Humility or against the umbilicus mundi syndrome

 

Most of us, whether we know it or not, suffer from a peculiar condition: the umbilicus mundi syndrome, a pathological inclination to place ourselves at the center of everything, and to fancy ourselves far more important than we are. From a cosmic standpoint, there must be something irrepressibly hilarious about Homo sapiens. Most of the time we behave as though the world exists only for our sake; we think of everything in terms of our own needs, concerns, and interests. Not only do we appropriate other species—we devour them. We don’t just use the planet, we abuse it, voiding it of life and filling it with trash. Out of greed or stupidity or both, we have subjected the natural world to such savagery that we may well have damaged it beyond repair. We are as a rule indifferent to the suffering of others, and incapable of relating meaningfully to them. Far from loving our neighbors, we exploit, mock, or resent them, when we don’t simply ignore them.

What makes our situation particularly ludicrous is that, within the bigger picture, we are utterly insignificant creatures. Lilliputian tyrants. The smallest stone we pick up randomly from a riverbed has long preceded us, and will outlast us. We are no grander than the rest of the world; in fact, we are less than most things.

The good news is that there may be a cure for this condition. The failure of the plane’s engine, of our car’s braking system, or of the elevator’s, can shatter us so thoroughly that, should we survive the experience, we will find ourselves transformed. What defines our changed existence is a new humility: failure has humbled us, and healing can come from there. The word “humility” has moral connotations, but rather than a virtue in the narrow sense, humility involves a certain type of insertion into the world, and a distinct way of experiencing the human condition. Humility is no ordinary virtue, as Iris Murdoch reminds us; it is “one of the most difficult and central of all virtues.”78In “The Sovereignty of Good,” Murdoch offers what may be the best definition of humility, describing it as “selfless respect for reality.”79 Ordinarily, she thinks, we misrepresent reality because we have an oversized conception of our place within it; our “picture of ourselves has become too grand,” and as a result we have lost “the vision of a reality separate from ourselves.”80 This misrepresentation harms us more than anything else. If we don’t do anything to correct it, we will end up cut off from the world, inhabiting a reality of our own making. Humility offers us such a correction.

Some of the most endearing characters in Yasujirō Ozu’s films are martyrs of humility. They would rather waste their lives than assert themselves. The greatness of the Japanese director’s art, however, is that it not only depicts humility; it embodies and performs it. Thanks to his use of low camera angles, Ozu gives us access to another side of things, to their lowly dimension, which we—self-centered as we are—normally miss. This is the method of humility itself.

Just as in Ozu’s films, where low camera angles bring forth a surprisingly rich face of the world, a humble position allows us to access a layer of reality that we don’t ordinarily see. That’s because our self-assertive drive places a screen between us and the world, and what we end up seeing is not the world itself, but our own fantasies of self-assertion—mere projections of power. It is only through humility, the opposite of self-assertion, that we can tear this screen apart and glimpse things as they are.

More than a form of behavior, then, humility should be seen as a form of knowledge. No wonder mystics and philosophers of different stripes have connected humility to a vision of truth. Purifying though it may be as a practice, this line goes, humility should be sought not for its own sake, but for the higher good it leads to. Bernard of Clairvaux likens humility to a ladder: you climb up it, one rung at a time (twelve in all), until you reach “the highest summit of humility” (summae humilitatis).81 That’s when you’ve finally found truth, for the sake of which you’ve done all the climbing. In his own words: “The way is humility, the goal is truth. The first is the labor, the second the reward.”82 Following in the same tradition, André Comte-Sponville defines humility as “loving truth more than oneself.”83There is something unique about the truth that humility gives us access to. It’s not just that we acquire a better, more “truthful” understanding of how things are, even if that’s no small feat. Something important is happening to us on the way there: we are being transformed as we climb the ladder and take in the view. When the humble reach the top, they find themselves possessed of a renewed sense of self—a reformed self. For those who happen to be believers, this is an epiphany of redemption: “Therein lies the greatness of the humble,” writes Comte-Sponville, “who penetrate the depths of their pettiness, misery, and insignificance—until they reach that place where there is only nothingness, a nothingness that is everything.”84

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The Mud Cure

The labor of humility is a complex, dialectical process. Let me focus here on just three of its phases. In a first movement, humility involves acceptance of our cosmic insignificance. The word itself comes from the Latin humilitas (lowliness), derived in turn from humus (earth). The truly humble regard themselves as dust, or even less than that. The insight is as old as spiritual life itself. Adam, the first man in the Abrahamic tradition, not only was made out of dust, but had earth in his name (adamah). Humility is what God wanted to instill in Job when he asked him, “Where were you when I laid the foundation of the earth?” (Job 38:4). Job could not answer because dust doesn’t talk, especially not to God. Bernard of Clairvaux intuited something essential about humility: the humble can reach heavenly heights precisely because they lower themselves so drastically.

When the Stoics recommended “the view from above” as a form of philosophical therapy, what they meant was that one should embrace utter humility. To see yourself from above is to realize your insignificance on a large, cosmic scale. That’s also what Lady Philosophy, in The Consolation of Philosophy, sought to teach a terrified Boethius waiting execution in his prison cell. Or what, more recently, Carl Sagan popularized so well. “Our posturings, our imagined self-importance, the delusion that we have some privileged position in the Universe,” he writes in Pale Blue Dot, take a different meaning if we just look at the earth from some remote point in space.87 Taking “the view from above” is the opposite of arrogance: it is to place ourselves within the bigger picture so as to understand how insignificant we truly are. Seen from such a distance, we are nothing but humus, if that. At its most fundamental, to be humble is to embody, in our dealings with the world and others, the insight that we are closer to nothingness than to anything else.

Embracing our cosmic insignificance is the zero-degree of our existence. At this stage, shattered by failure and overwhelmed by precariousness, we rightly feel crushed, flattened, reduced to dust. Humility, thus, places us where we belong. We are reduced to our true condition: next-to-nothingness. Yet this is no small feat: for along with losing our self-importance, we manage to get rid of the combination of self-deception and self-flattery that usually keeps us hidden from ourselves. The humble, although they are at the very bottom, are the ones who will make progress. “The humble man,” writes Murdoch, “because he sees himself as nothing, can see other things as they are.” He is the kind of person “most likely of all to become good.”88

In a second movement, we come to the realization that, thanks to our being brought down to earth, we find ourselves in a better position: we are on firm ground. Granted, we have been crushed and defeated, but then we underwent a rebirth of sorts, and we can again stand on our own two feet. We also realize that there is no degradation at this stage, for, by embracing our cosmic insignificance, we are true to ourselves. We may be poor, but we are honest. And that’s the best place to start: wherever we go from here, it will be a worthwhile journey. There is nothing healthier, for minds so frequently pulled up into the air by the force of their own fantasies, than to be drawn back down to earth once in a while. Hardened dreamers undertaking the mud cure are in for a feast. If the first stage, involving a crushing experience of failure, was traumatic, this one is rather serene. We are contemplators now, biding our time and enjoying the view. But don’t be deceived: the ultimate lowliness can take us to new heights of insight.

The third movement is expansive. Having lowered an anchor into the world, and regained our existential balance, we can move on to other, bigger things. The dreams now have the necessary ballast to be dreamt properly. At this stage, humility is no longer an impediment, but an enhancement of action, should we so desire. There is nothing more daring than the act of the humble.

Humility is the opposite of humiliation—that’s the chief lesson of this stage. There is nothing demeaning or inglorious about humility; on the contrary, it is rejuvenating, enriching, emboldening. Humiliation relies on the exercise of raw, external power; humility is all inner strength. Humiliation involves coarseness of mind (a truly intelligent person doesn’t humiliate others), while humility is itself a form of intelligence. Whether aware of it or not, the one who humiliates is a reject. Humiliation is often born out of frustration. In contrast, humility is all about inwardness and intimacy. The humble know from within—they see everything, understand everything, forgive everything—and that places them in a position of significant strength. Humiliation exhausts itself in the act, and those who perform it usually reveal their impotence. Humility grows and thrives with practice, transforming everything around it in the process. True humility, writes the rabbi Jonathan Sacks, “is one of the most expansive and life-enhancing of all virtues.” What it involves is not “undervaluing yourself,” but an “openness to life’s grandeur” and a “willingness to be surprised, uplifted, by goodness.”89 It is written that the meek shall inherit the earth.

Humility in response to the experience of failure is a promise of healing. Properly digested, then, failure offers us a medicine against arrogance and hubris. Against the umbilicus mundi syndrome—our debilitating tendency to imagine ourselves at the center of the world. It can heal us, should we care for a cure.

IN PRAISE OF FAILURE

Four Lessons in Humility

COSTICA BRADATAN

Gratitude

 Gratitude is the most pleasant of virtues, though not the easiest. And why would it be easy? There are pleasures that are difficult or rare and that are no less pleasing, indeed are perhaps even more pleasing for being so. Still, in the case of gratitude, the surprising thing is not the pleasure so much as the difficulty. After all, who wouldn’t rather accept a gift than receive a blow? Or express thanks than show forgiveness? Gratitude is a second pleasure, one that prolongs the pleasure that precedes and occasions it, like a joyful echo of the joy we feel, a further happiness for the happiness we have been given. Gratitude: the pleasure of receiving, the joy of being joyful. What could be easier? That gratitude is a virtue, however, should suffice to indicate that it cannot be taken for granted, that it is something we can be lacking in, and that consequently, in spite of or perhaps because of the pleasure, there is merit in experiencing it. But why? Gratitude is a mystery, not because of the pleasure it affords us but because of the obstacles we must overcome to feel it. It is the most pleasant of virtues and the most virtuous of pleasures.But what about generosity and the pleasures of giving that we hear so much about? The interested nature of that argument—it has become a staple of advertising, after all—should put us on our guard. Were there really such pleasure in giving, why would we need advertisers to remind us to give? If generosity were a pleasure, or rather, if it were only a pleasure or primarily a pleasure, why would we be so lacking in it? Giving always involves loss, which is why generosity is the opposite of and counter to selfishness. But receiving? Gratitude takes nothing from us: it is a gift given in return with no loss and almost no object or objective. Gratitude has nothing to give, except this pleasure of having received. What lighter, brighter, what more Mozartian virtue, I am inclined to say, and not just because Mozart inspires it in us but because he celebrates it and incarnates it, because he carries within him this joy, this boundless gratitude for who knows what—for all and everything—this generosity of gratitude. What happier and more humble virtue, what easier and more necessary grace than that of giving thanks with a smile or a dance step, with a song or with happiness itself? The generosity of gratitude. This expression, which I owe to Mozart, I find particularly enlightening: if so often we lack gratitude, might it not be more because we cannot give than because we cannot receive, more because we are selfish than because we are insensitive? To thank is to give; to be gracious means to share. This pleasure that I owe to you is not for me alone. This joy, this happiness, they belong to both of us. The egoist enjoys receiving; but his enjoyment is his alone and he keeps it for himself. Or if he shows his pleasure, it is because he wants to make others envious, not because he wants to make them happy: he displays his pleasure, but it is his pleasure. He has already forgotten that others might have had something to do with it. But what does he care about others? The egoist is ungrateful not because he doesn’t like to receive. He is ungrateful because he doesn’t like to acknowledge his debt to others and gratitude is this acknowledgment; because he doesn’t like to give in return and gratitude is giving thanks in return; because he doesn’t like to share and he doesn’t like to give. What does gratitude give away? It gives away itself, like a joyful echo, as I said; and in this it is love, it is sharing, it is a gift. It is pleasure upon pleasure, happiness upon happiness, gratitude upon generosity. Aware only of his own satisfactions and his own happiness, hoarding them as a miser hoards his coin, watching over them as a miser watches his purse, the egoist cannot be grateful. Ingratitude is not the incapacity to receive but the inability to give back—In the form of joy or love—a little of the joy that was received or experienced. This is why ingratitude is so pervasive a vice. We absorb joy as others absorb light, for egoism is a black hole.Gratitude is a gift, gratitude is sharing, gratitude is love: it is a joy accompanied by the idea of its cause, as Spinoza would say, when the cause is another person’s generosity, or courage, or love.1 Joy in return is love in return. Strictly speaking, therefore, gratitude can be addressed only toward living persons. Nevertheless, it is worth asking ourselves whether any gotten joy, whatever its cause, might not be the object of this joy in return for which is gratitude. How could one not be grateful to the sun for existing? To life, to flowers, to birds? I could feel no joy were it not for the rest of the universe (since without the rest of the universe, I would not exist). In this respect all joy, even a purely internal or introspective one (Spinoza’s acquiescentia in se ipso), has an external cause that is the universe, God, or nature—in other words, all and everything.2 No one is the cause of himself or, in the end, of his own joy. All causal chains, of which there are an infinite number, are themselves infinite: all things are interrelated, and related to us, and flow through us. All love, taken to its logical extreme, should therefore love all things: all love should be a love of everything (the more we love individual things, Spinoza might say, the more we love God),3 a universal gratitude, then, one that, though certainly not undifferentiated (how could we have the same gratitude for birds as for snakes, for Mozart as for Hitler?), would nevertheless be comprehensive or at least thankful for everything. Excluding nothing and rejecting nothing, not even the worst of things, this gratitude would have to be a tragic gratitude, in the Nietzschean sense, since the real must be accepted or rejected as is, since the real in its totality is the only reality4Gratitude is gratuitous in that one cannot ask of it, or for it, any recompense whatsoever. Gratitude may be a duty, or in any case a virtue, but, as Rousseau notes, it cannot be demanded as a right and nothing can be demanded in its name.5 Gratitude is love, not a quid pro quo. It is responsive and inclined to act in behalf of the person who inspires it, not as an exchange of one favor for another (this would no longer be gratitude but barter)6 but because love wants to delight the person who delights us. It is in this way that gratitude almost invariably fosters generosity, which in turn fosters gratitude. Whence Spinoza’s characterization of gratitude as a “reciprocal love,” an “eagerness of love.” “Thankfulness or gratitude is a desire or eagerness of love, by which we strive to benefit one who has benefited us from a like affect of love.”7 Here is where we go from a purely affective gratitude (to use a Kantian term) to an active gratitude, from joy in return to action in return.8 To my mind, Spinoza does not so much define gratitude here as describe its consequences (we can, for example, be grateful to someone who is dead and whom we cannot benefit). But the distinction is unimportant. What is certain is that gratitude differs from ingratitude precisely in its ability to see in the other the cause of its joy (unlike self-love, which sees the cause of its joy only in the self).9 This is why ingratitude is dishonorable 10 and why gratitude is good and makes us good.“All things excellent are as difficult as they are rare,” Spinoza writes.11 In the case of this excellent thing called gratitude, it is the strength of self-love that accounts for its rarity or difficulty. We all tend to see the love we have received as reason for self-congratulation rather than as cause for gratitude, which is love for the other.12 “Pride refuses to owe, self-love to pay,” writes La Rochefoucauld.13 How could pride be anything but ungrateful, if it can only love, admire, and extol the self? There is humility in gratitude, and humility is difficult. Is it a sadness? According to Spinoza it is, a point we will return to in the next chapter. What gratitude teaches us, however, is that there is also such a thing as joyful humility, or humble joy, humble because it knows it is not its own cause or its own principle and, knowing this, rejoices all the more (what a pleasure to say thank you!); because it is love, and not primarily love of self; because it knows it is indebted, or rather—since there is nothing to repay—because it knows it has all it could wish for and more, more than it had hoped for or could have expected, all thanks to the existence of the very person or thing responsible for this joy—God if you are a believer, or the world, or a friend, or a stranger, or anything at all. Gratitude is humble because it knows it is graced, graced by existence, or by life, or by all things, and gives in return, not knowing to whom or how, simply because it is good to offer thanks—to give grace—in return, to rejoice in one’s own joy and love, whose causes are always beyond our comprehension but which contain us, make us live, and carry us along. The humility of Bach, the humility of Mozart, each so different (the former gives grace with unequaled genius; the latter, we might say, is grace itself) but both overwhelming in their happy gratitude, their true simplicity, their almost superhuman power; even in anguish and suffering, they have a serenity to them that stems from the knowledge of being an effect and not a cause, an effect contained in the very thing they sing, to which they owe their existence and which carries them along. Clara Haskil, Dinu Lipatti, or Glenn Gould could express this, it seems to me, at least when they were at their best, and the joy we feel in listening to them reveals to us what gratitude essentially is, namely joy itself, in as much as it is something received and received undeservedly (yes, even for the best of us!), a state of grace that is always giving itself over to an even higher state of grace, the grace of existing, or rather of existence itself, the essence of being, the principle behind all existence, all beings, all joy, all love. Yes, what we read in Spinoza’s Ethics we can also hear in music; best of all, it seems to me, in the works of Bach and Mozart (in Haydn what we hear is more on the order of politeness and generosity, in Beethoven courage, in Schubert gentleness, in Brahms fidelity). And so we see how lofty a virtue gratitude is, a virtue more for giants than for dwarfs. Not that we are thereby exempted from it: let us be grateful for grace, and first of all to those who reveal it to us by celebrating it.No man is the cause of himself: the spirit, Claude Bruaire says, “is in debt for its being.”14 That is not quite accurate, however, for no one ever asked to come into being (it is the loan, not the gift, that results in a debt), and no one could ever repay such a debt. Life is not a debt: life is a state of grace, and being is a state of grace; therein lies gratitude’s highest lesson.

Gratitude rejoices in what has taken place or in what is. It is therefore the opposite of regret or nostalgia (which aches for a past that never was or is no more); it is also the opposite of hope or apprehension, one desiring, the other fearing (both of them desiring and fearing) a future that is yet to come and in fact may never be but that tortures by its absence. Gratitude or anxiety, the joy of what is or was, versus the dread of what could be. “The fool’s life,” says Epicurus, “is empty of gratitude and full of fears; its course lies wholly toward the future”15 Those who are incapable of gratitude live in vain; they can never be satisfied, fulfilled, or happy: they do not live, they get ready to live, as Seneca puts it.16 Or as Pascal would say, they hope to live17 and then regret the life they lived or, more often, the life they did not live. They miss the past as well as the future. The wise man, on the contrary, takes delight in living and also rejoices in having lived. Gratitude (charis) is this joy of memory, this love of the past—it neither suffers over what no longer is nor regrets what has been but joyfully recalls what was. It is time regained—the past recaptured, if you will—“the grateful recollection of what has been,” says Epicurus—by which we understand that the idea of death is made immaterial, as Proust says, for even death, take us though it will, cannot take from us what we have lived.18 These are immortal blessings, observes Epicurus, not because we do not die but because death cannot nullify what we have lived, lived fleetingly but definitively.19 Death deprives us only of the future, which does not exist. Gratitude frees us from death, through the joyous knowledge of what was. Gratitude is acknowledgment, which is to say, knowledge (whereas hope is merely imagination); this is why gratitude touches on truth, which is eternal, and inhabits it. Gratitude is the enjoyment of eternity.Yet someone will say, in answer to Epicurus, that the recollection, however grateful, of what has been will not give us back the past or return what we have lost. But what can? Gratitude does not abolish grief; it completes it. “We must heal our misfortunes by the grateful recollection of what has been and by the recognition that it is impossible to make undone what has been done.”20 Is there any more beautiful formulation of the mourning process? Mourning is about accepting what is, hence also what no longer is, and loving it as such, in its truth, in its eternity, so that we can go from the unbearable pain of loss to the sweetness of remembrance, from unfinished mourning to its completion (“the grateful recollection of what has been”), from amputation to acceptance, from suffering to joy, from love rent apart to love appeased. “Sweet is the memory of the departed friend,” says Epicurus: gratitude is this sweetness itself, when it becomes joyous. Yet suffering at first is the stronger: “How awful that he should have died!” How can we ever accept it? That is why mourning is necessary, and so difficult and so painful. But joy returns in spite of everything: “How fortunate that he should have lived!” The process of mourning is a process of gratitude.

Kant and Rousseau think gratitude a duty.21 I’m not convinced. Moreover, I don’t really believe in duties. But that gratitude is a virtue, in other words, an excellence, of this we find ample proof in the obvious baseness of those who are incapable of gratitude and in the mediocrity of all of us, who are lacking in it. How easily hatred outlasts love! How much stronger resentment is than gratitude. Gratitude sometimes even turns into resentment, so exquisitely sensitive is self-love. As Kant writes, ingratitude toward one’s benefactor “is an extremely detestable vice in the public judgment, yet man is so notorious for it, that one thinks it not unlikely to make an enemy even by rendering a benefit.”22 The greatness of gratitude, the pettiness of man.And yet for all that, gratitude itself can sometimes warrant suspicion. La Rochefoucauld sees it as mere disguised self-interest,23 and Chamfort observes, correctly, that “there is a base kind of gratitude”— a disguised servility, a disguised egoism, disguised hope.24 Sometimes we offer thanks only so that we might continue to receive (we say “thank you” but we think “more!”). This is not gratitude but flattery, obsequiousness, mendacity. It is not a virtue but a vice. In fact, even sincere gratitude cannot exempt us from any other virtue or justify any wrongdoing. It is a secondary, though not a second-rate, virtue and must be kept in its proper place: justice or honesty might warrant a breach of gratitude, but gratitude never warrants a breach of justice or good faith. Suppose someone has saved my life: am I therefore obliged to give false testimony on his behalf and cause an innocent person to be condemned? Of course not! Whatever we may owe someone, we do not become ungrateful by keeping in mind what we owe everyone else, and ourselves. He is not ungrateful, writes Spinoza, “who is not moved by the gifts of a courtesan to assist her lust, nor by those of a thief to conceal his thefts, nor by those of anyone else like that. On the contrary, he shows firmness of mind who does not allow any gifts to corrupt him, to his or to the general ruin.”25 Gratitude is not connivance; nor is it corruption.

Again, gratitude is joy; it is love. In this respect it borders on charity, which Jankélévitch has likened to “an inchoate gratitude, an unfounded, unconditional gratitude, just as gratitude is a secondary or hypothetical charity.”26 Joy upon joy; love upon love. Gratitude, then, is the secret of friendship, not because we feel indebted to our friends, since we owe them nothing, but because we share with them an overabundance of common, reciprocal joy. “Friendship goes dancing round the world,” says Epicurus, “proclaiming to us all to awake to the praises of a happy life.”27 Thank you for existing, friends say to one another, and to the world and all the universe. This kind of gratitude is certainly a virtue, for it is the happiness of loving, the only happiness there is.

GRATITUDE1

Benedict de Spinoza, The Ethics, in A Spinoza Reader: The Ethics and Other Works, ed. Edwin Curley, Princeton University Press, 1994, III, def. 6 of the affects, p. 189 (“Love is a joy, accompanied by the idea of an external cause”).2

Spinoza’s term means self-esteem or, literally, peace with oneself, which he defines as “a joy born of the fact that a man considers himself and his own power of acting” (Spinoza, The Ethics, III, def. 25 of the affects, p. 192).3

Spinoza, The Ethics, V, P24.4

See, for example, Friedrich Nietzsche’s Will to Power, IV, nos. 462, 463, and 464.5

Jean-Jacques Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, in The First and Second Discourses and the Foundations of Inequality among Men, ed. and trans. Victor Gourevitch, Harper & Row, 1985, p. 188: “Gratitude is indeed a duty that ought to be performed, but it is not a right that can be exacted.”6

Spinoza, The Ethics, IV, P71, schol.7

Ibid., III, def. 34 of the affects, p. 194; see also III, P39 and 41, as well as P41, schol. (for the expression “reciprocal love”).8

Immanuel Kant, “Concerning the Duty of Gratitude,” in The Metaphysical Principles of Virtue, trans. James W. Ellington, Library of Liberal Arts, Bobbs-Merrill, 1964,p.119.9

Spinoza, The Ethics, III, P41, schol.10

Ibid., IV, P71, schol.11

Ibid., V, P42, schol., p. 265.12

Ibid., 111, P41, schol. This is why “men are far more ready for vengeance than for returning benefits” (p. 176).13

François La Rochefoucauld, Maxims and Reflections, trans. Leonard Tancock, Penguin, 1959, maxim 228, p. 67.14

Claude Bruaire, L’être et l‘esprit, PUF, 1983, p. 60. See also p. 198.15

Cited by Seneca, Ad Lucilium Epistulae Morales (The Epistles of Seneca), trans. Richard M. Gummere, William Heinemann, 1925, XV, 9, p. 101. Epicurus also says: “The ungrateful greed of the soul makes the creature everlastingly desire varieties of dainty food” (Epicurus: The Extant Remains, trans. Cyril Bailey, Clarendon Press, 1926, LXIX, p. 117). See Marcel Conche’s enlightening remarks in his edition of Epicurus, Lettres et maximes, PUF, 1987, pp. 52-53.16

Epicurus: The Extant Remains, XLV, 13, p. 299 (“non vivunt, sed victuri sunt”).17

Blaise Pascal, Pensées, trans. W. F. Trotter, Modern Library, Random House, 1941, no. 172, pp. 60-61.18

Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus, 122, in Epicurus: The Extant Remains, p. 183. Epicurus’s expression seems to indicate (for otherwise it would be pleonastic) that, for him as for us, gratitude can apply to the present—even if, in the writings of Epicurus that have come down to us, it seems primarily linked to memory. But what is conscience, if not memory in and of the present?19

Epicurus, Letter to Menoeceus, 135.20

Epicurus: The Extant Remains, LV, p. 115. On mourning, see also my essay “Vivre, c’est perdre,” in the journal Autrement, no. 128.21

Rousseau, Discourse on Inequality, II, p. 188; Kant, The Metaphysical Principles of Virtue, § 32, p. 119.22

Kant, The Metaphysical Principles of Virtue, § 36, p. 124.23

At least as far as “most men” are concerned, for whom it is “but a covert desire to receive greater gifts” (maxim 298, Maxims, p. 76). See also maxims 223-26.24

B. Chamfort, Products of the Perfected Civilization: Selected Writings of Chamfort, trans. W. S. Merwin, Macmillan, 1969, p. 203.25

Spinoza, The Ethics, IV, P71, schol. See also P70, dem. and schol.26

Vladimir Jankélévitch, Traité des vertus, Champs-Flammarion, 1986, vol. 2, p. 250. See also vol. 1, pp. 112ff.27

Epicurus, Sentences vaticanes, 52, in Epicurus: The Extant Remains, p. 115.

About the Author

André Comte-Sponville is one of the most important of the new wave of young French philosophers. He teaches at the Sorbonne and is the author of five highly acclaimed scholarly books of classical philosophy as well as the hugely popular A Small Treatise on the Great Virtues, which is being translated into nineteen languages. Comte-Sponville lives in Paris.

Seneca - On Benefits

 [1]1. You complain that you have met with an ungrateful person. If this is your first experience of that sort, you should offer thanks either to your good luck or to your caution. In this case, however, caution can effect nothing but to make you ungenerous. For if you wish to avoid such a danger, you will not confer benefits; and so, that benefits may not be lost with another man, they will be lost to yourself. 

It is better, however, to get no return than to confer no benefits. Even after a poor crop one should sow again; for often losses due to continued barrenness of an unproductive soil have been made good by one year's fertility. 2. In order to discover one grateful person, it is worth while to make trial of many ungrateful ones. No man has so unerring a hand when he confers benefits that he is not frequently deceived; it is well for the traveller to wander, that he may again cleave to the path. After a shipwreck, sailors try the sea again. The banker is not frightened away from the forum by the swindler. If one were compelled to drop everything that caused trouble, life would soon grow dull amid sluggish idleness; but in your case this very condition may prompt you to become more charitable. For when the outcome of any undertaking is unsure, you must try again and again, in order to succeed ultimately. 3. I have, however, discussed the matter with sufficient fulness in the volumes which I have written, entitled "On Benefits."[2]What I think should rather be investigated is this, – a question which I feel has not been made sufficiently clear: "Whether he who has helped us has squared the account and has freed us from our debt, if he has done us harm later." You may add this question also, if you like: "when the harm done later has been more than the help rendered previously." 4. If you are seeking for the formal and just decision of a strict judge, you will find that he checks off one act by the other, and declares: "Though the injuries outweigh the benefits, yet we should credit to the benefits anything that stands over even after the injury." The harm done was indeed greater, but the helpful act was done first. Hence the time also should be taken into account. 5. Other cases are so clear that I need not remind you that you should also look into such points as: How gladly was the help offered, and how reluctantly was the harm done, – since benefits, as well as injuries, depend on the spirit. "I did not wish to confer the benefit; but I was won over by my respect for the man, or by the importunity of his request, or by hope." 6. Our feeling about every obligation depends in each case upon the spirit in which the benefit is conferred; we weigh not the bulk of the gift, but the quality of the good-will which prompted it. So now let us do away with guess-work; the former deed was a benefit, and the latter, which transcended the earlier benefit, is an injury. The good man so arranges the two sides of his ledger[3] that he voluntarily cheats himself by adding to the benefit and subtracting from the injury.

The more indulgent magistrate, however (and I should rather be such a one), will order us to forget the injury and remember the accommodation. 7. "But surely," you say, "it is the part of justice to render to each that which is his due, – thanks in return for a benefit, and retribution,[4] or at any rate ill-will, in return for an injury!" This, I say, will be true when it is one man who has inflicted the injury, and a different man who has conferred the benefit; for if it is the same man, the force of the injury is nullified by the benefit conferred. Indeed, a man who ought to be pardoned, even though there were no good deeds credited to him in the past, should receive something more than mere leniency if he commits a wrong when he has a benefit to his credit. 8. I do not set an equal value on benefits and injuries. I reckon a benefit at a higher rate than an injury. Not all grateful persons know what it involves to be in debt for a benefit; even a thoughtless, crude fellow, one of the common herd, may know, especially soon after he has received the gift; but he does not know how deeply he stands in debt therefor. Only the wise man knows exactly what value should be put upon everything; for the fool whom I just mentioned, no matter how good his intentions may be, either pays less than he owes, or pays it at the wrong time or the wrong place. That for which he should make return he wastes and loses. 9. There is a marvellously accurate phraseology applied to certain subjects,[5] a long-established terminology which indicates certain acts by means of symbols that are most efficient and that serve to outline men's duties. We are, as you know, wont to speak thus: "A. has made a return for the favour bestowed by B." Making a return means handing over of your own accord that which you owe. We do not say, "He has paid back the favour"; for "pay back" is used of a man upon whom a demand for payment is made, of those who pay against their will, of those who pay under any circumstances whatsoever, and of those who pay through a third party. We do not say, "He has 'restored' the benefit," or 'settled' it; we have never been satisfied with a word which applies properly to a debt of money. 10. Making a return means offering something to him from whom you have received something. The phrase implies a voluntary return; he who has made such a return has served the writ upon himself.

The wise man will inquire in his own mind into all the circumstances: how much he has received, from whom, when, where, how. And so we[6] declare that none but the wise man knows how to make return for a favour; moreover, none but the wise man knows how to confer a benefit, – that man, I mean, who enjoys the giving more than the recipient enjoys the receiving. 11. Now some person will reckon this remark as one of the generally surprising statements such as we Stoics are wont to make and such as the Greeks call "paradoxes,"[7] and will say: "Do you maintain, then, that only the wise man knows how to return a favour? Do you maintain that no one else knows how to make restoration to a creditor for a debt? Or, on buying a commodity, to pay full value to the seller?" In order not to bring any odium upon myself, let me tell you that Epicurus says the same thing. At any rate, Metrodorus remarks[8] that only the wise man knows how to return a favour. 12. Again, the objector mentioned above wonders at our saying: "The wise man alone knows how to love, the wise man alone is a real friend." And yet it is a part of love and of friendship to return favours; nay, further, it is an ordinary act, and happens more frequently than real friendship. Again, this same objector wonders at our saying, "There is no loyalty except in the wise man," just as if he himself does not say the same thing! Or do you think that there is any loyalty in him who does not know how to return a favour? 13. These men, accordingly, should cease to discredit us, just as if we were uttering an impossible boast; they should understand that the essence of honour resides in the wise man, while among the crowd we find only the ghost and the semblance of honour. None but the wise man knows how to return a favour. Even a fool can return it in proportion to his knowledge and his power; his fault would be a lack of knowledge rather than a lack of will or desire. To will does not come by teaching.

14. The wise man will compare all things with one another; for the very same object becomes greater or smaller, according to the time, the place, and the cause. Often the riches that are spent in profusion upon a palace cannot accomplish as much as a thousand denarii given at the right time. Now it makes a great deal of difference whether you give outright, or come to a man's assistance, whether your generosity saves him, or sets him up in life. Often the gift is small, but the consequences great. And what a distinction do you imagine there is between taking something which one lacks, – something which was offered, – and receiving a benefit in order to confer one in return?

15. But we should not slip back into the subject which we have already sufficiently investigated. In this balancing of benefits and injuries, the good man will, to be sure, judge with the highest degree of fairness, but he will incline towards the side of the benefit; he will turn more readily in this direction. 16. Moreover, in affairs of this kind the person concerned is wont to count for a great deal. Men say: "You conferred a benefit upon me in that matter of the slave, but you did me an injury in the case of my father" or, "You saved my son, but robbed me of a father." Similarly, he will follow up all other matters in which comparisons can be made, and if the difference be very slight, he will pretend not to notice it. Even though the difference be great, yet if the concession can be made without impairment of duty and loyalty, our good man will overlook it – that is, provided the injury exclusively affects the good man himself. 17. To sum up, the matter stands thus: the good man will be easy-going in striking a balance; he will allow too much to be set against his credit. He will be unwilling to pay a benefit by balancing the injury against it. The side towards which he will lean, the tendency which he will exhibit, is the desire to be under obligations for the favour, and the desire to make return therefor. For anyone who receives a benefit more gladly than he repays it is mistaken. By as much as he who pays is more light-hearted than he who borrows, by so much ought he to be more joyful who unburdens himself of the greatest debt – a benefit received – than he who incurs the greatest obligations. 18. For ungrateful men make mistakes in this respect also: they have to pay their creditors both capital and interest,[9] but they think that benefits are currency which they can use without interest. So the debts grow through postponement, and the later the action is postponed the more remains to be paid. A man is an ingrate if he repays a favour without interest. Therefore, interest also should be allowed for, when you compare your receipts and your expenses. 19. We should try by all means to be as grateful as possible.

For gratitude is a good thing for ourselves, in a sense in which justice, that is commonly supposed to concern other persons, is not; gratitude returns in large measure unto itself. There is not a man who, when he has benefited his neighbour, has not benefited himself, – I do not mean for the reason that he whom you have aided will desire to aid you, or that he whom you have defended will desire to protect you, or that an example of good conduct returns in a circle to benefit the doer, just as examples of bad conduct recoil upon their authors, and as men find no pity if they suffer wrongs which they themselves have demonstrated the possibility of committing; but that the reward for all the virtues lies in the virtues themselves. For they are not practised with a view to recompense; the wages of a good deed is to have done it.[10]20. I am grateful, not in order that my neighbour, provoked by the earlier act of kindness, may be more ready to benefit me, but simply in order that I may perform a most pleasant and beautiful act; I feel grateful, not because it profits me, but because it pleases me. And, to prove the truth of this to you, I declare that even if I may not be grateful without seeming ungrateful, even if I am able to return a benefit only by an act which resembles an injury; even so, I shall strive in the utmost calmness of spirit toward the purpose which honour demands, in the very midst of disgrace. No one, I think, rates virtue higher or is more consecrated to virtue than he who has lost his reputation for being a good man in order to keep from losing the approval of his conscience. 21. Thus, as I have said, your being grateful is more conducive to your own good than to your neighbour's good. For while your neighbour has had a common, everyday experience, – namely, receiving back the gift which he had bestowed, – you have had a great experience which is the outcome of an utterly happy condition of soul, – to have felt gratitude. For if wickedness makes men unhappy and virtue makes men blest, and if it is a virtue to be grateful, then the return which you have made is only the customary thing, but the thing to which you have attained is priceless, – the consciousness of gratitude, which comes only to the soul that is divine and blessed. The opposite feeling to this, however, is immediately attended by the greatest unhappiness; no man, if he be ungrateful, will be unhappy in the future. I allow him no day of grace; he is unhappy forthwith. 

22. Let us therefore avoid being ungrateful, not for the sake of others but for our own sakes. When we do wrong, only the least and lightest portion of it flows back upon our neighbour; the worst and, if I may use the term, the densest portion of it stays at home and troubles the owner.[11] My master Attalus used to say: "Evil herself drinks the largest portion of her own poison." The poison which serpents carry for the destruction of others, and secrete without harm to themselves, is not like this poison; for this sort is ruinous to the possessor. 23. The ungrateful man tortures and torments himself; he hates the gifts which he has accepted, because he must make a return for them, and he tries to belittle their value, but he really enlarges and exaggerates the injuries which he has received. And what is more wretched than a man who forgets his benefits and clings to his injuries?

Wisdom, on the other hand, lends grace to every benefit, and of her own free will commends it to her own favour, and delights her soul by continued recollection thereof. 24. Evil men have but one pleasure in benefits, and a very short-lived pleasure at that; it lasts only while they are receiving them. But the wise man derives therefrom an abiding and eternal joy. For he takes delight not so much in receiving the gift as in having received it; and this joy never perishes; it abides with him always. He despises the wrongs done him; he forgets them, not accidentally, but voluntarily. 25. He does not put a wrong construction upon everything, or seek for someone whom he may hold responsible for each happening; he rather ascribes even the sins of men to chance. He will not misinterpret a word or a look; he makes light of all mishaps by interpreting them in a generous way.[12] He does not remember an injury rather than a service. As far as possible, he lets his memory rest upon the earlier and the better deed, never changing his attitude towards those who have deserved well of him, except in cases where the bad deeds far outdistance the good, and the space between them is obvious even to one who closes his eyes to it; even then only to this extent, that he strives, after receiving the preponderant injury, to resume the attitude which he held before he received the benefit. For when the injury merely equals the benefit, a certain amount of kindly feeling is left over. 26. Just as a defendant is acquitted when the votes are equal, and just as the spirit of kindliness always tries to bend every doubtful case toward the better interpretation, so the mind of the wise man, when another's merits merely equal his bad deeds, will, to be sure, cease to feel an obligation, but does not cease to desire to feel it, and acts precisely like the man who pays his debts even after they have been legally cancelled.[13]27. But no man can be grateful unless he has learned to scorn the things which drive the common herd to distraction; if you wish to make return for a favour, you must be willing to go into exile, or to pour forth your blood, or to undergo poverty, or – and this will frequently happen, – even to let your very innocence be stained and exposed to shameful slanders. It is no slight price that a man must pay for being grateful. 28. We hold nothing dearer than a benefit, so long as we are seeking one; we hold nothing cheaper after we have received it. Do you ask what it is that makes us forget benefits received? It is our extreme greed for receiving others. We consider not what we have obtained, but what we are to seek. We are deflected from the right course by riches, titles, power, and everything which is valuable in our opinion but worthless when rated at its real value. 29. We do not know how to weigh matters;[14] we should take counsel regarding them, not with their reputation but with their nature; those things possess no grandeur wherewith to enthral our minds, except the fact that we have become accustomed to marvel at them. For they are not praised because they ought to be desired, but they are desired because they have been praised; and when the error of individuals has once created error on the part of the public, then the public error goes on creating error on the part of individuals.

30. But just as we take on faith such estimates of values, so let us take on the faith of the people this truth, that nothing is more honourable than a grateful heart. This phrase will be echoed by all cities, and by all races, even those from savage countries. Upon this point good and bad will agree. 31. Some praise pleasure, some prefer toil; some say that pain is the greatest of evils, some say it is no evil at all; some will include riches in the Supreme Good, others will say that their discovery meant harm to the human race, and that none is richer than he to whom Fortune has found nothing to give. Amid all this diversity of opinion all men will yet with one voice, as the saying is, vote "aye" to the proposition that thanks should be returned to those who have deserved well of us. On this question the common herd, rebellious as they are, will all agree, but at present we keep paying back injuries instead of benefits, and the primary reason why a man is ungrateful is that he has found it impossible to be grateful enough. 32. Our madness has gone to such lengths that it is a very dangerous thing to confer great benefits upon a person; for just because he thinks it shameful not to repay, so he would have none left alive whom he should repay. "Keep for yourself what you have received; I do not ask it back; I do not demand it. Let it be safe to have conferred a favour."[15] There is no worse hatred than that which springs from shame at the desecration of a benefit.[16] Farewell.

1 The reader will be interested to compare this letter with the treatise (or essay) On Benefits, De Beneficiis, which was dedicated to Aebutius Liberalis, the subject of Ep. xci.

2  See De Ben. i. 1. 9 f. non est autem quod tardiores faciat ad bene merendum turba ingratorum.

3  Calculi were counters, spread out on the abacus, or counting-board; they ran in columns, by millions, hundred thousands, etc.

4  Talio (from talis, "just so much") is the old Roman law of "eye for eye and tooth for tooth." As law became less crude, it gave way to fines.

5  This "long-established terminology" applies to the verborum proprietas of philosophic diction, with especial reference to τὰ καθήκοντα, the appropriate duties of the philosopher and the seeker after wisdom. Thus, referre is distinguished from reddere, reponere, solvere, and other financial terms.

6  i.e., the Stoics.

7  e.g., "Only the wise man is king," "there is no mean between virtue and vice," "pain is no evil," "only the wise man is free," "riches are not a good" etc.

8  Frag. 54 Körte.

9  Literally, "more than the capital and in addition to the rate of interest."

10  Beneficence is a subdivision of the second cardinal virtue of the Stoics, Justice. Cicero discusses this topic at length in De Off. i. 42 ff.

11  Perhaps a figure from the vintage. For the same metaphor, though in a different connexion, see Ep. i. 5, and Ep. cviii. 26: quemadmodum ex amphora primum, quod est sincerissimum, effluit, gravissimum quodque turbidumque subsidit, sic in aetate nostra quod est optimum, in primo est.

12  Cf. § 6: "The good man so arranges the two sides of his ledger that he voluntarily cheats himself by adding to the benefit and subtracting from the injury." Cf. also § 17: "The good man will be easy-going in striking a balance; he will allow too much to be set against his credit."

13  When by law or special enactment novae tabellae were granted to special classes of debtors, their debts, as in our bankruptcy courts, were cancelled.

14  Cf. Ep. xxxi. 6 quid ergo est bonum? rerum scientia.

15 The words are put into the mouth of an imaginary benefactor who fears for his own life.

16 Cf. Tac. Agric. 42 proprium humani ingenii est odisse quem laeseris.

Humility, Gratitude and Patience

 Humility

Our society encourages navel-gazing and celebrates entitlement and exuberance. Economic interests lie not in humility but in pride and hubris, while to call something or someone ‘humble’ most often connotes that the thing or person is simple, contemptible, or of little worth.

To distinguish it from modesty is the first step in finding humility. Like ‘humiliation’, ‘humility’ derives from the Latin humus, ‘earth’ or ‘dirt’. Modesty on the other hand derives from modus, ‘manner’ or ‘measure’, and means restraint in appearance and behaviour. It is the reluctance to flaunt, display, or otherwise draw attention to oneself.

Modesty often implies a certain artfulness or artificiality, perhaps even insincerity or hypocrisy. In Dickens’s David Copperfield (1850), the character of Uriah Heep is notable for his obsequiousness, and often brings up his own ‘umbleness’ in a bid to disguise the true scale of his ambition. Modesty often poses as humility, but, unlike humility, is superficial and external rather than deep and internal. At best, modesty is no more than good manners.

True humility, on the other hand, derives from a proper perspective on our human condition: one person among billions on a small planet among billions, like a bacterium on a titbit of cheese. Of course, human beings cannot remain this level-headed for longer than three winks, but truly humble people are nonetheless far more aware of their cosmic insignificance, an insignificance that verges upon non-existence. A mote of dust does not consider itself superior or inferior to other motes of dust, or concern itself with their comings and goings. Enthralled by the miracle of existence, truly humble people live not for themselves or their image, but for life itself.

Drunk on their humility, humble people can sometimes come across as arrogant. In 399 BCE, at the age of 70, Socrates was indicted for offending the Olympian gods and breaking the law against impiety. He was accused of ‘studying things in the sky and below the earth’, ‘making the worse into the stronger argument’, and ‘teaching these same things to others’. At his trial, he gave a defiant defence, telling the jurors that they ought to be ashamed of their eagerness to possess as much wealth and reputation as possible, while not caring for or giving thought to wisdom or truth, or the best possible state of their soul.

After being convicted and sentenced to death, Socrates turned around to the 501 jurors and said:

You think that I was convicted through deficiency of words—I mean, that if I had thought fit to leave nothing undone, nothing unsaid, I might have gained an acquittal. Not so; the deficiency which led to my conviction was not of words—certainly not. But I had not the boldness or impudence or inclination to address you as you would have liked me to address you, weeping and wailing and lamenting, and saying and doing many things which you have been accustomed to hearing from others, and which, as I say, are unworthy of me. But I thought that I ought not to do anything common or mean in the hour of danger: nor do I now repent of the manner of my defence, and I would rather die having spoken after my manner, than speak in your manner and live.

Throughout his long life, Socrates, who looked like a tramp, had been a paragon of humility. When his friend Chærephon asked the Delphic oracle if anyone was wiser than Socrates, the Pythian priestess replied that no one was wiser. To discover the meaning of this divine utterance, Socrates questioned a number of people with a claim to wisdom, and in each case concluded, ‘I am likely to be wiser than he to this small extent, that I do not think I know what I do not know.’ From then on, he dedicated himself to the service of the gods by seeking out anyone who might be wise and, ‘if he is not, showing him that he is not.’

Was Socrates lacking in humility at his trial? Was he, paradoxically, being arrogant by bragging about his humility? Perhaps he put on an arrogant display because he wanted to die, because he was ill or infirm and knew that by dying the death of a martyr his thought and teachings would be preserved for posterity. Or perhaps genuine humility can seem like arrogance to those who are truly arrogant, in which case humble people may need to hide their humility under a cloak of… modesty—which, at his trial, Socrates was unwilling to do.

To be humble is to subdue our ego so that things are no longer all about us, whereas to be modest is to protect the ego of others so that they do not feel uncomfortable, threatened, or belittled, and attack us in return. Because humble people are in fact very big, they may need to slap on an extra thick veneer of modesty.

Socrates is not the only humble person who occasionally comes across as arrogant. In fact, there is a propensity for such ‘arrogance’ among celebrated thinkers and artists. Even doubting Descartes had his moments. In an appendix to his Discourse, he let slip: ‘I hope that posterity will judge me kindly, not only as to the things which I have explained, but also to those which I have intentionally omitted so as to leave to others the pleasure of discovery.’

Erasmus said that ‘humility is truth’. Humble people are disinclined to conceal the truth because they are by nature truth seekers: it is often through philosophy that they found humility, and this humility in turn invites philosophy. Philosophy, the art of perspective, if carried out in earnest, eventually leads to clarity of thought, such that humble people are often highly productive or prolific. If a person is insightful and inspired, chances are good that he or she is also humble.

Religious traditions are keen to emphasize humility in their teachings. In Greek mythology, Aidos, the daimona of shame, reverence, and humility, held people back from doing wrong. In around the eighth century BCE, Hesiod wrote: ‘Aidos and Nemesis with their sweet forms wrapped in white robes, will go from the wide-pathed earth and forsake mankind to join the company of the deathless gods…’ Some of the most vivid Greek myths, like those of Tantalus, Sisyphus, Œdipus, Phæthon, Œdipus, and Icarus, who famously flew too close to the sun, can be read as warnings against hubris, which is the defiance of the gods from excessive pride, leading to downfall or nemesis.

In the Christian canon, pride is the original sin, since it is from pride that the angel Lucifer fell from Heaven to become Satan:

How art thou fallen from heaven, O Lucifer, son of the morning! How art thou cut down to the ground, which didst weaken the nations! For thou hast said in thine heart, I will ascend into heaven, I will exalt my throne above the stars of God… I will sit also upon the mount of the congregation, in the sides of the north: I will ascend above the heights of the clouds; I will be like the most High. Yet thou shalt be brought down to hell, to the sides of the pit.

The Book of Numbers speaks of Moses as ‘a man exceeding [sic.] meek above all men that dwelt upon earth’, and the Book of Proverbs teaches that ‘God opposes the proud but gives grace to the humble’. Similarly, Matthew says that ‘whoever exalts himself will be humbled, and whoever humbles himself will be exalted’.

St Augustine (d. 430 CE) held that humility is the foundation for all the other virtues: without humility, one can have only the appearance of virtue, but not the thing itself. In one of his sermons, he preached: ‘Do you wish to rise? Begin by descending. You plan a tower that will pierce the clouds? Lay first the foundation of humility.’

In the Buddhist tradition, humility is part of the spiritual practice, and an outcome of it: one cannot attain enlightenment unless one has perfected humility. In Taoism, humility is one of the Three Treasures, or basic virtues, along with compassion and frugality. As for Islam, the very word ‘Islam’ means ‘submission (to the will of God)’.

But not all of the canonical philosophers thought highly of humility. Aristotle omitted it from his list of virtues, and Hume and Nietzsche went so far as to condemn it.

(...)

There is much to chew upon in Nietzsche’s master-slave dichotomy, but he and Hume seem to confuse or confound humility with modesty or meekness. Both humility and modesty involve self-abnegation, but whereas modesty involves self-abnegation for the sake of others or for the sake of short-term ease and favour, humility involves self-abnegation for the sake of a higher truth and better self.

There is more and more evidence to suggest that, far from being inhibiting, humility is a highly adaptive trait. Researchers have linked it to pro-social dispositions such as self-control, gratitude, generosity, tolerance, and forgiveness; and associated it not only with better personal and social relationships, as might be expected, but also with better health outcomes, superior academic and job performance, and a more effective leadership style.

Because humility de-emphasizes the self, it diminishes the need for self-deception, which in turn frees us to admit to and learn from our mistakes; contemplate alternative perspectives and possibilities; recognize the qualities and contributions of others; and respect, value, and submit to legitimate authority.

In sum, humility could not be more different from mere modesty or meekness. If humility resembles anything, it is in fact the ancient concept of piety, or right relations, but stripped or abstracted of piety’s more concrete and sectarian religious dimensions.

Humility is the real religion.

Gratitude

Gratitude [Latin gratia, grace] never came easily to us men and women, and is a diminishing virtue in modern times. In our consumerist society, we tend to focus on what we lack, or on what other people have that we do not, whereas gratitude is the feeling of appreciation for what we already have. More than that, it is the recognition that the good in our life can come from something that is beyond us and beyond our control—be it other people, nature, or a higher power—and that owes little or nothing to us. Gratitude is not a technique or stratagem, but a complex and refined moral disposition. It has been defined poetically as ‘the memory of the heart’ or ‘the moral memory of mankind’.

It is easy enough, both for the debtor and the benefactor, to mistake indebtedness for gratitude. Indebtedness is a much more contained and restricted obligation, or perceived obligation, on the part of the debtor to recompense or otherwise compensate the benefactor, not because recompense is a pleasure but because obligation is a pain. Unlike gratitude, indebtedness can lead the debtor to avoid and even resent the benefactor.

As philosopher Seneca (d. 65 CE) put it:

In the case of certain men, the more they owe, the more they hate. A trifling debt makes a man your debtor; a large one makes him an enemy.

Gratitude should also be distinguished from appreciation, which is the recognition and enjoyment of the good qualities of a person or thing, but without the dimension of awe, reverence, and humility that is at the core of gratitude.

Gratitude is magnified if the conferred benefit is unexpected, or if the benefactor is of a higher social standing than the debtor. But if a benefit comes to be expected, both it and the benefactor tend to be taken for granted by the beneficiary—a common feature of tired relationships, and a rationale for doling out gifts and favours on a variable ratio schedule. Every Christmas, I give the refuse collectors in my street a bottle of wine. One year, the gift failed to materialize, and when it eventually did, some time in February, they accepted it only grudgingly.

Gratitude is also magnified if, in benefiting us, the benefactor touches our feelings. Unless our feelings are moved, we tend to respond not with gratitude but with mere appreciation—which is why a gift ought to be accompanied by a thoughtful card. By the same token, the teachers whom we hold dearest in our hearts are not those who assiduously taught us the most facts, or fastidiously covered every bulleted point on the syllabus, but those who inspired us and opened us up to the world.

In paying homage to something outside ourselves, gratitude enables us to connect with something that is not only larger than ourselves but also benevolent, even nurturing. By turning us outward, it opens our eyes to the miracle that is life, something to marvel at, revel in, and celebrate, rather than forget, ignore, or take for granted as it passes us by. Gratitude encourages us to joy, tranquillity, awareness, enthusiasm, and empathy, while removing us from anxiety, sadness, loneliness, regret, and envy, with which it is fundamentally incompatible. All this it does because it opens us up to a bigger and better perspective, shifting our focus from what we lack or strive for to all that we already have, to the bounty that surrounds us, and, above all, to life itself, which is the fount of all opportunity and possibility. This eagle or godlike perspective frees us to live life, no longer for ourselves, but for life itself.

For this reason, the philosopher Cicero (d. 43 BCE) called gratitude the greatest of the virtues, and, more than that, the mother of all the other virtues. Today, science has begun to catch up with Cicero. Studies have linked gratitude with increased satisfaction, motivation, and energy; better sleep and health; and reduced stress and sadness. Grateful people engage much more with their environment, leading to greater personal growth and self-acceptance, and stronger feelings of purpose, meaning, and connectedness.

We can be grateful not only for past and present benefits but also for likely future benefits. Forward gratitude promotes optimism, and optimism faith. So it can be no surprise that both Western and Eastern religious traditions strongly emphasize gratitude. In many Christian denominations, the most important rite is Holy Communion or Eucharist—a word that derives from eucharistia, Greek for ‘thanksgiving’. Luther himself spoke of gratitude as ‘the basic Christian attitude’. More than a mere feeling, Christian gratitude is a virtue, or disposition of the soul, that shapes our thoughts, feelings, and actions, and that is developed and exercised through a remembered relationship with God and His Creation.

In contrast, ingratitude—which can range from mere lack or absence of gratitude to Brutus’ murder of Cæsar—is hurtful because it ignores the efforts and sacrifices of the benefactor, thereby affronting him or her, and, by extension, life itself.

In Shakespeare’s King Lear (1606), Lear cries out:

Ingratitude, thou marble-hearted fiend,

More hideous when thou show’st thee in a child

Than the sea monster!

…

How much sharper than a serpent’s tooth it is

To have a thankless child!

Hume maintains that ‘of all the crimes that human creatures are capable of committing, the most horrid and unnatural is ingratitude…’ For Kant, ingratitude is, quite simply, ‘the essence of vileness’. Ingratitude, which, of course, has become the norm, corrodes social bonds and undermines public trust, leading to societies built on rights and entitlements rather than duties and obligations, on me rather than us, and in which every aspect of human life has to be regulated, recorded, and monitored.

Despite the great and many benefits that it confers, gratitude is hard to cultivate. It is opposed to some deeply ingrained human traits, in particular, our need to feel in control of our destiny, our propensity to credit ourselves for our successes while blaming others for our setbacks, and our unconscious belief in some kind of cosmic equality or justice—that is, our refusal to accept that life is fundamentally unfair. Today, we seek more and more to exist as independent individuals rather than as a social collective, and gratitude undermines our ego illusion.

As human nature does not leave much place for it, gratitude is an attainment of maturity, or, to be more precise, emotional maturity, which can arrive at any age or, more commonly, not at all. Children who are taught to parrot ‘thank you’ mean it even less than their parents do. Many people express gratitude, or a semblance of it, simply because doing so is useful or the ‘done thing’. Gratitude is good manners, and good manners aim at aping profundity when profundity is lacking.

Real gratitude, in contrast, is a rare and accomplished virtue. There is a fable in Æsop about a slave who extracts a thorn from the paw of a lion. Some time later, the slave and the lion are captured, and the slave thrown to the lion. The starved lion bounds and roars towards the slave, but upon recognizing his friend fawns upon him and licks his face like a lapdog. ‘Gratitude’ concludes Æsop, ‘is the sign of noble souls.’

Like all virtues, gratitude requires constant cultivation, until such a day as we can say, ‘Thank you for nothing.’

Patience

An old man shared his deepest regret. ‘I wish’ he said, ‘that I had understood the unfolding of time.’ Patience (or forbearance) comes from the Latin patientia, ‘patience, endurance, submission’, and, ultimately—like ‘passivity’ and ‘passion’—from patere, ‘to suffer’. It can be defined as the quality of endurance or equanimity in the face of adversity, from simple delay or provocation to tragic misfortune and excruciating pain.

Being both adaptive and difficult, patience is often thought of as a virtue, but it can also be understood as a complex of virtues including self-control, humility, tolerance, generosity, and mercy, and is itself an important aspect of other virtues such as hope, faith, and love. Patience is, therefore, a paradigm for the ancient notion of the unity of the virtues.

In Buddhism, patience is named as one of the Six Perfections [paramitas] and extends to the non-return of harm. The Book of Proverbs, in the Judeo-Christian tradition, speaks very highly of patience: ‘He that is slow to anger is better than the mighty; and he that ruleth his spirit than he that taketh a city.’ This is echoed in Ecclesiastes, which teaches, ‘The patient in spirit is better than the proud of spirit. Be not hasty in thy spirit to be angry: for anger resteth in the bosom of fools.’

The opposite of patience is impatience, which can be defined as the inability or disinclination to endure perceived imperfection. Impatience is a rejection of the present moment on the grounds that it is tainted or marred, and ought to be replaced by some more ideal imagined future. It is a rejection of the way things are, a rejection of reality. Whereas patience recognizes that life is a struggle for each and every one of us, impatience takes umbrage at people for being the way they are, betraying a kind of disregard, even contempt, for human nature in its finitude.

Impatience implies impotence, that is, lack of control or command over a situation, and this impotence gives rise to frustration. Like anger (Chapter 16), impatience and frustration are as misguided as they are miserable, and as sterile as they are self-defeating. They can lead to rash and destructive action, and also, paradoxically, to inaction, or procrastination, since to put off a demanding or boring task is also to put off the frustration to which it is bound to lead.

Today more than ever, patience is a forgotten virtue. Our individualistic and materialistic society values ambition and action (or, at least, activity) above all else, whereas patience involves a withdrawing and withholding of the self. And things are only getting worse: In a study of millions of Internet users, researchers found that, within just ten seconds, about half of users had given up on videos that had not yet started to play. What’s more, users with a faster connection were fastest to click away, suggesting that technological progress is actually eroding our patience.

Waiting, even for a very short time, has become so unbearable that much of our economy is geared at eliminating ‘dead time’. In The Art of Failure, I argue that such restless impatience is an expression of the manic defence, the essence of which is to prevent feelings of helplessness and despair from entering the conscious mind by distracting it with opposite feelings such as euphoria, purposeful activity, and omnipotent control.

Even in pre-modern, pre-technological times, the so-called egocentric predicament made it difficult to exercise patience. Because I have privileged access to my own thoughts, I blow them out of all proportion and, as a result, lose perspective over a situation. For example, if I am impatient in the checkout line, this is largely because I am under the impression that my time is more valuable, and my purpose greater, than that of the mugs standing in front of me, about whom I know nothing at all. In a belief that I could be doing a better job at the till, I give dagger eyes to the cashier—failing to recognize that he or she is coming at it from a different angle and with different skills and abilities. In the end, my frustration in itself becomes a source of frustration as I vacillate between biding my time in the queue, switching queues, and even abandoning my shopping.

Patience can be regarded as a decision-making problem: eat up all the grain today, or plant it into the ground and wait for it to multiply. Unfortunately, human beings evolved not as farmers but as hunter-gatherers, and have a strong tendency to discount long-term rewards. This ancestral short-sightedness is borne out by the Stanford marshmallow experiment, a series of studies on delayed gratification led by Walter Mischel in the late 1960s and 1970s. Conducted on hundreds of four- and five-year old children, Mischel’s studies involved a simple binary choice: eat this marshmallow or hold back for fifteen minutes to be given a second one. Having explained this choice to a child, the experimenter left the child alone with the marshmallow for fifteen minutes. Follow-up studies carried out over forty years found that the minority of children who had been able to hold out for the second marshmallow went on to enjoy significantly better life outcomes, including higher test scores, better social skills, and less substance misuse.

Even so, patience involves much more than the mere ability to hold back for some future gain, as some of the children did. Exercising patience (note the use of the verb ‘to exercise’) can be compared to dieting or growing a garden—or, indeed, writing a book. Yes, waiting is involved, but one also needs to have a plan in place, and to work at that plan. And so, when it comes to others, patience amounts not to mere restraint or toleration, but to an active, almost complicit, engagement in their struggle and welfare. In that much, patience is a form of compassion, which, rather than disregarding and alienating people, turns them into friends and allies.

If impatience implies impotence, patience implies power, power borne out of understanding. Rather than make us into a hostage to fortune, patience frees us from frustration and its ills, and affords us the calm and perspective to think, say, and do the right thing in the right way at the right time—while still enabling us to enjoy all the other things that are good in our life. Faced with a long checkout line, I might choose to abandon my shopping, but, even then, I can do so without losing my cool and ruining my day.

Exercising patience need not mean never protesting or giving up, but only ever doing so in a considered fashion: never impetuously, never pettily, and never pointlessly. Neither need it mean withholding, just like ageing a case of fine wine for several years need not mean withholding from wine during all that time. Life is too short to wait, but it is not too short for patience.

Last but not least, patience enables us to achieve things that would not otherwise have been possible to achieve. As the philosopher Jean de La Bruyère (d. 1696) put it, ‘There is no road too long to the person who advances deliberately and without undue haste; there are no honours too distant to the person who prepares himself for them with patience.’ Michelangelo compressed this thought into just four words when he said: ‘Genius is eternal patience.’

Patience is much easier, maybe even pleasant, to exercise if one truly understands that it can and does deliver much better outcomes, not just for ourselves but for others too. In 2012, researchers at the University of Rochester replicated the marshmallow experiment. But before doing so, they split the participating children into two groups, exposing the first group to unreliable experiences in the form of broken promises, and the second group to reliable experiences in the form of kept promises. What they found is that the children in the second group (exposed to reliable experiences) waited an average of four times longer than those in the first group.

In other words, patience is largely a matter of trust, or, some might say, faith—including in our political, legal, and financial systems.

Heaven and Hell The Psychology of the Emotions

Neel Burton