Learning Humility From La Rochefoucauld
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You wouldn’t think François de La Rochefoucauld would be a good role model. Born in Paris in 1613, by all accounts "he had a thoroughly difficult and often miserable life." His Maxims were published in 1665 and consist of short aphorisms most just 1 or 2 sentences long.
In the Maxims, he expresses a certain cynicism that seems to highlight all of the worst qualities of human beings. Some of his pithier insights include:
"We all have strength enough to endure the troubles of others."
"We have not the strength to follow our reason all the way."
"In order to succeed in the world, people do their utmost to appear successful."
But, could we learn something useful from someone who seems to delight in pointing out the flaws and foibles of our behavior? Perhaps.
Consider one of the best qualities of a true friend. They will point out your worst qualities not to insult or belittle but to help you improve. If we approach La Rochefoucauld’s Maxims in this spirit we might be able to learn some useful lessons, among them, humility.
He only addresses humility directly in a few maxims calling it in one case "merely feigned submissiveness." But, we still might be able to learn something about it by examining his thoughts on pride, luck, and chance.
Pride:
Let’s begin with the opposite of humility. As La Rochefoucauld says, “All men have an equal share of pride; the only difference is in their ways and means of showing it.” Here is the friend pointing out our flaws and also pointing out that we all share the flaw. But, is pride always a flaw? Perhaps not. After all, “pride, which makes us so envious, also helps to keep envy within bounds.”
It’s ironic how one fault can be used to contain another. Pride might help keep envy within bounds but what happens when we work to reduce or eliminate other faults? We are proud of the accomplishment! “Our pride often grows fat on what we cut from our other faults.”
I am reminded of Aristotle’s notion of the golden mean that he uses to discuss virtues. There is a balance. Courage is a virtue. Too much courage is the vice of being foolhardy. But, too little courage is also a vice: cowardice. The key to living the virtues is balance. La Rochefoucauld seems to be telling us that the same thing applies to our faults. We cannot eliminate them. We need them to balance each other.
But, we do well to remember that our faults are double-edged swords. They can balance each other but they will also be opposed to our virtues. “The very pride that makes us condemn failings from which we think we are exempt leads us to despise good qualities we do not possess.”
None of us are exempt from failings and the very qualities we despise in others might just be ones we need to cultivate in ourselves. Once we cultivate these qualities and address our faults we can then take pride in our accomplishments. Right? Not necessarily.
Luck & Chance:
We take pride in our accomplishments because we think it is our efforts and actions that produced them. But, “although men pride themselves on their noble deeds, these are seldom the outcome of a grand design but simply effects of chance.” More often than not, we underestimate the role that luck and chance play in our lives for better or worse.
When people tell the story of their success, they inevitably emphasize their own actions as the primary cause. But, “however great may be the advantages she bestows, it is not nature alone, but nature helped by luck that makes heroes.”
We underestimate the power of luck and chance in other ways as well. We often think that good fortune will make us happier than it actually does and that bad fortune will make us more miserable than it actually does. People who win the lottery are happier for a time before returning to their base level of happiness. The same goes for people who suffer bad fortune through illness or other misfortune. Their happiness does decrease in the short term but also returns to a baseline. As La Rochefoucauld puts it “We are never as fortunate or as unfortunate as we suppose.”
Luck and chance are themselves indifferent to their impact on our lives though we like to think otherwise. The temptation for those who are fortunate is to think that their fortune is the result of merit. As a result, “Fortunate people seldom mend their ways, for when good luck crowns their misdeeds with success they think it is because they are right.”
But, while luck and chance are not driven by moral considerations, they can often reveal a person’s moral character or lack thereof. “Chance reveals virtues and vices as light reveals objects.” You can tell a lot about a person by how they react to bad fortune as well as good.
What’s more some people can turn misfortune into fortune while others have an uncanny ability to snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. As La Rochefoucauld puts it, “No occurrences are so unfortunate that the shrewd cannot turn them to some advantage, nor so fortunate that the imprudent cannot turn them to their own disadvantage.”
The idea is very Stoic. As the Stoic philosopher, Seneca put it “No man finds poverty a trouble to him, but he that thinks it so; and he that thinks it so, makes it so. He that is not content in poverty, would not be so neither in plenty; for the fault is not the thing, but in the mind.” Luck and chance will happen as they may. What matters is how we frame these events.
Are these lessons we can learn from La Rochefoucauld despite his intentions? Perhaps, though he does say that "We give nothing so liberally as our advice," which makes it sound like he's including himself. He also points out that "We give advice but we do not influence people's conduct."
So, we're left to interpret and use his insights as we may. Indeed, "Sometimes no less cleverness is needed to benefit from good advice than to think of the good advice oneself." Perhaps my interpretations are too clever.
I began by supposing that La Rochefoucauld could be that friend who criticizes to help. I still maintain that could be the case. He says as much in the Maxims by pointing out that "The most difficult undertaking in friendship is not showing our faults to our friend, but making him see his own." If he does anything in the Maxims it is to make us see our own faults. If we read his aphorisms in this spirit, we can benefit from the stinging insights.
And, perhaps we can see La Rochefoucauld's point in saying that "Rare though true love may be, true friendship is rarer still."