Out of Character: Modernism, Vitalism, Psychic Life, by Omri Moses

Abstract

Out of Character: Modernism, Vitalism, Psychic Life, by Omri Moses. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2014. 296 pages. In Western cultural history, the concept of character--in both psychological and literary contexts--has always maintained an ideal of consistency. Since Aristotle, the moral conception of good has been defined by its capacity for stability, predictability, and consistency of habit. Aristotelian ethics grounded in the notion of character as one's power to legislate through self-control or strength of (Moses 356), thereby presupposing fixed self or will inherent to character in the first place. So too, in the wake of psychology and psychoanalysis, does our current understanding of character maintain that we have an essential identity or set of personality traits that determines who we are and how we will act in any given situation. If we deviate from these established convictions, we are said to have failed to be true to ourselves, risking both social censure and misunderstanding (1). In Out of Character: Modernism, Vitalism, Psychic Life, Omri Moses attempts to sever the notion of consistent character from moral integrity. Why, he asks, in both moral and literary conceptions of character, do we root out and extol secret unmovable centers guiding and motivating behavior (2)? Why do we demand that character conform to set of paradigmatic beliefs and principles grounded in both an individual and social past? Through an extensive engagement with three modernist writers--Henry James, Gertrude Stein, and T. S. Eliot--Moses constructs an alternative approach to the concept of character, one based on an openness to circumstances and social relationships rather than on fixed identity defined by its resistance to external flux. These modernist writers, despite their reputation for offering an impersonal and antipsychological portrait of character in their fiction and poetry, are for Moses those most interested in exploring an understanding of that does not consist of an underlying character. This does not mean, however, that James, Stein, and Eliot rejected the notion of character altogether. For them, character consists of more dynamic notion of relational selves whose ethical lives are grounded not in consistency but in the ability to improvise and adapt to complex and shifting communal world (2). For Moses, vitalism the framework through which these modernists conceived of character as an ever-emerging set of attitudes and attributes that develop and change according to the unexpected circumstances of daily life. Defining vitalist philosophy as the focus on emergent processes that develop in unpredictable ways and sustain themselves by means of their internal logic (3), Moses draws together the evolutionary theories of Charles Darwin with the work of Henri Bergson, William James, and Friedrich Nietzsche, in order to show how these thinkers inspired modernist revaluation of character based on the affective responses of lived experience. Bergson, James, and Darwin in particular shared a concern with evolving living processes that takes complexity and open-endedness of life as conceptual starting point (4). For both vitalist psychology and evolutionary science, Moses argues, the open-endedness and complexity of life revolve around the nature of affect: at once the we prepare to take in change and the we experience that change as related to ourselves (60). Feelings or emotions act as our means of registering given experience and therefore cannot be separated from the conditions in which they arise. To have feeling, claims Moses, is to be affected by thing, to have it work on us in certain way (63). The relation between feeling and thing circumstantial, and the ways in which the thing works on us can only unfold over time, an indication that our orientation toward the world cannot be foreclosed through given disposition or predetermined attitude. …