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IV. Humility: Past and Present
What is the status of humility? As we have seen, it is a concept that is structured
by a transcendental hierarchy of being and value that not only instructs a low estimation
of self but one that counsels recognition of human nothingness (Job’s, “Behold I am
insignificant.”) This may be a form of freedom and a pathway of ascent for believers (as
various figures from Maimonides, Saint Bernard of Clairvaux, and Thomas Kempis
would argue), but even granting this possibility is to concede too much that is inherently
contestable from within the matrix of religious thought and practice itself. As we have
also seen, humility seems to founder on both the question of proper human motivation,
and on the appropriate conditions or definitive marks of its practice. And from the
outside looking in, as it were, humility seems to embrace not only a low or diminished
assessment of the self, relative to some standard of the good, but humility entails forms of
self-curtailment and self-abnegation that can run counter to political freedom
(Machiavelli), equal moral standing (Kant), and the preconditions for a self-creating life
(Hume and Nietzsche). Are we right, then, to leave humility out of the list of liberal-
democratic virtues?
While surprisingly little has been written on this topic in recent years, even as
both philosophy and political theory have shown signs of a renewed interest in the
virtues, a few contemporary thinkers have broached the question of the status of humility
in an attempt to salvage it as a moral virtue.
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Most of these contributions share an
understandable interest in removing humility from any explicit dependence on a
comprehensive account of human worth or the good as a way of disassociating humility
from the idea of low self-estimation.
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Thomas Spragens has provided an instructive
Convention