151. - Pride and Humility

Summary

In the Ethics, Spinoza presents a revisionary account of pride (superbia) and humility (humilitas). Unlike the traditional Christian view in the seventeenth and early eighteenth centuries, he does not consider pride and humility as opposites, a vice and virtue respectively. On Spinoza’s view, neither pride nor humility is a virtue. Instead, they are both “passions” or passive affects, which for him are changes in the individual’s power whose “adequate” (roughly, total) cause lies not wholly in the individual itself, but partly in external things. Whereas pride is “a joy born of the fact that a man thinks more highly of himself than is just” (E3p26s), humility is “a sadness born of the fact that a man considers his own lack of power, or [sive] weakness” (E3DA26; see also E3p55s).