tfindlay
Posted on behalf of vandermude
Well, after thinking about it, I do feel that self-knowledge is a better term than humility. I don’t know much about Ben Shapiro, but in general self-knowledge is a good thing.
What I don’t care about is the concept of humility in sense of being low. This is related to the idea of selflessness, which I don’t think is a good thing either. This is something that you express JD. You mention it as part of the feeling of awe. I know that a lot of people have this feeling of smallness, but personally I just don’t get it. It just feels weird to me.
So I don’t have a better word than humility for the feeling of being small. But I can’t consider that a positive emotion – certainly not a virtue.
I am surprised that most of the discussion about humility on the discussion group mostly applied to intellectual humility. Even I used humility in that sense.
As to the notion of a “growth stance”, I enter into a conversation willing to be proven wrong not out of any sense of smallness, but out of a sense of intellectual honesty. This is better captured in the ancient Greek concept of “Know thyself”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Know_thyself
The metaphor that better captures this is not one of size and smallness, but of adventure and journey. There is so much I do not know. I am ignorant in so many ways. But like Calvin said to Hobbes in the last cartoon: “It’s a magical world, Hobbes ol’ buddy … Let’s go exploring”.