Character - is a core mental property of a person, which affects all his actions and actions, a property on which, above all, depends the activity of a person in various life situations.
In other words, giving the definition of character, it is possible to tell that it is a set of properties of the person, defining typical ways of its reaction to life circumstances.
The character should be understood not as any individual-psychological peculiarities of a person, but only as a set of the most expressed and relatively stable features of a person, typical for a given person and systematically manifested in his actions and deeds.
According to B.G. Ananyev, the character "expresses the main direction of life and manifests itself in a specific way of action for a given person". The word "character" in Greek means "sign", "peculiarity".
Very often the character is understood as something that almost coincides with the personality or differs from the personality by the criterion that the whole individual belongs to the character, and the personality is only a common one. We had such views in the 40's, 50's and 60's. In fact, this is not the case. There is such a joking typology, which is given in one of his books by B.S. Bratus: A good man with a good character, a good man with a bad character, a bad man with a good character and a bad man with a bad character. From the point of view of common sense, such a typology is true, it works. This means, first of all, that personality and character are not the same, they do not coincide.
The character of a person is characterized not only by what she does but also by how she does it.
The words "characteristic" and "character" do not accidentally have a common root. A well-compiled psychological characteristic of a person, first and foremost, should reveal his character, because it is in him that the most essential features of the personality are manifested. However, as it is sometimes done, it is impossible to replace all the features of a person only with character traits. The concept of "personality" is broader than the concept of "character", and the concept of "individuality of a person as a person" is not exhausted only by his character.
Psychology distinguishes between a person in the broad and narrow sense of the word, and the character is beyond the limits of the person in the narrow sense of the word. Character is understood as such characteristics of a person that describe the ways of his or her behavior in different situations. In relation to character, such concepts as "expressive characteristics" (characteristics of external manifestation, external expression of a person) or "stylistic characteristics" are used. In general, the concept of "style" is quite close in essence to the concept of "character", but about this later. A wonderful illustration of this relationship between personality and character is a small fantastic story by Henry Kuttner "Mechanical Ego". The protagonist of the novel is an American writer and scriptwriter of the 1950s. - He is concerned about the relationship with his employers, his girlfriend and, at the same time, his literary agent, who defends his interests, as well as a number of other problems. Unexpectedly, the robot arrives from the future, traveling through time and shooting and recording "character matrices" from interesting figures of different times and peoples. The hero manages to "drink" this robot with the help of high-frequency current and persuade him to apply some matrixes to it. Further the hero several times leaves and communicates with different people, having imposed at first matrixes of character of Disraeli, the English aristocrat and the politician of last century, then tsar Ivan Terrible, and, at last, Mammoth from the Stone Age. It is interesting to see what changes and what remains unchanged when changing the matrixes. The goals of the hero, his aspirations, his desires, his values remain unchanged. He strives for the same thing, but acts in different ways, showing in one case the refinement and insidiousness of Disraeli, in another case - the straightforwardness and aggressiveness of Mammoth Boy, etc.
Thus, the difference of character from personality in the narrow sense of the word is that the character includes features related to the way of behavior, to the forms in which the same behavior can be dressed in the same content.
Each person differs from others by a huge, truly inexhaustible number of individual features, that is, features that are specific to him as an individual. The concept of "individual features" includes not only psychological but also somatic ("soma" - "body" in Latin) features of a person: eye and hair color, height and shape, development of the skeleton and muscles, etc.
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