(image courtesy of blackeri)

Vanity is a naive obsession with a non-existent Self.

Vanity is the excessive belief in one’s own abilities or attractiveness to others.

So vanity and pride are different things, and were once considered completely independent of one another! Well then- what is Pride?

Pride is an inward directed emotion that exemplifies either a high sense of one’s personal status or ego (i.e., leading to judgments of personality and character) or the specific mostly positive emotion that is a product of praise or independent self-reflection. Philosophers and social psychologists have noted that pride is a complex secondary emotion which requires the development of a sense of self and the mastery of relevant conceptual distinctions (e.g., that pride is distinct from happiness and joy) through language-based interaction with others. Some social psychologists identify it as linked to a signal of high social status. One definition of pride in the first sense comes from St. Augustine: “the love of one’s own excellence”. In this sense, the opposite of pride is either humility or guilt; the latter in particular being a sense of one’s own failure in contrast to Augustine’s notion of excellence.

Aristotle:

Aristotle identified pride (megalopsuchia, variously translated as proper pride, greatness of soul and magnanimity) as the crown of the virtues, distinguishing it from vanity, temperance, and humility, thus:

Now the man is thought to be proud who thinks himself worthy of great things, being worthy of them; for he who does so beyond his deserts is a fool, but no virtuous man is foolish or silly. The proud man, then, is the man we have described. For he who is worthy of little and thinks himself worthy of little is temperate, but not proud; for pride implies greatness, as beauty implies a goodsized body, and little people may be neat and well-proportioned but cannot be beautiful.

He concludes then that

Pride, then, seems to be a sort of crown of the virtues; for it makes them more powerful, and it is not found without them. Therefore it is hard to be truly proud; for it is impossible without nobility and goodness of character.

By contrast, Aristotle defined hubris as follows:

to cause shame to the victim, not in order that anything may happen to you, nor because anything has happened to you, but merely for your own gratification. Hubris is not the requital of past injuries; this is revenge. As for the pleasure in hubris, its cause is this: men think that by ill-treating others they make their own superiority the greater.

Hacking Vanity:

Vanity once meant “futility”, and it’s a shame that the association is no longer apparent. For vanity remains futile- it is self-sabotaging, and it diminishes the value of the very individual that it idolizes. We might possess ideas, abilities and perspectives that are perhaps superior to those held by others, but it is important that we realize that they are not entirely our own.“If I have seen further,” mused Issac Newton, “it is by standing on the shoulders of giants.”

Vanity is self-idolatry. True self-awareness, however, necessitates that you also understand the limitations of the concept of the self. As Lewis Thomas elegantly puts it from a biological (and very philosophical!) perspective, “A good case can be made for our non-existence as entities. We are not made up, as we had always supposed, of successively enriched packets of our own parts. We are shared, rented, occupied.” How do you idolize the self, once you realise that the self is ultimately an illusion? You can’t. You take pride, instead, in the giants whose shoulders you stand on. You strive to do them justice.

The loop that needs to be hacked lies in the following dilemma:

We are inseparably bound to others, whether we like it or not. We are defined, to a large extent, by our relationships with others- the isolated individual independent of others is a myth, an illusion.

Our value is largely derived from our ability to empower others. If we want to be powerful, to be proud of ourselves the way Aristotle and Nietzsche describe it, we have to empower others.

Self-idolatry does not empower others- it offends and repels them. This is especially tragic when the individual indulging himself happens to have something of value to offer to others, but sabotages himself in the process.

Any sense of superiority you get out of insulting and denigrating others (Aristotelean hubris) is self-destructive. You may feel superior for a moment, but it is a Pyrrhic victory- you damage long-term relationships with others for a quick fix of uneasy pleasure. Your victims will resent you. Your peers may feign support, but they will cease to respect you. The Hero does not trample on the weak- he chooses to empower them, and earns their trust and admiration in the process.

I’d now like to leave it to two of my personal Heroes to share with you, in their own words, a wisdom that I myself struggle to embody:

The following is a quote from Benjamin Zander, the music director of the Boston Philharmonic Orchestra (an incredibly accomplished musician and conductor!):

“Now, I had an amazing experience. I was 45 years old, I’d been conducting for 20 years, and I suddenly had a realization. The conductor of an orchestra doesn’t make a sound. My picture appears on the front of the CD — but the conductor doesn’t make a sound. He depends for his power on his ability to make other people powerful. And that changed everything for me. It was totally life-changing. People in my orchestra came up to me and said, “Ben, what happened?” That’s what happened. I realized my job was to awaken possibility in other people. And of course, I wanted to know whether I was doing that. And you know how you find out? You look at their eyes. If their eyes are shining, you know you’re doing it. You could light up a village with this guy’s eyes. Right. So if the eyes are shining, you know you’re doing it. If the eyes are not shining, you get to ask a question. And this is the question: Who am I being that my players’ eyes are not shining? We can do that with our children too. Who am I being that my children’s eyes are not shining? That’s a totally different world.

Randy Pausch, the star of The Last Lecture, (a must watch!) describes a similar realization, from a conversation with a mentor:

God, what is there to say about Andy Van Dam? When I was a freshman at Brown, he was on leave. And all I heard about was this Andy Van Dam. He was like a mythical creature. Like a centaur, but like a really pissed off centaur. And everybody was like really sad that he was gone, but kind of more relaxed? And I found out why. Because I started working for Andy. I was a teaching assistant for him as a sophomore. And I was quite an arrogant young man. And I came in to some office hours and of course it was nine o’clock at night and Andy was there at office hours, which is your first clue as to what kind of professor he was. And I come bounding in and you know, I’m just I’m going to save the world. There’re all these kids waiting for help, da da, da da, da da, da da, dada. And afterwards, Andy literally Dutch-uncled – he’s Dutch, right? He Dutch-uncled me. And he put his arm around my shoulders and we went for a little walk and he said, Randy, it’s such a shame that people perceive you as so arrogant. Because it’s going to limit what you’re going to be able to accomplish in life. What a hell of a way to word “you’re being a jerk.” [laughter] Right? He doesn’t say you’re a jerk. He says people are perceiving you this way and he says the downside is it’s going to limit what you’re going to be able to accomplish.

Did they cease to be vain people? I don’t think so. I’m pretty sure that there are (were, in Randy’s case) times where such great men and women catch a glimpse of themselves on the cover of a magazine and they go, “Wow, check me out!” The difference, I’m willing to bet, is that they remind themselves of how they got to where they are, and they make a conscious effort to focus on others rather than themselves. And after a while, I’ll bet that it becomes a habit.

It’s okay to be self-obsessed! If you truly care about yourself, though, you owe yourself this much: Realise that the best thing you can do for yourself, apart from developing your intrapersonal skills (how you deal with yourself)- is to improve your interpersonal ones (how you deal with other). The best way to do that effectively is to empower them- and empowering other people necessitates putting their needs ahead of your own, or at least aligning their needs with yours. Find the mutually beneficial outcome, and execute it.

Is your arrogance, vanity and hubris limiting what you’re going to be able to accomplish? Mine most certainly is, and it’s something I continue to grapple with to this day. But here’s a simple thought- here are two of the most powerful and accomplished men I have ever had the honour of witnessing, even indirectly, and they both carry themselves with more humility than I typically do. And they are powerful not in spite of their humility, but because of it. I like to look at it as a deep sense of pride, in one’s truest sense of worth, and in the universe at large- perhaps what religious people might define as God’s grace. I imagine Aristotle would agree.

“Hacking The 7 Deadly Sins“, including Vanity,Lust, Greed.