Character: The Conceptual Context

Abstract

To define and type a person discursively (by descriptive analysis) as opposed to dramatically (through his/her words and actions) requires a vocabulary capable of dealing with more than just physical attributes. That vocabulary in turn requires a conceptual scheme or grid: that is, some general theory or notion of what the range and nature of these non-physical aspects of person are. The terminology generated by such a notional scheme usually takes the form of antithetical doublets (extrovert/introvert, silly/intelligent, etc), selection from which can then map individual instances onto this grid. That grid, the pre-existent notion of what, in this instance, we call character, governs the way we both see and describe people, and may be likened to the schema posited by the art historian, E.H. Gombrich, for the visual arts.¹ Artists, he argued, do not simply paint ‘what they see’; they see individual objects in terms of ‘schemes’ or conventional visual representations of them, and they reproduce them by adapting or manipulating that scheme. Similarly, our notions of what constitutes ‘character’ are to a large extent culturally determined. The accuracy or otherwise of that cultural scheme itself is probably unverifiable, and is not as important as the use made of it in particular contexts to conduct interesting appraisals or make significant discriminations.