of an individual.

I am not using the word habit in the way we often do, as a technical ability existing apart from our wishes. These habits are an intimate and fundamental part of our selves. They are representations of our will. They rule our will, working in a coordinated way they dominate our way of acting. These habits are the results of repeated, intelligently controlled, actions.

Habits also control the formation of ideas as well as physical actions. We cannot perform a correct action or a correct idea without having already formed correct habits. “Reason pure of all influence from prior habit is a fiction. “The medium of habit filters all material that reaches our perception and thought. “Immediate, seemingly instinctive, feeling of the direction and end of various lines of behavior is in reality the feeling of habits working below direct consciousness. “Habit means special sensitiveness or accessibility to certain classes of stimuli, standing predilections and aversions, rather than bare recurrence of specific acts. It means will.

Britannica specifies that attitude is “a predisposition to classify objects and events and to react to them with some degree of evaluative consistency.

If I consult my inner self I cannot focus upon an attitude but can infer such an attitude based on behavior. If I wish to become conscious of my intuition I can through observation of behavior describe the attitude, which, in turn, allows me to ascertain the nature of my intuition.

When a mother tells her son “you must change your attitude. The son cannot change the attitude directly but the son must change his intuition from which the inferred attitude emanates. This does become a bit convoluted but in essence when we wish to change an attitude we are saying that our intuition must be modified. We can modify intuition only through habit directed by our will.

“Were it not for the continued operation of all habits in every act, no such thing as character would exist. There would be simply a bundle, an untied bundle at that, of isolated acts. Character is the interpenetrating of habits. If each habit in an insulated compartment and operated without affecting or being affected by others, character would not exist. That is conduct would lack unity being only juxtaposition of disconnected reactions to separated situations. But since environments overlap, since situations are continuous and those remote from one another contain like elements, a continuous modification of habits by one another is constantly going on.

My understanding of character and the quotations concerning the nature of character are taken from “Habits and Will by John Dewey

http://www.alexandercenter.com/jd/johndeweyhabits.html.

Novelty

I am sure Dewey would be surprised to read your conclusion if he were still alive.

I'm pleased to see you're reading Ernest Becker. I've brought him up a couple of times and would like the chance to discuss his ideas with someone else who has also read his work. I'm surprised at the bits you've chosen to focus on though. Admittedly I've read more of his later work but I'm not convinced that you are keeping his ideas in context.

To explain what I mean by context, you wrote:

“Man cannot evolve beyond his character—Becker

Becker makes the point that the humanization process is one wherein the individual exchanges the natural organismic propensity for a mysterious symbolic dictation. The child in its very essential formative age is faced with denying that which ‘comes naturally’ for what are symbolic dictates that are far beyond its ability for comprehension. The child’s formation of character is dictated by its need to be somebody in the symbolic world.



you go on to say "In the very essential formative years the child develops character traits that in many cases remain with that individual for the rest of their life." somehow coincides with the Becker statement.

This, to me, tries to imply that Becker reinforces the idea that a personality is formed in childhood and becomes unchangeable when I don't take Becker to be saying that at all. I think that a quick look around at people you have known for some time would directly refute the idea. This concept that people don't evolve borders on the absurd unless you have some other explanation by what you mean by your use of the words.

The Ernest Becker Society describes his views of personality as such:

Becker rejected the idea that an abstract and universal science of individual personality could ever be constructed. Since individual personality as an emotionally charged symbol system is formed within a cultural context and incorporates the symbols of that culture, the study of personality development would always have to be culturally specific.

That hardly coincides with how you have presented his ideas. Perhaps more clarification is required.

koan;518835 wrote: I'm pleased to see you're reading Ernest Becker. I've brought him up a couple of times and would like the chance to discuss his ideas with someone else who has also read his work. I'm surprised at the bits you've chosen to focus on though. Admittedly I've read more of his later work but I'm not convinced that you are keeping his ideas in context.


Yes, I got the name from your reference and I want to thank you for that. Becker is proceeding to develop an argument about a matter that has intrigued me for years and when I found his books I was determined to walk through the whole thing step by step.

I am not prepared yet to state his argument and I suspect it will take me several more weeks. I have purchased three of his books and I have scaned but have not yet bought a fourth one, which is about evil.

Koan

I perhaps have not been clear because I mixed into Becker's ideas the ideas of Dewey. Dewey certainly makes it clear that character can and is constantly changing as a function of habit. I think Becker is focusing upon the development of character that results during the early childhood when the child is passively forming character as a result of running into the demands placed upon the child by the parents. These early character traits are very difficult to uncover let alone change.

I would be more inclined to combine Ernest Becker with Erich Fromm's and Otto Rank's philosophies. He mentions Fromm and Rank a lot and with some admiration. In fact a large portion of the Becker work that I've read consists of him quoting from other writers and assembling them into an order which supports his own ideas.

koan;519931 wrote: I would be more inclined to combine Ernest Becker with Erich Fromm's and Otto Rank's philosophies. He mentions Fromm and Rank a lot and with some admiration. In fact a large portion of the Becker work that I've read consists of him quoting from other writers and assembling them into an order which supports his own ideas.


I get the impression that Becker is a synthesizer of vast domains of knowledge and then takes that synthesis to make a conclusion in "Beyond Alientation" that interests me. Becker goes through a vast effort to conclude that we need an ideal and a assembly of knowledge--a unity of knowledge that then will pose the foundation for a restructuring of society; especially a restructuring of our moral philosophy to prevent our own destruction.