Daoist Humility: How Ancient Chinese Wisdom and Modern Psychology are Telling Us to Be Natural by Going <i>Against</i> the Flow

ABSTRACT The concept of humility has a long history of paradoxicality. From denoting a lowly social status—to becoming one of the highest Christian virtues—to falling under the critique of the liberators of the Enlightenment—to experiencing an upsurge of philosophical and psychological interest in recent years, the value of acknowledging one's least valued traits remains hard to define and defend. Recent definitions of humility as accurate intra‐ and interpersonal awareness have successfully severed the connection between humility and harmful self‐deprecation; however, in the process, they have sidestepped the question of whether intentional self‐lowering can, for some persons and purposes, be beneficial. Self‐lowering as self‐beneficial is a common theme in ancient Chinese thought. The Daodejing , especially, provides an insightful approach to this practice. When effort, ambition, and desire for social approval are taken too far, they give rise to destructive fixations and thereby become counterproductive. One way to disrupt such fixations is to embrace conditions and personal qualities that we and others perceive to be socially unacceptable and even humiliating. Rather than showing subservience to existing power structures, Daoist humility involves voluntarily doing menial tasks and exposing parts of ourselves that we view as shameful so as, ironically, to loosen the hold of our obsessions, increase our equanimity, and, by extension, reduce social conflict and oppression. I support and expand on this approach via recent scholarship from feminist and antiracist philosophers as well as psychological studies suggesting that cognitive control is limited, and embracing the very compulsions that we usually try to avoid can weaken their power.