CONSIDER ‘CHARACTER,’ PART III. . .

Gentle reader, last time we briefly explored Knowledge/Knowing, this morning we will briefly explore the second major taproot that nurtures and sustains ‘Character’ – Affect.

At our healthiest we human beings are living paradoxes; we are ‘good and evil,’ we are ‘virtue and vice,’ we are ‘light and darkness.’ We are also ‘rational and emotional.’ At our best we seek to balance our ‘rational and emotional’ dimensions. This balance, or lack of it, powerfully determines to what extent we are ‘moral’ – to the extent that we are people of ‘good character.’

For many reasons we humans tend to believe that we are rational, first. Some of us even deny that we are influenced at all by our emotional dimension. Research, thus far, continues to flip this idea. Our decisions and actions are motivated first by our emotions – our Affect; then we use our intellect to rationalize or justify our decisions and actions. Most of us know folks who lead with their emotions; research suggests that we all do this. We might also have experienced – I know I have – that our emotions can move us in a direction that our rational-self would not choose to go. We can talk a good moral game, we can believe we reason with the angels, AND we are often ‘betrayed’ by our emotions – actually, we simply confirm that we are fully human beings who are motivated by, at times driven by, our emotions.

On the positive side, our emotions provide us an energy that our rational dimension does not possess. We can also use our Knowledge/Knowing (our intellect) to help monitor and moderate our emotions. Moral human-beings learn to balance ‘habits of the head’ and ‘habits of the heart;’ this balancing is part of what has come to be known as ‘Character Education’ or ‘Character Development.’

A significant portion of our human development entails developing our emotional capacity whereby we learn to love, to care for ‘the good, the beautiful, and the true.’ Our commitments are also rooted in our emotions and then they are supported by our rational dimension. Consider that we tend to be suspect of the person who is only ‘intellectually committed’ – who is lacking an ‘emotional commitment.’ For example, compliance is not as powerful as ‘buy-in’ and ‘buy-in’ is not as powerful as ‘emotionally owning’ (say, my role, my discipline, my work, etc.). It also appears that our ‘conscience’ is healthy when it is motivated by a balance of the ‘emotional and the rational.’

Finally, for this morning anyway, a healthy development of our ‘Character’ seems to be rooted in healthy ‘self-love’ and ‘self-love’ is rooted in and motivated by our emotional dimension. Our Affect enables us to love ‘the good, the beautiful, and the true’ that resides within us. And to the extent that we are able to do this we are then able to offer our ‘love’ to the other(s).

Affect is also a bridge between Knowledge/Knowing and Behavior. Next time we will briefly explore this third powerful taproot — Behavior.