Ontological Humility: Lord Voldemort and the Philosophers

Conclusion

Conclusion It’s a cold and it’s a broken hallelujah . . . —Leonard Cohen, “Hallelujah” With the discussion of race in Collins and McWhorter, we have come full circle to Rowling’s assertion that an antiracist moral stance is at the core of the Harry Potter saga. It should be clearer now how ontological humility, and its other, are systematically tied to, without being confined to, the dynamics of race in the modern world. Racism, in both its U.S. and Nazi forms, can in fact be understood as a direct refusal of ontological humility in reaction to historical forces (e.g., lack of identity as a nation, long-standing religious prejudice, the humiliation of the Versailles Treaty) that bring the demand for such humility to the forefront of a people’s consciousness. Of course, there are other factors, above all economic ones, that contribute to such manifestations of human arrogance , but tied to a tradition more open to ontological humility (one thinks of the Danish or the Dutch in World War II), their effects can be less devastating. So the literary conclusion here, if you will, is that arrogance and humility constitute a largely implicit, or “unthought” in Heidegger’s sense of the term, theme in the Harry Potter books, which underlies the Rowling’s explicit antiracism. As already noted, Rowling certainly marks arrogance as a profound and disturbing evil when it does raise its head in her saga: “[Harry] could not lie to himself; if he had known the prefect badge was on its way, he would have expected it to come to him, not Ron. Did this make him as arrogant as Draco Malfoy? Did he really think himself superior to everyone else?”1 Philosophically, however, what Rowling (along with a few other popular authors of magical tales in the last century, such as C. S. Lewis, J. R. R. Tolkien, and T. H. White2 ) may have done is to make more explicit a theme that has, as I’ve argued, run through the work of major European philosophers for at least the last 400 years without 131 132 Ontological Humility ever being labeled as such. Still, it could be argued that some of the philosophers discussed here were to some extent aware of their own ontological humility, albeit not under that name, and that of others—one might see this kind of awareness as what drew, for instance, Kant to Hume or Heidegger to Kierkegaard. So why does ontological humility remain only implicit in their work? Why don’t these philosophers label it, explain their reasons for it, engage others in philosophical exchanges about it? Why does ontological humility reappear over and over again in the history of philosophy, only to vanish and need to be re-created in each new generation of philosophers? I think one answer to this question may lie in the word “humility.” Aristotle already considered “undue humility” a vice for those he taught (although probably not for women and slaves), and the Christian virtue of humility could be said to fall closer to that end of the spectrum than to the end represented by the justified (and hence often limited) ambition that I argued earlier may play the role of ontological humility for Aristotle. Annette Baier offers one version of the contemporary attitude toward Christian humility when she says, somewhat scornfully, that it “can scarcely be thought to pass the test of reflection” (HRWE 28), because it creates the paradox of a demand to be humble about one’s humility. This, of course, again confuses personal humility, of which this may be true, and ontological humility, of which I would argue it is not. In any case, we inherit from two millennia of Christianity a concept of humility that is nearer to servility than Kantian wonder. Given that, and our culture’s even longer obsession with an individualist model of masculinity with its roots in honor, pride, and physical strength, why would any man, outside of the confines of certain forms of religious life, want to flaunt his humility, much less recommend it to others as a virtue? What kind of scorn would a man who preached or promoted humility have been subject to? (Kierkegaard might be a useful example here.) One profound link between ontological humility and feminism is that in our culture humility remains powerfully culturally coded as feminine, so to articulate it as a philosophical view is to become in some sense, as Baier said of Hume, “a virtual...