What is humility?
Although humility is often equated in people's minds with low self-regard and tends to activate images of the stoop-shouldered, self-deprecating, weak-willed soul only too willing to yield to the wishes of others, in reality humility is the antithesis of this caricature.
(Emmons, 1998, p. 33)
Strikingly, most accounts of humility share a similar feature—namely, a sort of “shrinking” of the self. Or, more specifically, a shrinking of the value, esteem, care, or prioritization that is given to it. That said, there are also a number of important differences between the various accounts of humility on offer. In this chapter, I will restrict the discussion to two main approaches (though for a more thorough discussion of them, see Nadelhoffer and Wright, 2017, Nadelhoffer,Wright, Echols, Perini, and Venezia, 2017). Historically, for example, one approach to humility has been to view it as a form of self-denigration, deprecation, or abasement, a recognition of one's own lowliness and insignificance—especially in relation to God's greatness (Aquinas II—II, Q. 161, Art. 1, ad. 2, 1274/1972; see also Baxter, 1830; Horneck, 1651; Kempis, 1441/1940; Maimonides, 1972; St. Bernard of Clairvaux, 1942). Contemporary versions of this view exist—for example, the view that the humble person is someone “who accepts his lowly position as due him” (Taylor, 1985, p. 17; see also Klein, 1992; Knight and Nadel, 1986; Langston and Cantor, 1989; Weidman, Cheng, and Tracy, 2016; Weiss and Knight, 1980), that humility is “having a lowly opinion of oneself; meekness, lowliness... the opposite of pride or haughtiness” (McArthur, 1998), or being “of little worth, unimportant. having a sense of insignificance, unworthiness, dependence, or sinfulness” (Funk and Wagnall, 1963).
Others, critical of this view, have either rejected humility entirely as a legitimate moral capacity or virtue (Hume 1777/1960; Nietzsche 1886/1966; Sidgwick, 1874/2011; Spinoza, 1677/1955), or they have tried to salvage it, while retaining the essential “self-shrinking” feature.
In this alternative approach, people argue that humility does not require self-deprecation, etc. at all. Instead, what it requires is only that one “keep one's accomplishments, traits, abilities. in perspective, even if stimulated to exaggerate them” (Richards, 1988, p. 256; see also Snow, 1995). According to this approach, we are not required to hold ourselves in low regard, but simply to not be overly centered upon, or enamored with, ourselves—as C.S. Lewis (1952/1980) is credited with saying that a truly humble man “will not be thinking about humility: he will not be thinking about himself at all”.Thus, while this approach still involves a shrinking of the self, so to speak, it looks like more of a decentering than a decreasing—more of a quieting than a reducing ( Leary,Adams, and Tate, 2006; Leary and Guadango, 2011; Leary and Terry, 2012)—of the self.1This more positive approach underlies two related strategies for defining humility. The first of these defines humility in terms of certain intrapersonal attributes—for example, arguing that it involves qualities and capacities such as having an accurate assessment of one's talents and achievements, an open-minded willingness to admit one's mistakes, imperfections, and limitations, an openness to new ideas and advice, an appreciation for other people's ideas, beliefs, and values, and a relative lack of self-preoccupation or desire to “self-enhance” or make oneself look or feel better, and so on (Baumeister and Exline, 2002; Emmons, 1999; Hwang, 1982; Peterson and Seligman, 2004; Rowatt, Ottenbreit, Nesselroade, and Cunningham, 2002; Sandage,Wiens, and Dahl, 2001;Tangney, 2000, 2009;Templeton, 1997).
The second strategy defines humility more in terms of certain inter-personal qualities—for example, the possession of empathy, gentleness, gratitude, respect for others, and the recognition of the equality, autonomy, and value of others (Emmons and Kneezel, 2005; Halling, Kunz, and Rowe, 1994; Means,Wilson, Sturm, Bion, and Bach, 1990; Sandage, 1999;Tangney, 2000, 2009), as well as a willingness (even desire) to share credit with other for one's accomplishments (Exline and Geyer, 2004; Tangney, 2000, 2009; Vera and Rodriguez-Lopez, 2004), an appreciation of and compassion for other's welfare (LaBouff, Rowatt, Johnson, Tsang, and Willerton, 2012) that allows one to balance the needs of self and others (Davis,Worthington, and Hook, 2010).Yet others speak of it as a willingness to surrender to God, a higher being, or some transcendent power (Emmons and Kneezel, 2005; Murray, 2001; Powers, Nam, Rowatt, and Hill, 2007)—as Gerber (2002) maintains,“humility stems from a person's relationship with something greater” (p.
43).While my colleagues and I are strongly supportive of the more positive approach to humility, nonetheless we have elsewhere argued that these various strategies for defining humility are problematic insofar as they run the risk of confusing whatever capacities and qualities actually constitute humility with those that are simply related to it—whether as a precursor, a parallel process, or a downstream consequence (Nadelhoffer and Wright, 2017,Wright, Nadelhoffer, Ross, and Sinnott-Armstrong, 2018). After all, as we have pointed out, while it is certainly the case that humble people may possess and express all (or a subset) of these intra- and inter-personal capacities and qualities, and they may even do so because they are humble, this does not show that these capacities and qualities are humility. Thus, while these different strategies have likely succeeded in identifying important intra- and inter-personal preconditions and consequences of humility, they may have nonetheless failed to capture humility itself.
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