15
repellent, and enervating vice. This critique is the final step that must be taken before
beginning a critical reclamation of humility.
For David Hume, “every thing related to us, which produces pleasure or pain,
produces likewise pride or humility.”
35
Hume categorizes both pride and humility (along
with ambition, vanity, love, hatred, etc.) as indirect passions. What these passions have
in common is their object, that is, the self, “or that succession of related ideas and
impressions, of which we have an intimate memory and consciousness.” Accordingly,
Hume says that: “as our idea of our self is more or less advantageous, we feel either of
those opposite affections, and are elated by pride, or dejected with humility.”
36
Given
Hume’s way of structuring the issue, there is little sense in talking of the good or the
merit of humility, or even naming it as a virtue. For Hume, humility is more often than
not the sign or the feeling of vice (Spinoza would have said weakness), so the attempt to
cast humility as a virtue is at the same time a project that, if it were to succeed, would
make it impossible for us to enjoy the other virtues and accomplishments of which we are
capable and justly proud. Hume wants us to see that even “the most rigid morality allows
us to receive a pleasure from reflecting on a generous action; and ‘tis by none esteemed a
virtue to feel any fruitless remorses upon the thoughts of past villainy and baseness.”
37
On the basis of this (counter-factual) reading of moral history, and in keeping with his
more general critique of Christianity, Hume famously transfers humility (along with “the
whole train of monkish virtues”) to the catalogue of vices. He does so because humility,
by his estimation, is neither useful nor agreeable to the self or to others.
38
“For what
reason,” Hume asks, “are they [the ‘monkish virtues’ like humility] everywhere rejected
by men of sense, but because they serve no manner of purpose; neither advance a man’s
Convention