Preliminaries
(i) We talk of pride and humility as episodes, and also as traits.Thus someone might experience feelings of pride in a particular instance — when she's receiving her degree certificate, say; and the same person might experience instances of humility or modesty — when she's asked afterwards about her achievement, for example.1 We also talk of humble or modest people, and mean by this those who are disposed to be humble or modest in the right circumstances.Things are a little more complicated when we talk of proud people — which might be one reason why the latter is often regarded as of dubious value.
For calling someone a proud person seems to imply that they have an overly rigid, and perhaps exaggerated, view of their own standing and qualities.We sometimes say that people are too proud to do manual labour, or too proud to be seen in that pub or with those people, or too proud for their own good, and so on. Our puzzle would easily be solved if we pointed out the difference between the modest person, and someone who is proud in this kind of way. But the puzzle remains, I think, when we focus on episodes of pride and humility.To avoid complications associated with pride as a (potentially dubious) long-standing character trait, therefore, I'll focus on the former: cases where, for instance, a tennis player is proud of his victory, or a musician is humble or modest about her performance.(ii) Pride and humility are, in the episodic sense, emotions. We talk easily of feelings of pride, and equally of feeling humble(d), and so the episodes have associated affective elements.2 As we'll see, pride and humility have a particular appraisal structure: they involve evaluations of the world and of oneself, they embody ways of seeing or perceiving value. Pride and humility have effects on attention and other cognitions.
They incline us towards certain behav- iours.And they have associated facial and bodily expressions. Since emotions are standardly characterized just in terms of this collection of elements or components, it is plausible to think that pride and humility are also emotional.3(iii) Pride and humility need to be distinguished from their respective close relations. Pride should be distinguished from arrogance (which is associated with being unpleasantly or overbearingly proud) and self-aggrandizement (which is associated with aggressively promoting one's own power and accomplishments).Again, it would be too easy a solution to our puzzle to castigate pride by aligning it with one of these vices. But if one is tempted by this argumentative line, note that we can do the same with humility: for we can equally well distinguish humility from timidity (which is associated a lack of courage or confidence) and self-deprecation (which is associated with belittling and disparaging oneself).These are vices, too, but it is no strike against humility that it can be mistakenly associated with such things.
With these preliminaries in mind, let us outline the nature of pride and humility, and highlight the important similarities between them, similarities which generate the problem of distinguishing them in terms of their value.
9.2
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