Unpretentiousness

Understanding Unpretentiousness

Unpretentiousness is a disposition to meet people and activities without unnecessary performance of rank, refinement or importance. It lets the actual contribution carry the encounter. The gardener can share a bucket of beans as beans: there is enough to notice in the harvest without inventing a prestige that separates giver from companion.

Unpretentiousness: finding the balance

Neighbors sort an ordinary harvest of beans.

An unpretentious encounter gives the actual activity enough room to be interesting.

Unpretentiousness gives…

Others can join an activity without first learning how to flatter its owner. Practical information travels more clearly when it is not wrapped in display. Simplicity can reveal an unexpected delight, such as the crooked bean that would disappear beneath a grand account of its pedigree.

What Unpretentiousness makes possible

A plain encounter allows attention to rest on what people are doing together. Questions become easier when ignorance is not treated as a fall in rank. Pleasure can attach to a modest harvest, an ordinary skill or a genuine conversation. Unpretentiousness makes room for participation without a ceremony of social position.

Unpretentiousness in ordinary life

• Explain a familiar skill in plain terms without testing whether someone knows the fashionable name.
• Share an ordinary object because it is worth enjoying, not because it proves your taste.
• Ask a basic question instead of performing expertise you do not have.

Nearby virtues, different work

Modesty keeps claims about oneself proportionate. Unpretentiousness concerns avoiding unnecessary rank performance in the encounter itself. Sincerity concerns truthful expression. A person can have real expertise and fine things while meeting others plainly.

Modesty

Unpretentiousness and its counterfeits

Performed simplicity is a counterfeit of Unpretentiousness: the gardener sneers at another person’s fine basket to advertise their own superior plainness. Genuine unpretentiousness leaves rank contests aside. Hiding useful expertise to sustain a humble image is another counterfeit of plain dealing.

How to cultivate Unpretentiousness

Notice where an explanation becomes a display. Use the name that helps the listener understand. Let the activity offer its own interest, and be willing to ask or answer a basic question. Receive someone’s different taste without turning plainness into a badge of moral superiority.

Try it today

Explain one thing you know to a willing person in clear everyday language. Leave out a status cue that contributes nothing to their understanding.

Keep the practice proportionate

Plain dealing does not require concealing expertise, identity or cultural expression. Do not treat another person’s clothing, speech or tastes as evidence of inferior character.

A question worth returning to

Am I using simplicity to join the company or to win another contest of rank?

Quotations and further reading

These historical passages offer different philosophical and literary perspectives. Each note identifies its setting, point of comparison and relevant limits; none supplies an official definition of this virtue.

1. Between simple and noble persons, there is always a quick intelligence: they recognize at sight, and meet on a better ground than the talents and skills they may chance to possess, namely, on sincerity and uprightness.

   Ralph Waldo Emerson · The Conduct of Life

   The Project Gutenberg eBook of The Conduct of Life · , exact-print and territory review held.

   Emerson imagines meeting on sincerity and uprightness beyond a display of talents. Plain company can value the person without requiring a performance of expertise.

2. The reputation that every one pretends to of vivacity and promptness of wit, I seek in regularity; the glory they pretend to from a striking and signal action, or some particular excellence, I claim from order, correspondence, and tranquillity of opinions and manners:

   Michel de Montaigne · Essays

   CHAPTER XVII——OF PRESUMPTION · Charles Cotton translation, William Carew Hazlitt edition, 1877

   Montaigne prefers regularity and correspondence to striking displays. His personal account gives ordinary, sustained conduct enough interest without a heroic announcement.

3. The empty coxcomb who gives himself airs of importance which he has no title to, the silly liar who assumes the merit of adventures which never happened, the foolish plagiary who gives himself out for the author of what he has no pretensions to, are properly accused of this passion.

   Adam Smith · The Theory of Moral Sentiments

   CHAP. IV. Of licentious systems. · , exact-print and territory review held.

   Smith names pretensions to importance, invented adventures and borrowed authorship. Unpretentiousness lets the contribution speak accurately rather than padding its prestige.

4. The pride of ancestry may be had on cheaper terms than to be obliged to an importunate race of ancestors; and the coatless antiquary in his unemblazoned cell, revolving the long line of a Mowbray's or De Clifford's pedigree, at those sounding names may warm himself into as gay a vanity as those who do inherit them.

   Charles Lamb · Essays of Elia and Last Essays of Elia

   BLAKESMOOR IN H——-SHIRE · Elia (1823) / Last Essays of Elia (1833) in E. V. Lucas’s edited Works, volume II; editorial notes excluded, exact edition/contributor rights held.

   Speaker: Elia, Charles Lamb’s essay persona

   Lamb’s antiquary enjoys ancestry without inheriting it. The satirical portrait shows that status performance can survive in plain surroundings; lack of expensive costume does not establish plain dealing.

5. Now-a-days, men learn with a view to the approbation of others.

   Confucius (Analects, transmitted sayings) · The Analects

   BOOK XIV. HSIEN WAN. · James Legge; transmitted dialogues, attributed speakers identified

   Speaker: Confucius, transmitted saying in the Analects

   The Analects contrasts learning for oneself with learning for others’ approval in the surrounding passage. An activity can have its own value without becoming a display for an audience.

6. And then from simplicity of life would rise up the longing for beauty, which cannot yet be dead in men’s souls, and we know that nothing can satisfy that demand but Intelligent work rising gradually into Imaginative work; which will turn all ‘operatives’ into workmen, into artists, into men.

   William Morris · Hopes and Fears for Art

   p. 169THE PROSPECTS OF ARCHITECTURE IN CIVILISATION [169] · , exact-print and territory review held.

   Morris connects simplicity of life with imaginative work and beauty. This social and artistic ideal gives plainness a positive pursuit, rather than treating bare surroundings as automatically superior.

7. It would be an impertinence in me to praise a work of his—to pronounce on its quality; and that I happen to like it can be of no consequence to him.

   George Eliot · Impressions of Theophrastus Such

   A TOO DEFERENTIAL MAN. · William Blackwood and Sons, second edition, 1879; satirical narrator Theophrastus Such, not an empirical report.

   Speaker: Hinze, fictional speaker reported by Theophrastus Such

   Eliot gives Hinze a deferential speech about a celebrated writer. Read as satire: rank makes an ordinary statement of liking seem presumptuous, showing what plain participation loses to prestige.

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