Final thoughts about humility and human flourishing
Other concerns than love and respect for fellow human beings can dispel self-importance, for example, the pursuit of knowledge for its own sake, or the pursuit of excellence in an art or craft.
And these passions or pursuits also contribute meaning and well-being to human life, though I think the fulfillment they provide is less universal and less fundamental than that provided by love and respect. Humility is characteristic of persons who with purity of heart seek any transcendent good, where the transcendence in question is transcendence of the persons' purely private or personal “good.” To the extent that such transcendence is realized, self-importance will be excluded as an object of pursuit. So we might say that humility is a by-product of transcendence toward the good.I mentioned earlier that in snobbery, and sometimes in arrogance, the self-importance that is aimed at has a “we—self” character.This is characteristic of racism and other invidious “isms” that undermine human flourishing.This makes possible a form of humility that is conditional on the in-group conception of self-importance.Thus, for example, within his group a white supremacist might exhibit humility: in the interest of this transcendent “good” he eschews the concern for high status and privilege, and willingly accepts a kind of social invisibility. He gladly accepts the most menial, unglorious grunt-work roles within his white supremacist community for the sake of the greater social “good.” But his humility is within the parenthesis of the fundamental snobbery and arrogance of white supremacy. It seems to me that such a person does exhibit a kind of humility insofar as his transcendent “good” really appears to him to be a good. But those of us who think it is an evil and not really a good will note that outside this parenthesis the white supremacist's humility supports the vices of snobbery and arrogance.
The suggestion that humility is a by-product of transcendence toward the good raises the question what justifies assigning to humility the status of a distinct virtue. Love and respect for persons are substantive ways of caring about others and thus ways of thinking about others.And other virtues—courage, perseverance, patience, and self-control, for example—are perhaps, at least in part, self-management skills. And so they, too, have a kind of substantive, positive, psychological existence. So far, I have not identified any such positive status for humility, but I have said that it is, or at least entails, an absence of the passion for self-importance. And I have said that this absence seems to be a by-product of such passions as love and respect for others, as well as the love of knowledge or of an art or craft. Humility doesn't seem to be identical with these other virtues, yet as distinct from them we haven't identified any other positive psychological status that it might have. But even if we can't find any positive psychological status to assign to humility, I think we can still regard it as a distinct virtue.
People want their drinking water to be pure. The positive value of pure drinking water is beyond dispute. Purity is a virtue in water. But it is literally nothing in the water. If you do a chemical analysis of pure water, you won't find any substance that is the purity of the water. The great thing about pure water is that it's nothing but water. I have argued in this chapter that humility is (at least) the absence of a passion poisonous to human happiness and well-being for a pseudo-good that the American Psychiatric Association and I have called self-importance. So if it turned out that the great thing about humble love and respect is that it's nothing but love and respect, that wouldn't in the least impugn humility's status as a virtue.
Humility is not the same virtue as love and respect, because it can be displayed in connection with other concerns, such as an artistic passion or the love of knowledge.
Still, it might be thought to be an aspect of these and any other self-transcending passions for the good. One argument in favor of thinking of humility as a distinct virtue is that it has long been regarded as such; another is that a person can try specifically to be humble upon noticing how self-importance is motivating his thought, feeling, and action, by trying specifically not to care about his self- importance.An implication of this chapter is that one of the most effective strategies for caring less about one's self-importance is to love and respect those with whom one has to do, or to train one's attention on some other transcendent object of concern.Notes
1 The Holy Rule of Saint Benedict, translated by BonifaceVerheyen (Grand Rapids: Christian Classics Ethereal Library, www.ccel.org/ccel/benedict/rule.html), chapter seven, pp. 13—14.
2 The Ladder of Perfection (Grand Rapids: Christian Classics Ethereal Library), www.ccel.org/ccel/hilton/ ladder.pdf) book 1, part 1, chapter XV, p. 52.
3 Dissertation on the Passions, Section II. In David Hume. An inquiry concerning human understanding. A dissertation on the passions.An inquiry concerning the principles of morals.The natural history of religion (Bell and Bradfute. Kindle Edition), Locations 2426—2428.
4 “The Practice of Pride,” Social Philosophy and Policy 15 (1998) 71—90, p. 78.
5 See, for example,“Learning Intellectual Humility” in Jason Baehr, editor, Intellectual Virtues and Education: Essays in Applied Virtue Epistemology (Routledge, 2016), pp. 184—201; “Humility from a Philosophical Point ofView” with Scott Cleveland, in Everett Worthington, Joshua Hook, and Donnie Davis, editors, Handbook of Humility (Routledge, 2016), pp. 33—46; “Jesus and the Virtues of Pride” with Ryan West, in Adam Carter and Emma Gordon, editors, The Moral Psychology of Pride (Rowman and Littlefield, 2017), pp. 99—121; and “Understanding, Humility, and the Vices of Pride” in Heather Battaly, editor, The Routledge Handbook of Virtue Epistemology (Routledge, 2018), pp.
363—375.6 Washington, D. C.:American Psychiatric Publishing, 2013.
7 In saying that narcissism is as much a character defect as a personality disorder, I may seem to be blaming the narcissist for his mental illness.This seems inappropriate. But the vices of pride have a long history of being regarded as vices while being pretty obviously contrary to individual and social well-being, and thus health. Here I follow the Christian tradition, which has allowed for the idea of inherited sin.You can hardly be blamed for what you inherited without your consent, and yet sin is inherently blameworthy. In a similar way, we do blame people for the nasty and destructive behaviors and attitudes that are rooted in their envy, arrogance, conceit, and vanity, even though we also think that such traits are a kind of sickness of the spirit. And then, if pushed, we admit that they seem to be characteristic of human nature and can often be at least partially explained by reference to people's unhealthy upbringing and current social environment. I thank Mark Alfano for raising this question.
8 Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologiae 2a2ae, Q161, art.1, reply to objection 3.
9 See Nicomachean Ethics, translated by W D. Ross, edited and revised by J. L.Ackrill and J. O. Urmson (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1980), 2.6, 1107a22-27, pp. 39-40.
10 For the fuller account of the nature of emotions as concern-based construals, see my Emotions in the Moral Life (Cambridge U. P, 2013), chapters 3-5. Sara Protasi identifies a kind of “envy” that lacks the concern to be more important than the “envied” one (“Varieties of Envy” Philosophical Psychology 29 (2016): 535-549). In “emulative envy” the subject focuses on the good at which the other person outshines the subject, and feels the other's superiority as an incentive to emulate the other's excellence rather than to put her down.Whether it is right to call this emotion a kind of envy is a matter of linguistic intuition, but it is clear that emulative envy is not a vice of pride or a symptom of narcissism.
11 DSM IV Quick Reference, p. 275.
12 p. 672.