Pride, I claim, is an emotion that we cannot and should not suppress but instead cultivate in its proper form. Considering parents’ behavior toward their children, most people agree with this claim because they want their kids to be proud of, for example, being female if they happen to be born female, of being black if they happen to be black, of being small among the tall, stout among the lean. We expect Americans to be proud of being American and Chinese to be proud of being Chinese. Gays and lesbians teach gays and lesbians to be proud of being gay or lesbian, and though it took some time, most people in the West have learned that this is how it should be.

It is no less clear that pride can become arrogant, pretentious and boastful. There is proper and improper pride, and here the problems start. How can we distinguish proper and improper pride? Is pride evil when there is too much of it, as we may argue using Aristotle’s claim that virtue is the middle between the extremes of too much and too little? Or is pride evil from the outset, as Christianity teaches, ranking pride among the deadly sins? How then can we want kids to be proud of the properties that they are born with without their merit? Or do we only want them not to be ashamed of their innate properties and mistake lack of shame for pride? Yet authenticity is a child of pride, as we need pride in ourselves to want to be true to ourselves. How can authenticity be the ideal of self-loyalty if we are only not ashamed of the properties of our self?

Such problems about pride arouse suspicion that the prevailing ideas of pride are confused when we turn to philosophers. “The social bases of self-esteem” we read in John Rawls’ famous Theory of Justice, are “primary social goods” of which we can assume that rational beings “normally prefer more…rather than less.”¹ So Rawls, it seems, judges self-esteem as so good that normally we should prefer more of it rather than less.² Yet pride, like the “passions for power and glory,” only moves “a nobility and lesser aristocracy” who want “to earn their social standing and place in the sun.”³ But isn’t self-esteem pride too? The philosopher Donald Davidson in fact dryly remarked, self-esteem is “what is normally called pride.”⁴ So Rawls seems to want to reserve the term pride to mean bad pride and the term self-esteem to mean proper pride.

These are questions worth considering, and considering them led me to write this book. But I was neither able nor willing to proceed systematically. I explored the questions like foreign land, without program and method, but with the thrills of an adventure and the joys of seeing the familiar in a new light. Though pride was homeland for ancient and medieval philosophers it has become foreign for us. Twenty years ago, Richard Taylor, the only recent author to write a book on pride, tried to restore pride as a virtue, but he did not rekindle interest in pride. Maybe his scope was too narrow. True, philosophers should have a focus, but pride needs closer consideration of authenticity and authors such as Augustine and Kierkegaard. Therefore, I roam into history and morality, the self and free will, rational theology and technological unemployment, referring to a lot of authors from perhaps confusingly different backgrounds. Pride, as Ludwig Wittgenstein remarked, but referring to a different topic, “compels us to travel over a wide field of thought criss-cross in every direction.”⁵

The most important results of my exploration are two claims. First, proper pride is not a crowing over what I have done but rather a preparation for what I will do. Proper pride is the right emotional response to an obliging endowment we are not responsible for, but want to live up to and be true to. Second, authenticity consists not in self-realization but in doing things for their own sake.

I’ll argue for these claims by (1) analyzing the concepts of pride, self and doing things for their own sake; (2) examining historical facts, in particular facts of the Renaissance interest in doing things for their own sake; (3) looking for the role of pride in motivating morality, metaphysics and rational theology; and (4) considering the interaction between modern technology and pride and arguing that authenticity calls for a society different from the current ones. These four tasks correspond roughly to the four parts of this book.

The investigations will show that the self that we want to be true to in authenticity is not a narrative or conceptual construction as contemporary theorists claim, but an innate property of natural organisms, selected in the process of natural evolution. It provides us with the capacity to intentionally intervene in nature and improve or deteriorate it. Thus, in addition to its claims on proper pride and authenticity, this book makes similarly ambitious claims on the self: that our self is what enables us to intentionally change the world and makes us responsible, punishable or praiseworthy, and of which, with good reasons, we can be both proud and afraid.

Yet there is a third and even more ambitious claim that the book implies. Pride demands crying out the injustice of the world (as we’ll see when we compare kitsch and tragedy), but it cannot tolerate an absurd world either, a world without meaning. To sober unemotional reason, the world we are born into lacks a purpose for us. Freud claimed that science dealt three blows to narcissistic human self-esteem, by Copernicus, Darwin and Freud himself.⁶ Though Copernicanism was rarely felt to be humiliating, Freud was right that science was perceived as proving that man’s position in the universe is unimportant. To the proud, however, our reason and will are evidence that our existence is not marginal⁷; for our having them enables us to the discoveries of Copernicus, Darwin and Freud, and even enables us to both improve and worsen the world. Even the evils of the world are challenges for the proud to use reason and will to improve the world.

I’ll not explore the metaphysical implications of this third thesis but argue for a claim that suits it: Doing things for their own sake is the way for rational creatures to make sense of their lives. As our properties are not marginal in the universe, using them by doing things not for some goal beyond our actions but for the actions’ sake is important enough to provide meaning in life. I also imply claims that presuppose my third thesis but that I do not explicate in this book: that doing things for their own sake commits to a life of professional passion incompatible with ideas of a universal man who will “hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon, rear cattle in the evening, criticize after dinner”⁸; and that the dangers of “specialists without spirit, sensualists without heart” that Weber warned against⁹ can be reduced in a society of citizens with enough of due pride to participate in its organization.

If in exploring pride we hit upon so various and even deep metaphysical issues, do we hit upon them haphazardly? Is it my accidental subjective interest that leads us, or is there more to it? In a closing remark that stands for a conclusion, I show why it’s not haphazard, pointing to a parallel with hermeneutic philosophy that this book (and its author), having an analytic background, finds to be quite strange.

Who is interested in exploring pride? Pride is a topic in psychology, theology and pedagogy and, in addition, draws the interest of all devotees of the humanities: historians, political and social theorists, anthropologists, literary critics; whoever is interested in the puzzles and paradoxes of human life. As a result of my positive theses, some cherished views on the self and authenticity will prove to be illusions. So this book will be of interest to the field of philosophy as well as to philosophers, and can be used in philosophy classes too.