Martha Nussbaum on Emotions and 'Upheavals of Thought'
Thursday, October 4, at 1 p.m. U.S. Eastern timeThe author, a professor of law and ethics at the University of Chicago, will respond to questions and comments about her new book and more.
In Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions (Cambridge University Press), Martha Nussbaum argues that emotions are not a strictly personal experience -- they embody judgments of the world that are shaped by cultural values. Her latest book appears at a time when events have left people's feelings in turmoil.
» What Makes Martha Nussbaum Run? (10/5/2001)
Martha C. Nussbaum, a professor of law and ethics at the University of Chicago, previously taught at Harvard and Brown Universities and the University of Oxford. She has been a research adviser at the World Institute for Development Economics Research, in Helskini, Finland. Her many publications include Aristotle's De Motu Animalium (1978), The Fragility of Goodness(1986), Love's Knowledge (1990), The Therapy of Desire (1994), Cultivating Humanity (1997), and Women and Human Development (2000). She has also edited 10 books. Ms. Nussbaum will respond to questions and comments about her new book, the politics of emotion, the emotions of politics, and more on Thursday, October 4, at 1 p.m. U.S. Eastern time, 5 p.m. Greenwich Mean Time. Advance questions are encouraged and may be posted now.
Scott McLemee (Moderator):
Good afternoon and welcome to the online colloquy with Martha Nussbaum. The immediate occasion for this exchange is Ms. Nussbaum's new book Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. But the floor is also open for discussion of the various aspects of her work--which is to say, a very wide range of topics in the humanities and public life, since her work seems rather stubbornly unspecialized. In working out her account of emotion as part of the basic human apparatus for experiencing and understanding value in the world, Ms. Nussbaum's latest book builds on her earlier scholarly publications on Hellenistic ethics. It also links up (at least potentially, since not all of her readers are going to hunt down the connections) with her recent work in political philosophy, especially the "capabilities approach" presented in the book she published last year, Women and Human Development. And of course there are implications for literary study....
Question from Scott McLemee:
Maybe we should interrupt the interdisciplinary catalog long enough to ask the author for comment. Did you write Upheavals of Thought with any sense of it as a culmination or synthesis of earlier work? Or was it less deliberate than that? It certainly feels, to this reader anyway, like a more exhaustive treatment of ideas you wrote about in Love's Knowledge (1990). Some of the essays in that volume appeared twenty years ago.
Martha Nussbaum:
I have been interested in the ethical role of the emotions ever since high school; in fact my senior English paper at The Baldwin School in 1964 was about ethical learning from emotions, in two novels of Dostoyevsky and Oscar Wilde's De Profundis. And this topic has been prominent in all of my books, at least since The Fragility of Goodness. But by the time I wrote The Therapy of Desire I felt that what I had said about the topic in Fragility and Love's Knowledge was too thin, uninformed by any systematic analysis of what emotions are and how they are related to perception, belief, and evaluation. I began to work out my views on that topic when I was writing Therapy, but I knew that I wanted to write a book of my own on the topic, where I would say what I think, not just interpret the Hellenistic views. Fortunately, right at that time I was invited to deliver the Gifford Lectures at the University of Edinburgh, so I chose emotions as my topic, and began to map out the book that you now see. I began the book in 1991, delivered the ten lectures in the spring of 1993, and have been improving, expanding, and refining the book ever since. The third section, in which I discuss philosophical and literary portrayals of love, does indeed have much in common with the themes of Love's Knowledge, but in a way that integrates those themes into a systematic account of emotion (presented in part I) and a systematic account of compassion in particular (presented in part II). I think of the book not so much as a synthesis of earlier work as the time when I set out to say, in my own voice and systematically, what I really think about a topic I have touched on often in other work.
Question from :
You've been a player -- albeit one hard to place on one "side" or the other -- in the culture wars. Do you think the events of September 11 will bring the culture wars back to academe? Would that be a good thing?
Martha Nussbaum:
Well, I didn't think the "culture wars" were at a very high level really. So often there was distortion, or lack of systematic information, or careless description. I wrote Cultivating Humanity because, after reading a bunch of books in the "culture wars," I felt that we needed something that had more information about what was really going on at schools of different types, and also more careful argumentation. I also thought that the polarities constructed in the debate were silly: on the one side, a conservative defense of the Great Books, and an authoratarian traditionalist style of education; on the other, postmodern denials of objectivity. As a philosopher, I felt that most of what I taught and heard in my own profession was simply not on the map at all. Most moral and political philosophers in America are neither postmodernists nor traditionalists: they are heirs of the Enlightenment in one way or another, whether they are Kantians or Utilitarians or a certain type of Aristotelian. So I wanted to bring the Enlightenment back into this debate, and I was feeling it was weird that it had been so left out. So if the culture wars come back I hope it will be in the form of good argument. Another thing I'd like to see more of is systematic public criticism of the assumptions of economics, something that seems to me far more important than the old culture wars. Economics shapes lives all over the world and has real importance. Economists are good at prediction (sometimes), but they are frequently very bad at normative thinking, and yet their crude norms shape public policy in every nation. That, to me, is where the battle ought to be: how to get a rich set of norms for public policy, rather than the impoverished norms of the economists. In that sense,the culture wars did harm, because they turned attention away from the really urgent and important struggle over value. When Bloom says that American students are relativists about value because of Heidegger, well really! He might have thought about Ec 1 and how that teaches almost every undergraduate that preferences are hard-wired and can't be argued with. So let's turn to that opponent for a while! After working for years in international development agencies, I have become more and more convinced that this is really important.
Question from Nadine Pinede, Indiana University,:
You've said that your work on women and human capabilities and development ethics is really linked to your work in moral philosophy and narrative. However, you rarely examine postcolonial literature, which might make the link explicit. Why is this the case? Will it change in the future?
Martha Nussbaum:
I regularly teach the work of Mahasweta Devi, but I wouldn't publish anything on her work because I do not know Bengali. In general, I don't publish on any text I can't read in its original language. Of course there is a lot of excellent English-language fiction growing out of the postcolonial experience, but I feel, too, that I ought to know something about the literary tradition involved, and I still don't feel that I know enough about the Bengali and Hindi literary traditions to write about English-language fiction in those cultures. Where Africa and Latin America are concerned, my ignorance is far greater. India at least I've gotten to know rather well in some respects. I did write about Achebe's novels in a couple of articles, but I have read a lot of his prose and I feel that I have something of a handle on his literary tradition, and he has seen what I've written and not despised it utterly. As for the future: I do think I shall write more about the Indian authors I admire, despite my ignorance. Thanks for the prodding!
Question from S. Sherman independent scholar:
You refer to your deep commitment to India. What Indian languages do you speak and read, and what are your thoughts about the BJP regime?
Martha Nussbaum:
I began doing development work in partnership with Amartya Sen at the World Institute for Development Economics Research of the United Nations University, which is in Helsinki. From the start, we were working with people from all over India, so the language of our work was English. Through my connections with Sen and his family, I have learned a very little Bengali, and I hope to learn still more, but in the sort of women's development work I do, going to different parts of the country and spending time with various different development groups, Bengali is not very useful, and indeed, given that there are about 350 languages in active use in India, English is always the lingua franca that all activists communicate in with one another. Typically I hook up with a local activist who knows, as well, whatever local language it is, but I manage to learn only shreds of each. I've traveled and worked a lot with Marty Chen, who is fluent in Hindi, Gujarati, and Bengali, so that is a help. All the academics I work with are primarily English speakers. I wish this were not so much the case, because I fear that vernacular literatures are dying. Sen is fluent in Bengali and a great defender of Bengali culture; indeed he knew no English until he was 14. But that is the exception.
I am very critical of the BJP, because I think that religious pluralism and mutual respect among religions is absolutely crucial to India. The BJP definitely want to turn Indian into a Hindu nation, and I think that would be terrible, especially since they don't really contemplate a benign establishment like the Lutheran church of Finland, they mean second-class status for Muslims. Right now they are carrying on a particularly ugly campaign to "saffronize" the universities, meaning to Hinduize them. They have made Delhi University fund a department of Vedic astrology, and they are in many ways introducing their own brand of Hinduism into the teaching of history and language, whether people want to do it or not. They control academic appointments, and are using this power to put in people who support this program. Sadly, many people have come to believe that their narrow and sectarian version of Hinduism is what Hinduism is, whereas historically Hinduism has been highly plural and diverse. Partly this results from the fact that many young people don't learn about their own tradition, given the devaluation of the humanities in Indian education, and thus are willing to accept any version as the truth. It's as if only the Southern Baptists taught about the Christian tradition in the U. S. and nobody else knew anything about what Christianity is. I am about to go to India to be the keynote speaker in a conference on women and religious laws, but now the government says that they have to approve all academic conferences that are proposed, a blatant assault on academic freedom. We'll see how bad publicity (which I intend to give them, here and elsewhere) may bring pressure to bear against them, and help scholars who are fighting for their rights.
Question from Scott McLemee:
What are your thoughts on the affective climate, post-September 11 -- both in terms of Americans feeling more united, and also in terms of the emotions felt (or not felt) for people in Afghanistan?
Martha Nussbaum:
I wrote a little piece on that you can find: it appeared in The Philadelphia Inquirer on Sunday the 16, and also in the Indian Express in New Delhi later. I think Americans certainly feel more united, and we are experiencing strong emotions for our country and our fellow citizens. My question was why, in the past at least, Americans have been so slow to feel strong emotions for people outside our borders who are suffering: for the Rwandans, for example, but this trend goes way back in our history, and includes our culpable failure to rescue Jews during the Holocaust. I think America is an unusually isolationist nation, with particular difficulty in feeling for people at a distance. I have campaigned for a long time for changes in our educational system that would lead to much more knowledge about lives in the rest of the world, and also a greater ability to imagine and to feel. I am encouraged by what I've seen during the past few weeks. People are really learning a lot more about the nations involved, their economic problems, their educational problems, their poverty, the struggles of women. As this happens, we begin to have emotions we didn't have before. We believe, morally, that all human beings are of equal worth, but it is so hard for our emotions to reflect that reality. I hope this crisis is the beginning of much more learning and imagining.
Question from Nadine Pinede, Indiana University, Philosophy of Education:
Considering your prominent use of literature in ethical inquiry, and in light of Sept. 11 and the growing American awareness of its potentially new role in a diverse but interdependent global community, what do you see as the significance of literature and the moral imagination, and what role should they play in education?
Martha Nussbaum:
We all need to learn a lot more facts about other nations in the world, and I have been harping on that point for years, especially in my book on education, Cultivating Humanity. But learning facts isn't enough, because that only gets us to the outside of people, so to speak. Reading a literary work that portrays vividly the experience of racial oppression, or of the life of poor women in a developing country, shows a great deal that facts cannot show, and so I feel that literature and the arts are extremely important to the education that we all need to get as citizens. Even when literary works do not deal directly with distant groups and people, they exercise the muscles of the imagination, so that we can more easily imagine distant lives when they do confront us.
Question from Frank Williams, Eastern Ky U:
Serious readers of literature usually focus on the views, actions, etc. of the characters rather than of the authors; but for Plato the emphasis almost exclusively is on ferreting out the author's views instead of those of his characters. Why?
Martha Nussbaum:
That's odd, I would have said almost the opposite. Plato sometimes is concerned with the author, but so often he just quotes something one character says, expressing fear, or grief, or whatever, and then attributes it to the author and criticizes it, without even asking whether the author endorses that character. Usually, however, he selects heroes such as Achilles, and that way he can argue that the work presents bad examples of heroism for the young, though I would have liked a more nuanced treatment of how Achilles is seen and judged in the poem as a whole. Ancient literary criticism standardly attributes the views of characters to the author, and often this causes real problems: Euripides' Hippolytus was criticized because H. says that his tongue has sworn an oath but not his heart; but H is hardly a hero in that play.
Question from Elizabeth Adams, Temple U., Philadelphia:
From reading the Oct. 5 essay in
If answering all three is too burdensome, please address what you will.
1. Do you find it difficult in any way to linke the "personal" of autobiography to the "political" life of a public philosopher in your narrative dicourse?
2. How may the "work of mourning" contribute positively to the "work of compassion"?
3. Why do you find working with women in India at the "core" of your understanding of the meaning of life? Did you experience a conversion, a teshuvah, at some point that contributed toward this broadening of horizons? What strong emotions inform your judgment about this exercise of solidarity?
Thanks. I greatly admire your work and eagerly anticipate reading your new book.
Martha Nussbaum:
Thanks! I'll try briefly on all three. I use personal autobiography only where I think it will advance my philosophical aims. My model here is Seneca, who draws on his life to make philosophical points. The death of a parent is a virtually universal experience, so talking about it is a way of tapping into the reader's likely experience of emotion, and setting the stage for the analysis to come. That doesn't mean that the "work of mourning" didn't really inform the book: it did. A journal I kept during my mourning guided the book in all sorts of ways. As to how it can contribute positively to compassion, that's complicated, because mourning is often a way of focusing in on a narrow sphere of concern. But by understanding what it is to experience loss on a deep level, I think one ultimately has resources that one can use to understand the suffering of others. Thus I think my mother's death informs my work with women in developing nations, though the connections aren't on the surface.
I came to the UN Institute where my development work began just for a conference, and the issues and people were so urgent and exciting to me that I was indeed changed by that. One part of it was love: for several years I lived with Amartya Sen, and knowing his work and thought really did inspire and change me. But more generally, seeing what was going on, and how development was being guided by impoverished norms from economics, I felt that there was an urgent job for philosophy to be doing, so I wanted to see what I could do.
Scott McLemee (Moderator):
Professor Nussbaum has a gift for inspiring debate. I'd like to stop for a moment to invite more readers to write in, whether with questions or challenges to things she's already said. Surely someone out there has a bad word to say for compassion? Or a good one for shame? Is cosmopolitanism not imperialism with a human face? Your provocations are welcome.
Question from Frank Forman, U.S. Department of Education:
How have you incorporated Darwinian psychology into your thinking? What is your opinion about Larry Arnhart's Darwinian Natural Right, which shows the broad similarity between Aristotle, Hume, and Darwin?
Martha Nussbaum:
I don't know Arnhart's book. In general, I think Darwin is of huge importance, but that his ideas are often misused and misappropriated today. Everything is given an armchair evolutionary "explanation," as a way, often, of disarming ethical and political debate about it. If sexism can be shown to be "in the genes", that somehow invalidates feminist critiques of it. Well of course Darwinism doesn't invalidate ethical criticism. It may inform us about what problems we have to contend with as we try to make things better, but it doesn't tell us not to wage that struggle. Added to this problem is the fact that most of these "explanations" are not good biology: the Thornhill and Palmer book on the origins of rape, for example, has received scathing criticism from first-rate biologists who have reviewed it. In my emotions book I do draw on evolutionary accounts of what the likely role of emotions was in our heritage. I think they can show us some problems we have to deal with: for example, they focus on our immediate context, and what is salient to us for good or ill in that context. That no doubt is part of their significance in survival terms. But that poses a moral problem, which I described in my answer to the previous question: how do we extend them to people at a distance from us? That problem is central to part II of my new book.
Question from Scott McLemee:
Someone reading the profile might well come to the conclusion that you think that negative emotions are, well, negative. Bad and dispensible. As the writer responsible for giving that impression, I should ask you to discuss this topic some. What possibly worthy values are reflected in anger? Is there anything good to say about disgust?
Martha Nussbaum:
Hi Scott, first, thanks for all the care and thought you devoted to that piece! By "negative emotions" people usually mean those that are painful to feel. Of course, as the Stoics point out, you cannot have the positive ones without the negative ones: no hope without fear, no love without grief. That's the way the world is: the minute you value something out there in the world, you are in the hands of chance. So the first thing to say about negative emotions is that they are the price one pays for love that is deep, for hope for humanity, and so on. Now what about anger? It is theoretically possible that one might have love and fear and grief without anger -- if one thought that the bad things that happen in the world are never someone's fault. Anger requires not just the thought that something important has been damaged, but the additional thought that someone wrongfully caused the damage. But I would say that one cannot live very long in the world without seeing that this is often true. So a person who just suffers and doesn't have anger is deluded -- or perhaps she might have such a low sense of self-worth that she doesn't understand what has happened to her as a wrongfully inflicted damage. I think many women do suffer in this way without anger, thinking that they have no right to expect treatment that is good. But for such people, anger is progress: it is a way of saying that I have rights, that I matter in the world. I'm very afraid of the destructive capacities of my own anger, and I tend to underrate its importance, so the capacity for justified anger used not to be on the capabilities list. Discussions with women and reflection about wrongs suffered by women made me add it. Disgust probably had evolutionary value, certainly Paul Rozin makes good arguments about this, by steering us away from genuine sources of danger. But, as Rozin also shows, disgust does not very well track genuine danger; it relies on magical thinking about contamination that is often quite removed from any real danger. Still, it seems wise for parents to teach children to feel disgust at feces and perhaps spoiled foods and corpses of animals, as a way of steering them away from genuine danger, before they can reason well about danger. What should be absolutely avoided, I think, is the creation of disgust-groups of humans: subordinate groups who serve as proxies for our own fear of our mortality and animality. Jews, women, the poor, members of ethnic and racial minorities, gays and lesbians, all these have at different times been found disgusting, and though slimy, smelly, etc. This type of disgust plays, I think, no useful role at all.
Question from Bob Wilson, Suffern High School, NY:
Ari Fleischer has been widely criticized for his comment, "The reminder is to all Americans, that they need to watch what they say, watch what they do[.]" However, I see this remark as indistinguishable from calls for greater sensitivity re remarks on race and ethnicity. Although hate speech is lawful (R.A.V. v. St Paul [1992]), isn't there a double standard in the condemnation of criticism of anti-American hate speech versus the (laudatory) criticism of other types of hate speech?
Martha Nussbaum:
Hate speech is a very complicated issue. In terms of law, I am glad that the U.S. protects the political speech of people who hold hateful views. This wasn't always the case: Eugene Debs went to jail for telling people to resist military service in World War I. Ernst Freund (the person after whom the chair I hold here at U of Chicago was named), a Jewish law professor here, was the first person to argue that the First Amendment does protect the political speech of dissidents in wartime, and by now that is established doctrine. Nobody will go to jail for criticizing America now. But that does not answer the ethical question. Ethically, I think it is very important to show respect for all the different positions in a pluralistic society such as ours, and for all the people and groups. That doesn't mean not criticizing the government, even at this tense time, but it does suggest that criticism should be expressed respectfully and tastefully. I think that exactly the same thing holds of race and ethnicity: one should not go to jail for a racist remark (unless it is a threat targeted at an individual, in which case it may well be treated differently); but ethically, one should exercise caution and sensitivity in one's speech.
Question from Danny Postel, Encyclopaedia Britannica:
Against patriotism, you've argued that one's loyalties should belong to humanity as a whole rather than to the territorial group one happens to belong to. How might this apply to the current context, in which patriotism is running rampant in the United States? Is it morally problematic, in your view, for Americans to emote more over the loss of life caused by the attacks of September 11th than, say, over similar numbers of innocent people who have died in terrorist attacks and atrocities in different parts of the world?
Martha Nussbaum:
I never argued that loyalty should belong to humanity as a whole *rather than* to the group. I said that humanity as a whole should claim our first moral allegiance, and that all more local allegiances should be made consistent with what, on reflection, we think we owe to humanity as a whole. More recently, in my new book, I puzzle about the inconsistency of our compassion. It seems to me that Aristotle was right against Plato when he said that if you set out to make people love everyone equally, you actually get no love, rather than equal love. We have to begin with strong attachments to the local, to our parents, our context, various other groups, and even our nation. But that is a beginning not an ending. The piece in the Inquirer to which I referred earlier (Sept. 16) was an attempt to puzzle about the point you raise: that so often Americans don't feel anythiing about atrocities elsewhere. And I'd add now, why only atrocities, when hundreds of thousands die every day from preventable malnutrition, disease, sex-selective infanticide, etc.? We should focus more in general on such quiet atrocities, not only on earthquakes and attacks. I think that it is morally justified to care more about one's own children and to work for their well-being -- but not by denying that other people's children have equal worth as human lives, and also deserve a chance to live and flourish. This leads me to the conclusion that our goal should be to provide a basic level of the central human capabilities for all the world's people, and then, once that threshold is in place, we may devote our resources to our own -- just as, in a just nation, we guarantee a social minimum and then allow various inequalities over that threshold. How should we pursue that goal? My own preferred solution involves a large role for institutional structures; we just can't do it by private philanthropy, any more than we could run America by philanthropy without taxation. But I'm not for a world state: I think that nations are accountable to people in a way that a world state could never be. So what I'd like to see is the emergence of thin and decentralized transnational agreements that have geniune force and bite, but at the same time internal progress in each nation toward supporting all the capabilities as basic constitutional entitlements.
Question from Scott Jaschik:
People who work for charities talk about "compassion fatigue" and the difficulty of getting people to support certain worthy causes, especially those that involve people far away from them (geographically or economically). What are the implications of your ideas about compassion for those seeking to raise attention (and money) from a public that has succumbed to "compassion fatigue"?
Martha Nussbaum:
I say in my new book that really compassion must issue in institutional structures that guarantee that the right distribution will be made even when people are fatigued. We would not have a very good result if we had no system of taxation and relied utterly on private philanthropy. So too in the world, I believe: we need institutional structures that take responsibility for transnational redistribution, and we can't simply trust to the good instincts of individuals. We never will have good institutions without compassionate people, so educating compassion is still crucial. But we're all finite and weak, and we need laws to make us commit our resources even when we don't have compassionate feelings at the moment. Many nations do far more about this than the U. S. currently does. Norway, for example, devotes 8 times as large a proportion of its national budget to foreign aid as do we. My ideas about compassion suggest that we will do better if we make the reality of distant people's lives vivid to ourselves through education, beginning in early years. Then, I hope, we will demand structures that make a decent live more available to the poorest people. Our campus debates about labor standards are a hopeful sign in this regard.
Scott McLemee (Moderator):
Speaking of fatigue, the pace of this discussion may now need to slow down a bit, for the public's sake if not Ms. Nussbaum's. If there is a question or comment you want to pose, this next minute or two might be the best time to send it.
Question from Karthika Sasikumar, Cornell University:
From your experience working with women's groups in India, how would you characterize the Indian women's movement? Would you say that is very different from the feminist movement in the US? What lessons could the movements learn from each other?
Martha Nussbaum:
Excellent question. Of course the Indian women's movement, like India, is so diverse that any generalization is somewhat comic, but let me mention a few salient things. First of all, the movement focuses much more on poverty than does the U. S. women's movement, recognizing that women are key to the empowerment of the poor, and also that dealing with poverty is crucial to the *real* empowerment of women. Of course women of the upper classes have long been empowered, and do better in some areas of life (academic jobs, for example) than U. S. women. Ok, so, the movement focuses on literacy, on land rights, on credit, on these mundane matters, which sometimes the U. S. movement perhaps does not focus on enough. And they do so in a way that shows respect for poor people, for their own view of their own predicament. Most good programs are very ground-up, mostly run by women who have been helped earlier by them. Second, we can really learn about the social responsibility of academics from the Indian women's movement. I know of no feminist academic who does not also go out into the field and do something with NGO's or other social movements. Such work is draining and physically difficult, and Indian academics don't have the level of research support that we do. Still, these women are always on the front lines, and this means, too, that they are in constant communication and contact with women who are illiterate, impoverished, and quite different from themselves. That is crucial to the health of a feminist movement. Third, we can learn a lot about the solidary of women from the Indian women's movement. We used to have consciousness raising groups, but the pull, in the U. S., has always been toward the romantic couple and the nuclear family, so by now there is not much in the way of groups of women just meeting together as women. In India everywhere I go I am with groups of women sitting on the ground talking about common problems, and finding pleasure and delight together as women. Such groups are often more important than a woman's nuclear family, whether natal or marital, as a source of affection. These women are puzzled by the romantic fascination we have with couples. Often they don't like the couple, and Marty Chen's new book shows that most widows don't actually want to remarry. They don't think marriage did much for them in the first place. Once some women in Andhra Pradesh asked me to sing a U. S. feminist song, and I realized that I did not know any, and that will tell you something of the difference I mean. (I sang We shall Overcome, which they already knew and had translated into Telugu, with real feminist words!) One thing I think the Indian movement could learn from the U. S. is how to use law as an instrument of social change. Of course legal education and the legal system in India are right now not such that they can fulfill that goal; too many delays, too much low-level bureaucracy, too much thinking of law as a low-level family business. Legal education has to change, and probably that will have to take place through the private sector: Indira Jaising, the excellent feminist lawyer, is trying to start a private law school in Delhi for this purpose. I have started a Center for Comparative Constitutionalism and the Implementation of Constitutional Rights here at the U of Chicago, to link up with such groups and to see how we can both study and support the implementation of constitutional rights for the disadvantaged. Here I think the US legal academy can actually help India, though in so many respects we lag behind.
Question from Steven J. Squires, Loyola University Chicago:
As part of my readings for class at Loyola, I just (a few days ago) read chapter 2 from Cultivating Humanity titled "Citizens of the World." Keep in mind that this was the only part I read even though you have me sold on reading more! I was very impressed and liked that you used reverse psychology to examine the hidden aspects of even a classical curriculum. Was was your level of intentionality with this? How would you describe your methods (deconstructionist, critical, etc.)? Would you classify this as a hidden curriculum? Finally, do you have any other reading suggestions?
Martha Nussbaum:
That part of the book began when I reviewed Allan Bloom's The Closing of the American Mind. What I found was that his understanding of the Greco-Roman tradition was rather incomplete. In particular, he didn't seem to me to understand anything about Stoicism and the cosmopolitan approaches of antiquity. Nor did he take seriously the critiques of traditional education that the tradition made from Socrates through Seneca. So I thought it would be rhetorically neat to use the ideas of the Greeks against their alleged defenders. My main point, however, was always the continued validity of the ideas I was defending, not any appeal to authority. If no Greek had ever said them, they would still be right, but I studied the Greeks largely because I thought that they did have some ideas that were neglected and right. I'd characterize my method as that of a moral philosopher in the tradition of Kant or John Stuart Mill, just trying to look critically at society with the welfare of humanity in view.
Question from James Rhem, Executive Editor, The National Teaching and Learning Forum:
Ms. Nussbaum, over the years, I've written often in NTLF about emotion and its place in learning, but I think, on the whole, there is wide-spread resistance to believing emotion has a vital role in learning. Many who know of Bloom's Taxonomy of cognition, for example, do not know that six years later the same group produced a taxonomy of affect. If I'm right, what's the gain faculty feel in resisting the notion that cognition and affect are inseparably and vitally linked.
Martha Nussbaum:
Well, I don't much like the word "affect." It is never very precisely defined, and it often serves as an excuse not to define more precisely the relationship between emotion and belief. If it means a feeling that we recognize by the way it feels, I argue in the book that such feelings are often present in emotions, but not always. (We often have a fear of death, for example, that doesn't signal itself to us by any feeling.) If it means an excited physiological state, again, there is no particular such state, I argue, that would be a necessary criterion of an emotion such as grief. (I talk about the way grief persiste through physical changes of many kinds.) What does seem to me to lie at the core of an emotion is a certain sort of evaluative thought: in grief, the thought that someone one cares about greatly is lost. That thought may or may not be conscious all the time, of course. I think that people resist recognizing the large role of thoughts in emotions if, and to the extent that, they want to denigrate emotions as unimportant, marginal, not part of what we have to deal with. But it's interesting that many cultures have never had this split. In Ghana, for example, it is impossihle to articulate the split: for "anger" one simply says "angry thoughts." But I wouldn't be as pessimistic as you: I think that in many disciplines, including psychology, anthropology, and even philosophy, there is excellent work being done on emotions now. It is a flourishing time for that topic.
Scott McLemee (Moderator):
Here Ms. Nussbaum is at the edge of a possibly very lively argument, which it's too bad we don't have someone to take up today. The work of the late Silvan Tomkins suggests that emotion ought to be understood in terms of a limited number of hard-wired affects--ways of responding that are part of our biology. It's been surprising to find people in literary and cultural studies taking up this work. It will be interesting to see how they respond to Ms. Nussbaum's work.
Question from Erick Janssen, Kinsey Institute, Bloomington, Indiana:
I've always admired the clarity of your writing in philosophy. The Oct. 5 essay mentioned some fiction you have written. Are you planning on writing more fiction in the future, and why do you find yourself turning to that genre?
Martha Nussbaum:
I have always thought that I would write fiction some day, but I have to find the right way to combine it with philosophy. The essay that Scott mentioned at the very end of his piece was actually written first in 1983, so that short story, about a woman who is trying to write a philosophy paper about love and the individual while breaking up with her lover, is the first thing I attempted in that way. (It's in Love's Knowledge.) The second such thing was the dialogue with my mother and father in it. I was convinced by Bernard Williams and others to enter a competition that Oxford was running, together with a group in Sweden, to revive the form of the philosophical dialogue. They suggested that I might take my first Gifford Lecture (the ancestor of ch. 1 of the new book) and turn it into a dialogue. So I did, and it was among the winners, and was performed by wonderful actors in Stockholm. (It's published in Comparative Criticism, and will eventually be in that book about the dialogue that he mentioned.) Most recently, in a collection of essays called Glones and Clones: Fact and Fantasy About Human Cloning, edited by me and Cass Sunstein, I wrote a short story called "Little C," about a woman who loses her lover and her friends give her a baby clone of him to bring up as her child. (It is based on, and uses, the plot of George Sand's Francois le Champi, but with a tragic rather than happy ending.) I wanted to use fiction to reflect on the perpetual urge people have to replace one person with another person, and to indicate that cloning raises not just some new issues, but many that are very old. Right now, for the dialogue book I'm working on a dialogue where I get to meet and talk with John Stuart Mill: I adore Mill, and it looks like this is the only way I am going to get to meet him. I also plan to write someday a book about my parents that will be a kind of literary essay. I find myself turning to fiction for the same reasons I turned to fiction by other people: fascination with character, image, language, and the feeling that these are important parts of what I want to grapple with as a philosopher. If it doesn't work out, I will still have learned a lot.
Question from Frank Forman, U.S. Department of Education:
Why are there emotions in the first place? Why don't animals just do whatever helps their survival and reproduction instead of having all this intermediate brain machinery?
Martha Nussbaum:
The answer that Richard Lazarus comes up with, in his excellent book Emotion and Adaptation seems to me very convincing: animals need some way of marking to themselves the aspects of their world that are salient for good and ill, and of registering meaningful transactions that happen to those objects. (Keith Oatley's wonderful Best-Laid Schemes also develops this idea.) They could not survive and reproduce without becoming aware of parts of the world as good for them and others as bad for them; emotions like fear and grief track the good and bad. Frans de Waal has shown that even more complex emotions like compassion are found in apes, and the grief of animals for lost loved ones has been well described by Jane Goodall and others.
Question from researcher, policy think tank:
What role do you think the political and philosophical thought of Emmanuel Levinas has in opening the debate about just war theory? How would you build from Michael Walzer’s perspective? And, which thinkers might you explore in trying to build just law theory that draws on Jewish and Greek traditions (i.e. Maimonides meet Abraham Heschel ……) And finally, please describe your own thoughts on just war in relation to Jean Bethke Elshtain’s or Stanley Hauerwas.
Martha Nussbaum:
I don't know Levinas's thought well enough to say anything useful here. That's my fault. Michael Walzer is a fine thinker, but the work that I know best, Spheres of Justice, seems to me to concede too much to cultural relativism, and thence to "adaptive preferences," in which people come to accept their own subordination. I think that Susan Okin's critique of that book is basically right, where women's issues are concerned. In thinking about just war and just law, I myself have been working on the tradition that moves from Cicero and the Roman Stoics through Grotius and Adam Smith and Kant to the foundations of modern international law. So that is the book that I'm writing, and notice that this is a mostly Protestant tradition, though of course in conversation with the just war theories of mediaeval Catholic thinkers. Jewish thought is something I'd like to learn a lot more about. I am a convert and a Reform Jew, so I never learned quite enough about Maimonides, or even recent figures such as Heschel. I hope to learn more, and am planning to take some courses from my colleague Josef Stern when he returns from his two-year sabbatical in Israel. Elshtain is a colleague, so I won't comment on her work. Hauerwas and I have had some lively debates about whether Aristotle can be seen as an antecedent of a liberal tradition (see Soundings, many years ago). I disagree with almost everything Stanley says, but he is a very valuable and lively figure. But I don't know his views on just war. Among contemporary thinkers, I tend to spend most time reading political philosophers such as Rawls, Habermas, and others.
Question from Steven J. Squires, Loyola University Chicago:
Could greater diversity and multiculturalism be achieved by revising the canon itself, or would you advocate something totally different?
Martha Nussbaum:
It depends what you mean by "canon." I'm generally opposed to an education that starts from any list of "great books" as if these have authority. I think it encourages passivity and deference, where one should teach critical skills and active thinking. But a good course in the history of literature or philosophy will of course assign many of those same books, and here I think that one can get a long way by revising standard lists, so long as it's done in the spirit of challenging the mind to its own activity.
Question from Nadine Pinede, Indiana U.:
Iris Murdoch once wrote that she wanted to place love at the center of philosophy. Do you think your work is doing this?
Martha Nussbaum:
A very appropriate question, because I'm just starting to review Peter Conradi's life of Murdoch, and have recently written a paper about The Black Prince. I think Iris (whom I knew) was enormously complex on this topic. In a way she attached importance to love, but she was so skeptical of human motivation, and so mistrustful of human emotion, that there's a very real sense in which she simply refused to put love into her philosophy. She refuses, it seems to me, the sort of receptivity, passivity, and trust that is an essential ingredient of all love. There was something very controlling and impenetrable about Iris, both as a person and as a writer. I guess that I have these *tendencies*: that is, in the fragment Scott quotes at the end of his piece, I represent the character who is in many ways like me as amazed at the way she manages to convert grief into an argument that she manages and controls herself. But she is also critical of this tendency, and the final sentence of the story is, "Love, and be silent." I hope that in my work and in my life I manage to be more receptive to the activities of other people, and their thoughts, than I suspect Iris ever was. But it is a moral struggle, and it is always difficult to know how one is doing on a moral struggle!
Scott McLemee (Moderator):
As mentioned in the article, Martha Nussbaum is very serious about running. She enters marathons. And today's colloquy should certainly qualify as one. Thanks to everyone who wrote in with questions about Upheavals of Thought and her other work. And thanks to Ms. Nussbaum for an interesting exchange--conducted at what has been, by any standard, a fairly strenuous pace.
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