Love and Humility as Epistemological Virtues

To see the overlooked aspects of anything takes a peculiar wisdom; you have to see with fresh vision the things that jaded sight no longer notices. Part of this fresh vision comes from the sense that the world is a wonder, not made by us, not chosen by us, but nevertheless a strange and mostly cheery home for us. Consistent with this vision of a cottage-garden-type world in a quaint universe, G.K. Chesterton (1874–1936) saw that the homely but overlooked qualities of love and humility are essential, rather than irrelevant, to a robust epistemology.

When the people who presume to lead society began to steer it away from faith that the universe had its origin in a personal creator, to embrace the faith that the universe had its origin in impersonal forces, there was a related attempt to create an epistemology based on impersonal techniques. Sir William Petty articulated this ideal with eloquent brevity as early as 1690:

To express itself in terms of numbers, weight or measure, to use only arguments of sense, and to consider only such causes as have visible foundations in nature; leaving those that depend upon the mutable minds, opinions, appetites, and passions of particular men to the consideration of others.

Despite the obvious and justly celebrated successes of these impersonal techniques, there remains, however, the stubborn fact of man’s personality; not an abstract entity that can be quantified and therefore wholly accounted for, but a mysterious entity that is expressed in the unique life of each human being. And the life—and therefore the judgment—of every individual can be affected by many things: by a fly buzzing around one’s ear, or the distinctive nose of a distinguished woman, as Blaise Pascal noted; or by less tangible things such as popular theories, conflicting priorities and institutional preferences. We get hints of the dynamics of these affects in the debate on anthropogenic global warming, which has been plangent with cries that distortions in published research results are real and have been caused by biased funding allocations, ideological fashion and the pressures of politics. Clearly, it isn’t so easy to remove from any venture “the mutable minds, opinions, appetites and passions of particular men”.

That man may become venal in his search for knowledge did not surprise Chesterton; he, in contrast to ancient or modern determinists, presupposed a large degree of free will, and any man could at any time embrace or reject knowledge, with that decision often complicated by the great power of self-interest which tempts us to cover our ears to reason in the hope of some other gain; a temptation that every one of us has, at some point and in some manner, allowed to dominate our nobler instincts.

To aid us in the battle against our own prevarications, Chesterton knew we needed to develop a deep love for knowledge; nothing less than love was needed to overcome the temptation to distort, ignore or suppress unwanted or unanticipated truths. And it is unanticipated truths that cause self-satisfied people particular strife, because a truth born out of time upsets established habits and ideas. Here, humility joins love not as only a moral or spiritual ideal but as a vital epistemological ideal. Chesterton brought the two concepts together when he observed, “In order to know the truth it is necessary to desire the truth, especially the truth you do not know.” A researcher who deeply desires knowledge is more likely to delight in rather than to discount unexpected results, while humility reminds him of his own limitations and leads him to consider different perspectives and fresh possibilities. Humility is also an aid to pragmatic action: it submits to experience and doesn’t insist on a comprehensive understanding before adopting an effective strategy or exploring a challenging conception.

In the history of science there are many examples of the value of humility in the face of clear evidence bringing great but surprising discoveries to light. One thinks of John Cade and the use of lithium salts to treat mania.

There are also many occasions when arrogance led to tragedy on a massive scale. For example, in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, thousands of mothers died unnecessarily from puerperal fever as doctors moved straight from autopsies to attending women in childbirth; unwittingly, the doctors carried deadly bacteria from the cadavers to the healthy birthing women and infected them. In 1847, Ignaz Semmelweis, a Hungarian doctor, made the connection between the autopsies and the infections and discovered that hand-washing in a chlorinated-lime solution greatly lessened the mortality rate of the birthing women attended by doctors. However, he couldn’t offer an acceptable scientific explanation for his observations. The medical fraternity was loath to adopt the laborious hand-washing practice because it didn’t seem logical. The necessary rational link—Pasteur’s discovery of the existence and effects of bacteria—hadn’t yet been formulated. The doctors, proud and busy rationalists, continued to scorn hand-washing. And they infected thousands more new mothers, creating thousands more needless tragedies. One could conjecture that neither love for knowledge or humanity nor humility in the face of experience were epistemological ideals for the doctors who opposed Semmelweis’s demand for a modest degree of hygiene.

Chesterton further championed humility as an aid to knowledge because humility affirmed a helpful sense of proportion between man and nature, whereas an immodest self-confidence resulted in a loss of proportion and, with it, the neglect of opportunities to learn. This is from his essay “A Defence of Humility”:

Whatever virtues a triumphant egoism really leads to, no one can reasonably pretend that it leads to knowledge. Turning a beggar from the door may be right enough, but pretending to know all the stories the beggar might have narrated is pure nonsense; and this is practically the claim of the egoism which thinks that self-assertion can obtain knowledge. A beetle may or may not be inferior to a man—the matter awaits demonstration; but if he were inferior by ten thousand fathoms, the fact remains that there is probably a beetle view of things of which a man is entirely ignorant. If he wishes to conceive that point of view, he will scarcely reach it by revelling in the fact that he is not a beetle. The most brilliant exponent of the egoistic school, Nietzsche, with deadly and honourable logic, admitted that the philosophy of self-satisfaction led to looking down on the weak, the cowardly, and the ignorant. Looking down on things may be a delightful experience, only there is nothing, from a mountain to a cabbage, that is really seen when it is seen from a balloon. The philosopher of the ego sees everything, no doubt, from a high and rarefied heaven; only he sees everything foreshortened or deformed.

Apprehending things from an exaggerated height deforms one’s vision; so does a lack of love. Chesterton valued love as an epistemological ideal for a reason that is often dismissed: love gives a clearer vision of reality, whereas suspicion and antagonism are blinding. It is the person who loves a subject—a husband, a religion, or a dog, for example—who sees that subject with the greatest fullness. True, love may involve a degree of bias, but not to the extent that animosity involves bias. If any man was asked to nominate his fairest and most incisive critic, most married men would point to their wives. The love of a wife does not blind her to her husband’s faults; more often a wife’s love gives her the keenest vision for all aspects, both good and bad, of her man. But very few men would identify an antagonistic colleague as their fairest and most incisive critic because the colleague would be blinded by his own hostility, preventing him from seeing the man in a just manner. In the same way, a faithful, obedient priest could give a far more comprehensive and reasonable critique of the church than a celebrated university professor who hated religion. Love is not blind, love is almost preternaturally perceptive, and anyone who seeks knowledge will discover that fostering a loving heart is one way to avoid having a distorted mind.

Another common cause of a distorted mind is following intellectual fashion, in our day a strange fashion that has little true love for man: it exalts man’s intellect but denigrates man’s meaning. Chesterton saw that love for truth and love for man were two keys to avoiding seductive theories which have the attractions of novelty but are inconsistent with their own premises or with common experience:

Those who leave the tradition of truth do not escape into something which we call Freedom. They only escape into something else, which we call Fashion … If we wish to test rationally the case of rationalism, we should follow the career of the sceptic and ask how far he remained sceptical about the idols or ideals of the world into which he went. There are very few sceptics in history who cannot be proved to have been instantly swallowed by some swollen convention or some hungry humbug of the hour, so that all their utterances about contemporary things now look almost pathetically contemporary.

There are many intelligent people who are thorough in their scepticism of Christianity, for instance, yet fulsome in their faith in the wisdom and power of the state to legislate and engineer human attitudes and behaviour because the state knows best, or who believe that material resources will remedy spiritual deficiencies, to name two swollen conventions and hungry humbugs of our hour.

Chesterton loved both humanity and knowledge, so he pinpointed the absurdities that lay within the philosophies that sought to rob people of freedom, reason and spirit: determinism, nihilism and materialism. These, he said, were thoughts that would end all thought and were therefore unworthy of man because, whatever man may say about himself, his actions and daily conversation confirm that he sees himself as a responsible being who seeks to make meaningful decisions. Chesterton’s criticisms were simple but profound: he saw that there was no point making any statement, or conducting any research, or undertaking any program for social improvement if man did not possess free will; these and any other edifying gestures were futile if determinism was true. And there was no point saying that man had to evolve beyond good and evil if nihilism was true: there was no basis for saying man had to do anything, nor was there any “beyond”, “good” or “evil”; they were comparatives that lacked a superlative. Likewise, if materialism were true then there was no basis, consistent with materialism, to insist on any truth if it could not be freely examined and verified by man’s mind.

These discredited notions persist because each new generation discovers the cast-offs of previous generations and embraces them as fresh thoughts. Chesterton did not find it incredible that self-contradictory ideas are recycled, re-labelled, and attract plenty of adherents. He observed, “A new philosophy generally means the praise of some old vice.” He elaborated on this point:

You can find all the new ideas in the old books; only there you will find them balanced, kept in their place, and sometimes contradicted and overcome by other and better ideas. The great writers did not neglect a fad because they had not thought of it, but because they had thought of it and of all the answers to it as well.

What the old writers had—certainly writers like Dante, Shakespeare, Pascal, Burke, Turgenev and Dostoevsky—was knowledge of what most contemporary writers exhibit little idea of: first prin­ciples, metaphysics. This scorn for first principles is partly why contemporary writers have such scorn for mankind: not understanding the basis of their own philosophy, they can’t understand any alternative philosophy either; they have no basis for patience with the perspective of those who disagree with them. It’s no surprise that misrepresentation, slur and execration become substitutes for rational argumentation. Chesterton saw this trend, and the cruel spite in public debate it would unleash:

The redemption of reason in this modern age presents many difficulties, mainly because men have abandoned their belief in first principles. Not having principles on which to agree at the outset, our men of letters lack a common ground for argument. And so, in our popular controversies and debates we find instead of calm, logical thought, merely abuse and ridicule and unreason.

Chesterton’s love for reason and love for mankind led him to reject the fashionable philosophies of his day; however, these exact philosophies, their nakedness covered with the rags of renewed insistence, are prevalent today, indicating that there are still many people whose love for both knowledge and mankind has, somehow, been compromised.