The smallness in humility

Aristotle comes upon something resembling humility from another direction, when mapping out the spectrum whose mean he calls “greatness of soul.” Aristotle measures all human types against what each one is axios “worthy” of, what honor or how much respect each deserves.

In the vocabulary of virtues we might call Aristotle’s self-aware unworthies humble without ascribing humility to them.They view themselves correctly, and they get credit for their correct­ness, but the moral credit they earn for their humility is discounted because of their lesser worth.

Something closer to complete humility emerges with the type that Aristotle calls “small- souled,” his name for those who value themselves as less than they are worth. Regardless of your true value, you could value yourself beneath that value, thus exhibiting humility whether or not you are actually ordinary or humble.To ears that are accustomed to hearing humility called a virtue this sounds closer, because it bespeaks an effort to aim below what the evidence seems to show.Those who deserve little and say they deserve little could be no more than guileless or naive. People with real humility are doing something more.

This difference between accurate self-estimation and underestimation is not quite as sharp as the words for the two behaviors might suggest. Given the human propensity for thinking more highly of yourself than you should, it takes some work at under-assessing yourself even to esteem yourself truly.

For Aristotle, the act of underselling yourself makes you worse the better you actually are. He proposes this valuation in the form of a puzzle. “Most of all,” i.e. smallest-souled of all, “would the one worthy of much seem to be,” if that person claims a lower worth than is true. “For what would he do if he were not even worth that?”²² There seems to be no self-disrespect to which this kind won't sink.The humility strikes Aristotle as mysterious.

Aristotle's reaction to humility sounds a Nietzschean note in that GM, too, finds something puzzling about Christian virtues at large and about self-effacement specifically, what Zarathustra — now sounding like an Aristotle launched on a tirade — calls “submission and modesty and shrewd­ness and diligence and considerateness and the long and-so-on of little virtues.”²³ Self-denial seems to be at work in self-effacement, and the third essay of GM will come to a halt and turn its inquiry in a new direction with the comment that self-denial makes no sense. “Such a self­contradiction... ‘life against life' is — this much is obvious right away — simple nonsense [Unsinn] when understood physiologically and not only psychologically.”²⁴ Contradictions and nonsense don't prove that ascetic behavior fails to occur, but they do show that it eludes simple explana- tion.Those who wear a hair shirt may constantly want to scratch their bodies. Philosophers who watch those people can only scratch their heads.

But GM, polemic that it is, battles the self-effacing virtues in a way that would have bemused Aristotle. People sell themselves short; these kinds of people evidently make mistakes, and the mistakes make them look bad. To Aristotle, it looks like peculiar behavior but nothing to get exercised about.You would need to say more about humility, or more about what causes that self-underestimation, to account for the difference between Nietzsche's reaction and Aristotle's.

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