Humility as falsehood

It suits Nietzsche’s description of the masters’ antiquity, and of noble morals as a long-lost inheritance, that appearances of humility in classical writings sometimes meet with bafflement and surprise — not as threat, not with enmity — as if a Greek uncorrupted by decadent moral­izing could not have recognized this trait as even a putative virtue.This is the innocence against which Nietzsche measures morality’s long fall.

Aristotle, who in some distinctive ways reflects an ethos predating Plato’s, likewise associ­ates frank talk with political dominance. Aristotle’s apparent coinage for the other kind of talk, metaphora, understands metaphor as transfer (which is what metaphora means) or exchange, one word’s being replaced by another word related to it.⁴ Although the account of metaphor as sub­stitution or transfer ought to make its alternative be something like “language that stays where it is,”Aristotle only occasionally refers to a word’s literal sense as oikeion “fitting, at home,” from oikos “home, household.” More typically he spoils his own contrast by calling the literal word kurion “strict, authoritative, controlling, master.”⁵ Mixing his metaphors for the contrast between metaphorical and literal, Aristotle makes ordinary straight diction kurion or masterly, using the word that we find not only in such later documents as the Letter to the Ephesians, but already and without fanfare in Aristotle’s own Politics naming the powerful element in a constitution.⁶ Metaphors are words that travel and literal words are the ones in charge.⁷

(The closest parallel in English to Aristotle’s kurios might be the expression “strictly speaking” to signal a word’s literal application; as if metaphors were other than strict, even shirking the task set to them by language, even on a holiday.)

Against masterly straight talk comes humble talk, and the masters can’t make sense of it.The confusion and the surprise among ancients when confronted with manifestations of humility may express themselves as the suspicion that someone is lying, even up to something.That is the response we find in Thrasymachus, one of Plato’s two most uncompromising (and most non- Socratic, and most grandly drawn) characters, when he hears the familiar line from Socrates: “Teach me, I’m ignorant.”

“Here is that eironeia of Socrates!” Thrasymachus says, using the Greek word from which “irony” derives, but that meant something harsher and more fixed than irony; mendacity, rather than the playful indeterminacy of utterance.⁸

Thrasymachus means: What a fraud! Socrates says he wants to learn from others, but he’s obviously lying.

In the antagonistic setting of Republic Book 1,Thrasymachus’s words for Socrates are accu­satory and dismissive at once. Socrates must be playing dumb for a strategic purpose. Why else would he understate his talents? Real men in politics, like those “stronger” ones whom Thrasymachus describes as bending justice to their will, do not hang back and parry definitions. They take what advantages them and call it right, with that communicative immediacy that Nietzsche attributes to masters and that Aristotle associates with the master sense of a word. So, besides being mendacious, Socrates is doomed to remain inefficacious. He brought a logical razor to a gunfight.

Aristotle too has the Socratic personality in mind when he speaks of the type he calls the eiron “ironic one,” but he describes that type more charitably than Thrasymachus did. Nicomachean Ethics 4.7 contrasts the eiron, at one end of the spectrum of self-presentation, with the boast­ful type at the spectrum’s other end. Boastful people claim more about themselves than is true, while dissembling or ironic people say less.We might describe the latter as humble; and Aristotle allows for merit in them. In fact, this is almost the only place in his corpus that looks at eiro- neia with indulgence. But that he continues to find misrepresentation in their presentation, as Thrasymachus found in Socrates, is evident from Aristotle’s contrast of both extremes with the mean or best value of truthfulness. As it features in ethics, speaking with humility means speak­ing untruly, and therefore not in the manner that one most virtuously speaks.⁹

Nietzsche sometimes extends himself to giving a fair hearing to Socrates.¹⁰ In such moods he might echo the Aristotle of this Nicomachean Ethics passage. More often Nietzsche sounds like Thrasymachus smelling a lie, or shouting back as the jurors did at the trial of Socrates (as reported by Plato).There was little humility in Socrates when he proposed the sentence of free meals for life.

As effective stratagems go, the Socratic plea of ignorance leaves something to be desired. Thrasymachus sneers and jurors convict. But Nietzsche does pick up some of their response. He attributes strategic thinking to the resentful — which does not mean he credits them with real success — as when he calls the man of ressentiment adept at “temporarily abasing and humbling himself” in the far-seeing plan to get even with the masters.¹³ Humbling yourself temporarily must mean humbling yourself as a game or an act.

It is in the same spirit that GM complains about the New Testament’s advocacy of humil­ity. Nietzsche speaks sarcastically of the slave-revolt weaklings “so humble [demuthig] about everything.” He sums up the Christian Scripture: “Humility and pomposity [Demuth und Wichtigtheuerei] right next to each other.”¹⁴ Nietzsche’s Zarathustra will warn his friends that “nothing is more vindictive” than the priests’ humility, which in his warning sounds like a false humility.¹⁵

We know what Nietzsche is talking about in passages like these. We’ve seen Uriah Heep present himself as “so humble,” then show his true opinion of himself when he maneuvers to marry Agnes Wickfield. The condemnation is a familiar one, even too familiar, not to mention that it arrives from Nietzsche a quarter-century after David Copperfield. It does not say much for Nietzsche (or for the way he smirks at English psychologists)¹⁶ that he has let Dickens get the drop on him. In any case, the accusation of hypocrisy returns the inquiry to those Christian values that Nietzsche claims to have overcome.¹⁷ And we have come to expect more and deeper from Nietzsche than the fun of exposing sanctimonious hypocrisy, a kind of fun that must rank among the most fleeting, most spurious.

The telling consideration against reading Nietzsche as Thrasymachus appears in GM's. third essay. In search of asceticism’s true meaning Nietzsche takes up the figure of the philosopher. The philosopher behaves in every respect as ascetics do but is no such thing. All an act! In phi­losophers’ hands, ascetic virtues like chastity and humility serve a purpose: advance the philo­sophical work: grant the truly original thinker an escape from distractions. Philosophers avoid marriage not because they consider sex wrong but to keep up the energy that counts, as jockeys do when abstaining before a race. Chastity is “not a virtue” for philosophers but a practical dis­cipline, and so is the humility-behavior that lets a philosopher avoid publics and recognition. As philosophical chastity has nothing to do with prudishness, philosophical humility is not about undervaluing oneself.¹⁸ Humility specifically helps to bring about the solitude necessary for true independence of mind.¹⁹

Nietzsche’s own character Zarathustra can say: “Was trug nicht schon das Fell meiner Demuth.”²⁰ What hasn’t already worn away at the hide of my humility? The precision and play of Nietzsche’s German here are hard to reproduce, but any translation should note Zarathustra’s word “Fell,” the hide or fur that is the humility he wears, which is the humility that endures the assaults he suffers. Whichever way you parse the sentence, Zarathustra’s humility belongs on his outside and protects him, is skin deep, and even (as with the stitch known as a “fell” in English) works to conceal. Zarathustra’s humble wrapping does not register as hypocritical, and it never seems to cross Nietzsche’s mind in GM that a philosopher’s self-presentation might read that way either.

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