The non-existence, or non-importance, of the self has for millennia been an uncontroversial proposition in Eastern thought. But Western thinkers have tended to embrace the concept of the isolated self as, if not sufficient, at least necessary for a coherent account of human life. Yet there are many ways to describe what it means to have a self—an ego, an individual identity. Is the self a product of culture, history, and economy? Is it a collection of subjective experiences to which no one else has access? Is it constituted only in relation to other selves, or in relation to an ultimate, unchanging, all-powerful Self?
For the Existentialists, the self can be a prison, a trap, and a source of great anxiety. Heidegger called selfhood a condition of being “thrown into the world.” By the time we realize where and what we are, according to restrictive categories of historical thought and language, we are already there, inescapably bound to our conditions, forced to perform roles for which we never auditioned. Jean-Paul Sartre took this notion of “thrownness” and gave it his own neurotic stamp. We are indeed tossed into existences against our will, but the real condemnation, he thought, is that once we arrive, we have to make choices. We are doomed to the task of creating ourselves, no matter how limited the options, and there is no possibility of opting out. Even not making choices is a choice.
This extreme kind of free will, as Stephen Fry explains in the short, animated video above, stems from the problem of human nature—there isn’t any. “According to Sartre, there is no design for a human being,” says Fry, or in Sartre’s famous phrase, “existence precedes essence.” There is only the absurdity of arriving in a world with no plan, no God, no universal codes or fixed standards of value: just a dizzying array of decisions to make. And yet, rather than making life trivial, the absurd condition described by Sartre lends substantial weight to all of our choices, for in making them, he claimed, we are not only creating ourselves, but deciding what a human being should be.
Illusions of certainty and necessity obscure the contingent nature of existential choice, both the true inheritance and the unremitting burden of every individual. What we become in life is up to us, Sartre thought, a proposition that causes us a good deal of anguish, since we cannot know the outcome of our choices nor understand the world in which we make them beyond our limited capacity. And yet, we must act, Sartre thought, “as if everyone is watching me.” This is not a pleasing thought, even if, for many, the idea might actually lead to more careful, sober, and deliberative decision-making—that is, when it doesn’t lead to paralyzing dread.
Tucked in the afterward of the second, 1982 edition of Hubert Dreyfus and Paul Rabinow’s Michel Foucault: Beyond Structuralism and Hermeneutics, we find an important, but little-known essay by Foucault himself titled “The Subject and Power.” Here, the French theorist offers what he construes as a summary of his life’s work: spanning 1961’s Madness and Civilization up to his three-volume, unfinished History of Sexuality, still in progress at the time of his death in 1984. He begins by telling us that he has not been, primarily, concerned with power, despite the word’s appearance in his essay’s title, its arguments, and in nearly everything else he has written. Instead, he has sought to discover the “modes of objectification which transform human beings into subjects.”
This distinction may seem abstruse, a needlessly wordy matter of semantics. It is not so for Foucault. In key critical difference lies the originality of his project, in all its various stages of development. “Power,” as an abstraction, an objective relation of dominance, is static and conceptual, the image of a tyrant on a coin, of Thomas Hobbes’ Leviathan seated on his throne.
Subjection, subjectification, objectivizing, individualizing, on the other hand—critical terms in Foucault’s vocabulary—are active processes, disciplines and practices, relationships between individuals and institutions that determine the character of both. These relationships can be located in history, as Foucault does in example after example, and they can also be critically studied in the present, and thus, perhaps, resisted and changed in what he terms “anarchistic struggles.”
Foucault calls for a “new economy of power relations,” and a critical theory that takes “forms of resistance against different forms of power as a starting point.” For example, in approaching the carceral state, we must examine the processes that divide “the criminals and the ‘good boys,’” processes that function independently of reason. How is it that a system can create classes of people who belong in cages and people who don’t, when the standard rational justification—the protection of society from violence—fails spectacularly to apply in millions of cases? From such excesses, Foucault writes, come two “’diseases of power’—fascism and Stalinism.” Despite the “inner madness” of these “pathological forms” of state power, “they used to a large extent the ideas and the devices of our political rationality.”
People come to accept that mass incarceration, or invasive medical technologies, or economic deprivation, or mass surveillance and over-policing, are necessary and rational. They do so through the agency of what Foucault calls “pastoral power,” the secularization of religious authority as integral to the Western state.
This form of power cannot be exercised without knowing the inside of people’s minds, without exploring their souls, without making them reveal their innermost secrets. It implies a knowledge of the conscience and an ability to direct it.
In the last years of Foucault’s life, he shifted his focus from institutional discourses and mechanisms—psychiatric, carceral, medical—to disciplinary practices of self-control and the governing of others by “pastoral” means. Rather than ignoring individuality, the modern state, he writes, developed “as a very sophisticated structure, in which individuals can be integrated, under one condition: that this individuality would be shaped in a new form and submitted to a set of very specific patterns.” While writing his monumental History of Sexuality, he gave a series of lectures at Berkeley that explore the modern policing of the self.
In his lectures on “Truth and Subjectivity” (1980), Foucault looks at forms of interrogation and various “truth therapies” that function as subtle forms of coercion. Foucault returned to Berkeley in 1983 and delivered the lecture “Discourse and Truth,” which explores the concept of parrhesia, the Greek term meaning “free speech,” or as he calls it, “truth-telling as an activity.” Through analysis of the tragedies of Euripides and contemporary democratic crises, he reveals the practice of speaking truth to power as a kind of tightly controlled performance. Finally, in his lecture series “The Culture of the Self,” Foucault discusses ancient and modern practices of “self care” or “the care of the self” as technologies designed to produce certain kinds of tightly bounded subjectivities.
When he began his final series of talks in 1980, the philosopher was asked in an interview with the Daily Californian about the motivations for his critical examinations of power and subjectivity. His reply speaks to both his practical concern for resistance and his almost utopian belief in the limitless potential for human freedom. “No aspect of reality should be allowed to become a definitive and inhuman law for us,” Foucault says.
We have to rise up against all forms of power—but not just power in the narrow sense of the word, referring to the power of a government or of one social group over another: these are only a few particular instances of power.
Power is anything that tends to render immobile and untouchable those things that are offered to us as real, as true, as good.
Read Foucault’s statement of intent, his essay “The Subject and Power,” and learn more about his life and work in the 1993 documentary below.
On his way to sainthood as an avatar of love and justice, Martin Luther King, Jr. lost too much of his complexity. Whether deliberately sanitized or just drawn in broad strokes for easy consumption, the Civil Rights leader we think we know, we may not know well at all. King himself ruefully noted the tendency of his audiences to box him in when he began publicly and forcefully to challenge U.S. involvement in the Vietnam War and the perpetuation of widespread poverty in the wealthiest country on earth. “I am nevertheless greatly saddened,” he remarked in 1967, “that the inquirers have not really known me, my commitment, or my calling.”
As WBUR notes in its introduction to a discussion on King’s political philosophy, the “specifics of his radical politics often go unexamined when celebrating his legacy…. His political and economic ideas are clear in his speeches against the Vietnam War and his call to work toward economic equality.”
His radical stances did not sit well with the FBI, nor with many of his former supporters, but their roots are evident in his most-published work, the 1963 “Letter from Birmingham Jail,” in which he coined the famous phrase, “injustice anywhere is a threat to justice everywhere.”
We know of King’s indebtedness to the thought of Mahatma Gandhi and Henry David Thoreau, and of his theological education. He was also steeped in the political philosophy of the West, from Plato to John Stuart Mill. In his graduate work at Boston University and Harvard in the 50s, he read and wrote on Hegel, Kant, Marx, and other philosophers. And as a visiting professor at Morehouse College—one year before his arrest in Birmingham and the composition of his letter—King taught a seminar in “Social Philosophy,” examining the ideas of Plato, Aristotle, Augustine, Aquinas, Machiavelli, Hobbes, Locke, Rousseau, Kant, Hegel, Bentham, and Mill.
At the top of the post, you can see his handwritten syllabus (view in a larger format here), a sweeping survey of the European tradition in political philosophy. Further up (or here in a larger format) see a typewritten exam with seven questions from the reading (students were to answer any five). King not only asked his students to connect these thinkers in the abstract to present concerns for justice, but, in question 3, he specifically asks them to “appraise the Student Movement in its practice of law-breaking in light of Aquinas’ Doctrine of Law” (referring to the Catholic theologian/philosopher’s distinctions between human and natural law).
The syllabus and exam give us a sense of how King situated his own radical politics both within and against a long tradition of philosophical thought. For more on King’s political philosophy, listen to Harvard professors Tommie Shelby and Brandon Terry discuss their new collection of essays—To Shape a New World: Essays on the Political Philosophy of Martin Luther King, Jr.—in the WBUR interview above.
Ikiru, one of several Akira Kurosawa films routinely described as a masterpiece, tells the story of Kanji Watanabe, a middle-aged widower who, three decades into a dead-end bureaucratic career, finds out he has just one year to live. This sends him on an urgent eleventh-hour quest to find something to live for. The picture’s The Death of Ivan Ilyich-inspired script originally bore the title The Life of Kanji Watanabe, but Kurosawa chose to rename it for the Japanese verb meaning “to live” (生きる). And anyone who wants to truly ikiru needs an ikigai.
A combination of characters from the Japanese words for “living” and “effect” or “worth,” ikigai (生き甲斐) as a concept has recently come to attention in the West, not least because of last year’s bestseller Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life by Héctor García and Francesc Miralles. (Note: You can get the bestseller as a free audio book if you sign up for Audible’s 30-day free trial program. Get details on that here.)
“For this 102-year-old karate master, his ikigai was carrying forth this martial art,” Buettner says of one Okinawan in particular. “For this hundred-year-old fisherman it was continuing to catch fish for his family three times a week.” He notes that “the two most dangerous years in your life are the year you’re born, because of infant mortality, and the year you retire. These people know their sense of purpose, and they activate it in their life, that’s worth about seven years of extra life expectancy.” This phenomenon has also come under scientific study: one paper published in Psychosomatic Medicine found, tracking a group of more than 40,000 Japanese adults over seven years, “subjects who did not find a sense of ikigai were associated with an increased risk of all-cause mortality.”
We in the West have long looked to the traditional concepts of other cultures for guidance, but the Japanese themselves, a population among whom dissatisfaction with life is not unknown, have long scrutinized ikigai to draw out useful lessons. “There are many books in Japan devoted to ikigai, but one in particular is considered definitive: Ikigai-ni-tsuite (About Ikigai), published in 1966,” writes the BBC’s Yukari Mitsuhashi. “The book’s author, psychiatrist Mieko Kamiya, explains that as a word, ikigai is similar to ‘happiness’ but has a subtle difference in its nuance. Ikigai is what allows you to look forward to the future even if you’re miserable right now.”
Akira Kurosawa, who painted his movies when he couldn’t find the money to shoot them, stands as a towering example of someone who found his ikigai in filmmaking, which he kept on doing it into his eighties. In Ikiru, he guides the bewildered Watanabe into an encounter with ikigai in the form of a young lady who quits her job in his office to make toy rabbits: more arduous work than the civil service, she admits, but it gives her a sense of satisfaction that feels like playing with every child in Japan. This inspires Watanabe to return to find his own ikigai, if only at the very end of his life, in campaigning for the construction of a neighborhood playground. But one year with ikigai, if you believe in the power of the concept, beats a century without it.
Based in Seoul, Colin Marshall writes and broadcasts on cities and culture. His projects include the book The Stateless City: a Walk through 21st-Century Los Angeles and the video series The City in Cinema. Follow him on Twitter at @colinmarshall or on Facebook.
The idea of acceptance has found much, well… acceptance in our therapeutic culture, by way of Elisabeth Kübler-Ross’ five stages of grief, 12-step programs, the wave of secular mindfulness practices, the body-acceptance movement, etc. All of these interventions into depressed, bereaved, guilt-ridden, and/or anxious states of mind have their own aims and methods, which sometimes overlap, sometimes do not. But what they all share, perhaps, for all the struggle involved, is a general sense of optimism about acceptance.
One cannot say this definitively about the Stoic idea of amor fati—the instruction to “love one’s fate”—though you might be persuaded to think otherwise if you google the term and come up with a couple dozen popularizations. Yes, there’s love in the name, but the fate we’re asked to embrace may just as well be painful and debilitating as pleasurable and uplifting. We cannot change what has happened to us, or much control what’s going to happen, so we might as well just get used to it, so to speak.
If this isn’t exactly optimism in the sense of “it gets better,” it isn’t entirely pessimism either. But it can become a grim and joyless fatalistic exercise. Yet, as Friedrich Nietzsche used the term—and he used it with much relish—amor fati means not only accepting loss, suffering, mistakes, addictions, appearances, or mental and emotional turbulence; it means accepting all of it—everything and everyone that causes both pain and pleasure, as Alain de Botton says above, “with strength and an all-embracing attitude that borders on a kind of enthusiastic affection.”
“I do not want to wage war against what is ugly,” he wrote in The Gay Science, “I do not want to accuse; I do not even want to accuse those who accuse.” Readers of Nietzsche may find themselves picking up any one of his books, including The Gay Science, to see him doing all of the above, constantly, on any random page. But his is never a systematic philosophy, but an expression of passion and attitude, inconsistent in its parts but, as a whole, surprisingly holistic. “My formula for greatness in a human being,” he writes in Ecce Homo, “is amor fati”
That one wants nothing to be different, not forward, not backward, not in all eternity. Not merely bear what is necessary, still less conceal it… but love it.
Although the concept may remind us of Stoic philosophy, and is very often discussed in those terms, Nietzsche saw such thought—as he understood it—as gloomy, ascetic, and life-denying. His use of amor fati goes beyond mere resignation to something more radical, and very difficult for the human mind to stomach, to use a somewhat Nietzschean figure of speech. “It encompasses the whole of world history (including the most horrific episodes),” notes a Leiden University summary, “and Nietzsche’s own role in this history.” Above all, he desired, he wrote, to be a “Yes-sayer.”
Is amor fati a remedy for regret, dissatisfaction, the endlessly restless desire for social and self-improvement? Can it banish our agony over history’s nightmares and our personal records of failure? De Botton thinks so, but one never really knows with Nietzsche—his often satirical exaggerations can turn themselves inside out, becoming exactly the opposite of what we expect. Yet above all, what he always turns away from are absolute ideals; we should never take his amor fati as some kind of divine commandment. It works in dialectical relation to his more vigorous critical spirit, and should be applied with a situational and pragmatic eye. In this sense, amor fati can be seen as instrumental—a tool to bring us out of the paralysis of despair and condemnation and into an active realm, guided by a radically loving embrace of it all.
Philosophy is not an idle pursuit of leisured gentlemen and tenured professors, though the life circumstances of many a philosopher might make us think otherwise. The foremost example of a privileged philosopher is Marcus Aurelius, famous expositor of Stoicism, and also, incidentally, Emperor of Rome. Yet we must also bear in mind that Epictetus, the other most famous expositor of Stoicism, whom Aurelius quotes repeatedly in his Meditations, was born a slave.
Against certain tendencies of modern thinking, we might hazard to believe that both men shared enough common human experience to arrive at some universal principles fully applicable to everyday life. Stoicism, after all, is nothing if not practical. Consider, for example, the emperor’s advice below—how challenging it might be for anyone, and how beneficial, not only for the individual, but—as Aurelius makes plain—for everyone.
Begin the morning by saying to yourself, I shall meet with the busybody, the ungrateful, arrogant, deceitful, envious, unsocial. All these things happen to them by reason of their ignorance of what is good and evil. But I who have seen the nature of the good that it is beautiful, and of the bad that it is ugly, and the nature of him who does wrong, that it is akin to mine, not only of the same blood or seed, but that it participates in the same intelligence and the same portion of divinity, I can neither be harmed by any of them, nor no one can fix on me what is ugly, nor can I be angry with my brother, nor hate him. For we are made for cooperation, like feet, like hands, like eyelids, like the rows of the upper and lower teeth. To act against one another then is contrary to nature; and it is acting against one another to be vexed and to turn away.
Yes, a passage that might have come from the speeches of Gandhi, the Dalai Lama, or Martin Luther King, Jr. also belongs to the philosophical traditions of ancient Rome, though in the mouth of an emperor it may not sound to us as compellingly radical.
Nowadays, several million more people have access to books, literacy, and leisure than in Marcus Aurelius’ era (and one wonders where even an emperor found the time), though few of us, it’s true, have access to a nobleman’s education. While currently under threat, the internet still provides us with a wealth of free content—and many of us are much better positioned than Epictetus was to educate ourselves about philosophical traditions, schools, and ways of thinking.
We can cruise through a summary of Aristotle’s views on “flourishing” in the video above, narrated by the always-affable Stephen Fry as part of the BBC’s “History of Ideas” series, currently up to 48 uniquely animated videos featuring other smart-sounding celebrity narrators like Harry Shearer and Gillian Anderson.
The Macat series of philosophy explainer videos (136 in total) may lack celebrity cred, but it makes up for it with some very thorough short summaries of important works in philosophy—as well as sociology, psychology, history, politics, economics, and literature. “The essential purpose of politics is freedom,” Hannah Arendt wrote in her 1958 The Human Condition, we learn above, a work of hers that is not focused on mass murder and totalitarianism. Arendt had much more to say, and in this book, she relies on a classical distinction well known to the Greeks and Romans and all who came after them: the contrast between two kinds of life—the vita activa and vita contemplativa.
While philosophy may have become much more accessible, it has also become less “open access”—in the sense of being a public affair, taking place in city squares and actively encouraged by statesmen and ordinary loiterers alike. For all its possibilities—and we hope they can remain—the internet has never been able to recreate the Athenian ideal of the philosophical public square, if such a thing ever really existed. But projects like Wireless Philosophy—sponsored by Yale, MIT, Duke, and other elite institutions—have sought for years to introduce people from every walk of life to the kinds of ideas that Athenians supposedly threw around like frisbees in their spare time, including Plato’s notion (via his mouthpiece, Socrates) of “the good life,” which University of New Orleans professor Chris Surprenent, summarizes above. See all of Wireless Philosophy’s 130 animations here.
The material is out there. We’ve highlighted 350 philosophical animations above, and also separately gathered 200+ Free Online Philosophy Courses. And, if you’re reading this, it’s a good bet you’ve probably got a little time to spare. If it’s an old-fashioned sales pitch you need to get going, consider that for just pennies, er, minutes a day, you can become more knowledgeable about ancient Greek and Roman thought, Kantian ethics, 20th century Critical Theory, Nietzsche, critical thinking skills, Scholastic theological thought, Buddhism, Wittgenstein, Sartre, etc., etc, etc., etc. That said, however, acquiring the concentration, discipline, and will to do your own thinking about what you’ve learned, and to apply it, has never been so free and easy to come by for anyone at any time in history.
I left much of my reading of C.S. Lewis behind, but one quote of his will stay with me for life: “It is a good rule,” he advised, “after reading a new book, never to allow yourself another new one till you have read an old one in between.” I believe his advice is invaluable for maintaining a balanced perspective and achieving a healthy critical distance from the tumult of the present.
Reading works of ancient writers shows us how alike the mores and the crises of the ancients were to ours, and how vastly different. Those similarities and differences can help us evaluate certain current orthodoxies with greater wisdom. And that’s not to mention countless historians, novelists, poets, playwrights, critics, and philosophers from the past few hundred years, or several decades, who have much to teach us about where our modern ideas came from and how much they’ve deviated from their precedents.
For example, 19th century liberal political philosopher John Stuart Mill is now widely admired by conservative and libertarian writers and academics as a proponent of individual economic liberty, the free market, and a flat tax. And they are not wrong, he was all of that, in his early thought. (Mill later supported several socialist causes.) Many of his other political views might be denounced by quite a few as the excesses of campus activist leftism. Adam Gopnik summarizes the Victorian philosopher’s generous slate of positions:
Mill believed in complete equality between the sexes, not just women’s colleges and, someday, female suffrage but absolute parity; he believed in equal process for all, the end of slavery, votes for the working classes, and the right to birth control (he was arrested at seventeen for helping poor people obtain contraception), and in the common intelligence of all the races of mankind. He led the fight for due process for detainees accused of terrorism; argued for teaching Arabic, in order not to alienate potential native radicals.…
Can people to Mill’s left on economics learn something from him? Sure. Can people to his right on nearly everything else learn a thing or two? It’s worth a shot. Mill championed engaging those with whom we disagree (he greatly admired Thomas Carlyle; the two couldn’t have been more different in many respects). He also argued vigorously for “’liberty of the press’ as one of the securities against corrupt or tyrannical government.” Before nodding your head in agreement—read Mill’s arguments. He might not agree with you.
And what did John Stuart Mill read? In Chapter One of his autobiography, Mill gives a detailed account of his classical education from ages 3–7, during which time he read “the whole of Herodotus,” “the first six dialogues of Plato,” “part of Lucian,” all in their original Greek, of course, as any young gentleman of the time would. Mill’s father, Scottish philosopher James Mill, intentionally set out to create a genius with this advanced course of study.
Lapham’s Quarterlyexcerpted the passage, and turned the many books Mill mentions into a list called “Early Education.” You can find all of the titles below, including the ancients mentioned and over two dozen “modern” works (that is, since the time of the Renaissance) Mill read as a child in English, including Cervantes’ mammoth Don Quixote. Most of us will have to make do with translations of the Greek texts, but take heart, even Mill “learnt no Latin until my eighth year.” The list shows not only Mill’s daunting precocity, but also how essential classical texts were to well-educated Europeans of any age.
It also highlights what kinds of texts were valued by Mill’s society, or at least by his father. All of the authors but one are men, all of them are Europeans, most of the works are histories and biographies. Given Mill’s broad views, his own recommended reading list might look different. Nonetheless, Mill’s account of his extraordinary early years gives us a fascinating look at the relative breadth of a liberal education in 19th century Britain. What ancient authors did you read as a young student? Or do you read now, between books, essays, articles, or Twitterstorms du jour?
In Greek
Aesop–The Fables
Xenophon–The Anabasis, Memorials of Socrates, The Cryopadeia
Herodotus–The Histories
Diogenes Laertius–some of The Lives of Philosophers
Lucian–various works
Isocrates–parts of To Demonicus and To Nicocles
William Robertson–The History of America, The History of the Reign of the Emperor Charles V, The History of Scotland During the Reigns of Queen Mary and King James VI
David Hume–The History of England
Edward Gibbon–The History of the Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire
Robert Watson–The History of the Reign of Philip II, King of Spain
Robert Watson and William Thompson–The History of the Reign of Philip III, King of Spain
Nathaniel Hooke–The Roman History, from the Building of Rome to the Ruin of the Commonwealth
Charles Rollin–The Ancient History of the Egyptians, Carthaginians, Assyrians, Babylonians, Medes and Persians, Macedonians and Grecians
Plutarch–Parallel Lives
Gilbert Burnet--Bishop Burnet’s History of His Own Time
The Annual Register of World Events, A Review of the Year (1758–1788)
John Millar–An Historical View of the English Government
Johann Lorenz von Mosheim–An Ecclesiastical History
Thomas McCrie–The Life of John Knox
William Sewell–The History of the Rise, Increase, and Progress of the Christian People Called Quakers
Thomas Wight and John Rutty–A History of the Rise and Progress of People Called Quakers in Ireland
Philip Beaver–African Memoranda
David Collins–An Account of the English Colony in New South Wales
George Anson–A Voyage Round the World
Daniel Defoe–Robinson Crusoe
The Arabian Nights and Arabian Tales
Miguel de Cervantes–Don Quixote
Maria Edgeworth–Popular Tales
Henry Brooke–The Fool of Quality; or the History of Henry, Earl of Moreland
We may have grown used to hearing about the importance of critical thinking, and stowed away knowledge of logical fallacies and cognitive biases in our argumentative toolkit. But were we to return to the philosophical sources of informal logic, we would find that we only grasped at some of the principles of reason. The others involve questions of what we might call virtue or character—what for the Greeks fell into the categories of ethos and pathos. The principle of charity, for example, in which we give our opponents a fair hearing and respond to the best version of their arguments as we understand them. And the principle, exemplified by Plato’s Socrates, of intellectual humility. Or as one punk band put it in their Socratic tribute. “All I know is that I don’t know. All I know is that I don’t know nothing.”
Intellectual humility is not, contrary to most popular appearances, reflexively according equal weight to “both sides” of every argument or assuming that everyone’s opinion is equally valid. These are forms of mental laziness and ethical abdication. It is, however, believing in our own fallibility and opening ourselves up to hearing arguments without immediately forming a judgment about them or the people who make them. We do not abandon our reason and values, we strengthen them, argues Mark Leary, by “not being afraid of being wrong.” Leary, professor of psychology and neuroscience at Duke University, is the lead author of a new study on intellectual humility that found “essentially no difference between liberals and conservatives or between religious and nonreligious people” when it comes to intellectual humility.
The study challenges many ideas that can prevent dialogue. “There are stereotypes about conservatives and religiously conservative people being less intellectually humble about their beliefs,” says Leary. But he and his colleagues “didn’t find a shred of evidence to support that.” This doesn’t necessarily mean that such people have high degrees of intellectual humility, only that all of us, perhaps equally, possess fairly low levels of the trait. I’ll be the first to admit that it is not an easy one to develop, especially when we’re on the defensive for some seemingly good reasons—and when we live in a culture that encourages us to make decisions and take actions on the strength of an image, some minimal text, and a few buttons that lead us right to our bank accounts. (To quote Operation Ivy again, “We get told to decide. Just like as if I’m not gonna change my mind.”)
But in the Duke study, reports Alison Jones at Duke Today, “those who displayed intellectual humility did a better job of evaluating the quality of evidence.” They took their time to make careful considerations. And they were generally more charitable and “less likely to judge a writer’s character based on his or her views.” By contrast, “intellectually arrogant” people gave writers with whom they disagreed “low scores in morality, honesty, competence, and warmth.” As a former teacher of rhetoric, I wonder whether the researchers accounted for the quality and persuasiveness of the writing itself. Nonetheless, this observation underscores the problem of conflating an author’s work with his or her character. Moral judgment can inhibit intellectual curiosity and open-mindedness. Intellectually arrogant people often resort to insults and personal attacks over thoughtful analysis.
The enormous number of assumptions we bring to almost every conversation with people who differ from us can blind us to our own faults and to other people’s strengths. But intellectual humility is not genetically determined—it is a skill that can be learned, Leary believes. Big Think recommends a free MOOC from the University of Edinburgh on intellectual humility (see an introduction to the concept at the top and a series of lectures here). “Faced with difficult questions,” explains course lecturer Dr. Ian Church, “people often tend to dismiss and marginalize dissent…. The world needs more people who are sensitive to reasons both for and against their beliefs, and are willing to consider the possibility that their political, religious and moral beliefs might be mistaken.” The course offers three different levels of engagement, from casual to quite involved, and three separate class sections at Coursera: Theory, Practice, and Science.
It’s likely that many of us need some serious preparation before we’re willing to listen to those who hold certain views. And perhaps certain views don’t actually deserve a hearing. But in most cases, if we can let our guard down, set aside feelings of hostility, and become willing to learn something even from those with whom we disagree, we might be able to do what so many psychologists continue to recommend. As Cindy Lamothe writes at New York Magazine’s Science of Us blog, “we have to be willing to expose ourselves to opposing perspectives in the first place—which means that, as daunting as it may seem, listening to friends and family with radically different views can be beneficial to our long-term intellectual progress.” The holidays are soon upon us. Let the healing—or at least the charitable tolerance if you can manage it—begin.
We're hoping to rely on loyal readers, rather than erratic ads. Please click the Donate button and support Open Culture. You can use Paypal, Venmo, Patreon, even Crypto! We thank you!
Open Culture scours the web for the best educational media. We find the free courses and audio books you need, the language lessons & educational videos you want, and plenty of enlightenment in between.
