Love and Humility

To Be Humble Is To Refuse Vanity, Hate, Pride

We all are deeply dependent on luck, and subject to the cruelties of life. We all need love. We all share the same existential conditions. We are all different, but also equals. And to understand this at the bottom of our hearts is to become humble, and to renounce vanity and pride. To be humble is not to give too much importance to our strength, power, or intelligence. Humility can be a major virtue.

That’s what Sponville defends: «Humility is the virtue of the man who knows that he is not God». And that’s why humility is a major virtue, and not a virtue of the weak and losers, as often seen. «The more generous human beings are usually the most humble» (Descartes).

We need humility. If Aristotle – of whose superior intelligence nobody doubts – had been more humble, he wouldn’t have expressed the shocking opinions he did about women or slavery: «Women are defective by nature (…). A woman is as it were an infertile male»; «There is little difference between using slaves and using tame animals: both provide bodily help to do necessary things».

Aristotle never revealed the humility that others of his time, or of some years after, revealed:
 

Isn’t it true that the one who you indicate as a slave was born from the same seeds and enjoys the same sky as you, and breathes, lives and dies as you, and that you can see the master in him and the servant in you? Seneca, Letters to Lucilius

You are my brother because you share the same conscience and the same destiny. Marcus Aurelius, Thoughts

To hate others is lack of humility:

It’s not suitable of the wise man to hate those we are going wrong, because in that case he should hate himself. There is nobody who absolutely can absolve himself, and if someone proclaims that publicly, he feels otherwise in his conscience.

Seneca, Letters to Lucilius

Lack of humility may inclusively be a source of war and crime. Lack of humility makes men see their adversaries as inhuman and as enemies, and leads them to proclaim the right to vengeance, with all it may bring of evil.

Life ends up by being a long lesson in humility, but we seldom t learn some fundamental things. And that’s why we don’t love more, and aren’t more humble, and there are so many conflicts.