Orgueil
In Schopenhauer, pride is the already acquired, inner, and direct conviction of our own worth—a certainty that requires no witness and dispenses with words. It is rooted in judgment, not will: one does not become proud by deciding to be so, but is proud because one holds certain real or supposed merits to be assured. Unlike vanity, it makes one taciturn: having nothing to gain from others, it has nothing to beg for.
l’orgueil est la conviction déjà fermement acquise de notre propre haute valeur sous tous les rapports
Schopenhauer ranks pride and vanity among the three offshoots of the “madness” that drives man to seek happiness in the opinion of others, alongside ambition. Yet he sharply distinguishes them: “pride is the firmly established conviction of our own high worth in every respect.” The merit may be real or illusory—it matters little—what defines pride is that the conviction is fixed, internal, and requires no one’s approval.
This gives it its most recognizable trait: “Not just anyone can be proud; at most, one can feign pride; but the pretender will soon slip out of character, as with any borrowed role.” Pride cannot be performed because it “has its roots in conviction”—and conviction, like all knowledge, eludes free will: one does not choose to believe; one either believes or does not. This is why it renders one “taciturn”: having nothing to gain from others, it has no reason to speak.
Schopenhauer offers an unexpected defense of this much-maligned passion: those who condemn it, he suggests, “have nothing to be proud of.” Yet he singles out one variety he deems worthless—national pride, “pride at bargain prices”—which betrays the absence of any personal merit, the individual clinging to what they share with millions of others for lack of anything truly their own.
Schopenhauerian pride ≠ vanity, its exact opposite in the same pairing: vanity begs from the outside for the conviction pride already holds within. It ≠ the Aristotelian megalopsuchia either, which demands verified merit and unfolds in public action—greatness of soul is a just judgment of real worth, whereas Schopenhauerian pride couldn’t care less whether its conviction is grounded, “erroneous,” or based on “merely external and conventional merits.” Finally, it ≠ Rousseau’s self-love, a relational sentiment born of social comparison: Schopenhauer’s pride, by contrast, needs no other to exist—it is self-sufficient, even in its silence.