The Lasting Life
by
James Hillman
 In
our competitive societies, "lasting" has come to mean outlasting.
"I've outlived my father and both grandfathers!" "According to
my doctor, I should have been dead three years ago." "My insurance
company is losing money on me. I've beat my pension plan and cashed in on
Social Security, far more than I ever put in." Surely goodness and mercy
shall follow me all the days of my life, because my life has outlasted the
expectancy curve.
Not only have I defeated my
genetic inheritance, my childhood schoolmates, and the actuaries, I've held
off death itself. Life: a contest with all others and with death, so that
living longer becomes a victory, repeating each year on my birthday that
famous passage from St. Paul: "Death is swallowed up in victory.... O
death, where is thy sting?"
Our experience of aging is so
embedded in numbers of years left to live, as given by longevity tables, that
we can hardly believe that for centuries late years were associated not with
dying but with vitality and character. The old were not mainly thought of as
limping toward death's door, but were regarded as stable depositories of
customs and legends, guardians of local values, experts in skills and crafts,
and valued voices in communal council. What mattered was force of character
proven by length of years. Mortality was associated with youth: stillbirth and
death in infancy; battle wounds, duels, robberies, executions, and piracy; the
occupational hazards of farming, mining, fishing, and of childbirth; family
feuds and jealous rages; epidemics and plagues that carried off populations in
the prime of life. Cemeteries were dotted with the short graves of children.
The intimate coupling of
longevity and mortality, that link which monogamously marries the archetype of
old with the idea of death, takes hold of our minds only in the nineteenth
century, with the advance of demographics. In France, positivist philosophy
promoted the statistical study of populations, which moved death from the
realm of the private and spiritual to that of sociology, politics, and
medicine. The statistics on life span gave evidence of a falling death rate,
which was read to indicate the progress of civilization. Society as a whole
could prove its improvement by advancing longevity figures, and longevity
could be advanced by new medical methods (vaccination, pasteurization,
sterilization) and programs of public health (potable water; sewage treatment;
ventilation).
Demographics took an even
firmer grip when Emile Durkheim, one of the fathers of sociology, analyzed
suicide statistics, showing that each district in France had a suicide rate
that hardly varied from decade to decade. A predictable number of people in
any given district could be expected to commit suicide in the coming year.
When the incidence of suicide dissolves into the sociology of class,
occupation, heredity, religion, age, and so on, then the act of suicide
becomes a fact of sociology quite apart from the psychology of the individual
who commits it. The statistical fact becomes a societal force, dooming a
definite percentage in each district to die by their own hands. Data become
destiny.
The life expectancy curve
carries a force of its own. If you place yourself on it as a female teenager,
say, you may have a life expectancy of at least seventy. At sixty, you find
your expected longevity has risen; it may now be seventy-eight, or more. Once
you arrive there, the statistical tables may place your life term at
eighty-six. And so on. Even if you reach one hundred, actuarial statisticians
speak of the "conditional probability" that there are a few more
months or years ahead. Statistics confirm that the longer you last, the longer
you will last, so that with each day of aging you may expect another day on
the "actuarial curve to infinity". The curve cannot predict when
your longevity will end; instead, it seems to bear you interminably forward.
Rather than carrying you toward death and revealing the bare fact of your
mortality, the curve functions as a statistical annunciation of immortality!
If "lasting" means
more than outlasting statistical expectations, then what is it that lasts?
What is the "it" that persists and endures? What could possibly last
through all the events of a long life, remaining constant from start to
finish? Neither our bodies nor our minds stay the same; they cannot avoid
change. What does seem to hold true all along and to the end is an enduring
psychological component that marks you as a being different from all others:
your individual character. That same you.
But what does "same"
mean? I have changed so much and am so different, and yet despite all changes
something continues to assure me of being the same. I could lose my social
identity, my physical configuration, and my personal history, yet something
will remain the same, outlasting these radical vicissitudes.
If sameness is the
philosopher's term for what we experience as our character, we will have to
discover more about this deep principle "sameness" -- what it is and
how it works. No small job, since philosophers have been thinking about
sameness ever since Plato made the Same and the Different two of the most
basic ideas to enter into the existence of things, form our thinking about
them, and even make them possible.
Philosophers play with the
riddle of sameness. Take, for instance, your favorite pair of wool socks. You
get a hole in a heel and darn it. Then you get a hole in the big toe -- and you
darn that, too. Soon the darned holes are more of the sock than the original
wool. Eventually, the whole darned sock is made of different wool. Yet it's
the same sock. In relation to its looks and in relation to its partner on your
other foot, it is still the same sock. They go out together and lie together
in the drawer; and even in relation to itself, its identity, it is the same
sock, though it is different.
Here philosophers can apply
Plato's archetypal ideas of Sameness and Difference. The sock is entirely
different from the original as far as the wool goes, but its shape has
remained the same. It never becomes a different sock, despite the radical
material alteration. Its material is different; its form is the same.
By "form",
philosophers mean the look of the sock, by which you recognize it as a sock.
(Tube socks raise conceptual problems!) When can a sock not look like a sock
and still be a sock? Philosophers also mean by "form" the sock's
function as a match to its partner and to your foot (form following function).
A third meaning interests us most: form as the active principle governing the
way the new wool integrates into the old sock. Form is thus visible shape, and
the shaping force of the visible. Do you see that we are getting closer to the
notion of character?
A human body is like that
sock, sloughing off its cells, changing its fluids, fermenting utterly fresh
cultures of bacteria as others pass away. Your material stuff through time
becomes altogether different, yet you remain the same you. Not one square inch
of visible skin, not one palpable ounce of bone is the same, yet you are not
someone different. There seems to be an innate image that does not forget your
basic paradigm and that keeps you in character, true to yourself. The idea of
DNA seems too tight to hold the psychic dimensions of our unique image. To
embrace our complexity we need a larger idea.
Some Greek philosophers and
thinkers of the medieval church attributed this consistency in the midst of
alteration to the idea of form. Some further claimed that form individualizes.
What causes each person and each thing to be different from other persons and
things is the active force of form. No two forms can be alike. We are each
maintained in our specific individual image by the principle of form. To use
one of William James's suggestive terms, we are each an "each". As
"each"es, we are unique because each of us has, or is, a specific
character that stays the same.
It is most important here to
grasp that we are unique qualitatively. You have your style, your history, a
set of traits, and a destiny. You are essentially different from me by virtue
of the lasting sameness of each of our individualized characters.
If the difference between you
and all others were defined by physics, logic, politics, economics, and law,
we would each be a numerical "one" without any necessary
characteristics. The law says, "All are equal under the law";
politics says, "One person, one vote"; physics says, "No two
bodies can occupy the same place at the same time"; economics puts all
eaches into categories -- consumers, workers, owners, employers. When each one
is interchangeable with any other one, individuality requires nothing more
than a different ID number. Since uniqueness depends on the qualitative
differences forming the consistent sameness of your individuality, the idea of
character is necessary to keep us different from one another, and the same as
ourselves.
Let's go back to the sock. If
what outlasts the wool is the form, then a preoccupation with physical decay
-- with where the sock is wearing thin -- misses a crucial point. Sure, the
sock is showing holes, and stitching up its weak places keeps it functional.
But our minds might more profitably be thinking about the mystery of this
formal principle that endures through material substitutions. Surely the
lasting strength of character counts as much as the durability of wool.
Sometimes the stitchings and
darnings don't take. Medicine watches carefully for rejection after
transfusions, organ transplants, and bone grafts. The formal principle that
guarantees sameness despite the introduction of exotic material is named by
medicine the immune system. This system accepts or rejects replacements in
accord with its own innate code. The new materials must be integrated into the
integrity of the person. Or, as they might have said in church debates nine
hundred years ago, the material must be accommodated to the form. It must fit
my innate image. The new part -- kidney, hip, or knee -- must become my knee. The
new wool must become me.
What converts this
"it" into "me"?
Modern psychology, regardless
of school, understands the assimilation of events into a "me" to be
a function of character. The schools of psychology use other words for
character, such as "personality," "ego," "self,"
"behavioral organization," "integrative structure,"
"identity," "temperament." These substitute terms fail to
characterize the styles of assimilation that are the hallmarks of
individuality. We each respond to the world differently, handling our lives in
a particular style. The word "character" implies a bundle of traits
and qualities, habits and patterns; it requires descriptive language such as
we find in character references, letters of recommendation, primary school
report cards, scripts and novels, performance criticism, obituaries.
"Ego," "self," "identity" are bare abstractions,
telling us nothing of the human being they supposedly inhabit and govern. At
best, these words refer to the unifying sameness of people while neglecting
their unique differences.
It is refreshing to discover
that some of the oldest and most basic ideas of philosophy -- Same and
Different, Form and Matter -- are actually at work in our daily lives, even in
our bodies. I find it a delight that these old-fashioned woolly principles are
immediately practical and can be discussed as bodily facts. Why must we be
exhorted to build character and strengthen character when character is already
a given, the staying power that keeps us who we are and holds our bodies to
their form? Imagine the body as an ancient philosopher, the body as a place of
wisdom -- an idea already announced in the book titles of two medical
specialists, Walter Cannon and Sherwin Nuland.
Cannon in the 1930s and Nuland
in the 1990s both say the body's physiology knows what it is doing. There is a
wisdom at work. The idea of character makes more understandable this governing
wisdom. Moreover, if we regard character as more than a collection of traits
or an accumulation of habits, virtues, and vices, but rather as an active
force, then character may be the forming principle in the body's aging. Aging
then becomes a revelation of the body's wisdom.
I am emphasizing form in the
organization of matter for two reasons. First, to counter the hustlers of
materialism, who ask us to buy the idea that we are complex pieces of
biotechnology, best compared with the newest computer chips. Whatever form we
show results from underlying biogenetic impulses. Form can be reduced to
matter; it obeys matter's laws and is shaped by genetic material. Since matter
does the forming, there is no need for a separate idea of form.
A succinct, well-written --
and fantastic -- passage from one of the world's leading cognitive scientists
represents a host of similar statements in similar books.
The mind is a system of organs
of computation, designed by natural selection to solve the kinds of problems
our ancestors faced in their foraging way of life.... The mind is what the
brain does; specifically, the brain processes information, and thinking is a
kind of computation.... The various problems for our ancestors were subtasks
of one big problem for their genes, maximizing the number of copies that made
it into the next generation.
Why do I call this fantastic?
Because this account of foraging ancestors, genes facing problems, and natural
selection as deus ex machina leaves the big questions begging. Moreover, the
statement is set down axiomatically, not as myth or as reductive
simplification, but as self-evident truth, and that allows Pinker to go on
blithely saying that psychology is engineering.
To reduce psychology to
engineering brutalizes the meaning of form. My shape is more than how I'm put
together. We all know that the way to last is to stay in shape, but
"staying in shape" means more than working out. Do diet, exercise,
and bed before midnight satisfy the needs of your shape? The first meaning of
"shape" is "create", which relies upon a force that is
invisible and yet makes each creature visible in its own style. The blanket
term "information processing" covers over the history of subtle
thought carried in the idea of form.
My second reason for insisting
upon form is to keep a psychological viewpoint when addressing psychological
questions. After all, life to the one who lives it is harassed by
psychological perplexities for which biochemistry and brain physiology offer
little comfort. Why live, why live long and with the probability of biological
impairment are questions irrelevant to these sciences. Even should they remove
the impairment and prolong the years, the "why" questions remain
which no "how" answers can satisfy.
This
article is excerpted from the book:
 The
Force of Character
by James Hillman.
Excerpted by permission
of Random House, a division of Random House, Inc. All rights reserved. ©1999. No part
of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing
from the publisher.
Info/Order this book
About The
Author
James
Hillman is a psychologist, scholar,
international lecturer, pioneer psychologist, and the author of more
than twenty books, including The
Soul's Code: In Search of Character and Calling, We've
Had a Hundred Years of Psychotherapy and the World's Getting Worse, Re-Visioning
Psychology, Healing
Fiction, The
Dream and the Underworld, and Suicide
and the Soul. A Jungian analyst and originator of post-Jungian
"archetypal psychology," he has held teaching positions at
Yale University, the University of Chicago, Syracuse University, the
University of Chicago, and the University of Dallas, where he co-founded
the Dallas Institute of Humanities and Culture.
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