(February 11, 2023 at 5:23 am)Belacqua Wrote:

(February 11, 2023 at 4:30 am)GrandizerII Wrote: Yeah, I suppose, broadly speaking, there are two senses of the term "pride" that I often see being used.

The first sense is, as what is described in your C. S. Lewis quote, something that is akin to narcissism. That kind of pride is indeed very competitive, seeing others as threats to one's success. In this sense, pride is excessively selfish, unempathetic, disregarding of the wellbeing of others, having an often unwarranted sense of superiority to others (in terms of indicators of power and high status) and an intense focus on how to maintain that sense of superiority (even if at the expense of others).

The second sense of pride is far more joyful and hopeful. In this sense, when one feels pride at one's accomplishments (for example), it is more of a feeling of joy and relief than a feeling of superiority. It is inclusive rather than exclusive, readily and willingly acknowledging the support of others and showing gratitude towards them. It's a circumstantial feeling one feels when specific events occur that invoke such pride, not a strongly ingrained personality trait/disposition.

So yes, you're correct to suggest we first ask what C.S. Lewis himself meant by the word "pride". And in this case, I actually agree with him that pride (as he describes it) is very bad.

I wonder if there's been a kind of drift in the meaning of the word "pride." Like maybe it used to be more clearly about hubris, and now it's closer to "self-esteem." 

(I mean, in Henry James novels, "make love" means "flirt." But now it means "fuck," so that's a pretty big change in less than 100 years. You have to stop and think when you read in a novel that "the young couple was seen making love on the sofa at the party." So words can change.)

The first translations of Dante into English were made in the mid-1700s. In those translations, and in every one that I'm aware of since then, the first sin that needs purging in Purgatory has been called "pride." Though the translators could conceivably have used "hubris" or just kept the Latin "superbia." 

Japanese translations use 高慢. The first character means "high," and the second covers a lot of ground -- from "chronic" to "conceited" or even "lazy." (Boasting is "自慢" -- "self" + "conceit.") The dictionary entry for 高慢 gives "haughty; arrogant; proud; stuck-up." So it's clearly the bad kind of pride. 

America is famous for being an individualistic sort of place, where Ayn Rand, for example, could find a home. I wonder if this tendency has contributed to the word "pride" getting a more positive meaning over time.

‘Mere Christianity’ was published in 1952 (although some of Lewis’ source material is from about a decade earlier). If he was discussing ‘pride’ in a Dantean sense, he should have explicitly said so, or used a difference term. As I recall - and it’s been a fair bit of time since I read it - Lewis did neither. He was decrying ‘pride’ in the modern sense; pride in one’s accomplishments, pride in one’s children, and so on.

But that’s to be expected - if Christians were told to feel good about themselves, they wouldn’t be very good Christians. The self-loathing required to make this death cult seem like a good thing is part and parcel of Christianity.

Boru

(February 11, 2023 at 6:11 am)BrianSoddingBoru4 Wrote:

(February 11, 2023 at 5:23 am)Belacqua Wrote: I wonder if there's been a kind of drift in the meaning of the word "pride." Like maybe it used to be more clearly about hubris, and now it's closer to "self-esteem." 

(I mean, in Henry James novels, "make love" means "flirt." But now it means "fuck," so that's a pretty big change in less than 100 years. You have to stop and think when you read in a novel that "the young couple was seen making love on the sofa at the party." So words can change.)

The first translations of Dante into English were made in the mid-1700s. In those translations, and in every one that I'm aware of since then, the first sin that needs purging in Purgatory has been called "pride." Though the translators could conceivably have used "hubris" or just kept the Latin "superbia." 

Japanese translations use 高慢. The first character means "high," and the second covers a lot of ground -- from "chronic" to "conceited" or even "lazy." (Boasting is "自慢" -- "self" + "conceit.") The dictionary entry for 高慢 gives "haughty; arrogant; proud; stuck-up." So it's clearly the bad kind of pride. 

America is famous for being an individualistic sort of place, where Ayn Rand, for example, could find a home. I wonder if this tendency has contributed to the word "pride" getting a more positive meaning over time.

‘Mere Christianity’ was published in 1952 (although some of Lewis’ source material is from about a decade earlier). If he was discussing ‘pride’ in a Dantean sense, he should have explicitly said so, or used a difference term. As I recall - and it’s been a fair bit of time since I read it - Lewis did neither. He was decrying ‘pride’ in the modern sense; pride in one’s accomplishments, pride in one’s children, and so on.

But that’s to be expected - if Christians were told to feel good about themselves, they wouldn’t be very good Christians. The self-loathing required to make this death cult seem like a good thing is part and parcel of Christianity.

Boru

A quote taken from the book itself, explaining what the author meant by "pride", was posted in one of Belacqua's posts in the previous page. Per my understanding, it seems to be of the Dantean sense (or something similar to that).

(February 11, 2023 at 12:52 am)Belacqua Wrote:

(February 11, 2023 at 12:03 am)Objectivist Wrote: I will say another thing.  I applaud C. S. Lewis for his consistency.  As long as he accepts the Christian ethics of self-sacrifice, he must hold pride as the primary sin because pride is essentially self-worth.

I think I mentioned before that Lewis was a medievalist and a Dante scholar. When he says that pride is a sin, he is using the word in the way that Dante and others use it.

This is the definition he used, from Wikipedia's page on the Seven Deadly Sins:

Quote:Pride is identified as dangerously corrupt selfishness, putting one's own desires, urges, wants, and whims before the welfare of others. Dante's definition of pride was "love of self perverted to hatred and contempt for one's neighbor". 

So it's clear that this is NOT a sense of gratification at one's real accomplishments, which as far as I know is not condemned anywhere. 

As so often happens, part of the problem comes from translation. "Pride" here is a translation of the Latin "superbia," for which there is no exact English equivalent. If I were in charge I would just leave the Latin untranslated, but nobody asked me.

Dante's system is based on Aristotle more than on the Bible. One of Aristotle's recurring themes is the importance of having accurate knowledge of oneself. If I believe I'm the best guy in the world (which I'm clearly not), then I don't have a clear picture. If I furthermore think that being the best guy in the world makes me entitled to special treatment, and that my neighbors are worthless in comparison, then I'm guilty of pride as Lewis defined it. 

Likewise, when I feel good about my own accomplishments, it would be bad for me to forget about the shoulders of all the giants I stand on.

I think it's appropriate that the psych paper John 6IX Breezy linked us to speaks of two kinds of pride: the "authentic" kind, which is being justified in being pleased about real accomplishments, and "hubristic" kind, which is pretty much what Lewis means.

I did not know that.  Thank you for telling me.  I would never define pride in that way when the meaning is so divergent from the good kind of pride.  There seems to be a clear need for two different concepts to denote Dante's and the good kind of pride.  I actually define pride as moral ambition.  I just said self-worth to avoid using an objectivist definition when the normal one would get my point across.  But thank you again for enlightening me.

(February 11, 2023 at 11:11 pm)Objectivist Wrote: I actually define pride as moral ambition.  I just said self-worth to avoid using an objectivist definition when the normal one would get my point across.  But thank you again for enlightening me.

Thank you for being so reasonable about this. So many of these issues result from people defining things differently.

I agree that moral ambition and self-worth are valuable things to have. And I can see how they overlap with the more modern meaning of "pride." 

Recently people have been talking about "deaths of despair" in America, where people just give up and stop taking care of themselves. Here in Japan people who lose their self-worth jump in front of trains, but I suspect Americans are more likely to sit on the sofa, self-medicate, and play video games until they croak. I wish there were some way to motivate such people, so they could get back their ambition. 

When my brother was teaching elementary school the board of education got on a kick about teaching "self-esteem" to all the kids. My brother got in trouble by suggesting that they ought to do something to earn their self-esteem, rather than just having it handed to them. 

I guess all this has been on my mind because we have recently lost the last of my family's older generation, and this has made me, by default, the new older generation. So I feel somewhat reflective and self-critical, thinking a lot about parts of my life in which I am NOT deserving of esteem. This is why I'm thinking about accurate views of oneself -- humility demands that I acknowledge the ways in which I am or was bad. Pride (in the bad sense) would allow me to justify or ignore those times.

There certainly is a way to motivate those people, maybe no way to motivate them that the political class who makes hay out of the issue is comfortable with, ofc. As your "sir" story above alludes to.

(February 12, 2023 at 3:36 am)Belacqua Wrote:

(February 11, 2023 at 11:11 pm)Objectivist Wrote: I actually define pride as moral ambition.  I just said self-worth to avoid using an objectivist definition when the normal one would get my point across.  But thank you again for enlightening me.

Thank you for being so reasonable about this. So many of these issues result from people defining things differently.

I agree that moral ambition and self-worth are valuable things to have. And I can see how they overlap with the more modern meaning of "pride." 

Recently people have been talking about "deaths of despair" in America, where people just give up and stop taking care of themselves. Here in Japan people who lose their self-worth jump in front of trains, but I suspect Americans are more likely to sit on the sofa, self-medicate, and play video games until they croak. I wish there were some way to motivate such people, so they could get back their ambition. 

When my brother was teaching elementary school the board of education got on a kick about teaching "self-esteem" to all the kids. My brother got in trouble by suggesting that they ought to do something to earn their self-esteem, rather than just having it handed to them. 

I guess all this has been on my mind because we have recently lost the last of my family's older generation, and this has made me, by default, the new older generation. So I feel somewhat reflective and self-critical, thinking a lot about parts of my life in which I am NOT deserving of esteem. This is why I'm thinking about accurate views of oneself -- humility demands that I acknowledge the ways in which I am or was bad. Pride (in the bad sense) would allow me to justify or ignore those times.

You know I've been searching the Bible for any mention of pride and in every case, the Bible gives a negative spin to pride.  The only reference to pride in a positive light is talking about a people bieng proud because they obeyed God.  Every instance of individual pride is negative and it is associated with arrogance, haughtiness, boastfulness, thinking highly of one's self, 
,destructiion, downfall, strife, and violence.  So I think C S is using pride exactly as the Bible uses it.  I stand by my statement.  As long as C S Lewis accepts Christian morality he must, to be consistent, treat pride as a sin.

Now, I no longer own a bible so I can't look to see how the Bible defines pride if it does.  Can you point to a passage in the Bible that treats pride as a virtue.  I mean maybe I'm missing it.

(February 18, 2023 at 7:09 pm)Objectivist Wrote: You know I've been searching the Bible for any mention of pride and in every case, the Bible gives a negative spin to pride.  The only reference to pride in a positive light is talking about a people bieng proud because they obeyed God.  Every instance of individual pride is negative and it is associated with arrogance, haughtiness, boastfulness, thinking highly of one's self, 
,destructiion, downfall, strife, and violence.  So I think C S is using pride exactly as the Bible uses it.  I stand by my statement.  As long as C S Lewis accepts Christian morality he must, to be consistent, treat pride as a sin.

Now, I no longer own a bible so I can't look to see how the Bible defines pride if it does.  Can you point to a passage in the Bible that treats pride as a virtue.  I mean maybe I'm missing it.

I've also been looking into it a little bit. It seems to me that the only real problem occurs when the English translators choose the word "pride" for the original Hebrew or Greek. In those original languages, there is no ambiguity.

From what I've seen, the Hebrew is "gaon," and is nearly always synonymous with conceit, arrogance, haughtiness -- that kind of thing. The Septuagint translators rendered "gaon" as "hyperephanos." "Ephanos" on its own means arrogant, so "hyper" just makes it stronger. Then the authors of the New Testament also used "hyperephanos." 

https://www.quotescosmos.com/bible/bible...G5243.html

https://www.biblestudytools.com/dictionary/pride/

The only exception I see listed is from the above link:

Quote:An exception is "glory" (Isa 4:2).

As I recall the word "hubris" isn't in the New Testament. Its Greek meaning evolved over time and didn't always refer to overly-strong pride, the way we use it today. I don't know exactly the nuance it had for the authors of the Gospels, but it might have been different from the way we use it. 

It looks as though the ambiguity of the word is introduced when people started reading the Bible in English. While the word "pride" usually had the negative connotation, the positive meaning is there also, from fairly early on.

Quote:Middle English prede, from late Old English pryto, Kentish prede, Mercian pride "unreasonable self-esteem, especially as one of the deadly sins; haughtiness, overbearing treatment of others; pomp, love of display," from prud (see proud (adj.)).

[...]

In Middle English sometimes also positive, "proper pride, personal honor, good repute; exalted position; splendor," also "prowess or spirit in an animal." Used in reference to the erect penis from 15c. Meaning "that which makes a person or people most proud" is from c. 1300.

https://www.etymonline.com/word/pride

So from Middle English there's a possibility of the positive sense. I also like a lot that it can refer to an erect penis. I'll keep that in mind for the next time it comes up, so to speak.

(February 18, 2023 at 8:37 pm)Belacqua Wrote:

(February 18, 2023 at 7:09 pm)Objectivist Wrote: You know I've been searching the Bible for any mention of pride and in every case, the Bible gives a negative spin to pride.  The only reference to pride in a positive light is talking about a people bieng proud because they obeyed God.  Every instance of individual pride is negative and it is associated with arrogance, haughtiness, boastfulness, thinking highly of one's self, 
,destructiion, downfall, strife, and violence.  So I think C S is using pride exactly as the Bible uses it.  I stand by my statement.  As long as C S Lewis accepts Christian morality he must, to be consistent, treat pride as a sin.

Now, I no longer own a bible so I can't look to see how the Bible defines pride if it does.  Can you point to a passage in the Bible that treats pride as a virtue.  I mean maybe I'm missing it.

I've also been looking into it a little bit. It seems to me that the only real problem occurs when the English translators choose the word "pride" for the original Hebrew or Greek. In those original languages, there is no ambiguity.

From what I've seen, the Hebrew is "gaon," and is nearly always synonymous with conceit, arrogance, haughtiness -- that kind of thing. The Septuagint translators rendered "gaon" as "hyperephanos." "Ephanos" on its own means arrogant, so "hyper" just makes it stronger. Then the authors of the New Testament also used "hyperephanos." 

https://www.quotescosmos.com/bible/bible...G5243.html

https://www.biblestudytools.com/dictionary/pride/

The only exception I see listed is from the above link:

Quote:An exception is "glory" (Isa 4:2).

As I recall the word "hubris" isn't in the New Testament. Its Greek meaning evolved over time and didn't always refer to overly-strong pride, the way we use it today. I don't know exactly the nuance it had for the authors of the Gospels, but it might have been different from the way we use it. 

It looks as though the ambiguity of the word is introduced when people started reading the Bible in English. While the word "pride" usually had the negative connotation, the positive meaning is there also, from fairly early on.

Quote:Middle English prede, from late Old English pryto, Kentish prede, Mercian pride "unreasonable self-esteem, especially as one of the deadly sins; haughtiness, overbearing treatment of others; pomp, love of display," from prud (see proud (adj.)).

[...]

In Middle English sometimes also positive, "proper pride, personal honor, good repute; exalted position; splendor," also "prowess or spirit in an animal." Used in reference to the erect penis from 15c. Meaning "that which makes a person or people most proud" is from c. 1300.

https://www.etymonline.com/word/pride

So from Middle English there's a possibility of the positive sense. I also like a lot that it can refer to an erect penis. I'll keep that in mind for the next time it comes up, so to speak.

The only instance I can find of the word pride not being used to mean a vice is this:  In that day the Branch of the Lord will be beautiful and glorious, and the fruit of the land will be the pride and glory of the survivors in Israel.

It is clear from the context of the chapter that the survivors' pride will be in the abundance and beauty of the land after God has restored it and not pride in themselves.  Therefore, my statement stands.  

  

Maybe that's why Aslan is a rogue lion, instead of belonging to a pride.

(February 18, 2023 at 9:11 pm)Objectivist Wrote: The only instance I can find of the word pride not being used to mean a vice is this:  In that day the Branch of the Lord will be beautiful and glorious, and the fruit of the land will be the pride and glory of the survivors in Israel.
  

Yeah, that's Isaiah 4:2, the exception I mentioned earlier.