Pride, or the Danger of Introspection

Pride and the dangers of introspection

As is the case for many people, my idea of what sin is most central to me - the “real” sin - tends to evolve. It often follows predictable patterns: whichever impulse stands at the gates at any given moment or whichever I find hardest to resist, I most closely associate the corresponding sin to myself. “If only I could be a little less disdainful and standoffish, then the rest of it would really fall into place.” Of course, I have never discovered the desired results to occur - even when I seem to correct some fault, another seems to pop up or even the same again, at which moment I am forced to undergo another self-evaluation, to see why this son has popped up in me and what in me is faulty or needs to change in order to be at peace.

We are taught, from the very infancy of philosophy, that among all knowledge, knowlegde of oneself stands in a preeminent position. γνωθι σαυτον, etc. As such, it was always a point of emphasis in the course of my liberal education, and became a personal obsession of mine. I could not be satiated with some loose sense of who I was, or what man is, but found myself entangled of the question of what a self is, how it comes to know itself, and how it is differentiated from the world around it. (The latter two questions seemed to share much of the same domain). This pursuit brought me to my two most significant— if still meager — academic works, namely, my junior and senior annual essays at St. John’s College.

In each essay, confronted with Pascal and Kierkegaard, there seemed to be an unspoken truth lurking behind my pursuit, one from which I recoiled as I began to hear its whispers in my soul. The analogy of man in God to members in a body (stolen from Paul), the treatment of which in the Pensées I found so interesting, now screams at me: “If the toe spend its days asking what it is to be a toe, or what it is to be a member at all, how might that toe ever serve as a toe, and work in harmony with the whole body?” I left the end of that essay ironically frustrated that I was unable to comprehend the leap that occurs between reason’s coming to know its own limitations and wholeness in God. I could, of course, provide a name, Grace, and label the corresponding virtue, Faith, but in my heart there still remained the notion of some action, which, if not comprehensible, could at least be grasped in some mannner before it was achieved. I fear I have wandered, and mist remind myself that words do not suffice to speak fully on such matters. Of one thing, though, I am convinced: reason reaching its limites must include reason abandoning its unique pursuit of self-knowledge. For indeed, we are ourselves — our most individual and true selves — precaisely when we are most in God. And so, that tantalizing question of selfhood yields a confusing answer: “Holy men of humble heart, bless the Lord… praise and exalt him above all forever.” No other explanation, no method of encircling the self with one’s mind, will ever yield the fullness of selfhood which God’s saints enjoy theough giving him glory.

Unsurprisingly, these questions concerning (my)self remained unresolved for me, and led me to Either/Or the following summer, which so drew me in that I decided to treat in my senior essay, the culmination of my undergraduate career. I must qualify anything I write about Either/Or with a total profession of ignorance when it comes to that book; I could spend another ten years studying it and still not have “the answers.” Regardless of the challenges of the book, I am quite sure of one fact: A, the “author” of the first section, is obsessed with defining and differentiating himself. He is more obviously obsessed with aesthetic enjoyment, but one comes to see that creating an internal self which is unadulterated by the outside world is crucial to that pursuit, and the two goals are perhaps even inseparable. He seems to fail, though, and is left progressively jettisoning more of what we might say belongs to his “self.” Tellingly, reason and philosophy are intimately involved in this jettisoning.

There is a great deal of mystery in B’s (or Wilhelm’s) account of self-concretion. Without getting into too much detail, he claims an individual reaches a point where he is able to reclaim all of the particular elements of his self that A was able to cast off. These become justified parts of his “self” precisely because of their supposed outside-ness: they bring him into communion with the world. Thenotion is that a man finds himself most fully in disabusing himself of the aesthetic search for himself and finds himself, as his most true self, as a part of the world. I found this extremely troubling and difficult when I first read it, and could not have put it in the terms above. It helps me approach B’s challenging account of total reversal in self-concretion. While certainly not a comprensive account of this somewhat mystical change, I feel comfortable including some sort of total self-renunciation. Now, it must be said, this self-renunciation must be oriented upwards, i.e. it must somehow be oriented toward finding one’s truest self in God. I believe, though, that knowledge of that resolution is either not possible or not helpful. The individual is only required to give himself up, not to know what he does. God blesses the new man, who has died to himself so that he may live.

The danger with pride does not only lie in the turning away from God. It is the mother of sins, for indeed all lust for power, wealth, and violence is birthed from pride. When I am cut off in traffic and want to scream at the man who does so, I am wrathful, yes, but the origin of that wrath is in my pride. I feel that I am owed something, I think of what is fair—to me. True humilty is not first concerned with the wrong it suffers, but looks instead to the infinitely larger plenitude of mercy and love which God has poured upon each of us. What use is it complaining about some small debt that your brother owes? Are you not a sinner, as he is? Do you not know that feeling of sin?

A portion of the appeal of pride is the exercise of power. It makes sense to me to view the exercise of power as the mechanism of pride. How is it that we act pridefully? We distinguish ourselves from those around us. And how do we tend to accomplish this? We make someone owe us something, or we give someone an order, or we make ourseves feel morally superior. These are the pleasures of pride. Of course, the inverse of these pleasures also distinguish us, but we do not find ourselves drawn to servitude or moral inferiority in the same way.

This reality is what I missed in my earlier self-inquiry. At root, I sought the “self” for the sake of my own self. I wanted validation for the consequences of pride and justification for what I thought made me different. It explains the excessive disdain I exhibited (and somewhat still do). I often felt disgusted or I would make relatively acute readings of other people’s faults. I was ashamed of it, and often refused to explain my disdain, but I was also proud of it (I would often call it “my aristocratic sensibility.”)

I certainly recognize the irony of writing an essay on pride focused primarily on myself. I am obviously not a perfectly humble man, and I still harbor much pride. I think, though, that this exercise has been necessary. As death has conquered death, so my introspection must conquer itself. I hope from this effort to allow my heart to be open to humility. Lord, let this self-inquiry preapre the road of its own demise.