The Road to Character

by

David Brooks

The Road to Character: Chapter 9: Self-Examination Summary & Analysis

Summary
Analysis
Brooks introduces Samuel Johnson, born in Lichfield, England in 1709. Johnson’s father was a poor bookseller. Johnson contracted tuberculosis as a baby, which left him blind in one eye, deaf in one ear, and gave him smallpox that scarred his face. In an attempt to treat him, doctors cut into his neck glands. The operation went wrong, leaving him physically monstrous with bad scars. In defiance of his physical disabilities, he refused help from others. He also resisted self-indulgence, a trait he felt sick people were prone to.
Samuel Johnson’s poor health and rough physical appearance led him to be hard on himself from a very young age. He was prematurely aware of “life’s essential problem”—that human nature was a mix of good and bad qualities—as he could feel his own tendencies toward self-indulgence and self-involved misery due to his bad health. Early on, he also displayed his determination to conquer his own demons, refusing help from others.
Themes
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Johnson was given a strict, classical education in a school that used physical punishment to discipline its students. All in all, however, he mostly educated himself. He read voraciously through all his father’s books and committed hundreds of passages and authors to memory. At 19, his mother inherited a small amount of money to pay for him to attend Oxford for a year. While there, he was rebellious and lazy, but was recognized as having a brilliant mind.
Johnson was smart, but not in a way that cooperated with educational institutions. He was his own worst enemy when it came to his education, as he was lazy and unfocused. However, his brilliant mind shone through his bad nature. Knowing he’d only have one year at Oxford also fortified his determination to find his own way to virtue through his intelligence and his writing.
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While at Oxford, Johnson became a Christian. He read a book by William Law that made him warier of self-indulgence and convinced him that worldly things don’t satisfy the heart. Knowing that he was smart, he focused on the parable of talents from the Bible and believed that God was strictly watching him to make sure he made use of his abilities.
Johnson put even more faith in his intelligence when he subscribed to Christianity’s belief that worldly things are unsatisfactory. Johnson wanted to confront and escape his bad nature, and he would go on to use writing to attack his vices.
Themes
After one year at Oxford, Johnson returned to Lichfield with no money left. He fell into depression. He appalled everyone because he couldn’t control his body motions, and he had tics and compulsive behaviors. He was so ugly and his behavior so obscene that many people thought he was the village idiot. He tried to teach, but his students didn’t respect him. To many people’s confusion, he married a beautiful woman, Elizabeth Porter, who seemed to understand his inner virtue.
Johnson is an example of how a person’s true virtues transcend their outward appearance. To everyone in town, Johnson appeared to be insane, but in reality, he was shrewdly intelligence and extremely intent on grappling with his divided nature. Johnson could not teach because his students did not respect a man who appeared insane, leaving Johnson once again with writing as his only savior.
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Vice, Virtue, and Self-Confrontation Theme Icon
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In 1737, Johnson moved to London and settled on Grub Street. He scraped by as freelance journalist, writing for anyone and on any subject. In 1738, the House of Commons passed a law that forbade magazines to publish parliamentary speeches. Johnson wrote and published fictionalized speeches that let the public know what was going on in The Gentleman’s Magazine. The speeches were so eloquent that even the original speakers didn’t protest to them, and often they were misquoted as the speaker’s own words.
Striking out on his own, Johnson became a freelance writer, writing others’ projects rather than his own. Because of this, his success as a writer happened under a disguise—he wrote the parliamentary speeches so well that everyone thought they were original. This concealed Johnson’s true excellence as a writer from the public eye for a while.
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Johnson was living an unstable life that depended on whatever flashed through his mind. He had neither steady work nor family. He feared his imagination which confronted him with the demons of jealousy, self-hatred, and false hope. He fought these demons violently. When he wrote, he produced huge amounts of work, but was never proud of any of it. But through writing, he constructed a coherent worldview that gave his character stability and wholeness.
The point of view Johnson constructed in his writing was his only stable attribute. Otherwise, he was in the chaotic state of living day by day. The coherence he constructed through writing resembles the outward nature that Eisenhower built through artifice. These examples suggest that sometimes, a person actually becomes a better version of themselves by constructing an artificial self than they do by expressing their true nature.
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Johnson was part of a community of artists and thinkers who practiced an intellectual form of heroism and studied the great works of the Western canon. He hung out in taverns. In conversation, he would often switch sides in a debate to emphasize the controversy. Similarly, his writing had a conversational style, alternating between point and counterpoint.
Rather than solving controversy, Johnson liked to emphasize it. In this way, Johnson undertook true examinations of things. Rather than proclaiming his views on a matter, he looked at both sides and argued through to a true conclusion.
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Johnson was a dualist, which means he believed paradoxes and contradictions captured life’s true complexity. In whatever he wrote about, he always saw the good linked with the bad. He pursued knowledge through life experience and tested his observations in reality. For instance, when he heard someone drowned in a certain spot in the river, he jumped in to see if he could survive.
Like many of Brooks’s exemplars, Johnson didn’t believe the world was black and white; rather, he believed virtue and vice go hand in hand, even within the human soul. Johnson tested truths through his own experiences, showing that he only consented to objective truths and wouldn’t believe anything without evidence.
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Johnson didn’t believe that politics or social change could solve human problems. He also wasn’t a huge believer in science and let his mind roam over many interests instead of devoting himself to one logical system. He believed that each individual had their own particular complexity and dignity. To him, the biggest human problems were moral problems.
Johnson’s distrust of politics, social reform, and science reveal his determination to figure out his own problems by himself. From a young age. he was unwilling to accept help from others, believing that moral problems were each person’s individual responsibility.
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Today, literature is understood in aesthetic terms, but Johnson saw literature as a force for moral improvement. Although he wrote for money, he strove for the ideal of honest writing. He thought lowly of human nature but was sympathetic to it. Instead of hoping to cure his vices, he learned to live with them instead and tried to relieve the pain they caused.
Johnson believed so fully in “life’s essential problem” (that human nature is both good and evil) that he didn’t seek for cures. Like Frankl, he knew he couldn’t cure his personal suffering, so he decided to bravely confront it and learn to live with it.
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Johnson was known for his shrewd observations about human vice. In his moral essays, he examined pain, and in so doing, removed some of its power. He observed that many vices lead to their own extinction, but that sorrow only leads to more sorrow. He suggested activity as a defense against sorrow. His writing was geared toward planning strategies for confronting one’s weakness. For instance, he used pride to prevent himself from envying someone else.
Johnson tried to demystify many human vices through writing. He would uncover the nature of a vice, and in so doing, destroy some of its power over the human being. Johnson’s method shows that through self-examination, a person can understand the nature of their own vices, reduce the pain of them, and learn to live with them.
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Johnson used rigorous self-examination to transform his life. The essayist Michel de Montaigne was also intent on finding his way toward self-understanding and moral virtue but did it in a different way. Montaigne was raised by a wealthy, loving family on an estate near Bordeaux. His home life was comfortable, but his public servant role was difficult as he attempted to mediate the religious civil wars going on at the time. He planned to study Roman historians and write works on high policy.
Michel de Montaigne’s childhood was starkly different from Johnson’s. Montaigne was raised comfortably with many possibilities open to him and without the burden of poverty. He also had a naturally genial nature, unlike Johnson. Although both men examined themselves honestly through writing, their different upbringings gave them slightly different approaches.
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Happiness vs. Moral Joy  Theme Icon
Over time, Montaigne grew to believe he was living life wrong in some essential way. When he retired, he discovered his mind was fragmented, skipping from one thought to the next in an erratic manner. He grew depressed and set out to examine his suffering in writing. He realized how hard it was to control one’s mind or body and decided most suffering came from people’s inability to grasp their inner complexity. He used writing as a means for self-integration.
Johnson started low in life and tried to raise himself higher. Montaigne, on the other hand, started high and lowered himself because he felt he was living in a wrong way. While Johnson started out with the knowledge that human nature is incomprehensibly complex, Montaigne came to this realization through examining his suffering.
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Johnson observed things outside himself, gaining self-awareness indirectly. Montaigne, on the other hand, examined himself, hoping to arrive at the true nature of all human beings generally. He constantly revised his manuscripts, giving the impression that his project was easy. In reality, it was an original and intense attempt at self-revelation and honesty. He undertook this project of self-knowledge in privacy, hoping to gain self-respect rather than approval from the public.
Montaigne’s project of self-examination was very original; he directly and honestly examined his mind without any intermediary. Like Adam II, he sought self-respect rather than the public approval that Adam I seeks. In this way, Montaigne was concerned with building his own character, not with fame.
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Montaigne ended his career because he felt the need to cultivate inner depth and self-respect. His cheerful attitude about his faults charms readers; he admits to all his drawbacks and never gets defensive about them. He discovers that the things people strive for are actually fragile and finite. In his writing, he never claims to be right about anything.
Montaigne rejected the career path that the Adam I side of human nature follows. In so doing, he rid himself of the sin of pride. No longer caring whether he obtained external success, he was able to openly accept his faults and his lack of knowledge.
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One day, Montaigne was injured in a horse collision. When he was being carried inside, he tore at his clothes in agony. Once inside, however, he rested and enjoyed the “sweetness” of letting himself go. He realized that no one has to learn how to die, they have only to let nature do it for them. This attitude is reflected in his writing, which always has a calm tone, never giving in to either jubilance or despair.
Montaigne addressed the fear of death by realizing that it could become painless if one simply “let themselves go” to nature. The “sweetness” in letting go is similar to the peace Augustine felt when he surrendered to the will of God. In Montaigne’s view, a person’s own human nature is the force they should submit to.
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Brooks notes that people who are passionate and demand a lot of themselves don’t like Montaigne. They think his attitude is nihilistic, disliking that he avoids conflict, has few aspirations, and is emotionally distant. In his writing, he proposes that low expectations lead to happiness. However, he has a higher vision of good which is based on friendship. Friendship, for Montaigne, with its way of holding all things in common, is at the peak of a perfect society.
Montaigne was not passionate and driven like the other characters Brooks tells of. He was not the type to avidly fight for a cause or devote himself to an institution. This is because, in examining human frailty, he decided not to hold himself to higher standards but rather to lower the standards to his level.
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Vocation and Sacrifice  Theme Icon
Both Montaigne and Johnson were humanists: they used literature to heroically discover the great truths of the human mind. However, Johnson’s approach is about struggle and stern self-demand, while Montaigne’s is about self-acceptance and geniality. Montaigne was a calming presence while Johnson roused people into moral ardor. Brooks expresses that he admires Johnson over Montaigne because, coming from suffering, Johnson had to work harder to mold himself than Montaigne, who was naturally genial.
Montaigne’s lack of passion set him apart from Johnson, even though the two writers had the same approach of honest self-examination. Johnson is more in line with the other exemplars in The Road to Character, in that he started from suffering and struggled to hold himself to high moral standards. He is a testament to Brooks’s notion that a person builds their character from the raw material of their nature. 
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Quotes
In 1746, Johnson signed a contract to put together an English dictionary. He combed through thousands of books to find quotes that contained each definition. He threw himself into the tedious work as a way to calm himself. All in all, he defined 42,000 words and gave 116,000 illustrative quotes. Meanwhile, his wife, whom he called Tetty, fell ill and passed away.
Johnson’s dictionary forced him to be patient, hard-working, and studious, unlike how he was during his one year at Oxford. He enjoyed the tedious process because it had this character-building effect on him: it made him restrain the bad qualities in his nature.
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The dictionary made Johnson famous and financially stable. He spent the rest of his life socializing with artists and thinkers such as Adam Smith and Edmund Burke. He even socialized with lords and high-class figures but mostly lived with the lower class, often taking indigent and oppressed people under his care. He also ghostwrote for other people, such as when he helped an old sailor near death write up his life’s observations on sailing. He also wrote a biography of 378,000 words called The Lives of Poets.
Despite the dictionary’s success, Johnson’s life did not change much. He had become famous, but he still mostly ghostwrote and wrote biographies. This shows that Johnson was sympathetic and more interested in helping others and expressing what they had to say than he was in expressing himself. Similarly, Frances Perkins wrote a biography of Roosevelt but no memoir of herself.
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Johnson never achieved peace like Montaigne did. He was plagued by despair and shame. However, he had great character, and was known as an excellent conversationalist. He developed a consistent point of view in which he turned his adolescent rebelliousness toward confronting his own faults. This self-combat redeemed him, and his brutally honest writing helped him confront his demons. For him, every experience was a chance to either degrade or improve himself.
Johnson was always in a state of turmoil. He had an unkempt nature, but he developed a great character nonetheless because he confronted himself and his vices tirelessly. This shows that no matter how bad a nature a person has, they can always redeem themselves through honest self-combat. Character, Brook’s claims, is about self-confrontation rather than nature.
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Happiness vs. Moral Joy  Theme Icon
Before his death, Johnson recalled a time when his father asked him to man his bookstand in the market, and he had refused out of shame. He returned to the spot of the bookstand in his old age and rebuked himself for his shameful refusal. As his death approached, he increasingly feared damnation. He carried around a note reminding himself not to sin. Before dying, he asked to be taken off opium because he didn’t want to meet God “in a state of idiocy.”
Johnson was never happy—rather, he led a life of suffering, which Brooks earlier describes as a “fearful gift.” This fearful gift put Johnson in a state of constant self-criticism and shame, which magnified his great character. In this way, his character came at the expense of his happiness.
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Happiness vs. Moral Joy  Theme Icon
Johnson is an example of human wisdom. From a chaotic childhood, he developed an integrated way of seeing and judging the world that was more emotional than it was intellectual. Although he was born one of the world’s outcasts, he had a tremendous capacity for hard work and sympathy. He wrestled with himself honestly, saw through his motives and thoughts, and was sensitive to the world around him. When he died, the nation mourned the loss of someone irreplaceable.
Earlier in the book, Brooks described wisdom as knowing what it is one doesn’t know. Johnson knew from a young age that he was flawed, and as a result, he was able to examine himself without bias or illusion. Although he was an outcast, he developed a way of “seeing and judging” that was entirely honest and wise.
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Quotes