Paradoxes

It is generally not debated that President Trump likes to brag. One of the most fascinating things he sometimes brags about is his own humility. For example, on CBS's FaceThe Nation he said,“I do have actually much more humility than a lot of people would think” (Dickerson, 2016).

There is something intuitively odd about these boasts. As Alfano and I argue, bragging is about trying to impress others with something about yourself (Alfano and Robinson, 2014).

Humility, regardless of its precise nature, is antithetical to trying to impress someone, either because you don't regard yourself (or the relevant aspect of yourself) as impressive, or because you are not attending to what is impressive about yourself.To humblebrag, as President Trump did in these comments, is to try to impress others with how much you don't regard yourself as impressive.

This leads us to our first paradox of humility, the self-attribution paradox of humility. Consider again the utterance by speaker S,“I am so humble!” By producing this utterance, S has (typically) generated a paradox based on what S is attributing to herself. S is bragging.Yet, if she is in fact humble, it would seem that ipso facto she would not brag. Hence, boasts about one's own humility are ceteris paribus false. By attributing humility to herself, S has indicated that she is not humble. Hume appears to recognize this problem when he states,“'Tis impossible a man can at the same time be both proud and humble” (Treatise 2.1.1).

This category of paradox is distinct then from paradoxes of self-reference (like the liar para­dox) where the paradox is generated in part due to the sentence or utterance referring to itself. For example, “This sentence is false” is paradoxical because the sentence refers to itself.

The second paradox is the epistemic paradox of humility. Let's assume that knowledge is infallible: something must be true for us to know it. In that case, S cannot know that she is humble unless she is.Yet, if S is humble, then (typically) S cannot know that she is humble; her humility obscures this self-knowledge. This paradox has long been noticed, at least as far back as the sixteenth century, by the Catholic St.Teresa of Avila and the Protestant Martin Luther. Luther notes,“True humility, therefore never knows that it is humble... for if it knew this, it would turn proud from contemplation of so fine a virtue” (Luther, 1956, p. 375). Likewise, St. Teresa remarks that humility (and other virtues) “have the property of hiding themselves from one who possesses them, in such a way that he never sees them nor can believe that he has any of them, even if he be told so” (Avila, 1980, p. 77).

In addition to paradoxes regarding saying or knowing you are humble, there is a similar problem for becoming humble.The Neo-Aristotelian standard account of how one develops a virtue is through habitation (Alfano, 2016, p. 118). As Aristotle puts it,

But the virtues we get by first practicing them, as we do in the arts. For it is by doing what we ought to do when we study the arts that we learn the arts themselves; we become builders by building and harpists by playing the harp. Similarly, it is by doing just acts that we become just, by doing temperate acts that we become temperate, by doing brave acts that we become brave.

(Nicomachean Ethics, book II.1)

This process of virtue inculcation through habituation requires intentionality.

So far, none of the paradoxes assume anything terribly controversial, I take it, and can be widely accepted. Not everyone, however, may be as willing to recognize the legitimacy of the next two humility paradoxes. They both make various philosophical assumptions that, while not outside the mainstream, are not universally endorsed by philosophers. Consider next the agentic paradox of humility.While there remains considerable debate in action theory, it is not uncommon to claim that an action must be intended by an agent in order to count as an action (Davidson, 1980).The problem for humility is that (typically) one cannot intend to act humbly and then successfully do so.You may intend to act humbly, but whatever act you then perform will not be a humble act. Rather, such an action would demonstrate false modesty. For example, I have just praised you for a recent accomplishment.You now intend to act humbly by demurring and saying it was “No big deal,” and pointing out that it was not as noteworthy as someone else's recent achievement. Based on that intention you act accordingly, but not humbly. You tried too hard, demurring not because you in fact are humble but for some other reason, such as conforming to social expectation.

Lastly, we have the axiological paradox of humility. Humility is often considered a virtue. Virtues are good character traits for a person.Yet humility—as the name implies—requires being humbled, i.e., being brought low, brought down a peg. Being humbled does not appear to be a good state for a person to be in. Simply put interrogatively, how can it be good to be brought low? St.Aquinas noted this same problem with humility in the thirteenth century (Aquinas ST II-II, Q 161,A 1).² More recently, Baier makes the same point when she remarks,

Humility as a virtue faces a paradox, namely that the very approval of it seems to threaten to destroy the thing approved. Pride in due pride presents no paradox, and neither does shame for shame, but pride in shame and shame for pride are at best unstable, degenerate cases of reflexivity.

(1991, p. 216)

These paradoxes are not, I think, intractable. I follow Burge in being

guided by the assumption that the paradoxes are best approached as resources for understanding deep and subtle features of our language and concepts, rather than as symptoms of contradiction or incoherence in them. Insofar as the paradoxes are not resolved, they are symptoms of confusion or mistakes in our assumptions about our language and concepts.

(1984, p. 7)

2.3