The core of humility: epistemic and ethical alignment
Everything in my own immediate experience supports my deep belief that I am the absolute center of the universe; the realest, most vivid and important person in existence.
(Wallace, 2005, online)
As this quote suggestion, all human beings are naturally structured in such a way as to experience themselves as the organizing center of a consciousness—a “self” that stands at the phenomenological center of their experiences, weaving these experiences together into the coherent structure of a life.
And they experience this life as real and substantial—as something that they are not only living, but feel compelled to live. It is thus not surprising that in a world filled with different needs and interests, it is the ones that they experience as their own—as emanating out from the life for which they are the center—that most strongly demand their attention, and in a world filled with different beliefs and values, it is their own that most strongly demand their allegiance.In other words, those needs, desires, interests, beliefs, goals, and values (hereafter needs, etc.) that we experience as our own have a natural “gravitational pull”, making it seem natural and unproblematic to privilege and favor them over the needs, etc. of others. We naturally expend more energy, dedicate more resources, give more thought, and allocate more time to our own lives—to satisfying our own needs, looking out for our own interests, pursuing and defending our own beliefs, values, and goals, etc.—often without realizing that we are doing so.
Yet, as natural as this centeredness feels, it is problematic. After all, the fact that our values and beliefs are our own does not make them more likely to be actually true or appropriate; just because we experience our own needs and interests more strongly, does not mean that they actually matter more, objectively speaking.2 And the ethical life “is a life in which you encounter yourself as one person among others, all equally real” (Johnston, 2009, p.
89).Therefore, some sort of corrective process is needed to create a more balanced state of awareness. And this is where humility comes in.Johnston (2009) points out that all major religions agree that any corrective process “crucially requires overcoming the centripetal force of self-involvement, in order to orient one's life around reality and the real needs of human beings as such” (p. 23).What this highlights is that the problem with our centeredness is that it generates both epistemic and ethical distortion. That is, it interferes with our ability to accurately perceive, and fully engage with the world and with the other living beings around us as they actually are.
The position that we have argued for at length elsewhere is that, at its core, humility is a state of awareness free of the epistemic and ethical distortion generated by our centeredness (Nadelhoffer and Wright, 2017, Nadelhoffer,Wright, Echols, Perini, and Venezia, 2017;Wright, Nadelhoffer, Perini, Langville, Echols, and Venezia, 2017, Wright, et al., 2018). More specifically, humility is a state of epistemically and ethically aligned awareness—one in which we have escaped the centripetal force of self-involvement and experience ourselves in true relation to all else (everything and everyone), thereby allowing us to experience those relations, and their objects, objectively.3
Because humility facilitates a realistic, unbiased appraisal of ourselves, it removes the need to inflate or deflate our own—or others'—value or significance, resulting in a more balanced, “unencumbered”, encountering of self and others. And while, as a state of awareness, humility is something that we can “come into and go out of” (i.e., temporary states of humility), as a virtue it becomes stabilized into a standing disposition, or trait, that continuously informs and influences our cognition, affect, and behavior.
In a state of epistemic alignment (i.e., being oriented toward reality), we understand and experience ourselves as we, in fact, are—e.g., as a finite, fallible, imperfect beings that are but an infinitesimal part of a vast universe, and so have a necessarily limited and incomplete perspective or grasp on the “whole”, which is infinitely larger and greater than ourselves.
Many experience this spiritually, as a connection to God or some higher source, though others experience it as a heightened awareness of their place in, and connection to, the natural world and/or cosmos (a state of “existential awareness”). In this way, humility is a corrective to our natural tendency to seek social praise, status, acclaim, and influence over others—and to have undue attachment to our needs, etc. simply because they are ours.In a state of ethical alignment (i.e., oriented toward the real needs of human beings as such), we understand and experience ourselves as only one among a host of other morally relevant beings, whose interests are as legitimate, and as worthy of attention and concern, as our own (a state of “extended compassion”). In this way, humility is a corrective to our natural tendency to prioritize and privilege—to seek “premium treatment” for—our own needs, etc., even at significant cost to others, simply because they are ours.
Humility quiets the pull of our own needs, etc., not because they matter less, but because we no longer experience them in isolation—as separate, in conflict, or in competition, with those of others. Instead we experience them as connected and shared, as bonded and interwoven with the needs, etc. of others.Thus, humility involves both a shrinking and an expansion of the self. Through humility, we become more, not less.
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