The Force of Character: And the Lasting Life

Character Is Not a Moral Achievement but an Aesthetic Fate

Hillman opens The Force of Character with a deceptively simple reframing: “Aging is no accident. It is necessary to the human condition, intended by the soul.” This sentence does real philosophical work. It refuses both the biomedical narrative (aging as entropy to be resisted) and the spiritual-growth narrative (aging as ascent toward wisdom). Instead, Hillman proposes that the decades past sixty exist because character demands them — the soul requires that long last of life to complete its image. The move is vintage Hillman: he seizes a phenomenon everyone experiences and relocates it from biology to aesthetics, from geriatrics to imagination. Heraclitus’s fragment — “Character is fate” — serves not as epigraph but as thesis. Against Freud’s “anatomy is destiny” and Napoleon’s geography, Hillman places character as the governing force, the Aristotelian enérgeia that patterns the body even as the body deteriorates. This is not optimism; it is ontological insistence. The old body becomes, in Hillman’s vision, “like images on display that transpose biological life into imagination, into art.” The physical dysfunctions of aging — repetition, drying up, muddled agitation, heightened irritability — are not failures but revelations, the soul’s form pressing through thinning material the way a sculptor’s armature shows through worn plaster. Where Jung in Memories, Dreams, Reflections described his late-life experience as becoming “unfamiliar with myself,” Hillman reads this not as cognitive decline but as the porousness that comes when character has finally exceeded identity.

The Body’s Decay Is the Soul’s Finishing School

The central section of the book, “Leaving,” constitutes Hillman’s most original contribution. Twelve short chapters take individual symptoms of aging — insomnia, memory loss, loss of libido, gravity’s sag — and systematically reread them as instruments of character formation. This is not metaphorical consolation. Hillman argues that “character learns wisdom from the body,” that short-term memory loss, for instance, strips away the trivial accretions of daily life and forces the psyche back into its long-term mythic structures. Waking at night becomes the soul’s vigil; heightened irritability reveals the old person’s refusal to tolerate falseness, an aesthetic intolerance rather than a neurological one. The method here parallels and extends what Hillman accomplished in Re-Visioning Psychology (1975), where he attacked ego psychology’s literalism. But The Force of Character is more embodied, more concrete. Where Re-Visioning worked via negativa against abstractions like “self” and “ego,” this book works through the body’s own decomposition. The parallel to Jung’s alchemical writings is instructive: just as the nigredo in alchemy is not mere destruction but the necessary putrefaction that releases the anima from dense matter, so Hillman treats bodily aging as the dissolution that exposes character’s irreducible form. The Aristotelian scaffolding is explicit — soul as form of the body, enérgeia as the activity natural to that form — but Hillman gives Aristotle’s concept an imagistic density that the Philosopher never attempted. When Hillman writes that “aging deliteralizes biology just when we are most enslaved by it,” he articulates the exact moment where depth psychology parts company with every wellness ideology: the symptom is not the enemy of meaning but its carrier.

What Is Left Is Not Memory but Image — and Image Is Force

The book’s third movement, “Left,” makes the boldest claim: what survives a person is neither the body in the grave nor the soul bound for theological destinations, but character as “an independent configuration” of images that continue to act upon the living. Hillman describes how a deceased parent’s character “goes on unfolding” — appearing in dreams, flashbacks, habitual gestures one suddenly notices in oneself. These images “show surprising autonomy,” arriving “uninvited right in the middle of a choice, whispering advice, disapproval, criticism.” This is not sentimental reminiscence. Hillman is describing the ancestral function of character: the way the dead remain psychologically active forces. The idea resonates powerfully with Jung’s concept of the ancestral psyche and with what Edward Edinger, in Ego and Archetype, called the transpersonal dimension of psychic images — the recognition that certain images carry authority beyond the personal ego’s jurisdiction. But Hillman pushes further than either Jung or Edinger by dissolving the boundary between person and fiction: “character dissolves into stories about character,” and it is precisely this fictive quality that grants it lasting power. The image, not the literal person, is what lasts. This positions The Force of Character as Hillman’s most sustained engagement with what he elsewhere called soul-making — the transformation of raw event into imagined experience that gains depth, beauty, and staying power.

The Incorrigible Anomaly as the Signature of Soul

Hillman’s fiercest polemic runs against moral conceptions of character — the tradition from William Bennett’s Book of Virtues through the character-education movement. “A ‘bad’ character could refer only to an utterly empty one,” Hillman writes, “a person with no distinguishing characteristics whatsoever, innocent of qualities, a blank.” Moral strenuousness, in this reading, actually obscures character by replacing its idiosyncratic image with generic virtue. The persistence of “incorrigible anomalies, those traits you can’t fix, can’t hide, and can’t accept” is not pathology but the force of character itself. This directly inverts the therapeutic goal shared by CBT, positive psychology, and most self-help: the elimination of unwanted traits. Hillman’s position is closer to the tragic vision found in Sophocles — and to Jung’s late insistence that the shadow is not to be overcome but recognized as constitutive of wholeness. The Socratic tradition Hillman claims here is not the Socrates of rational self-improvement but the Socrates of the Apology, who insisted that the unexamined life is not worth living precisely because examination reveals what cannot be changed.

For anyone entering depth psychology today, The Force of Character accomplishes something no other book in the tradition attempts: it gives aging — the one universal human experience that psychology has ceded almost entirely to medicine — back to the soul. It provides not comfort but an imagistic framework dense enough to hold the full weight of the body’s decline without explaining it away. In a culture that oscillates between heroic denial of aging and morbid submission to it, Hillman offers a third path: the aesthetic apprehension of one’s own character as it finishes itself into an image that will outlast the life that bore it.