What are the traits that you connect with having character? 

In his “Nicomachean Ethics,” Aristotle argues that the final end for human beings is eudaimonia ─ the good life, or as it is most often translated, happiness. In an immortal sentence Aristotle announces, “The Good of man (eudaimonia) is the active exercise of his soul’s faculties in conformity with excellence or virtue, or if there be several human excellences or virtues, in conformity with the best and most perfect among them.”

A few pages later, Aristotle acknowledges that there are in fact two kinds of virtue or excellence, namely, intellectual and moral. Intellectual excellence is simple book learning, or theoretical smarts. Unlike his teacher Plato and his teacher’s teacher, Socrates, Aristotle recognized that a person could know a great deal about the Good and not lead a good life. “With regard to excellence,” says Aristotle, “it is not enough to know, but we must try to have and use it.”

Aristotle offers a table of the moral virtues that includes, among other qualities, temperance, justice, pride, friendliness and truthfulness. What, I ask, are the traits that you connect with having character?  Tolerance, kindness, self-respect, creativity, always make it on to the board, but it is usually only with prodding that courage gets a nod. And yet, courage seems absolutely essential to leading a moral life. After all, if you do not have mettle, you will not be able to abide by your moral judgments.  Doing the right thing often demands going down the wrong side of the road of our immediate and long-range self-interests. It frequently involves sacrifices that we do not much care for, sometimes of friendships, or jobs; sometimes, as in the case with Socrates, even of our lives. Making these sacrifices is impossible without courage.

According to Aristotle, courage is a mean between rashness and cowardliness; that is, between having too little trepidation and too much. Aristotle reckoned that in order to be able to hit the mean, we need practice in dealing with the emotions and choices corresponding to that virtue.  So far as developing grit is concerned, it helps to get some swings at dealing with manageable doses of fear. And yet, even in our approach to education, many of us tend to think of anything that causes a shiver as traumatic.  Consider, for example, the demise of dodge ball in public schools. It was banned because of the terror that the flying red balls caused in some children and of the damage to self-esteem that might come with always being the first one knocked out of the game. But how are we supposed to learn to stand up to our fears if we never have any supervised practice in dealing with the jitters?