Humility as self-assessment

Humility, the scriptural sources suggest, is a praiseworthy trait.Yet what then is humility? In his influential compendium on the virtues, The Pathway to the Noble Traits of the Law, the eleventh­century literary and religious scholar al-Raghib al-Isfahani answers this question as follows.

The emphasis on social class in this statement will seem puzzlingly narrow, excluding some of the more interesting cases around which questions about humility come up, where merit is a matter of moral accomplishment.¹ Yet even more surprising will be the natural way of reading its main thrust: humility, it implies, has to do less with how a person thinks of himself than how a person behaves. It's not about making a low estimate of one's merits but rather of not insisting on the claims these merits would typically generate.We may think here of the magnanimous or great-souled man as described in Aristotle's Nicomachean Ethics, who may choose not to insist on receiving the honour due to him. The obvious implication, in Aristotle's case as in this one, is that the person has a clear understanding of what is due to him—of his moral worth. Humility here comes across as a species of magnanimity in the recognizable modern sense of the word: a gracious self-concealment and abandonment of social rewards that rests on a robust awareness of one's actual merits.

Al-Raghib is not the only Muslim writer to frame humility in these terms, as a kind of social grace pertaining to the sphere of social behaviour.²Yet the more prominent formulations approach humility in terms that will be more familiar to contemporary philosophers and theo­logians.

The view that humility involves a programmatic underestimation of self-worth that may reach as far as wholesale denial is also conveyed by the later thinker Ibn Qayyim al-Jawziyya (d. 1350) in his spiritual compendium, Passages of the Wayfarers, in turn a commentary on an earlier Sufi classic, Stations of the Journeyers.“Humility,” he reports,“is to see yourself as having no value (qlma)” (2010a: 613). On many occasions, this judgement is framed in absolute terms, as in the statements just cited. On others, it is framed comparatively, as exemplified by Ibn Qayyim him­self in another work, The Book of the Spirit. Humility means “not to see yourself as superior to anyone or as having claims over anyone, and rather to see other people as superior to you and as having claims over you” (2010b: 658).Al-Ghazalι, on his part, makes this the basis of a distinction between two vices opposed to humility, pride and conceit ('ujb).

In recent times, there have been a number of philosophical attempts to provide an updated and more nuanced account of what humility consists in. Humility, to take some of the best- known versions, is about not over-estimating our merits, about owning our limitations, or about lacking self-concern (see, e.g., the overview in Roberts and Cleveland 2016).The views of these Muslim thinkers, by contrast, appear to return us to a more traditional understanding of humility that we find in almost any dictionary we open. Humility (so the Oxford English Dictionary) is “the quality of... having a lowly opinion of oneself.”

Taken in this form, these views will invite a question familiar to philosophers reflecting on the nature and value of humility. As a matter of fact, some people simply are better than others in a range of qualities, including ones of a moral and intellectual kind. Do al-Ghazalι and his peers think we ought to remain ignorant of this fact? Does the virtue of humility require wilful self­deception?⁴ We get help toward answering these questions, and a broader perspective on Islamic attitudes to self-worth, if we ask what makes the corresponding vices problematic. Here I will take my lights from al-Ghazalι's discussion of pride and conceit in the Revival, supplementing it with insights provided by other writers.

Al-Ghazali advances a number of reasons to explain why pride, taken as an attitude to the self incorporating a judgement of superiority over others, is problematic, which we could loosely distinguish into reasons of a utilitarian or forward-looking and a deontological kind. One reason of the first kind reflects a thesis we might call the “unity of the vices.” Vices hang together, just like the virtues do (al-akhlaq al-dhamιma mutalazima).

More interesting, however, is a different kind of reason, which I call “deontological” because it pivots on the notion of a right or a claim.What lends this reason its special interest is that it points to a conceptual model that provided a key framework for thinking about the life of virtue in the Islamic tradition, while at the same time revealing some of its provisos.To become virtu­ous, on this line of thinking, is to attempt to acquire qualities possessed by God in paradigmatic form: it is to imitate God. God's character, as al-Ghazali suggests in one place, provides a criterion for what constitutes virtue or true perfection (1937-8, 13: 2335).This model has well-known precedents in the ancient tradition, notably in Plato's philosophy. In the Islamic world, it played an important role among both Sufi thinkers and philosophers.

In its ancient counterpart, it has sometimes provoked perplexity: how could God, or the gods, possess virtues like temperance or courage when they lack the bodily conditions and limi­tations that make gluttony or cowardice a temptation among humans (and thus their opposites virtues)?⁵ In the Islamic context, the most important challenge shows up in a different place, and almost in reverse, as a question about whether qualities that are virtues in God are neces­sarily virtues among humans. Because God's qualities include a desire for praise, love of self­sufficiency, and a sense of greatness or superiority over other beings (kibr, kibriya ').Yet to imitate these qualities, and certainly the last, is in fact to expose oneself to divine wrath, as a well-known hadith attests. Al-Raghib is particularly forthright on this point: pride is “praiseworthy in God but blameworthy in humans” (2007: 214).

Put so simply, the force of the idea may not seem obvious. Surely we could grant that only God is entitled to judge himself absolutely great, and also comparatively greater than everyone else, while retaining our ability to make comparative judgements in the human context, and to say that certain people (including ourselves) are better than others? Judgements of worth are not a zero-sum game.

To this, al-Ghazali and his peers would, I believe, offer a number of responses. On the one hand, it's not that such comparative judgements, on the horizontal (human) plane, couldn't be made; it's that vertical comparison renders them meaningless. Once we have set the scale for wisdom, for example, using God's wisdom, the comparison between my level of knowledge as a scholar of Renaissance literature and yours as the possessor of a mere high-school diploma is like comparing shades of grey after having looked directly at the sun, or like comparing the size of molehills around one's feet having just looked up at a sheer cliff towering hundreds of meters above. It can be done, but the comparison seems meaningless. As in the experience of the sub­lime (which my last example may evoke), the vision of the vertical scale has a deflationary effect (though, unlike the sublime, this effect is not superseded by a new frisson of pride).

A second response is more illuminating and decisive, though it takes a little more work to spell it out.What is wrong with human pride, and the judgements of worth it incorporates, can't be gotten at simply by examining the judgements themselves taken as pure abstract propositions.

To appreciate the force of this point, we need to see it as flagging an important link between two vices that al-Ghazall presents as distinct but interrelated: pride and conceit. Unlike pride, as already mentioned, conceit doesn't have a comparative dimension. Instead, what individuates it is a different cognitive component. A person is conceited when they take satisfaction in a qual­ity they possess without referring this quality to any other source than themselves. They take pleasure in it under its description as a quality that is entirely their own. The vicious cognition here is privative, and the positive cognition it excludes is the role of God's agency in making one's virtues possible. Conceit is therefore based on a false concept of ownership, and entails an equally false sense of security. The phenomenology of conceit involves a pleasured sense of confidence and repose (rukun) (1937-8, 11: 1991-2; cf.Vasalou 2019: 43-4).These, of course, are the same words we just heard al-Ghazall use to describe the phenomenology of pride.This is no accident, as conceit, in his view, is a vice that is prior to and a cause of pride.The feeling of happy self-assurance and secure possession of the valued trait is thus a shared feature in both vices.

Al-Ghazalis response to this shared feature holds the key to explaining the problem, or one of the chief problems, with pride. Both pride and conceit can be described as vices of ignorance or self-deception, because the sense of self-assurance that constitutes them belies important facts concerning our dependence on God.This is a dependence that crucially cuts in two directions, or along two temporal lines. On the one hand, every perfection we possess in the present rests on a number of preconditions and prior causes. And all these causes, in al-Ghazalι's view, have been supplied by God in a series of undeserved acts of benefaction.We're like a servant whom a great king has had washed and combed and dressed up in his own finery. If the servant then marvels at himself, he is marvelling at the king's handiwork, not his own.⁶ The servant is not responsible for his beauteous appearance and deserves no credit for it. In the same way, we are not responsible for our beauteous character and other accomplishments and any credit is due to their real author, God.

This position has an important entailment for the emotional attitudes with which we relate to our virtues. The exulting sense of self-assurance that shapes the vice of pride cannot survive the acknowledgement that we are not responsible for our virtues. Self-assurance is replaced by a trembling awareness of the fragility of virtue.This view evidently rests on the endorsement of a particularly uncompromising form of determinism, which, here at least, al-Ghazall isn't con­cerned to camouflage or sugar-coat.

This acknowledgement of dependence and resulting perception of the fragility of virtue, which looks to the past, finds its natural complement in another acknowledgement that looks to the future. Because a person who at time t₁ finds herself endowed with great moral or intel­lectual virtue, as the result of causal chains lying outside her control, simply cannot guarantee that her virtue will endure all the way to the unknown future time t when death comes to her.And it is her spiritual state and spiritual performance at the moment of death, as al-Ghazall emphasises, that determines her otherworldly destiny, whether she will be happy or unhappy (see 1937-8, 13: 2363-75).

In fact, al-Ghazall seems prepared to go further. It's not just that we don't know for certain whether our present perfections will endure over time and pass the test at the final instants of our life (the khatima, or conclusion of life). It's that in a deeper sense we can't properly be said to possess particular perfections in the present time so long as the future outcome remains uncer­tain.This is suggested by another intervention al-Ghazali makes on the topic of pride, explaining why it is inappropriate for humans but not God. The issue, al-Ghazali says, is that pride must have a proper foundation; and human beings can never be certain of that foundation, since it depends on a future eventuality. “Were a person to judge that he possesses [an] attribute with a definiteness admitting no doubt,” then pride

would be appropriate for him and would be a virtue (fadlla) with respect to him.Yet he has no way of knowing this, for this depends on the conclusion, and he does not know what the conclusion will be.

(1937-8, 13: 2415)

This may seem like a puzzling position to take: how could what happens in the future affect what is true in the present? Surely we possess our virtues now, regardless of what happens at a later time? If we take a virtue in a familiar Aristotelian sense, as a stable disposition to be under­stood as a realised structure in psychological space, the idea may indeed appear alien.Yet, even in an Aristotelian context, virtues as dispositions cannot be separated from the expressions and performances they give rise to.Whether a person possesses a disposition is after all a judgement we make, not something we discover by looking directly into their psychological space. And how a person goes on to emote, think, and act at a future moment affects whether we still feel comfortable ascribing a certain trait to her, and may lead us to revise our earlier judgement (“She was not really generous after all”).

This analogy is certainly relevant for making sense of al-Ghazali’s point. But it doesn't entirely capture the significance that the temporal horizon of the future possesses in al-Ghazali's thinking and that of many of his peers. We can appreciate this more fully by considering the distinctive cognitions that constitute the mindset of the person affected by the vice of pride, as al-Ghazali characterizes him.The person who has a (false) sense of confidence about his perfec­tions is not simply confident about something he possesses in the present.To the extent that he is a believing Muslim, his sense of confidence about the present translates into a sense of confi­dence about the future, and about how he will be treated in the next life. His judgement about his merits is also a judgement about how God is judging his merits, and the value he attaches to his moral and intellectual state is intrinsically bound up with the standing he believes it secures with God.⁷ This part of the proud person’s mindset is no vice, but an essential (if not exhaustive) aspect of the eudaimonistic view of virtue championed in the Revival, which encourages us to see virtue as a necessary means to (primarily) otherworldly happiness.

In the terms of this theological economy, then, virtue looks to the future in a more fun­damental way. This is what gives teeth to al-Ghazali’s critique of pride and conceit and his emphasis on the fragility of our virtues.To return to our earlier question: do al-Ghazali and his peers think we should remain ignorant of our merits and of the differences in merit between different people? Does humility require self-deception? On the one hand, these differences will seem far less significant when measured against the scale of virtue, God himself. On the other, they will seem shorn of significance when considered against our lack of responsibility for their past production and our inability to control the future. Real self-deception is not when we try to pretend we don’t possess a quality we in fact do; it’s when we think we possess a quality while disregarding how we got there and what may still go wrong.

Yet once we have added these metaphysical “plug-ins” which undercut the objectionable attitudes of self-assurance, self-ownership, and scorn for others, this view would seem to be compatible with a type of self-knowledge that includes accurate judgements on our character, including our virtues. Such self-knowledge is after all practically important, and affects how we go about our efforts at self-governance and moral change.A person who can't frame the thought that she has a problematic relationship to physical enjoyments but not to money, or that she struggles to pass up opportunities to cheat but is easily touched by others' suffering and ener­gised to relieve it, would not make a good planner when it comes to choosing what parts of her character to focus her efforts on. Despite the rather extreme view of the present's dependence on the future conveyed by al-Ghazalι above, al-Ghazalι himself acknowledges this practical need for self-knowledge elsewhere. At a particularly suggestive point of the Revival, he counsels his reader to draw up a kind of workbook or logbook (Jarida) and organise it by making a list of the most important virtues and vices (20 in total).When he manages to remove one of the vices from his character, he can cross it off his list and continue moving down, and he can do the same when he acquires one of the virtues (1937—8, 15: 2807).

This exercise may remind us of Benjamin Franklin's industrious 13-week plan to cultivate the virtues.What is worth underlining is the premise that evidently supports it, which is that we can assess our strengths or weaknesses in a reasonably definite way—that is, definite enough to inform our practical efforts and make us decide to stop pursuing one virtue and continue with another.Yet crucially, this assessment is embedded in a paradigm shaped by a clear awareness of one's dependencies. Once a person has succeeded in removing a vice, he must “thank God for delivering him from it and... bear in mind that this only occurred through God's assistance” (ibid). Self-knowledge, divorced from gleeful self-assurance and instead infused with a grateful acknowledgement of dependence and an anxious-but-hopeful sense of fragility, is not only pos­sible but necessary. It is important here that self-knowledge is rooted in a practical concern, in which the self shows up as an object of practical endeavour, and not as something firmly pos­sessed but as a work-in-progress.

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