From the outset of The Road to Character, David Brooks proposes that there are two sides to human nature: he calls the first side “Adam I,” a person’s external, career-oriented side. He calls the second side “Adam II,” the internal side of a person that develops character traits such as humility. Adam I believes people are born with talents they should maximize, while Adam II believes a person contains both strengths and weaknesses, and that a person builds character through confronting their faults. Adam I holds that individual achievement leads to reward, while Adam II follows the inverse logic that one must surrender themselves to find themselves. Therefore—having different aims and different logics—the two sides seem to be completely at odds. However, Brooks contends that nurturing Adam II does not compromise Adam I. Rather, when one nurtures inner character, they experience “moments of catharsis when outer ambition comes into balance with inner aspiration.” In other words, when a person develops Adam II, their two sides end up harmonizing. Through the paradox of human nature’s two “Adams,” Brooks argues that by developing inner character, a person doesn’t just balance out their external side but overcomes the inner-outer distinction altogether.
Brooks distinguishes two opposite sides of human nature, “Adam I” and “Adam II.” Roughly speaking, these sides constitute a person’s inner life and outer life. Adam I encompasses a person’s external virtues and successes, such as their career, accomplishments, and assets, while Adam II encompasses their inner virtues of character, such as their humility and kindness. Furthermore, these two sides hold different views of human nature: while Adam I believes in the inherent talents of a person, Adam II believes that human nature is flawed as well as endowed with gifts. This causes Adam I to seek success through maximizing strengths, while Adam II seeks character through triumphing over weaknesses. Lastly, these two sides follow different logics: Adam I’s logic is that through the expression of one’s unique gifts, external things are achieved, and a person climbs “up the ladder of success.” By contrast, Adam II holds a paradoxical logic that a person must sacrifice a life of desire in order to attain what is truly of worth—constant moral improvement. This person succeeds in triumphing over themselves and building character.
When a person focuses on their Adam I side, they damage the Adam II side of their nature. If a person only develops Adam I, they become a “shrewd animal” who turns everything into a game. Since they hold that external success is everything, they become adept at cultivating skills they can use to compete for superiority in their career but lose sight of what gives their life an actual meaning from within. Furthermore, the Adam I person denies themselves deep relationships. Because they are so focused on the traits that make a good impression in the career world, they judge other people based on ability as opposed to worth. Their community crumbles because they believe in their own talents and don’t think they need support from others. Ultimately, because of their superficial focus, a person who is just an Adam I is not who they really want to be. A “humiliating gap opens up between [their] actual self and [their] desired self,” meaning that they live a life of partial satisfaction in which the self they actually want is always out of reach. Therefore, a person can never be satisfied through their Adam I nature.
However, if a person focuses on their Adam II nature, they achieve satisfaction by integrating inner character with outward action. First of all, “only Adam II can experience deep satisfaction,” because it knows that the happiness Adam I aims at is insufficient. Adam II goes deeper than happiness by striving for “moral joy”: the conquering of one’s weaknesses in order to lead a moral life. Also, Adam II is all-encompassing of a person, whereas Adam I is not. When one does not focus on their Adam II side by building their character, “not only [their] inner life but also [their] external life will eventually fall to pieces.” This suggests that Adam II and Adam I are not of equal importance to a person’s true character, but rather that Adam II actually supports Adam I’s success from within. Ultimately, through cultivating one’s Adam II nature, a person attains harmony between their inner and outer selves. When a person sacrifices the personal happiness that Adam I thirsts after and instead dedicates themselves to being a good person, they experience “the joy of having their values in deep harmony with their behavior.” For instance, it was through sacrificing her comfort and happiness that Frances Perkins dedicated her life to fighting for workers’ rights—something she was morally passionate about. In doing so, she became—outwardly and inwardly—her true self. Therefore, cultivating one’s Adam II nature has the deeply satisfying effect of erasing the inner-outer distinction within them.
Although it at first seems that Adam I and Adam II equally divide human nature, Brooks shows that Adam II is in fact more essential to human nature. He gives evidence to this by showing that if a person simply focused on their Adam II, not only would their external nature take care of itself, but they would cease to be divided in nature at all. This suggests that the Adam I side of human nature was originally just the external consequence of one’s inner character. In recognizing it as external and separating it off from the inner life, people exacerbated the inner-outer distinction and strived for satisfaction insufficiently through the Adam I side alone. The solution to this insufficient satisfaction, Brooks claims, is not to balance out Adam I and Adam II, but instead to focus solely on one’s inner character.
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Inner Life, External Life, and Character ThemeTracker
Inner Life, External Life, and Character Quotes in The Road to Character
To nurture your Adam I career, it makes sense to cultivate your strengths. To nurture your Adam II moral core, it is necessary to confront your weaknesses.
Without a rigorous focus on the Adam II side of our nature, it is easy to slip into a self-satisfied moral mediocrity […] A humiliating gap opens up between your actual self and your desired self.
Character is not innate or automatic. You have to build it with effort and artistry.
Only Adam II can experience deep satisfaction. Adam I aims for happiness, but Adam II knows that happiness is insufficient. The ultimate joys are moral joys.
One sees this in people with a vocation—a certain rapt expression, a hungry desire to perform a dance or run an organization to its utmost perfection. They feel the joy of having their values in deep harmony with their behavior.
Perkins didn’t so much choose her life. She responded to the call of a felt necessity. A person who embraces a calling doesn’t take a direct route to self-fulfillment. She is willing to surrender the things that are most dear, and by seeking to forget herself and submerge herself she finds a purpose that defines and fulfills herself. Such vocations almost always involve tasks that transcend a lifetime.
Eisenhower […] held that artifice is man’s nature. We start out with raw material, some good, some bad, and this nature has to be pruned, girdled, formed, repressed, molded, and often restrained, rather than paraded in public. A personality is a product of cultivation. The true self is what you have built from your nature, not just what your nature started out with.
Like the nation’s founders, [Eisenhower] built his politics on distrust of what people might do if they have unchecked power […] [He] felt in his bones that man is a problem to himself.
Suffering becomes a fearful gift, very different from that other gift, happiness, conventionally defined. The latter brings pleasure, but the former cultivates character.
The non-violent path is an ironic path: the weak can triumph by enduring suffering; the oppressed must not fight back if they hope to defeat their oppressor; those on the side of justice can be corrupted by their own righteousness.
This moment was Eliot’s agency moment, the moment when she began the process by which she would stop being blown about by her voids and begin to live according to her own inner criteria, gradually developing a passionate and steady capacity to initiate action and drive her own life.
Johnson tried to lift people up to emulate heroes. Montaigne feared that those who try to rise above what is realistically human end up sinking into the subhuman.
Johnson stands now as an example of human wisdom. From his scattered youth, his diverse faculties cohered into a single faculty—a mode of seeing and judging the world that was as much emotional as intellectual.
The realists believed in cultivation, civilization, and artifice; the romanticists believed in nature, the individual, and sincerity.
If you believe that the ultimate oracle is the True Self inside, then of course you become emotivist—you make moral judgements on the basis of feelings that burble up. Of course you become a relativist. One True Self has no basis to judge or argue with another True Self. Of course you become an individualist, since the ultimate arbiter is the authentic self within and not any community standard or external horizon of significance without.
Eventually [humble people] achieve moments of catharsis when outer ambition comes into balance with inner aspiration, when there is a unity of effort between Adam I and Adam II, when there is that ultimate tranquility and that feeling of flow—when moral nature and external skills are united in one defining effort.
