Theo Todman's Web Page - Paper Abstracts

Excerpt

• What is the danger of not being humble and of being sure that we know it all? We can pursue more answers from the past via Al-Ghazālī (c1056-1111), a Persian philosopher and mystic who spent much of his career in what is now Syria, Iraq and Iran. In The Beginning of Guidance, Al-Ghazālī described pride, arrogance and boastfulness as chronic diseases of ‘man’s consideration of himself with the eye of self-glorification and self-importance and his consideration of others with the eye of contempt. The result as regards the tongue is that he says “I…I…”.’ In giving advice, the proud person can be cruel; when he gets advice, he rudely dismisses it. What is Al-Ghazālī’s guidance on how to learn from others? Study with a humble heart and mind. ‘If he is a scholar, you say, “This man has been given what I have not been given and reached what I did not reach, and knows what I am ignorant of; then how shall I be like him?”’
• Thomas Aquinas (c1225-74) split this Gordian knot of knowing and not knowing with his helpful thoughts about pride and humility. Aquinas addressed these topics in several questions in his Summa Theologica within the larger context of virtue and vice, but particularly modesty. He equated moderation with a reproof to zeal, especially when tempering the drive to study with unchecked curiosity. It was Aquinas’s position that humility curbs the notion that we think we can know everything. But he also advises that humility can help us to figure out what we can know using reason, and to understand the stopping point where reason fails.
• Pride, on the other hand, pushes your thoughts about yourself and what you know out of proportion and perspective. When it goes way too far, we have hubris, which the ancient Greeks warned against, especially when humans tried to reach up to the gods. As Darwin would note centuries later, Aquinas is concerned that you’re tempted to be overconfident, overblown, and presumptuous: ‘excessive self-confidence is more opposed to humility than lack of confidence is.’ Strutting is dangerous. Aquinas applauds keenly applying an astute mind to a problem but admonishes against thinking that you can ever be a complete expert in that problem. To his credit, he understood this in his own life. Aquinas had a heavenly vision that put him in a stupor and drove him to try to burn all of his writings, which he likened to straw in light of what he’d experienced. He’d seen for himself the benefit of learned ignorance.
• To demonstrate this visually, we turn to a German thinker named Nicholas of Cusa (1401-64). In De Docta Ignorantia, or On Learned Ignorance (1440), he offered the image of a polygon drawn inside a circle. Our understanding of a specific topic is represented by the polygon; full knowledge of that topic is the circle. Even if we could enlarge the polygon inside to get as close as possible to the circle that frames it, the polygon would still never be a circle. Our understanding is always finite: we will never know all there is to know about the topic we’re studying. ‘Therefore,’ he writes, ‘it is fitting that we be learned-in-ignorance beyond our understanding, so that (though not grasping the truth precisely as it is) we may at least be led to seeing that there is a precise truth which we cannot now comprehend.’