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1177/0090591705280525 HUMILITY Y
A MONKISH KIND OF VIRTUE? For and Against Humility

MARK BUTTON University of Utah
Over the past several decades, scholars of liberal and democratic theory have shown a heightened interest in the role that various virtues might play in promoting the good/free society. Yet within this recent return to the virtues, one quality that has been almost entirely left out of the discussion is humility. In this essay, I critically address this lacuna and offer a defense of a particular form of humility, what I call democratic humility. After considering a range of moral and political objections to the concept of humility, I provide an account that seeks to address some of these long-standing difficulties while arguing that the idea of humility, recuperated as an ethos of civic attentiveness, may be one of the most important virtues for late-modern societies marked by ethical and cultural pluralism. Keywords: humility; virtue; democracy; citizenship; pluralism; attentiveness
hatever happened to humility? Once held as a cardinal virtue in the ethical life of the individual, humility seems to have undergone a quiet but steady diminution in value. While philosophers and political theorists have shown a renewed interest in a wide range of virtues of late, the concept of humility has not enjoyed any similar renaissance, nor has it been referenced within the general return to the virtues.1 The purpose of this essay is twofold: first, to understand why humility has not been included in the list of liberal-democratic virtues; and secondly, to make a case for a particular form of humility, what I will call democratic humility. I not only want to add humility
AUTHORS NOTE: Earlier versions of this essay were presented at the 2004 Annual Meetings of the Western Political Science Association and the American Political Science Association. I am grateful to all those who participated in these discussions. For their numerous suggestions and keen advice on earlier drafts, I would like to thank Casiano Hacker-Cordn, Richard Dagger, Thad Hall, Daniel Levin, Brenda Lyshaug, Dvora Yanow, and two anonymous reviewers for this journal. I would especially like to thank Chandran Kukathas for his encouragement and critical readings of previous versions of this essay. Special thanks to Stephen K. White for his guidance and many helpful comments on this essay.
POLITICAL THEORY, Vol. 33 No. 6, December 2005 840-868 DOI: 10.1177/0090591705280525 2005 Sage Publications
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to the list of important liberal-democratic virtues; I also want to argue that democratic humility may be one of the most important qualities for late-modern societies marked by ethical and political pluralism. We need to attend to the virtue of humility because democratic politics today requires a degree of attentiveness to multiple forms of difference and an acceptance of contingency and mutability that humility, properly configured, helps make possible. In parts I-IV of this essay, I confront some of the problems with humility through a critical investigation of various roles it has played in the history of moral thought and practice. I engage this historical/conceptual terrain in order to reconsider the status of humility as a virtue and to gain some critical purchase on why it has not been incorporated within the panoply of liberaldemocratic virtues. By grappling with these philosophical and historical difficulties, and by engaging those skeptical of the possibilities for, and value of, humility (including Montaigne, Spinoza, Hume, and Nietzsche), I outline the specific parameters that will condition the reclamation of humility as a virtue for late-modern democratic times. In part V, I develop an account of democratic or civic humility and seek to show why pluralistic democracies depend on the cultivation of this virtue, properly construed. By properly construed, I mean that humility needs to be reconceived as an active, other-regarding civic virtue and public ethos, and not as an interior, self-referencing quality indexed to an external standard of the good or a singular scale of value. Thus, I define democratic humility as a cultivated sensitivity toward the incompleteness and contingency of both ones personal moral powers and commitments, and of the particular forms, laws, and institutions that structure ones political and social life with others. While this disposition is neither sufficient in itself nor immune to normative contest from a variety of different theoretical-ethical positions, I want to show how a democratic renegotiation of humility might prove beneficial for supporting a pluralistic and pluralizing culture, and for addressing concerns about justice and democratic inclusion.
I. A BRIEF CONCEPTUAL HISTORY OF HUMILITY: BEING AND NOTHINGNESS In what sense is humility properly counted as a virtue, and why should humility be thought of as a virtue for pluralistic liberal democracies? Both of these questions are essential because even a cursory analysis of the meaning of humility reveals that it is a concept closely associated with the following terms: the low, inferior, ignoble, base, and vulgar. To be humble, according to
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the OED, is to have a low estimate of ones importance, worthiness, or merits. To humble oneself is to abase, subject, or otherwise lower ones condition, status, or self-evaluation in relation to another person or standard perceived as superior in some morally, socially, or politically relevant sense. If humility is the morality of the low, meek, and subservient, or that virtue in accordance with which one assumes such a status or bearing in relation to some higher, more noble, or elevated other, then humility is not only bound up with a potentially mobile set of contestable class/value hierarchies, but it may also be a quality fundamentally geared toward the acceptance of, rather than resistance to, a wide range of moral and political asymmetries of power/ value.2 Indeed, this was a central feature of Machiavellis concern with humility.3 Yet, to the extent that the moral character of liberal citizenship has been shaped over time, as Judith Shklar has argued, to preserve [ones] own self-respect and that of others, neither demanding nor enduring servility,4 then it is not at all clear why humility should be considered a virtue for liberal societies (as opposed to, say, theocracies or monastic orders).5 Indeed, if humility entails the acceptance of a low position for oneself as what is ones due,6 then humility would seem to be a vice for liberal citizens committed to the equal moral standing of persons and for individuals who treat self-respect and the conditions that sustain it as one of the most important primary goods in our lives.7 The first thing that we should recognize is that our understanding of humility has been shaped by religious thought and practice in fundamental ways. In both the Jewish and Christian traditions, humility is an essential spiritual quality that prepares the righteous believer to stand in an appropriate relationship of awe, obedience, and worship to a creator God.8 In both Hebrew scripture and the New Testament, humility is a quality of spirit aimed at combating the greatest and most debilitating form of human sin: pride or vanity. The Psalms testify to this (Psalm 51:17), as do the proverbs of Solomon: Pride goes before destruction, and a haughty spirit before stumbling. It is better to be of a humble spirit with the lowly, than to divide the spoil with the proud.9 The constitutive role of humility in fostering a proper relationship of subjection, gratitude, and reverence to God is also clearly at stake in the story of Job. The Book of Job, a touchstone text for an understanding of the religious sources of humility, shows (among other things) that humility and humiliation are, in this specific context, more than just etymologically related; they are fused together by a transcendental frame that structures mans essential dependency on God. When Job finally learns this extraordinarily hard lesson, he exclaims, Behold I am insignificant.10 This is only a later articulation of the same appropriately humbled disposition that Abra-
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ham feels in seeing himself, as through the eyes of God, as but dust and ashes.11 Humus, the Latin root of humility, means of the earth, or soil. For later Christian writers, humility played a central role in disciplining believers into both proper outward forms and inward dispositions of repentance, reverence, and obedience. This can be seen in St. Augustine, St. Bernard, St. Thomas Aquinas, and Thomas Kempis, as well as in more modern figures like Martin Luther, Robert Bolton, and Richard Middleton. For Aquinas, humility pertains most directly to the appetitive nature of man, serving to restrain the impetuosity of the soul, especially in relation to great things against right reason. While other virtues like charity and love hold a higher place in Aquinass scale of virtues, humility nonetheless plays a vital role in removing those obstacles, both cognitive and affective, that stand in the way of a particular understanding of human spiritual health. Thus, after initially raising the critical question of whether humility is a virtue, Aquinas argues that humility holds the first place [among the virtues], inasmuch as it expels pride, which God resisteth, and makes man submissive and ever open to receive the influx of Divine grace.12 For Luther, once man has recognized how helpless he is in fulfilling Gods commandments without the intervention of grace, and he recognizes nonetheless that the law must be fulfilled so that not a jot or title shall be lost, otherwise man will be condemned without hope, then Luther argues, being truly humbled and reduced to nothing in his own eyes, he finds in himself nothing whereby he may be justified and saved.13 This, for Luther, was the proper psychological/spiritual point at which one might finally stand in an appropriately abject relationship to God and so potentially receive, without of course warranting, grace.14 In an earlier formulation of a closely related idea, St. Bernard of Clairvaux, following Augustine, defined humility as that virtue by which a man has a low opinion of himself because he knows himself well.15 As these brief examples testify, humility has long been understood as both a religious and an epistemological quality that pertains most directly to and seeks to cultivate a certain kind of self-knowledge and self-appraisal. This is worth reflecting upon because, as most of the Christian authors cited above warned, scientia inflat, or knowledge makes arrogant.16 Hence, humility is first and foremost a substantive knowledge of self and self-appraisal that serves to control the flames of pride stoked by the pursuit of knowledge. More generally, we might say that humility is a quality that is meant to answer the dangers incumbent upon the possession of a self-conscious, active mind. Michel Foucault addressed a related concern within the formation of Christian technologies/hermeneutics of the self when he noted that we
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have inherited the tradition of Christian morality which makes self-renunciation the condition for salvation. To know oneself was paradoxically the way to self-renunciation. 17 To be sure, figures like St. Augustine (as well as St. Benedict) were acutely aware of this apparent paradox, and humility was both a source of and a remedy for this dilemma insofar as it held out the prospects for a unique understanding and proper judgment of the selfone that emphasized mortal contingency, limitation, and dependency.18 The importance (and simultaneous dangers) of the pursuit of the right kind of self-knowledge (or wisdom) is a theme that one can track from the Garden of Eden to more contemporary writings on humility.19 What is important to stress here is that humility, in this broadly religious/theistic sense, always means and requires more than modesty or a realism about ones talents, skills, or capacities, for the humble do not simply acknowledge their limitations or resist overestimating their moral qualities20 but hold a positively negative view of the self and of the selfs moral powers without God. Thus, if we are concerned to understand some of the most influential expressions of humility and how this has shaped the contemporary reception (or neglect) of this quality, it is important to recognize that humility has long been tied to a substantive metaphysic that instructs that to know and have contempt for ourselves is among the most important and salutary lessons for man.21 When humility is understood as a theistically grounded command,22 it can stand in sharp opposition to individual moral autonomy/reason. And when humility is cultivated as an imitative virtue, patterned (for example) after the life of Jesus, it can be at once both socially revolutionary (the low and humble will be lifted, the powerful will be brought low),23 and radically depoliticizing, counseling humble accommodation to a range of ascriptive class and gender hierarchies.24
II. HUMILITY, PRIDE, AND AMBITION: A SUBTERRANEAN ALLIANCE Part of what this general, abbreviated story helps to explain is why humility is dropped from the catalog of the virtues in the modern period. By the time of Hume and Kant, if not before, it becomes increasingly difficult to square principled commitments to the equal moral worth and dignity of persons with a quality that seems to run afoul of (if not deny) autonomous moral value to human reason and the individual self. Even when humility is not employed as an imperative moral command within a transcendental frame to combat the prodigious effects of pride, humility is often utilized in more gen-
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eral sociocultural terms to discipline the lower orders in their proper economic/social stationsrendering everyone below the monarch a humble servant to God and Crown. Socially and politically speaking, humilitys role in securing proper obedience to superiors (disciplina voluntatis) is both scriptural and capable of being detached from a specifically religious context of meaning for the purposes of solidifying rigid class/power distinctions.25 We have not, however, fully probed the range of difficulties that the idea of humility raises unless we confront the fact that it seems to be a quality that is particularly prone to false representation and human dissemblance. While early Christian authors understood that humility required long and difficult moral labor on the self, they largely took for granted that humility and pride represented two distinct and contrasting paths of life.26 But is this true? Another way to ask this question is this: can the humble know themselves to be humble without sacrificing the very quality or meaning of humility? Pervasive doubts about this question have elicited thoughtful, if also troubled, attention from Luther, Montaigne, Pascal, Spinoza, and Benjamin Franklin, among others. Michel Montaignes existential questioning of mans capacity for virtue led him to acknowledge that you can be humble out of pride.27 From that rudimentary, if elusive, recognition, it became almost impossible for Montaigne (and for many who came after him) to mark a stable distinction between the desire to be esteemed humble by others and the virtue of humility itself. What Montaigne impels us to confront is not just the annoying fact of false humility, but rather the more vexing moral question of how to mark a meaningful distinction between true and counterfeit humility in the first place. Underlying this question is not just the notorious moral trouble created by the opacity of human intentions (our own as well as others), but also the more difficult question that asks why human beings should be moral, or humble, and what sources could properly motivate such forms of character and such modes of action. To be sure, this is a question that becomes all the more pressing in the modern period,28 but Montaigne helps us to see that humility has become a problem prior to the rise of secularism and well before anyone thought to structure political societies by the right over the good. The more thinkers like Montaigne looked into the self for sources and motives of moral character and virtue, the more they found the habitual pulls of self-love, vanity, and pride instead. Which is to say, although Montaigne does not extend the logic of his argument this far, that humility does not exist: it can only be a false, counterfeit coin for beings of interest and pride. Indeed, a host of other Christian authors along with Montaigne were anything but sanguine about the prospects for and meaning of humility in human life.29 This represents a gradual but marked shift in the understanding of the possibility and merits of
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humility during the modern period. Whereas premodern figurations of humility were understood as difficult but salutary gains in self-knowledge, in the modern period that same inward turn toward self-knowledge increasingly pushes the idea of humility further beyond our grasp. While figures like Montaigne, La Placette, and Pascal speak to the elusiveness of humility, other thinkers have pushed a different point against humility that directs us not only to its subterranean psychological links to self-love but also to humilitys instrumental role in serving other, darker motives of the self. On these points, Spinoza (as well as La Rochefoucauld) offers arguments that identify humility as a disguise for pride, ambition, and social domination. For Spinoza, humility is properly categorized as an emotion, and a painful, melancholy one at that. Humility is a feeling of pain that occurs when we contemplate or experience our own weakness of body or mind.30 Thus, Spinoza opposes humility to self-complacency or self-approval, which are pleasurable feelings arising from reflections upon our power of action. If self-complacency can generate pridethinking too highly of ones self humility can foster self-abasement, which entails thinking too meanly of ones self.31 Spinoza is quick to add, however, that
these emotions, humility and self-abasement, are extremely rare. For human nature, considered in itself, strives against them as much as it can; hence those, who are believed to 32 be most self-abased and humble, are generally in reality the most ambitious and envious.
Spinozas rejection of humilitys status as a virtue is rooted in a theory of the mind and the emotions and in a set of claims about what the mind strives to affirm about itself. With a general account like Spinozas, one is equipped with a standard against which to judge a quality like humility (as well as a host of other virtues). Yet, without necessarily accepting this background account, Spinozas critique is valuable here because it captures a very modern anxiety about the concept of humility that is especially palpable when it is rhetorically invoked by political or social elitesa concern that humility is often little more than a transparent power play for self-interested domination.33 In this regard, Spinoza identifies a potential problem for virtue ethics generally, not only for humility. Whereas virtues like humility may speak to certain modes of action and forms or qualities of character, without a corresponding attention to more general and consequential concerns with things like justice or fairness (for oneself and others), humilitys standing as a moral good is, at the very least, indeterminate.34 But as I will consider further below (part V), conceptions of justice and practices of democratic inclusion may be incomplete without the cultivation of an ethical sensibility like humility.
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III. IS HUMILITY A VICE? The culminating point of the preceding discussion tempts us to view humility as a simulacrum, and one that, by shrouding 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 not only is difficult and full of practical ambiguity and moral paradox (or moral indeterminacy), but also is in fact a full-time vice, a contradictory, repellent, and self-mortifying vice. This critique is the final step that must be taken before undertaking a normative recuperation 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, and so on) 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 Humes 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 calls it weakness; for Nietzsche, it is resentment), 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 qualities 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 (counterfactual) 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.38 He does so because humility is neither useful nor agreeable to the self or to others.39 For what reason, Hume asks,
are they [i.e., the monkish virtues like humility] everywhere rejected by men of sense, but because they serve no manner of purpose; neither advance a mans fortune in the world, nor render him a more valuable member of society; neither qualify him for the 40 entertainment of company, nor increase his power of self-enjoyment?
In contrast to Hume, Nietzsche does not reject humility for its lack of use value, nor is he suspicious of humility simply because it readily lends
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itself as a mask for pride or ambition (indeed, for Nietzsche, some masks should be indulged and respected).41 Rather, the problem here for Nietzsche is that humility, particularly within the Christian tradition, entails forms of self-curtailment and self-abnegation whose effect is to foreclose and stigmatize the manifold possibilities for asserting human vitality, discharging strength, and experimenting with and expressing grateful affirmations of self and life.42 On Nietzsches telling, humility is a symptom of a self-defeating, self-sacrificing mode of being that is both provoked and fueled by a life structured by weakness and resentment. In these terms, humility is a kind of revenge taken against the self that is only a later, spiritualized, or internalized form of revenge that was unable to be vented upon the world and the suffering that worldly existence inevitably presents.43 Yet, it should be immediately added, humility also represents part of the creative moment in the slave revolt of morality and is an essential condition for Nietzsches own spiritualization of enmity.44 Accordingly, humility holds useful, compensatory value for theists by means of the cultivation of a value that allows for enduring the pressure of existence.45 At the same time, however, humility is not only part of a complex of passive/adaptive qualities, for in its active, disciplining, ordering mode, it also serves to extirpate those features of self and others that are coded as dangerous and evil. Hence, from a critical Nietzschean perspective, humility is doubly problematic: as the expression of an inward suffering of the self (closely tied to the inventions of the will, sin, guilt, and other self-torments) and as a quality that nourishes the soil in which drives for vengeance take root. In light of Nietzsches concerns, we might say that humility always seems to fluctuate between passive nihilism and vengeful resentment: at one moment, adapting to and embracing nothingness (fables of a true world); at the next, striving to humble that which disturbs Christian morality/identity. The skillful mendacity of the humble (toward which Spinoza was also sensitive) only augments the danger posed by self-suffering transcendental egoists, for [w]hosever is dissatisfied with himself is continually ready for revenge, and we others will be his victims.46 Whereas humility marks out a path in the direction of proper self-knowledge and self-judgment for many of the Christian authors discussed above, for Nietzsche humility is at best a barrier to, and at worst a grievous manipulation and distortion of, self-knowledge. For Nietzsche, the type of selfknowledge that humility provides simultaneously forecloses some of the (not unlimited) possibilities for self-making and human freedom, and therewith some of the inherent possibilities for a joyful affirmation of life. In a related way, Foucault characterized Christian technologies of self as rooted in the idea that there is no truth about the self without a sacrifice of the self.47
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Humility, as we have seen, is at the relational nexus of both sacrifice (humiliation) and truth in this tradition. With this in mind, we can see that Nietzsches more general critique of Christian culture and the micro-practices of self that define it renders humility highly problematic. Yet Nietzsche is not, for this reason, opposed to forms of self-discipline or arts of cultivation, nor does he accept the idea that it is possible to have a meaningful conception of the self without being critically attuned to the role that historically/institutionally mediated forces play in the cultural formation of the individual.48 Rather, the problem is more specifically with those hermeneutics and technologies of self that depend on self-renunciation and self-mutilation as central features of their ontological ground or teleological operation.49 Read in this way, Nietzsches challenge might be taken as a warning that could help to inform a more critical orientation to humility, one that would tap into certain features of this quality while seeking to stave off, as far as possible, resentment toward the limits and contingencies that humility acknowledges.
IV. HUMILITY: PAST AND PRESENT What is the status of humility? Given the general historical/conceptual account above, are we right 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.50 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.51 In keeping with these efforts, humility is often represented as little more than a corrective virtue, or a negative check on personal vices like vanity, graspingness, and dogmatism. 52 I want to suggest that the concept of humility can do a lot more work for diverse societies, valuable democratic work, if humility is reimagined less as a private, self-referencing quality and more as an active civic virtue and political ethos geared toward facilitating attentiveness, listening, and mutual understanding among and between plural others. In my view, humility holds underappreciated positive political-ethical possibilities that are not sufficiently accounted for when it is defined as a quality whose presence, at best, marks the (observable) absence of personal vices like pride or arrogance. Given the general story I have recounted up to this point, are there any alter-
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native sources within the tradition of western moral and political thought to which one might turn to support such an understanding of humility? One intriguing possibility comes from the writings of St. Bernard of Clairvaux. By briefly turning to the contributions of this Cistercian monk, we can draw some useful guidance for a more socially and ethically robust understanding of humility, and one that ironically belies the Humean/Kantian charge that humility is strictly a monkish kind of virtue. As previously mentioned, Bernard accepted the Augustinian notion that humility is a virtue of self-knowledge, in particular, of mans fallen status and of his nothingness without God. Likewise, Bernard echoed the widely shared idea that humility and pride are bound together in an epic life-and-death conflict, the former leading one on an upward ascent to truth, the latter toward personal destruction. Yet Bernards writings on humility also reveal a religious thinker who is deeply concerned with practical questions pertaining to the motivations for humility. In this regard, he begins by indicating what one will gain through the cultivation of humility, given that it is a quality that is bitter but medicinal. Bernard describes this process of self-fashioning as three degrees in the perception of truth that are only made possible through humility.53 The ultimate reward, or final step, of humility is the knowledge of truth in itself revealed through the humble contemplation of God. But the first step or degree of truth made possible by humility is truth in our selves, or selfknowledge. The second truth, after knowledge of self (and sin), pertains to our capacities for knowledge of others through compassion, generosity, and mercy. What is significant about this is that Bernard sees humility as a quality whose cultivation and practice is essential for relationships between people within the world, not one that pertains exclusively to what is either beyond/ outside the world or located entirely within the soul of the ascetic or within the walls of the monastery.54 Thus, Bernard treats humility as a precondition for fraternity or neighborliness with others. By first seeking the truth about our selves, we are made ready for sympathetic and charitable relations with others: one cannot be merciful if he is not humble. . . . Considering how easily you are tempted and how prone to sin, you will become meek and ready to help others in the spirit of gentleness.55 What Bernard helps to highlight is that humilitys value is not restricted to hard-earned self-knowledge in the service of disciplining the will, for it is a virtue that also relates to our ability to seek understanding with and hold sympathetic regard for others.56 Bernard (as I read him) is highlighting a relational network between self and other that humility helps both to open up and to shape, slowing drives toward condemnation and rejection (mocks and sneers), and fostering conditions for critical attentiveness, mutual under-
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standing, and generosity. In principle, there is no reason to suppose that this manner and mode of relating to others should be restricted to fellow members of the monastery in his time, nor to Christians or theists in ours.
V. DEMOCRATIC HUMILITY: A PLURALIST VIRTUE In what follows, I present humility as a window through which we allow that which is outside of the self or group to enter in and work upon us, at least for a time. It is within these terms that I want to suggest that democratic humility is more closely aligned with and supportive of cognitive/affective openness, a spirit of attentiveness and active listening, than it is to either moral skepticism or private modesty. In keeping with the former, democratic humility, as a public ethos, is less immediately opposed to individual pride (Montaignes dilemma) than it is to political and cultural forms of complacencythose forms of complacency and misdiagnosed accounts of completeness that serve to close the doors of sensibility to what it is outside or other to the self, group, or nation. In the course of making this argument, I will show how an ethos of democratic humility can both draw upon and provide a felicitous contribution to two rival approaches to contemporary pluralism: post-Nietzschean ethical theory and liberalism. The goal in this last effort is to indicate the multiple pathways (Christian, liberal, Nietzschean) by which a reworked disposition of humility might be cultivated today.
V.1. Conditions of Democratic Humility Drawing inspiration from St. Bernard, Nietzsche, Rawls, and Connolly, I define democratic humility as a cultivated sensitivity toward the limitations, incompleteness, and contingency of both ones personal moral powers and commitments, and of the particular forms, laws, and institutions that structure ones political and social life with others. By defining democratic humility in this way, I am drawing on the epistemic and social-relational dimensions of humility highlighted in the previous sections of this essay, and connecting these qualities more directly to contemporary conditions of heightened interdependency and pluralism. While this particular reconception of humility is also meant to distinguish it from its theistic/teleological past, it sustains the appreciation for incompleteness, limitation, and contingency, which have long been definitive marks of humility as a virtue. Here, however, the politically and ethically productive sense of incompleteness and contingency that democratic humility taps into and seeks to affirm
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flows from the confluence of a set of significant epistemological, political, and ontological factors in our lives: (1) the perspectival nature of knowledge, (2) the burdens of judgment that exist for any public question in which agreement or a mutually acceptable decision is needed, and (3) the more extensive and paradoxical conditions for democratic selves and society within late modernity. In what follows, I describe these conditions and sources of humility, then turn to a discussion of the potential value and limits of democratic humility so understood. As to the first, Nietzsche famously argued that there is only a perspective seeing, only a perspective knowing.57 From this inherently contestable and essentially humble epistemological position, Nietzsche did not go on to discount or denigrate the value of this kind of knowing, but instead developed a line of argument that has great value (quite against his best intentions) for democratic politics and culture. Given this perspectivism, 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.58 Here, objectivity does not mean contemplation without interest but is rather characterized as an active mode of seeking inclusion, a form of inclusion marked by the ability to control ones Pro and Con and to dispose of them, so that one knows how to employ a variety of perspectives and affective interpretations in the service of knowledge.59 In striving to cultivate such a capacity (a matter of no small discipline and preparation), Nietzsche suggests that we may find greater value for the enrichment of knowledge by listening to the soft voice of different life situations; each brings its own views with it.60 One question that immediately follows in this context is how we might make ourselves available for such enrichment, making it more likely that we will attend to and receive, rather than ignore, spurn, or resent, the soft voice of different life situations. What I want to suggest in this setting is that despite his powerful challenge to the (Christian) idea of humility, Nietzsche (at least in the passages provided above) expresses an epistemic-ethical sensibility that helps illuminate the cognitive/affective conditions necessary for a democratic understanding of humility. I draw on Nietzschean perspectivism here because we need to distinguish humility from fallibilism on one hand, and moral skepticism on the other. Whereas the notion of fallibilism seems motivationally too weak and ethically underdetermined to do any real moral work for usasking us to admit that we are as yet neither perfect beings nor beings who possess omniscient standards of knowledge skepticism tends to claim too much by denying us any room for confidence in our beliefs or values. By contrast, a public ethos of humility may generate mutual attentiveness, active listening, and greater possibilities for reciprocal
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enrichment when humility is identified not as a form of individual self-rapprochement or generalized moral/epistemological skepticism, but as a dispositionlike Nietzschean perspectivismthat is ethically attuned and actively responsive to our boundedness as cultural and temporal beings. In other words, democratic humility takes the basic facts of fallibility and limitation, and turns them into an affirmative, public practice of attentiveness and generous listening, while striving to hold off a more thoroughgoing skepticism that threatens to undercut the value or political relevance of such responsiveness in the first place. A second condition of democratic humility is grounded in the burdens of judgment in a pluralistic social and political universe. The burdens of judgment, as Rawls has enumerated them, help to give us an account as to why free institutions lead to reasonable pluralism.61 Yet the burdens of judgment also provide some of the basic conditions in which a public ethos of humility might take on renewed value today. For Rawls, the burdens of judgment and the irreconcilable disagreements that they generate establish the conditions that make the operation of public reason necessary, at least on fundamental issues of justice. By contrast, I want to suggest that the burdens of judgment, along with a more general recognition of the incompleteness and perspectivism of human knowing and judging, should not prompt us to fashion a deracinated mode of discourseone that would only appeal to presently accepted general beliefs and forms of reasoning found in common sense.62 Rather, contemporary conditions for political judgment and action should spur us to first cultivate forms of civic attentiveness that can help maximize the possibilities for reciprocal learning and moral growth from our mutual interactions with others, even when (or especially when) our democratic entanglements are themselves the outgrowth of deeper moral or religious disagreements. To the extent that an ethos of democratic humility can be effectively cultivated among a diverse array of citizens and leaders, we might find that our civic lives and what we are willing to label just and reasonable will be complicated and expanded not by prior orchestrations of public reason, but by forms of political expression and action moderated by and received in humility. Why should this be so, and why should this be considered desirable? With humility in place, we can make a virtue of our necessary limitations and political burdens by cultivating a disposition that inclines us to remain open to the multiple (and unpredictable) potentialities that exist for the self or group in every meaningful political encounter. As others have acknowledged, the fact of incommensurable value pluralism alone cannot make one alive to the plurality of values or to the contingency and potential revisability of ones own commitments.63 If we further acknowledge that
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contemporary conditions of cultural and ethical pluralism and substantive, agonistic strife are just as likely to produce greater degrees of mistrust, cultural polarization, and resentment as they are to generate an ethic of attentiveness and mutual respect, a crucial challenge becomes how to connect the ontological and political conditions of contemporary life to the formation of a more positive political ethic and a more inclusive democratic culture. What I am claiming is that this possibility can be more effectively realized when a prior supporting disposition opens one to those differences and prompts a critical attentiveness to their potential value. On this point, one feature of the Christian notion of humility retains its significance, and that is the importance of critical reflection and contemplation of self as an integral part in the cultivation of the self and in fostering generous and sympathetic relationships with others (St. Bernard). Yet, if this virtue or sensibility is to be motivationally effective for a diverse polity, it cannot be located within a singular Christian/theistic source. What, then, will serve as a motivating moral source for humility?64 One of the unique advantages of this conception of humility, as I see it, is that it is able to draw on a plurality of overlapping sources for its inspiration. I will develop this argument further below in relation to both post-Nietzschean and liberal political theory. In the immediate context, I want to address some of the ontological dimensions of this idea as a way of speaking to the fundamental (if also contestable) assumptions about the character of being that are presupposed by this formulation and to highlight the political and ethical ideals toward which it is aimed. V.2. Sources of Democratic Humility An ethos of democratic humility, as I am imagining it here, is one way of orienting us to a more general range of existential realities for human being: on one hand, the incompleteness, boundedness, and contingency of the self and its identity; and on the other, our capacity for development, moral growth, and natality.65 These dual features of human incompleteness and becoming, of boundedness and the capacity for novelty, have a historical corollary in the paradox of democratic politics: between democratic energies that represent periodic forces of disturbance, pluralization, and revision, and those that seek order, stability, and closure.66 If, in addition to these features, we further take hold of the idea that late modernity is marked by the acceleration and intensification of these strains for both the self and pluralistic societies,67 we might come to see value in new forms of ethical cultivation adapted to these specific characteristics of being, even if, as is partially the case here, such a project involves uncovering buried goods through rearticulation.68
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In my view, democratic humility is best understood as a quality that is rooted in the recognition that we are in need of ethical dispositions in accordance with which we can live within the multiple and increasingly heightened tensions of our ontological-historical condition without striving or believing it necessary, desirable, or possible to either resolve or detach ourselves from these challenges. It is against this general backdrop, what one might call a late-modern ontology of democratic selves and society, that a reworked ethos of humility gains its value and motivational force for contemporary politics and ethics, for a cultivated sensibility of civic humility may offer a practical means of affirming the relational and contingent features of ones identity without inciting resentment either toward the limits or differences in relation to which the self is constituted, or in relation to the necessary revisability of the laws and institutions that house ones social and political life with others. An ethos of democratic humility may increase the likelihood that ones agonistic political engagements with diverse others will be an occasion for reciprocal learning and moral growth, insofar as participants in a shared public culture come to acknowledge that these ontopolitical features, unchosen and indeterminate, reveal that there is always something worthy they can learn from others, if only because these others are (like themselves) in a constant process of relational becoming and relational self-definition. By exercising this virtue in their reciprocal political engagements, participants not only articulate an awareness of the incompleteness and fundamental contingencies of self and society, as both an ontological source of identity and an essential condition for pluralistic democracies, but in doing so also express willingness to critically attend to, listen to, and learn from diverse others.69 By awakening a mutual appreciation for the limitations and contingencies of self and society, this conception of humility may make a little room for new voices within and/ or without the self, or, alternatively, make older and long-repressed voices more audible and perhaps also more capable of being understood and included within the penumbra of rights and justice. It should be acknowledged that the same dimensions of being and history in reference to which an ethos of democratic humility takes its value might foster passivity, deferential resignation, and/or resentment if unaccompanied by the specific type of ethical cultivation toward which this sensibility is directed. On the view being offered here, one is not humble before some other agent but rather exercises humility in relation to an identity whose solidity is provided by relations of mutual dependency with differences that are often ignored, slighted, or denied. One is not humble before the law (secular) but exercises humility in relation to extant institutions whose neces-
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sity or naturalness often occludes ongoing forms of marginalization and humiliation. In the first case, one critically reflects upon the self/identity as a way of opening pathways of attentiveness and receptivity to differences that may already be constitutive of what one is; in doing so, new or better understood relations of mutual dependency may take hold. In the second case, one is alive to the possibility that long-accepted ideas about basic institutions (marriage, family, and the nation-state) may need to be reconceived in light of new or more clearly recognized forms of diverse human being. While the movement from the ontological to the political-ethical is neither direct nor easy,70 this conception of humility is oriented toward important democratic ideals of mutual attentiveness, political inclusion, reciprocal learning, and moral growth. In my view, these last qualities are more likely to come about in a substantively meaningful way if diverse participants engage more directly the differences in the moral and religious sources they honor. Once that problematic ideal is entertained, the question of the manner or sensibility in accordance with which such pluralistic engagements will occur takes on central ethical significance. In this respect, democratic humility is grounded in the ideal of a more attentive and inclusive form of political dialogue that it also seeks to cultivate and shape. Hence, while I want to acknowledge the ontological-moral presuppositions that inform this conception of humility, one of the advantages of this ethos is that it is able to provide a bridge to a plurality of moral sources for its motivation. Not only is democratic humility amenable to a variety of contemporary treatments of pluralism, but it may also provide a valuable ethical supplement to these theories as well. In what immediately follows, I develop this idea by first relating democratic humility to William Connollys postNietzschean ethic, then by briefly comparing it to liberal virtues like tolerance, fairness, and reciprocity. V.3. Democratic Humility and Post-Nietzschean Ethics Connolly has argued that one of the fundamental challenges facing pluralistic political cultures today is the need to renegotiate relations between interdependent partisans in a world in which no constituencys claim to embody the authoritative source of public reason is sanctified.71 Connolly has fused his genealogical critique of contemporary morality and politics to a post-Nietzschean ethic that cultivates a more generous ethos of democratic engagement across multiple lines of difference. For individuals or groups to be in a position to embrace a more robust and pluralistic ethos of engagement, Connolly has insisted upon the need to maintain a precarious balance between
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the politics of governance and the politics of disturbance in the regulative ideal of pluralist politics itself.72 To support this productive tension between a politics that unsettles rigid closures and a politics of consolidation, Connolly has argued that the key is to acknowledge the comparative contestability of the fundamental perspectives that you bring into public engagements while working hard not to convert that acknowledgment into a stolid or angry stance of existential resentment.73 This same acknowledgment and orientation to identity/difference sets the essential conditions for (and limits to) an ethos of agonistic respect among oppositional groups and for an ethos of critical responsiveness toward those identities striving for political and cultural inclusion.74 One of the challenges that Connollys political ethic faces is how to account for these features of contestability, incompleteness, and contingency within identity and belief. While Connolly appreciates and seeks to highlight the connections between ethical arts of the self and the cultivation of a larger political ethos, we are still left wondering how, first, a significant number of persons will come to affirm the inherent contestability and contingency of their identities, beliefs, and moral sources; and, secondly, how this will lead to the positive political-ethical possibilities that he endorses. To be sure, Connolly recognizes all of these difficulties.75 Hence, I do not call attention to them as novel objections to his post-Nietzschean ethic, but rather to suggest how an ethos of democratic humility might make connection with and offer a modest supplement to the ethical self-artistry that is central to Connollys account.76 Democratic humility might serve as an additional ethical resource here because it draws on Christian, liberal, and Nietzschean elements on the way to giving expression to an ethical-political orientation that each of these traditions could endorse. A common dilemma for each of these perspectives, as I read them, is not with the conditions that render an ethos of humility an appropriate bearing for relationships within and between persons, but rather with the refusal or rejection of these conditionseven as they construe the reasons and ultimate consequences of such refusals quite differently. Put otherwise, a civic reworking of humility may be able to offer multiple paths to the affirmation of limitation, boundedness, and comparative contestability that Connolly argues is preparatory to a more generous and pluralistic mode of democratic engagement.77 In each case, the sources of civic humility may differ (obedience to a God of agape, commitment to the equal moral worth of persons alongside the burdens of judgment, a nontheistic faith in the rich abundance of being), but in each case, participants within these agonistic traditions tap into honored ontological sources that can inspire the kind of ethical self-artistry that Connolly has identified as the starting point for both the desanctification of identity/belief and critical responsiveness to others.78
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Still, why should one believe that democratic humility will facilitate and support a positive political ethic of openness, attentiveness, and the embrace of revisability, as opposed to political withdrawal, cultural inertia, or resentment? How might these multiple, partially overlapping lines of connection give rise to an affirmative political ethic? There are, of course, no guarantees here. Yet, if instead of acting for the sake of humility (rooted in some prior understanding of fixed moral hierarchies or in accordance with a moral command), citizens and leaders were to deliberate, judge, and act from or out of an ethos of democratic humility, they might possess a quality that could inform the manner and character of political engagements without succumbing to the dangers that liberal thinkers (since Hume and Kant) have identified with humility. Specifically, democratic humility could help the members of a diverse polity to take the views and opinions of others seriously in circumstances where difficult moral and political choices must be made. It can do so by encouraging citizens and leaders to recognize the confluence of perspectivism (or ethical/cultural particularity) and the burdens of judgment for any given political-ethical question, and, at a deeper level, to affirm the existential and historical contingencies embedded in who/what they are as selves and as members of a specific polity. In doing so, in exercising humility in relation to self/identity and extant institutions, by availing oneself of the soft voice of different life situations, new possibilities for mutual understanding, moral growth, and political inclusion might be able to emerge. For plural and pluralizing societies that would sustain a tenuous balance between incompleteness and consolidation, these last qualities are significant normative goods, and an ethos of humility is one important conduit for their expression. V.4. Democratic Humility and Political Liberalism According to Rawls, the burdens of judgment are of first significance for a democratic idea of toleration.79 I have argued that these same burdens of judgment are among some of the basic conditions for a democratic conception of humility. I now want to consider more directly the relationship between humility and liberal virtues like tolerance and reciprocity. I have already indicated the ways in which humility draws on important features of contemporary political liberalism, especially in relation to its construal of the sources of disagreement for pluralistic societies.80 Yet the generosity, fairness, and open-mindedness that are often taken as hallmarks of liberal citizenship might be given more effective motivation if, as an ethos of humility would suggest, intrinsic and instrumental goods can be expected to flow from a more active mode of attentiveness to others. Whereas virtues like tolerance,
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civility, and reciprocity provide necessary qualities for making judgments under conditions of plural and incommensurable values, civic humility promises to perform some additional ethical and political work that may help vivify political liberalisms affirmation of diversity and inclusion. First, where a cultivated disposition of civic humility is effectively in play, political actors may be more open to the possibility that their views, perspectives, and moral horizons (including basic categories of justice, reason, and common sense) may need to be questioned and potentially expanded to be able to deal fairly with others. Alternatively, democratic humility may soften the harder edges of identity, belief, and pre-understanding enough to acknowledge those circumstances when our customary defenses, in the name of long-held political settlements and principles (walls of separation, neutral justice, normal sexuality), may need to be reconceived in the light of new or better understood challenges. Without a self-conscious effort to cultivate such an ethos, my fear is that important virtues like tolerance, forbearance, and civility may become shallow, formal performances that prematurely close off the possibilities for a mutually enriching and transformative mode of political and ethical engagement across multiple forms of difference. The risk is that tolerance and forbearance constitute an ethical response to difference that renders the moral and substantive nature of those differences inaudible/irrelevant to already established identities. An ethos of democratic humility can help offset this danger because it works on and through us in a manner that is amenable to and yet distinct from acts of tolerance and civility. If tolerance and civility require us to practice forbearance and restraint in our relations with others, democratic humility entails an ethical work on the self that can facilitate a critical attentiveness toward those differences that may have only been tolerated before. What democratic humility requires from citizens and leaders alike is the recognition that we are all shaped, enabled, but also constrained by our specific (but also fluid) moral, cultural, and cognitive horizons, even if we cannot specify the nature or the limits of those horizons in advance.81 When this recognition is brought to bear on public questions that are ineluctably constrained by the burdens of judgment, democratic humility holds out both the intrinsic value and motivating promise of deeper forms of understanding and self-knowledge, and recalls us to the fact that ones standing in a community radically depends on the reciprocal willingness of others to give ones own claims a serious hearing. Against the ontological and historical backdrop I mentioned earlier (section V.2), these forms of attentiveness and critical listening may not only indicate important reservoirs of meaning and value within democratic selves but facilitate new modes of social and political alliance within democratic societies as well.
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Secondly, democratic humility may improve the fairness of political judgments by encouraging citizens and leaders to attend, with as much openness, care, and foresight as possible, to the lived experiences and ways of knowing and seeing that characterize all those who might be affected by a particular public policy or judgment. This clearly connects democratic humility to the conditions necessary for meeting important liberal standards of equal respect, reciprocity, and moral justification.82 Yet, here too democratic humility puts stress not on the ability to justify ones perspective or actions to others on grounds that they could accept (or not reasonably reject) but instead works on the initial motivation to actively attend to those others in the first place. If reciprocal reason giving is going to form an effective or stable basis for the moral validity of agreements in a pluralistic society, then it seems that this kind of exchange depends not only on a will to justify ones position to others but also upon a prior willingness to actively engage, listen to, and learn from diverse others, for it seems that only then can the more general liberal principles of reciprocal reason giving and moral justification really get off the ground or indeed travel very far.83 Finally, unless and until we are collectively engaged in the task of understanding the nature and ground of the values and beliefs that others honor, we are not in a position to critically reconsider how contemporary practices and institutions are often complicit in their own forms of repression, silencing, exclusion, and humiliation. Without a cultivated ethical and political orientation characterized by humility, citizens and leaders may have a difficult time appreciating the moral and political significance of these moments of sociocultural reevaluation. This affirmation might take shape as an open, prospective alertness to the ways in which our ever-changing social and political interdependencies require a congruent willingness to return to and renegotiate our practices from time to time. The ability and willingness to reexamine previous judgments and long-held convictions are something about which political liberals are sensitive.84 Yet this capacity can be facilitated and rendered less onerous by the acknowledgment, at the outset, that any decision under the contingent and pluralizing dynamics of contemporary democratic societies is a necessary but also temporary settlement, never a closure. By fostering an active sense of the limits and contingencies that inhere in all of our social and political enactments, and by folding this into our various collective identities and practices, democratic humility may help to generate a pathos of distance (Nietzsche) out of which a critical attentiveness and self-reflexive appraisal of identity, institutions, and actions may take hold. And, when phronesis and foresight fail us, as they are bound to, democratic humility may help us to acknowledge those circumstances when the best that we can do is grant or seek forgiveness.85
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CONCLUSION Can the moral vocabulary and practice of humility be redescribed in such a way as to shift it from its status as a theistic moral command or a secular corrective virtue for private vanities, and instead conceive of humility as an active ethical and civic orientation toward diverse others? I have argued that it can and that it is desirable to do so. In the place of an ontologically strong, theistic humility that instructs us about our sinfulness, weakness, and nothingness, a more modest (and more generalizable) ethos of democratic humility would draw us to an appreciation of contingency, limitation, and partiality in identity/belief.86 Instead of marking individual pride or vanity as our essential vice, a democratic ethos of humility would put us on guard against the ethical and political dangers of complacency, premature closures, and dogmatismespecially those forms of political dogmatism that foster the illusion of moral completeness and that express a will to mastery or domination. By highlighting the incompleteness and manifold contingencies that enter into our necessary enunciations of what is just, true, or good, democratic humility does not counsel passivity in the face of such judgments but cautions us against the complacency and forgetfulness that can set in once those paths have been taken, where, quite unexpectedly and without much fanfare, contestable questions are taken as fixed, the range of acceptable differences and identities is narrowed, dissent has become uncivil if not immoral, and phusis seems to have quietly switched places with nomos. In this respect, democratic humility can be a salutary virtue for fluid and rapidly changing late-modern societies by freeing democratic citizens and their leaders from dangerous dreams of completeness.
NOTES
1. The one important exception of which I am aware is Thomas Spragens, Civic Liberalism (Lanham, Md.: Rowman & Littlefield, 1999), ch. 8. I discuss Spragenss contribution to the idea of humility later in this essay; see note 52, below. For examples of a renewed interest in virtue more generally, see Ronald Beiner, Whats the Matter with Liberalism? (Berkeley: University of California Press, 1992); Peter Berkowitz, Virtue and the Making of Modern Liberalism (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 1999); George Crowder, Liberalism and Value Pluralism (London: Continuum, 2002); Richard Dagger, Civic Virtues (New York: Oxford University Press, 1997); William Galston, Liberal Purposes (New York: Cambridge University Press, 1991); Amy Gutmann and Dennis Thompson, Democracy and Disagreement (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1996); Stephen Macedo, Liberal Virtues (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1990); and Alasdair MacIntyre, After Virtue (Notre Dame, Ind.: University of Notre Dame Press, 1984). Of course, we should not overlook in this respect the ways in which John Rawls was also acutely aware of the importance of moral and political virtues for sustaining liberal institutions.
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See especially pt. 3 of John Rawls, A Theory of Justice (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1971). See also Judith Shklar, Ordinary Vices (Cambridge, Mass.: Belknap Press, 1984), 5. 2. On this point, if on few others, Kant and Nietzsche are close to agreement. For Kant, humility borders too closely on servility to admit of any general commendation, particularly in our relations with one another. But one who makes himself a worm cannot complain afterwards if people step on him. Similarly, for Nietzsche, the humble are doglike people who allow themselves to be maltreated. Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals, trans. Mary Gregor (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1996), 188; and Friedrich Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage Books, 1989), no. 260. I discuss Kant and Nietzsche in further detail in part 3 of this essay. 3. For Machiavelli, the central place accorded to humility within the Christian tradition may prove to be salutary for individual salvation, but it is ruinous as a more general quality within the world of the saeculum. Niccol Machiavelli, The Discourses, trans. Leslie J. Walker (New York: Penguin, 1983), 277-78. 4. Shklar, Ordinary Vices, 233. See also Avishai Margalit, The Decent Society (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1996). 5. Arguably, the most famous and influential treatment of humility for the rule of monastic orders was provided by St. Benedict. See The Rule of St. Benedict, ed. Timothy Fry (Collegeville, Minn.: Liturgical Press, 1981), ch. 7. 6. Gabriele Taylor, Pride, Shame, and Guilt: Emotions of Self-Assessment (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1985), 17. See also Norberto Bobbio, who classifies humility among the weak virtues, that is, qualities that are inherent to private, insignificant, or inconspicuous individuals. Norberto Bobbio, In Praise of Meekness: Essays on Ethics and Politics, trans. Teresa Chataway (Cambridge: Polity, 2000), 26. 7. On self-respect as a primary good for liberal citizens, see Rawls, A Theory of Justice, 440-46. 8. To be sure, humility is central not only to the Jewish and Christian faiths but for a host of other religions as well. For a fascinating discussion of the place and role of humility within a theistic sect of Hinduism, see Graham M. Schweig, Humility and Passion: A Caitanyite Vaishnava Ethics of Devotion, Journal of Religious Ethics 30, no. 3 (2002): 421-44. 9. Proverbs 16:18-19; see also Proverbs 18:12 (all American Standard Version). 10. Job 40:4. 11. Genesis 18:27. 12. St. Thomas Aquinas, Summa Theologica, trans. Fathers of the English Dominican Province (London: Burns Oates and Washburn), pt. 2, 2nd pt., Q. 161, art. 5. For a valuable discussion of humility in Aquinass thought and its apparent conflict with the virtue of magnanimity, see Mary M. Keys, Aquinas and the Challenge of Aristotelian Magnanimity, History of Political Thought 24, no. 1 (2003): 37-65. 13. Martin Luther, Freedom of a Christian, in Martin Luther: Selections from His Writings, ed. John Dillenberger (New York: Anchor, 1962), 57. 14. In a related way, Robert Bolton in his Helpes to Humiliation counsels Christians that there can be no repentance or hope of salvation without humiliation before God and recognition of the greatness and vileness of mans sin. For Bolton, to be humble means to get a base esteem of thy self. Robert Bolton, Helpes to Humiliation (1603), 12. 15. Bernard of Clairvaux, The Steps of Humility and Pride, in The Works of Bernard of Clairvaux, vol. 5 (Washington, D.C: Cistercian Publications, 1974), 30. Etiennne Gilson offers the following analysis of this theme in Bernard: What in fact does a man do when he practices humility? He proves that he knows his misery and judges it; he judges himself then as God judges him. . . . So doing, he unites not
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only his judgment with Gods judgment, but also his will with Gods will; and that is why, if we take it in its essence, humility is already charity. (Gilson, The Mystical Theology of Saint Bernard, trans. A.H.C. Downes [Kalamazoo, Mich.: Cistercian Publications, 1990], 72-73) 16. I Corinthians 8:1. This passage is the theological core of Richard Middletons treatise on humility and pride, The Key of David (London, 1619). 17. Michel Foucault, Technologies of the Self, ed. Luther H. Martin, Huck Gutman, and Patrick H. Hutton (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 1988), 22. See also Michel Foucault, About the Beginning of the Hermeneutics of the Self: Two Lectures at Dartmouth, Political Theory 21, no. 2 (May 1993): 198-227. For a related reading of humility as a disciplinary practice in the formation of a particular kind of self in the context of Christian monasticism, see Talal Asad, Genealogies of Religion (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins Press, 1993), chs. 3 and 4. 18. St. Augustine speaks to Foucaults paradox this way: Thus, in a surprising way, there is something in humility to exalt the mind, and something in exaltation to abase it. It certainly appears somewhat paradoxical that exaltation abases and humility exalts. But devout humility makes the mind subject to what is superior. Nothing is superior to God; and that is why humility exalts the mind by making it subject to God. (Augustine, City of God, trans. Henry Bettenson [New York: Penguin, 1972], 572) For St. Benedict, to practice humility is to undertake a lifelong process that only looks from the outside as a loweringit is, for him, an upward path of ascent. Humility is a summit. See The Rule of St. Benedict, ch. 7, 193. 19. See for example, Stephen Hare, The Paradox of Moral Humility, American Philosophical Quarterly 33, no. 2 (April 1996): 235-41. 20. Norvin Richards has developed an account of humility understood as an inclination to keep ones accomplishments, traits, abilities, etc., in perspective, even if stimulated to exaggerate them. Richards, Is Humility a Virtue? American Philosophical Quarterly 25 (1988): 256. Owen Flanagan identifies humility with not overestimating ones worth or accomplishments. Flanagan, Virtue and Ignorance, Journal of Philosophy 87, no. 8 (1990): 426. Daniel Statman has defined humility as a disposition to avoid arrogance and boastfulness in spite of ones (justified) high self-assessment. Statman, Modesty, Pride, and Realistic Self-Assessment, Philosophical Quarterly 42, no. 169 (1992): 434. For other contemporary philosophical treatments of humility, see Julia Driver, The Virtues of Ignorance, Journal of Philosophy 86, no. 7 (1989): 373-84; Julia Driver, Modesty and Ignorance, Ethics 109, no. 4 (1999): 827-34; Nancy E. Snow, Humility, Journal of Value Inquiry 29 (1995): 202-16; G. F. Schueler, Why Is Modesty a Virtue? Ethics 109, no. 4 (1999): 835-41; and Joseph Kupfer, The Moral Perspective of Humility, Pacific Philosophical Quarterly 84 (2003): 249-69. 21. Bernard of Clairvaux, The Steps of Humility, 42; and Thomas Kempis, Of the Imitation of Christ (New York: D. Appleton, 1843), ch. 2. In a related way, Pascal argues that mans greatness derives from the knowledge of his wretchedness that humility helps make possible. Blaise Pascal, Penses, trans. A. J. Krailsheimer (New York: Penguin Books, 1995), no. 122. 22. I Peter 5:6. 23. Luke 14:11, 18:14. 24. See, for just one example, Colossians 3:12-24. 25. Thomas Hobbes illustrates both of these strands (the religious and sociopolitical dimensions) of humility when he draws on the biblical image of Leviathan both in conjuring his model of a commonwealth (a power that is king over the sons of pride) and in instructing men, through
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his science of virtue and vice, in the social and political ills of pride and arrogance. See Thomas Hobbes, Leviathan, ed. Michael Oakeshott (New York: Collier Books, 1962), chs. 15, 17, and 28. See also Job 41:33-34. 26. An early and highly influential expression of this battle between pride and humility is found in John Cassian, The Institutes, trans. Boniface Ramsey (New York: Newman Press, 2000), bk. 12. 27. Montaigne, The Complete Essays, trans. M. A. Screech (New York: Penguin, 1991), 716. 28. The most extensive treatment and critique of this problematic is Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self (Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989). By arguing, as I will here, that it is both possible and desirable to separate the idea of humility from its theistic origins while drawing on (and renegotiating) that conceptual history for the purposes of confronting some of the ethical-political challenges for late-modern pluralistic democracies, one immediately confronts the question of what will provide the necessary or sufficient sources of motivation for such a disposition. I address these challenges in section V. 29. See also the French Huguenot Jean La Placette, Trait de lorgueil (1643), quoted in Arthur O. Lovejoy, Reflections on Human Nature (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1961), 155. See also Pascal, Penses, no. 655, 212-13. 30. Spinoza, The Ethics, trans. R. H. M. Elwes (New York: Dover, 1955), bk. 3, 178. 31. Ibid., 180. 32. Ibid. 33. La Rochefoucauld also gives powerful expression to a similar set of concerns. La Rochefoucauld, Maxims, trans. Leonard Tancock (New York: Penguin, 1959), nos. 254, 358. 34. Kant seems to recognize this problem with virtue ethics in his Doctrine of Virtue, in Immanuel Kant, The Metaphysics of Morals. For a recent attempt to account for this within virtue theory more generally, see Julia Driver, The Virtues and Human Nature, in How Should One Live? ed. Roger Crisp (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1996). 35. David Hume, A Treatise of Human Nature, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1992), bk. I, 291. 36. Ibid., 277. 37. Ibid., 298. 38. Kant also seems to have been influenced by Hume in this regard. For Kant, we are right to be humble before the holy moral law, because in doing so we discover how remote we are from congruity with it. But, according to Kant, we should not feel humility in comparison to other human beings because each of us possesses equal moral worth. As Kant argues, A low opinion of ones person in regard to others is not humility; it betrays, rather, a petty soul and a servile temperament. Kant goes on to reject this kind of sham humility in language that recalls both Hume and some of the earlier Christian writers I have discussed, referring to it is monkish, unnatural, and vain. Immanuel Kant, Lectures on Ethics, ed. Peter Heath and J. B. Schneewind (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), 129. In a recent essay, Paul Saurette provides a compelling reading of The Critique of Practical Reason that suggests that Kant may in fact owe more to a Christian understanding of humility/ humiliation than has so far been recognized. The point that I would wish to stress in this context is that while Kant does indeed utilize humility/humiliation as a way of expressing the nature of mans proper relationship to the moral law, and in doing so articulates a theory of morality that remains wedded to a two-world metaphysic (one of Saurettes central claims), Kants important distinction between humility before the law (which he endorses) and humility in regard to others (which he rejects and mocks) is a distinction that separates him in important ways from Christian conceptions of humility, especially that provided by St. Benedict. Indeed, Kant may very well
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have had Benedicts seventh step of humility in mind when he chastised the humble in The Metaphysics of Morals. See note 2, above. Cf. Paul Saurette, Kants Culture of Humiliation: Politics and Ethical Cultivation, Philosophy and Social Criticism, 28, no. 1 (2002): 59-90. 39. David Hume, An Enquiry Concerning the Principles of Morals, ed. L. A. Selby-Bigge (Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1995), sec. 9, 268-70. 40. Ibid., 270. Humes argument against humility provides an interesting contrast with that of Benjamin Franklin. See Franklin, The Autobiography of Benjamin Franklin (New York: Penguin Books, 1986), 102. 41. There is not only guile behind a maskthere is so much graciousness in cunning. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, no. 40. In addition, Slave morality, of which humility is a central feature in Nietzsches analysis, is essentially a morality of utility. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, no. 260. 42. Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, nos. 13, 46, 212, 260. 43. See Friedrich Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, in The Portable Nietzsche, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Penguin, 1976), 502-3, 538-41; Friedrich Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R. J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1969), essay 1, nos. 11-14, and essay 2, no. 22. See also Friedrich Nietzsche, Daybreak, trans. R. J. Hollingdale (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1997), no.18. 44. See Nietzsche, Twilight of the Idols, 488-89. 45. Beyond Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, no. 260. In Ecce Homo, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1969), Why I am So Clever, (no. 9), 254, Nietzsche argues, Morally speaking: neighbor love, living for others, and other things can be a protective measure for preserving the hardest self-concern. 46. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Gay Science, trans. Walter Kaufmann (New York: Vintage, 1974), no. 290; Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, essay 3, no. 14. Also relevant here is Nietzsches reading of Paul, in particular Pauls letter to the Corinthians. See Friedrich Nietzsche, The Antichrist, in The Portable Nietzsche, no. 45, 51. 47. Foucault, About the Beginning, 222. 48. See for example, Nietzsche, Beyond Good and Evil, no. 203; and Nietzsche, The Gay Science, no. 290. 49. It is in this same spirit that Nietzsche also wants to make asceticism natural again: in place of the aim of denial, the aim of strengthening. Friedrich Nietzsche, The Will to Power, trans. Walter Kaufmann and R .J. Hollingdale (New York: Vintage, 1968), nos. 915, 916. In this mood, Nietzsche not only celebrates a revaluation of ascetic ideals as so many bridges to independence but also seems to gesture toward a particular understanding of humility (as well as poverty and chastity) as a precondition for philosophy and what he calls supreme spirituality. See Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, essay 3, no. 8. 50. See note 20, above. 51. Henry Sidgwick seems to have indicated the pathway here for more contemporary moral philosophers by observing that humility prescribes a low opinion of our merits: but if our merits are comparatively high, it seems strange to direct us to have a low opinion of them. Henry Sidgwick, The Methods of Ethics (1874; reprint, Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1907), 334. 52. Philippa Foot has identified humility as an example of a corrective virtue. That is, humility, on Foots reading, is a virtue only because men tend to think too well of themselves. Philippa Foot, Virtues and Vices and Other Essays in Moral Philosophy (Oxford: Basil Blackwell, 1978), 9. A related treatment of humility can be found in Michael Slote, Goods and Virtues (Oxford: Clarendon Press, 1983), 61-2.
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Thomas Spragens has provided an instructive account of humility as a liberal-democratic virtue. Distinguishing humility from any association with moral masochism or obsequiousness, Spragens writes, Democratic humility manifests itself in the absence of three things: vanity, pleonexia (the insistence upon getting more than ones fair share), and dogmatism. To be sure, any notion of democratic humility would have to incorporate these elements. My concern with Spragenss approach (as much as I endorse its basic moral concerns) is that it defines democratic humility as the absence of certain negative individual traits (vanity, graspingness, and dogmatism) but does not specify the positive or enabling characteristics by which it might be identified. My concern here is that we cannot assess the full ethical or political value of humility, or consider how something like a virtue of democratic humility might be cultivated, if we do not specify in what the positive/normative qualities of democratic humility consist. To be sure, Spragens goes on to consider a wide range of other civic virtues (deliberative virtues in particular) that help to compensate for the negative account he provides of democratic humility. See Spragens, Civic Liberalism, 224. 53. Bernard of Clairvaux, The Steps of Humility, 34. 54. While Bernards treatment of humility claims to follow in the steps of The Rule of St. Benedict (just as the Cistercian movement itself was an attempt the restore the purity of The Rule), the social-relational dimensions of humility are given greater emphasis in Bernard. It is also worth pointing out that Bernard self-consciously inverts Benedict by focusing on the stages of pride rather than the steps toward humility. Benedict acknowledges this in his concluding note: It looks as if I had described the steps of pride rather than humility. All I can say is that I can only teach what I know myself. I could not very well describe the way up because I am more used to falling down than to climbing. (Bernard of Clairvaux, The Steps of Humility, 82) We might read this as an attempt to cultivate a relationship with his readers that is intended to mirror and inspire the kind of social relationships to which his writings on humility are dedicated. 55. Ibid., 42. 56. It is necessary to recognize, however, that there are certain fundamental limits in Bernards understanding of the scope of humility. In this respect, what Romand Coles has argued with respect to the limitations and contradictions within the Augustinian approach toward caritas is structurally similar to the boundaries of Bernards understanding of humility. Coles argues that while the Augustinian embrace of caritas is not a vision of social homogeneity, The problem is that these forms of Christian receiving, giving, and proliferation are based on an imagination profoundly blind to the possible being and value of radical alterity in people who live resolutely outside the Christian story. Romand Coles, Rethinking Generosity: Critical Theory and the Politics of Caritas (Ithaca, N.U.: Cornell University Press, 1997), 2-3. 57. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, essay 3, no. 12. 58. Ibid. Hannah Arendt provides a related argument for this view in The Human Condition (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1958), 57-58. 59. Nietzsche, On the Genealogy of Morals, essay 3, no. 12. 60. Friedrich Nietzsche, Human, All Too Human, trans. Marion Faber and Stephen Lehmann (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press), no. 618. 61. John Rawls, Political Liberalism (New York: Columbia University Press, 1996), 55. The burdens of judgment include considerations of the following type: (1) the evidence bearing on specific issues is complex, often conflicting, and hard to assess; (2) even when we agree about the considerations that are relevant, we may disagree about their weight; (3) the way we assess evidence and weigh moral and political values is shaped to some extent by our life experiences,
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which in complex modern societies are bound to differ from individual to individual; (4) often, there are normative considerations on both sides of an issue; and (5) difficult decisions have to be made within a system of social institutions that is limited in the total range of values it can realize (Rawls, Political Liberalism, 56-57). 62. Ibid., 224. In a related way, Jrgen Habermas argues in a support of the moral point of view . . . which compels the participants to transcend the social and historical context of their particular form of life and particular community. Jrgen Habermas, Remarks on Discourse Ethics, in Justification and Application, trans. Ciaran Cronin (Cambridge, Mass.: MIT Press, 1993), 24. I provide a more developed critique of public reason in Mark Button, Arendt, Rawls, and Public Reason, Social Theory and Practice 31, no. 2 (April 2005): 257-80. 63. See the useful discussions in Macedo, Liberal Virtues, 234-40; and Crowder, Liberalism and Value Pluralism, ch. 8. 64. See Taylor, Sources of the Self, ch. 4. 65. I am drawing on the language of natality from Arendt, The Human Condition, ch. 5. 66. On these points, see Hannah Arendt, On Revolution (New York: Viking Press, 1965), ch. 6; and, more recently, Alan Keenan, Democracy in Question: Democratic Openness in a Time of Political Closure (Stanford, Calif.: Stanford University Press, 2003), 9-20. 67. See William Connolly, Identity/Difference: Democratic Negotiations of Political Paradox (Ithaca, N.U.: Cornell University Press, 1991), 25-26. See, more recently, William Connolly, Neoropolitics: Thinking, Culture, Speed (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 2002), ch. 6. 68. Taylor, Sources of the Self, 520. 69. See Taylor for a discussion of both the importance of and the limitations embedded in the articulacy of the moral sources; ibid., 88-89, 95-96. 70. See Stephen K. Whites discussion of this point in Sustaining Affirmation: The Strengths of Weak Ontology in Political Theory (Princeton, N.J.: Princeton University Press, 2000). 71. William Connolly, Why I Am Not a Secularist (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1999), 7. 72. William Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization (Minneapolis: University of Minnesota Press, 1995), 21, 93. See also Connolly, Why I Am Not a Secularist, 154. 73. Connolly, Why I Am Not a Secularist, 8, 39, 153-56, 185-87. 74. See Connolly, The Ethos of Pluralization, 192-93. 75. See Connolly, Why I Am Not a Secularist, 67. See also William Connolly, Beyond Good and Evil: The Ethical Sensibility of Michel Foucault, Political Theory 21, no. 3 (August 1993): 372. 76. Other scholars have pressed related concerns on Connolly. For example, Stephen K. White has suggested that Connollys ontological account, by itself, does not adequately prefigure the ethical qualities that he seeks in normative ideals like critical responsiveness. White, Sustaining Affirmation, 127-32. See also Keenan, Democracy in Question, 171-73; and Monique Deveaux, Agonism and Pluralism, Philosophy and Social Criticism 23, no. 4 (1999): 1-22. For an intriguing response to such concerns, see William Connolly, The Radical Enlightenment: Faith, Power, Theory, Theory and Event 7, no. 3 (2004), http://www.projectmuse.jhu.edu/tae/ 7.3. 77. See Connolly, Why I Am Not a Secularist, 39. 78. Ibid., 143-46. 79. Rawls, Political Liberalism, 58. 80. I might also note here that liberalisms historical acknowledgment of political artifice and conventionality provides another connecting link to democratic humility and the reflexive sensibility it strives to cultivate toward preexisting institutions.
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81. I am drawing on the language of horizons from Hans-Georg Gadamer, Truth and Method, trans. Joel Weinsheimer and Donald G. Marshall (New York: Continuum, 1994), 304-7. 82. I have been influenced on the importance of these points by J. Donald Moon. See, for example, his response to William Connolly in Engaging Plurality: Reflections on The Ethos of Pluralization, Philosophy and Social Criticism 24, no. 1 (1998): 63-71. 83. For an insightful study that takes the question of the conditions of listening seriously, see Susan Bickford, The Dissonance of Democracy (Ithaca, N.U.: Cornell University Press, 1996). 84. Rawls has referred to this as one of the basic moral powers in reference to which citizens are to be regarded as free and equal persons. See Rawls, Political Liberalism, 18-19. 85. I have been influenced on this last point by Arendts treatment of forgiveness in The Human Condition, 236-43. More recently, P. E. Digeser has provided a very thoughtful treatment of forgiveness that, among other things, considers how forgiveness could swing free of resentment. See P. E. Digeser, Political Forgiveness (Ithaca, N.Y.: Cornell University Press, 2001). 86. I am drawing here on the useful distinction between strong and weak ontologies in White, Sustaining Affirmation.
Mark Button is an assistant professor of political science at the University of Utah. His previous publications have appeared in Social Theory and Practice and Polity. He is currently completing a book manuscript on the social contract tradition tentatively entitled Contract, Culture, and Citizenship.

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