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While Spinoza’s rejection of humility is rooted in a specific theory of the mind
and what the mind strives to affirm about itself, La Rouchefoucauld comes to very much
the same point as Spinoza, from the perspective of a proto-sociological critique of man.
To be sure, La Rouchefoucauld recognized humility as a key Christian virtue that is
capable of recalling us to our faults lest human pride conceal them from us. Nonetheless,
La Rouchefoucauld accepted the fact that, most of the time, humility is an artful power
play for self-interested domination: “Humility is often merely feigned submissiveness
assumed in order to subject others, an artifice of pride which stoops to conquer, and
although pride has a thousand ways of transforming itself it is never so well disguised
and able to take people in as when masquerading as humility.”
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In this regard, Spinoza
and La Rouchefoucauld identify a potential problem for virtue ethics generally, not only
for humility. For humility, as with other virtues, may speak to certain modes of action
and forms of character, but without a corresponding attention to more general and
consequential concerns with things like justice or fairness (for oneself and others),
humility’s standing as a moral good is, at the very least, indeterminate.
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III. Is Humility a Virtue?
The culminating point of the preceding discussion tempts us to view humility as a
simulacrum, and one that by masking other qualities such as pride, ambition, and envy,
may be one of the more slippery and pernicious ruses in our diverse ensemble of specious
masks. Yet, this is not all that can be said against humility. Indeed, figures like Hume
and Nietzsche have extended this critique by arguing that humility is not just difficult and
full of practical ambiguity and moral paradox, but is in fact a vice, a most contradictory,
Convention