Humility as openness to others: Interactive humility in the context of l’Arche

Abstract

Exploring the concept of virtuous humility helps to highlight paths of human flourishing. Yet humility is difficult to study because it is often stereotyped as shame or self-abasement, it tends to defy uniform conceptualization across contexts and cultures, definitions are difficult to justify, and operationalizing humility challenges standard approaches in the social sciences. The present work develops a theory of interactive humility as openness to others (IHO) by foregrounding interaction and interpersonal context. IHO theory builds on a previously published theory of humility as the absence of the vices of pride and tests the new proposal against research done in conjunction with l’Arche communities. Conceptual networks from core l’Arche texts showed that openness ranks second among concepts most similar to humility (0.85), while humility ranks first for openness. These networks support the view that humility as openness in the context of l’Arche is primarily interactive and interpersonal, rather than intellectual.

Keywords:

• Natural language processing
• semantic space
• grounded cognition
• vices of pride

Acknowledgements

We gratefully acknowledge helpful conversations with Jean Vanier, Sister Anita Maroun, the Core Members, Assistants, and other leaders in the l’Arche Communities of Trosly and Cuise in France, and in Atlanta, Chicago, Cleveland, Clinton, Erie, Jacksonville, St. Louis, Syracuse, and Tacoma in the US. We are also grateful for helpful discussions with Warren Brown, Mark Graves, Remya Nair, Steven Quartz, Kevin Reimer, James Van Slyke, and the contributing groups of the Self, Motivation, and Virtue Project. We gratefully acknowledge support from the Self, Motivation, and Virtue Project, the Templeton Religion Trust, the John Templeton Foundation, the Center of Theological Inquiry, and the Center for Theology and the Natural Sciences. The views in this article do not necessarily reflect those of the organizations that generously funded the work.