What Is It to Be Intellectually Humble?
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We human beings are seekers. We seek love, wealth, security, power, happiness, and recognition. We also seek knowledge. Aristotle said, “All people by nature desire to know.” The desire to know can be very ambitious, like that of the scientists who sought to solve the structure of the DNA molecule, or rather modest. It can be enormously satisfying to know and understand things. What does it take to have intellectual success—to come to know and understand something challenging? Well, you need some raw intelligence and memory, and you need to work hard and persevere when it doesn’t come easily. You’ll be better off if you’re surrounded by learned people and have enough leisure and resources to support your inquiries.
However, you will also need to BE a certain kind of person. To achieve significant and challenging knowledge, you’ll need some virtues. One of those virtues is intellectual humility. Of course, several other virtues are needed for optimum performance as well. I mentioned persevering, and that’s of course the behavioral output of the virtue of perseverance; I mentioned working hard, and the corresponding virtue is diligence. The persevering and the diligent will have more success in knowing than the impatient and the lazy. While a love of knowledge, courage, open-mindedness, and intellectual fairness or charity are also necessary for optimal performance, the virtue I want to discuss here is intellectual humility. What is it to be intellectually humble?
The first definition of ‘humility’ in the Oxford English Dictionary is “The quality of being humble or having a lowly opinion of oneself.” Now we can’t deny that this is one meaning of the word, but it seems clear that thinking poorly of oneself is not a virtue. So some have suggested that humility is evaluating oneself correctly: if you’re the world’s worst pianist, then humility is assessing yourself as such, and if you’re the world’s greatest pianist, humility is assessing yourself as that. Although this is much closer to being the virtue than low self-esteem, correct self-assessment doesn’t seem to be humility either. Imagine two people. One is rotten at his job, and the other is spectacular at hers. And imagine that these two go around proclaiming their relative worth. The one says, “Woe is me, I am an abominable insurance salesman,” and the other says, “I am an amazingly glorious newspaper editor.” Even if both self-assessments hit the nail on the head, I don’t think either of these characters has exhibited the virtue of humility.