Oct 10, 2024 06:28 AM
(This post was last modified: Oct 10, 2024 06:35 AM by C C.)
https://aeon.co/essays/why-intellectual-...s-a-virtue
EXCERPT: . . . Even so, one might think, intellectual humility surely has an important role to play. Intellectual humility can temper some of our worst instincts.
People often underestimate just how hard it can be to work out the truth. Equivocal, murky evidence is blotted out in favour of the tidy, familiar narrative. Expertise in one domain is illicitly projected onto others. Past failures – fallacious inferences, or snafus of spatial reasoning – are glossed over. Those who value intellectual humility, to their credit, beseech us to be on our guard against these all-too-human tendencies.
This model of the human psyche emphasises our hastiness and hubris. But we are subject to other flaws, too – to cravenness, and self-deception. And when it comes to these other flaws, intellectual humility is prone to function less as a guardrail, and more as an alibi. Simone de Beauvoir’s midcentury masterpiece The Mandarins (1954) dramatises this dynamic.
The novel opens as the Second World War is coming to a close. (‘The streets would smell again of oil and orange blossoms … and he would drink real coffee to the sound of guitars.’) It follows a group of Left-wing intellectuals who are trying to make sense of the war’s legacy, and of how they might integrate their political commitments with their personal projects.
About halfway through the book, a mysterious stranger arrives from Russia. He is introduced as a high-ranking Soviet functionary – ‘George’ – who has recently defected to the West; he is said to have smuggled out with him ‘sensational information’ that will be ‘devastating’ for the Soviet regime – a regime in which many of the novel’s characters are profoundly invested. (‘[T]he only chance to see humanity delivered from want, slavery, and stupidity,’ thinks one character, Henri, ‘is the Soviet Union. No effort, then, must be spared to help her.’)
George presents Henri and his friend Robert with documents showing that ‘Russian socialism’ – the lodestar of their political hopes – relies on a brutal system of forced labour camps.
Henri and Robert respond quite differently to the evidence. After some initial resistance – ‘George was suspect, Russia was so far away, and you hear so many things’ – Henri comes to believe that the labour camps are real. He realises that the evidence comes from too many different sources – official documents, testimony from American observers as well as deportees – for him to credibly doubt it. Henri realises, painfully, that he can no longer place his hopes in Russian socialism. ‘In Russia, too,’ he thinks, ‘men were working other men to death.’
Robert responds with more diffidence. He chooses, Beauvoir writes, ‘to doubt’. He insists that it would be irresponsible to judge with only the information to hand, and that nothing has been ‘genuinely established’. Reflecting on his friend’s behaviour, Henri thinks to himself that Robert has taken ‘refuge in scepticism’.
Later, when Robert talks over the situation with his wife, Anne, she is initially inclined to disagree with her husband – to think that the evidence they have is decisive, that further enquiry will be otiose, and that Robert should help to publicise the revelations about the camps. But Robert insists that he cannot proceed until he knows more. Anne falls silent. ‘I didn’t insist,’ she records. ‘What right, after all, did I have to protest? I’m too incompetent.’
Of Beauvoir’s trio of characters, Henri is clearly the most admirable. This puts pressure on those who would treat intellectual humility as a virtue. Robert attends to the possibility of error, and to the difficulty of judging complex bodies of evidence. Henri, by contrast, is almost impetuous.
Anne takes her peer’s disagreement seriously, and is intensely conscious of the limits of her political expertise, whereas Henri doesn’t care that his old friend Robert has come to a different conclusion. Robert and Anne, then, cleave closer than Henri to the dictates of intellectual humility. And yet, Henri deserves more praise than either.
One might argue that neither Robert nor Anne is genuinely intellectually humble. Rather, they only pretend to be humble. Both use a pose of humility to hide what is, in reality, just cowardice. As such, one might think, neither makes genuine trouble for the idea that intellectual humility is a virtue. Rather, these cases simply show that the virtue of intellectual humility must be married to that of intellectual courage.
It’s not so clear, though, that we can draw a principled distinction between intellectual humility and intellectual cowardice (or, conversely, between intellectual hubris and intellectual courage). We are inclined to think of Henri as intellectually courageous – rather than as hubristic and rash – because he got things right, and to think of Robert as cowardly because he got things wrong.
Imagine a version of The Mandarins – and, indeed, a version of history – in which George’s documents were all forgeries: part of an elaborate CIA conspiracy to discredit the Soviet Union. Against such a backdrop, what we were before inclined to assess as Robert’s cowardice looks more like genuine humility. What seemed before, on Henri’s part, like clear-sightedness and nerve, starts to look more like recklessness.
The lesson is that it’s hard to isolate our judgments of intellectual character from the results of that character’s exercise within a given context. To judge whether you were being humble (good), or timorous (bad), I will often first need to know whether you ended up with knowledge.
We have reason, then, to be sceptical of the ambitious virtue epistemologist’s claim that we understand what knowledge is via our grasp of the intellectual virtues. Still, that’s compatible with thinking that intellectual humility makes for a genuine virtue, and, as such, that we should aspire to cultivate it.
But what if it turns out that our intellectual icons – our exemplars of the intellectual good life – tend not to be humble? What if it turns out that the growth of knowledge proceeds not via humility, but rather via stubborn pig-headedness? These are not hypothetical questions. A look at the history of science suggests that intellectual humility, far from being a crucial ingredient in intellectual flourishing, might serve to corrode it... (MORE - missing details)
EXCERPT: . . . Even so, one might think, intellectual humility surely has an important role to play. Intellectual humility can temper some of our worst instincts.
People often underestimate just how hard it can be to work out the truth. Equivocal, murky evidence is blotted out in favour of the tidy, familiar narrative. Expertise in one domain is illicitly projected onto others. Past failures – fallacious inferences, or snafus of spatial reasoning – are glossed over. Those who value intellectual humility, to their credit, beseech us to be on our guard against these all-too-human tendencies.
This model of the human psyche emphasises our hastiness and hubris. But we are subject to other flaws, too – to cravenness, and self-deception. And when it comes to these other flaws, intellectual humility is prone to function less as a guardrail, and more as an alibi. Simone de Beauvoir’s midcentury masterpiece The Mandarins (1954) dramatises this dynamic.
The novel opens as the Second World War is coming to a close. (‘The streets would smell again of oil and orange blossoms … and he would drink real coffee to the sound of guitars.’) It follows a group of Left-wing intellectuals who are trying to make sense of the war’s legacy, and of how they might integrate their political commitments with their personal projects.
About halfway through the book, a mysterious stranger arrives from Russia. He is introduced as a high-ranking Soviet functionary – ‘George’ – who has recently defected to the West; he is said to have smuggled out with him ‘sensational information’ that will be ‘devastating’ for the Soviet regime – a regime in which many of the novel’s characters are profoundly invested. (‘[T]he only chance to see humanity delivered from want, slavery, and stupidity,’ thinks one character, Henri, ‘is the Soviet Union. No effort, then, must be spared to help her.’)
George presents Henri and his friend Robert with documents showing that ‘Russian socialism’ – the lodestar of their political hopes – relies on a brutal system of forced labour camps.
Henri and Robert respond quite differently to the evidence. After some initial resistance – ‘George was suspect, Russia was so far away, and you hear so many things’ – Henri comes to believe that the labour camps are real. He realises that the evidence comes from too many different sources – official documents, testimony from American observers as well as deportees – for him to credibly doubt it. Henri realises, painfully, that he can no longer place his hopes in Russian socialism. ‘In Russia, too,’ he thinks, ‘men were working other men to death.’
Robert responds with more diffidence. He chooses, Beauvoir writes, ‘to doubt’. He insists that it would be irresponsible to judge with only the information to hand, and that nothing has been ‘genuinely established’. Reflecting on his friend’s behaviour, Henri thinks to himself that Robert has taken ‘refuge in scepticism’.
Later, when Robert talks over the situation with his wife, Anne, she is initially inclined to disagree with her husband – to think that the evidence they have is decisive, that further enquiry will be otiose, and that Robert should help to publicise the revelations about the camps. But Robert insists that he cannot proceed until he knows more. Anne falls silent. ‘I didn’t insist,’ she records. ‘What right, after all, did I have to protest? I’m too incompetent.’
Of Beauvoir’s trio of characters, Henri is clearly the most admirable. This puts pressure on those who would treat intellectual humility as a virtue. Robert attends to the possibility of error, and to the difficulty of judging complex bodies of evidence. Henri, by contrast, is almost impetuous.
Anne takes her peer’s disagreement seriously, and is intensely conscious of the limits of her political expertise, whereas Henri doesn’t care that his old friend Robert has come to a different conclusion. Robert and Anne, then, cleave closer than Henri to the dictates of intellectual humility. And yet, Henri deserves more praise than either.
One might argue that neither Robert nor Anne is genuinely intellectually humble. Rather, they only pretend to be humble. Both use a pose of humility to hide what is, in reality, just cowardice. As such, one might think, neither makes genuine trouble for the idea that intellectual humility is a virtue. Rather, these cases simply show that the virtue of intellectual humility must be married to that of intellectual courage.
It’s not so clear, though, that we can draw a principled distinction between intellectual humility and intellectual cowardice (or, conversely, between intellectual hubris and intellectual courage). We are inclined to think of Henri as intellectually courageous – rather than as hubristic and rash – because he got things right, and to think of Robert as cowardly because he got things wrong.
Imagine a version of The Mandarins – and, indeed, a version of history – in which George’s documents were all forgeries: part of an elaborate CIA conspiracy to discredit the Soviet Union. Against such a backdrop, what we were before inclined to assess as Robert’s cowardice looks more like genuine humility. What seemed before, on Henri’s part, like clear-sightedness and nerve, starts to look more like recklessness.
The lesson is that it’s hard to isolate our judgments of intellectual character from the results of that character’s exercise within a given context. To judge whether you were being humble (good), or timorous (bad), I will often first need to know whether you ended up with knowledge.
We have reason, then, to be sceptical of the ambitious virtue epistemologist’s claim that we understand what knowledge is via our grasp of the intellectual virtues. Still, that’s compatible with thinking that intellectual humility makes for a genuine virtue, and, as such, that we should aspire to cultivate it.
But what if it turns out that our intellectual icons – our exemplars of the intellectual good life – tend not to be humble? What if it turns out that the growth of knowledge proceeds not via humility, but rather via stubborn pig-headedness? These are not hypothetical questions. A look at the history of science suggests that intellectual humility, far from being a crucial ingredient in intellectual flourishing, might serve to corrode it... (MORE - missing details)
