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virtue can improve (morally speaking) our political judgments and policy decisions under
conditions of pluralism and uncertainty.
Drawing inspiration from Socrates, St. Bernard, Nietzsche, and Rawls, I define
democratic humility as a cultivated sensitivity toward the incompleteness and
contingency of both one’s personal moral powers and commitments, and of the particular
forms, laws, and institutions that structure one’s political and social life with others. This
politically and ethically productive sense of incompleteness and contingency follows
from the confluence of two significant factors in our lives: (1) the perspectival nature of
knowledge and belief; and (2) the burdens of judgment that exist for any public question
in which agreement or a mutually acceptable decision is needed. I will first describe
these two features and how they bear on the idea of humility, and then turn to a
discussion of the merits of democratic humility so understood.
As to the first, Nietzsche famously argued that “there is only a perspective seeing,
only a perspective ‘knowing.’”
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From this essentially humble epistemological position,
Nietzsche did not go on to discount or denigrate the value or meaning of this kind of
knowing, but instead developed a line of argument that has great value (quite against his
best intentions) for democratic politics. Given this perspectival conception of seeing and
knowing, “the more affects we allow to speak about one thing, the more eyes, different
eyes, we can use to observe one thing, the more complete will our ‘concept’ of this thing,
our ‘objectivity,’ be.”
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With this Nietzschean sentiment in mind, I suggest that we see
democratic humility as a cultivated disposition, exercised and strengthened through
practice, that allows citizens to remain open to the multiple (and unpredictable)
potentialities that exist for the self/public in every meaningful political encounter with
Convention