Introduction
Popular Christianity in the Middle Ages conceived humility in such a way that it can hardly be thought to contribute to human flourishing. Saint Benedict’s Rule (6th century) says that in the 6th step of humility the monk
thinks himself a poor and worthless workman in his appointed tasks [and in the 7th step] a man not only confesses that he is an inferior and common wretch but believes it in the depths of his heart.1
Walter Hilton (14th century) advises,
First, it behoveth thee to have humility on this manner: thou shalt in thy will and in thy feeling judge thyself unfitting to dwell among men and unworthy to serve God in conversation with His servants and as unprofitable to thy Christian brethren, wanting both skill and power to fulfil any good works of active life in help of thy neighbour, as other men and women do.
And, therefore, as a wretch and an outcast and refuse of all men art shut up in a house alone, that thou shouldst not grieve nor offend man or woman by thy bad example, seeing thou canst not profit them by any well-doing.2Unlike the medieval Christians, David Hume doesn’t regard humility as a virtue, though he seems to pick up on their self-hatred theme when he says,
Pride is a certain satisfaction in ourselves, on account of some accomplishment or possession, which we enjoy: Humility, on the other hand, is a dissatisfaction with ourselves, on account of some defect or infirmity.3
We hear an echo of this conception in the first definition of humility in the Oxford English Dictionary: “The quality of being humble or having a lowly opinion of oneself.” According to Tara Smith, a contemporary philosopher, to be humble is to have low aspirations or a low estimate of what one can expect from life.
Typically, the humble person does not want very much. She is content with a minimal standard of living, or job, or romance, and satisfies herself with relatively low-level needs and aims.4
My purpose in this chapter is to sketch how the trait of humility contributes to human flourishing—that of persons who possess the trait and of persons whose lives are touched by persons with the trait. So we need a conception of humility as a virtue.
In a group of recent papers5 I have proposed to conceive humility as an absence or low level of what I call the vices of pride, including grandiosity, conceit, envy, invidious triumph, snobbery, presumption, vanity, arrogance, hyper-autonomy, and domination. My view is that perfect humility is the complete absence of such vices, and that approximate humility is a low level of them. But I need not argue for such a strong thesis here.To see at least one major way that humility contributes to human flourishing, it will be enough to understand humility as entailing an absence or dearth of such vices.The vices of pride are all basically a concern (or interest in or desire) for a false and deceptive good that I call self-importance or narcissistic enhancement. But they differ from one another in the way that that “good” is thought to be attained or possessed. For example, the snob gets self-importance by belonging to some exclusive elite, the arrogant person by having special entitlements, the domineering person by co-opting others' agency, the hyper-autonomous by minimizing his dependency on others for his achievements, the vain by soliciting others' admiration, and the envious/invidiously triumphant by besting a significant rival.A theme that seems to run through the vices of pride is invidious comparison—getting this special value by having more of some other value than others (that is, superiority in some respect). My thesis about the nature of humility is that it excludes the vices of pride.The virtuously humble person is not arrogant, not vain, not domineering, not hyper-autonomous, not snobbish, and so forth.To the extent that the vices of pride undermine such goods of human life as friendship, love, collegiality, cooperation, and knowledge, humility promotes the good life by clearing the way for these genuine goods.
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