Aristotle is famous for many things of which he was made into a proud or magnanimous man. Chief among these might be his advice for living a life of good character.
Aristotle held that knowledge leads to virtuous actions, which lead themselves to happiness. Virtuous actions are those that are neither excessive or deficient—the two qualities of vices—, but which strike a healthy balance or equilibrium. That striking the medium is a virtue. The chief virtue is magnanimity, sometimes translated as “pride,” but as much about having something to be proud of. The translation by David Ross, as revised by J.L Ackrill and J.O. Urmson, of Nichomachean Ethics, has Aristotle saying
Pride seems even from its name to be concerned with great things; what sort of great things, is the first question we must try to answer. It makes no difference whether we consider the state of character or the man characterized by it. Now the man is thought to be proud who thinks himself worthy of great things, being worthy of them; for he who does so beyond his deserts is a fool, but no virtuous man is foolish or silly.[1]
Pride here translates literally into being “big-souled,” “great-minded,” or “magnanimous,” by others. The magnanimous individual may be said to be wise, benevolent, and proficient, each to a highly-developed degree, with subjective pride and eudaemonia, or flourishing happiness, following only after great acts and facts of magnificence. Aristotle expected very few to achieve magnanimity in their lives, expecting the magnanimous to have mastered all of his virtues more generally, summed up as wisdom, benevolence, and proficiency. Those who are earnestly trying, but fall short, he recognizes, but admits the lack of a name for such individuals—which he sees as falling between the vices of ambitiousness and lack of ambition—, while recognizing them as having some degree of magnanimity in their pursuits.
Aristotle names also an interesting “quasi-virtue.” It is shame. It is a quasi-virtue because the magnanimous individual need not ever express it, but, in particular instances, if not magnanimous, would need it to become magnanimous. Aristotle suggests that shame is like a self-correcting virtue for children to help them develop, but that adults should rarely if ever need it, and the magnanimous among them basically never. He says that
Shame should not be described as a virtue; for it is more like a feeling than a state of character. It is defined, at any rate, as a kind of fear of dishonour, and produces an effect similar to that produced by fear of danger; for people who feel disgraced blush, and those who fear death turn pale. Both, therefore, seem to be in a sense bodily conditions, which is thought to be characteristic of feeling rather than of a state of character.
The feeling is not becoming to every age, but only to youth. For we think young people should be prone to the feeling of shame because they live by feeling and therefore commit many errors, but are restrained by shame; and we praise young people who are prone to this feeling, but an older person no one would praise for being prone to the sense of disgrace, since we think he should not do anything that need cause this sense. For the sense of disgrace is not even characteristic of a good man, since it is consequent on bad actions […] But shame may be said to be conditionally a good thing; if a good man does such actions, he will feel disgraced; but the virtues are not subject to such a qualification. And if shamelessness-not to be ashamed of doing base actions-is bad, that does not make it good to be ashamed of doing such actions.[2]
Baruch Spinoza is not as famous as Aristotle, but he was himself also a magnanimous individual and, in many though certainly not all ways, an Aristotlean or eudaemonic thinker. He was also an avid pantheist, one who believes that God and Nature are synonymous.
Similar to Aristotle’s concepts of pride and virtue, Spinoza advocated what he called blessedness. For Spinoza, blessedness is gained through self-knowledge, which is gained by understanding one’s place in Nature, or in relation to God. He says, in R.H.M. Elwes’ translation of the Ethics, that “[b]lessedness is not the reward of virtue, but virtue itself,” saying further that it “consists in love toward God.”[3] To be blessed is neither to sell oneself short, nor to display rabid arrogance, but to be confident in one’s actual capacities, and to know oneself, for “[h]e who clearly and distinctly understands himself and his emotions loves God,”[4] and for “[t]he more we understand particular things, the more do we understand God.”[5] As with Aristotle’s views, blessedness might be described as involving wisdom, benevolence, and proficiency, but especially as it has been enabled by a love of God through the love of self and vice versa. Indeed, Spinoza suggests that these are deeply interconnected, saying
The intellectual love of the mind toward God is the very love of God whereby God loves himself, not so far as he is infinite, but in so far as he can be explained through the essence of the human mind regarded under the form of eternity; in other words, the intellectual love of the mind toward God is part of the infinite love wherewith God loves himself.[6]
By having a grasp of both one’s capacities and one’s limits, one grows in one’s power, which is what is demanded by the conatus, or inner striving of the individual. Aristotle addressed this in terms of flourishing and teleology, which he found to be innate within the fields of biology and psychology.
If one sells oneself short, that is a limit on one’s power, while expecting too much from oneself also leads to failure. For Spinoza, then, maximizing one’s power and potential comes from being blessed, knowing both one’s capacities and limitations. Acknowledging one’s limitations should not be confused for humility, however, for Spinoza scorns humility, which Aristotle referred to as being “overly humble.” After all, while being humbled might not sound so bad, it is cognate with being humiliated. For Spinoza, then, humility is the act of refraint from the legitimate use of one’s own powers, a lack of integrity or fortitude and a form of self-abasement, which he defines as “thinking too meanly of one’s self by reason of pain.”[7] It is similarly a form of what Aristotle might call pussilanimity, a lack of dutorious courage. Such humility or being humbled is often exercised around people with high status or claim to authority. It is pussilanimous, humiliating, and self-abasing to withhold the truth for the sake of not offending authority or the status quo, particularly when one could be effective in speaking one’s mind or taking action; Aristotle suggests, instead, that the magnanimous act “lofty,” “haughty,” or “dignified” toward officials and rich people. Spinoza says,
We are […] generally accustomed to oppose pride to humility, but in that case we pay more attention to the effect of either emotion than to its nature. We are wont to call proud the man who boasts too much, who talks of nothing but his own virtues and other people’s faults, who wishes to be first; and lastly who goes through life with a style and pomp suitable to those far above him in station. On the other hand, we call humble the man who too often blushes, who confesses his faults, who sets forth other men’s virtues, and who, lastly, walks with bent head and is negligent of his attire. However, 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 be most self-abased and humble, are generally in reality the most ambitious and envious.[8]
Here he is translated as using pride in the negative sense, but this is not the same pride that comes from translations of Aristotle’s “big souledness.” He would actually tend to agree with Aristotle about magnanimity,[9] as he identifies his own version of magnanimity, which he calls self-approval and relates to honor, with “the highest object for which we can hope.”[10]
In a way, humility, as seen by Spinoza, is a form of what the sophist Friedrich Nietzsche called ressentiment, for “those, who are believed to be most self-abased and humble,” being really “the most ambitious and envious” is very much an element of what Nietzsche, following after Stirner’s egotism,[11] deemed slave morality. Still, and even while Spinoza scorns humility, one should not consider those qualities that are often positively described in the words of humility—even by Spinoza himself— to be foreign to Spinoza. His suggestion to know the limits of one’s power, potential, and effectiveness speaks to the same qualities, even while he scorns humility as self-denigrating and self-deceiving.
Humility is not a virtue, or does not arise from reason […] Humility is pain arising from a man’s contemplation of his own infirmities. But, in so far as a man knows himself by true reason, he is assumed to understand his essence, that is, his power. Wherefore, if a man in self-contemplation perceives any infirmity in himself, it is not by virtue of his understanding himself, but by virtue of his power of activity being checked.[12]
By this, Spinoza means that the virtue of seeing one’s own faults is not a virtue simply because there are faults to see in oneself and to acknowledge, but because, by seeing those faults and acknowledging them, one can be more-or-less made faultless in comparison for the future. This is something similar to Aristotle’s concept of shame as a quasi-virtue. Spinoza continues on the topic of humility, however, saying,
But, if we assume that a man perceives his own infirmity by virtue of understanding something stronger than himself, by the knowledge of which he determines his own power of activity, this is the same as saying that we conceive that a man understands himself distinctly, because his power of activity is aided. Wherefore humility, or the pain which arises from a man’s contemplation of his own infirmity, does not arise from the contemplation or reason, and is not a virtue but a passion.[13]
Here, Spinoza is suggesting that one’s power or potential is aided through an understanding of that which is greater than oneself, such as the various laws and forces in Nature, and especially Nature herself, which he also identifies with God himself. An example of potential enhanced by admitting that which is truly greater than oneself might be when humans learned to fly. While conjurers may have attempted for millennia to do such things through shear acts of forceful declarations and imagination, acting from out of hubris in doing so (and apparently impressing some naïve onlookers), it was those who admitted that they did not know and could not force, but had to find out and recognize (whether formally or through common sense and trial-and-error) the laws of gravity and aerodynamics necessary to give lift to an aeroplane, that finally achieved it. Admitting that there are forces of Nature that are greater than oneself is not humiliating, even when conveyed by others— as is the way of bowing to another’s subjective, authoritarian, and external conceptions of God— because it is based in Reason rather than in “the passions,” as Spinoza calls them. By learning about Nature, we come to know more about what is actually possible in the world in which we live, and from ourselves, and though this does limit us from acting from out of pure hubris it can nonetheless lead to an honest sense of self-worth, Aristotle’s magnanimity or Spinoza’s self-approval. While we may not be able to learn everything,[14] the closer we come to doing so the more potential and power we have.
Among the other virtues of concern to Aristotle, if we may invoke him back into the conversation, and that especially suit us in this discussion, are the mental virtues of understanding and judgement. He says that understanding is “the exercise of the faculty of knowledge,” being “the exercise of the faculty of opinion for the purpose of judging of what someone else says about matters of which practical wisdom is concerned.”[15] Judgment, he says, “is the right discrimination of the equitable,”[16] referring to being able to wield both practical and intuitive wisdom to reach a sympathetic conclusion.
As Aristotle named shame as a kind of quasi-virtue, and Spinoza does something the same with humility even while scorning it, I think another quasi-virtue can be gleaned or assumed from this Aristotlean line of thought in Spinoza, or at least the course he was on, though it is presently unnamed much like Aristotle’s virtue between ambition and lack thereof. This quasi-virtue, similarly to shame, and perhaps to humility even in its positive light, should not need employment by the magnanimous individual, but nonetheless contributes to the path to magnanimity, perhaps more greatly than either shame or humility, by acknowledging a clear and positive response or corollary to these negative aspects, having also elements of clear understanding and fair judgment. Spinoza, a free thinker and (small-d) democrat in the radical republican sense, and a dialectical thinker, was, like Aristotle, an advocate of dialogue and deliberation. That being so, this something— similar to but distinct from shame and humility, and at first falling short of understanding and judgment as well— that one comes up against while maturing intellectually, is likely one that these two thinkers were well-acquainted with from their younger years.
When one forms an opinion prematurely, and if one is arrogant enough to assert it, but is proven wrong, one comes up against the discomfort of admitting one is wrong, though Spinoza would certainly say doing so is an increase in one’s power and a move toward blessedness. There is a kind of shame or humiliation that accompanies admitting one is wrong, but there is an accompanying quasi-virtue, more related to an emerging good judgment and understanding, that shame and humiliation do not cover when one does make a mistake but can admit it and so become more powerful.[17] This feeling that accompanies the shame and humiliation in being wrong, but which amplifies one’s power and potential, I deem conagnition, meaning “common or mutual acknowledgement,” from con– (“with” or “shared”) and agnitio (“recognition” or “comprehension”). This refers specifically to the character trait as objectively witnessed as well as the subjective, psychological experience of being able to admit when one is wrong and to adopt better views, for— to repeat Aristotle once more— “[i]t makes no difference whether we consider the state of character or the man characterized by it.”
Importantly, conagnition differs from Spinoza’s concept of emulation in that it is not innately envious, ingenuine, or based on mimicry to please others. It is instead expressing a genuine desire to know, though it may also authentically find glee in increasing its self-worth and maximizing its power, but in a way that is aligned with the True rather than for the sake of appeasing others or engaging in histrionics of living. While conagnition, like emulation, implies taking on something of another’s, this is not the emulation of behavior or traits, but the comprehension of facts, values, principles, and laws that exist independent of the individual describing them from out of the fabric of our mutually shared existence, and which gives rise to a more genuine and authentic expression of good character than that attainable through emulation. In these ways and more, it differs from emulation.
The excess of conagnition is known variously as, comes from, or is related to gullibility, credulity, or naivety, and its deficiency as, from, or to hard-headedness, conceit, or haughtiness. Someone who is conagnitious is ready to learn from their mistakes and is quickly progressing. They have the integrity and fortitude to use their own power and to generally avoid the pusillanimity derided by Aristotle and the humility scorned as a virtue by Spinoza. But they also have the capacity to understand what is being said to them and to swallow their arrogance when they are bad or wrong, to look their challenger in the eye, to honor their capacity for having taught a new lesson, to admire their displacing of falsehoods, and to thank them for setting oneself straight.
I think it is fair to anticipate this newly-identified quasi-virtue, crucial to the development of a magnanimous individual, and distinguished from the shame, humility, understanding, and judgment, but perhaps having elements of both, as a fair addition to Aristotlean and Spinozan lines of thought, and perhaps to the English language.[18] If I am to be mistaken in this, I will myself practice conagnition.
References
Aristotle, The Nichomachean Ethics (Oxford: Oxford, 1998)
Spinoza, Bendict de, Ethics (New York: Prometheus Books, 1989)
[1] Aristotle, 89
[2] Aristotle, 104
[3] Spinoza, 277
[4] Spinoza, 262
[5] Spinoza, 267
[6] Spinoza, 272
[7] Spinoza, 182
[8] Spinoza, 182
[9] Perhaps with some Epicurean or Stoic checks for purposes of also ensuring ataraxia or “equanimity”
[10] Spinoza, 227
[11] Typically styled egoism, but since this term is also used for rational egoists concerned with rational self-interest, and not just people inspired by Sadism such as Stirner, and due to the nature of the philosophy itself, egotism is more fitting in an objective, descriptive sense.
[12] Spinoza, 227
[13] Spinoza, 227
[14] Nicholas of Cusa, another pantheist, described accumulating knowledge of God as being like creating a circle by adding corners to a polygon. The more (corners/knowledge) one adds, the closer it comes to a full circle (complete knowledge of God), but no perfect circle can ever come from adding corners. Nonetheless, Nicholas encourages us to try, because doing so comes from a love of God and enriches our lives.
[15] Aristotle, 151
[16] Aristotle, 152
[17] And which might be more attributable to some degree of that virtue Aristotle calls understanding or that unnamed Aristotlean virtue related to ambition, or to self-worth in admitting one has been wrong
[18] I have not found any instances of this word in any of the common dictionaries or through AI chats with ChatGPT, though it is possible an unabridged dictionary that I do not have available beat me to it.
