Characteristics

Overview

About thirty-five pages, written by Thomas Carlyle for the Edinburgh Review and published in 1831, before the works, Sartor Resartus and The French Revolution, that would establish his major reputation, but already displaying the dense, aphoristic, idiosyncratic style and the characteristic diagnostic method that would define his later writing. Characteristics takes its title from its central concern, an attempt to identify the defining symptoms of Carlyle’s own historical moment, and it proceeds by an extended medical analogy that gives the essay its structure and much of its rhetorical force.

Carlyle wrote at a period of genuine intellectual and religious crisis in Britain, as traditional religious certainty faced increasing challenge from historical criticism of scripture, from new scientific findings, and from the general spirit of skeptical inquiry that had been building since the Enlightenment. Rather than celebrating this critical spirit as intellectual progress, in the manner many of his contemporaries did, Carlyle reads it as a symptom of a deeper crisis, and the essay is essentially an extended diagnosis of what he takes to be a civilization in the grip of an illness it mistakes for health.

The argument

The physician’s aphorism. Carlyle opens with a medical observation he extends far beyond its original clinical context: a healthy organ does not announce its own presence to consciousness; we become aware of our stomach, our heart, our limbs only when something has gone wrong with them, so that constant, painful self-awareness of a bodily part is itself evidence of disease rather than of attentive health. Carlyle proposes that this principle applies with equal force well beyond physiology, to institutions, beliefs, and entire civilizations: a genuinely sound society, a genuinely working faith, a genuinely healthy set of institutions, does not spend its energy examining and defending its own foundations, precisely because those foundations are functioning unconsciously and effectively, doing their work without requiring constant conscious attention.

Faith that does not argue for itself. Applying this principle to religion specifically, Carlyle argues that a perfectly healthy faith is not conscious of itself as a set of propositions requiring defense or proof; it operates the way a healthy heart operates, silently, unreflectively, sustaining a person’s life and conduct without becoming an object of constant scrutiny and debate. The endless theological argument, religious controversy, and self-conscious examination of belief characteristic of his own age is, on this account, not evidence of a vigorous religious culture but precisely the opposite, evidence that genuine, working faith has already broken down and been replaced by an anxious, self-aware substitute that must constantly justify itself because it can no longer simply operate.

Symptoms across philosophy, politics and art. Carlyle extends this same diagnostic method across the major domains of his contemporaries’ intellectual life. In philosophy, he finds endless critical self-examination replacing the confident, systematic construction of earlier eras. In politics, he finds constant argument over the proper foundations and justifications of government replacing settled, unreflective institutions that simply functioned. In literature and art, he finds a self-conscious, analytical spirit that he believes has displaced the more spontaneous, unreflective creative power of earlier ages. In each domain, the pattern repeats: what his contemporaries call progress, an increasingly critical, self-aware, analytical relationship to belief and institution, Carlyle reads instead as the accumulating symptomatology of a single underlying disease.

Refusing despair. Having built this diagnosis to what might seem an inevitably pessimistic conclusion, Carlyle turns in the essay’s closing sections to refuse simple despair. The very intensity of the age’s self-conscious suffering, he argues, is itself significant: pain of this kind and this scale is not merely destructive but is characteristic of crisis, the acute, uncomfortable stage through which a genuine cure must pass rather than a permanent condition with no exit. Carlyle suggests that a new faith, a new set of unconsciously held, genuinely functioning convictions, is struggling to be born out of the wreckage of the old certainties that have broken down, though he is notably vague about what form this new faith will actually take, offering the promise of renewal without specifying its content.

Action as the only remedy. The essay’s closing practical counsel, and the point at which Carlyle’s diagnosis turns into something closer to prescription, insists that doubt of any kind cannot actually be resolved through further introspection or analysis, the very activity that produced the sickness in the first place, but only through action. His famous closing precept, to do the duty which lies nearest to hand, proposes that the cure for excessive, paralyzing self-consciousness is not more careful thought about one’s own condition but engaged, practical work in the world, a theme that would become central to Carlyle’s later writing on heroism, labor and the moral value of work.

How to read it

Read the opening medical analogy carefully and test it against your own experience before accepting or rejecting it; Carlyle’s whole argument depends on this analogy actually holding, that unreflective, unconscious functioning is generally a better sign of health than constant self-examination, and it is worth asking how far this really extends from the body to institutions, beliefs and whole societies.

Notice that Carlyle’s diagnosis is considerably clearer and more fully developed than his proposed cure. The essay is far more persuasive as an account of what has gone wrong than as a positive program for what should replace it, and this asymmetry, common throughout Carlyle’s writing, is worth holding onto as you read.

Read this essay as a document of a specific historical crisis in religious and intellectual confidence, the early Victorian period’s struggle with the erosion of traditional certainty, rather than as a general argument against critical thought as such. Carlyle is not opposed to thought or analysis in general; his target is a specific kind of anxious, defensive self-examination that he believes has replaced genuinely confident, working conviction.

Read the closing counsel to do the duty which lies nearest to hand as Carlyle’s characteristic answer to a problem he cannot otherwise fully resolve, and notice how this same emphasis on practical action over further introspection recurs throughout his later, more famous works.

Read this essay alongside Carlyle’s later Sartor Resartus, which develops many of the same themes, the crisis of belief, the search for a new faith to replace the old, at much greater length and through a more elaborate fictional frame.

Questions it raises

• Does Carlyle’s medical analogy, that unconsciousness signals health and self-examination signals disease, actually hold up when extended from the body to institutions, beliefs and entire civilizations, or does the analogy break down under that extension?
• Is constant critical self-examination of one’s own beliefs and institutions genuinely a symptom of crisis, as Carlyle argues, or can a society examine its own foundations rigorously while remaining healthy and functional?
• What would Carlyle’s proposed new faith, born out of the wreckage of old certainties, actually need to look like to count as genuinely unconscious and unreflective rather than simply another self-aware substitute?
• Is doing the duty which lies nearest to hand a genuine remedy for the kind of intellectual and spiritual crisis Carlyle diagnoses, or does it risk becoming an excuse to stop thinking seriously about difficult questions rather than a real solution to them?
• How does Carlyle’s essay read differently depending on whether a reader shares his assumption that the erosion of traditional religious certainty is fundamentally a crisis to be overcome, rather than, as some of his contemporaries argued, a genuine liberation?
• Does the essay’s own highly self-conscious, analytical examination of the problem of self-consciousness create an internal contradiction Carlyle does not fully address?