www.sfgate.com Return to regular view Q & A Martha Nussbaum Call for compassion in vengeful times Kenneth Baker, Chronicle Staff Writer Sunday, November 11, 2001 ©2001 San Francisco Chronicle
URL: http://www.sfgate.com/cgi-bin/article.cgi?file=/chronicle/archive/2001/11/11/RV239242.DTL
Philosopher Martha Nussbaum taught ethics and classics at Harvard and Brown universities before being offered her current triple appointment in law, divinity and philosophy at the University of Chicago.
A liberal activist as well as an academic, Nussbaum, who is 52, has published books and essays on topics such as education, justice, patriotism and women's health. In the late 1980s, she worked with Nobel Prize-winning economist Amartya Sen to rehumanize the terms by which relief agencies reckon progress in the developing world.
Her "capabilities approach" to legal and institutional change views such things as play, practical reason, freedom of affiliation and bodily integrity as rights that true social progress must guarantee.
Her new book, "Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions" (Cambridge; 752 pages; $39.95) argues that emotions are modes of understanding essential to ethical judgment and what she calls "full political rationality."
She spoke with The Chronicle during her recent visit to Berkeley.
Q: Have the events of recent weeks -- terrorism and the war of reprisal -- changed your sense of your duties as a public intellectual?
A: No, but they have certainly brought me to attention. I do have things to say about patriotism and the need to think of ourselves as part of a larger human community. The one good thing that could come out of all this is that we learn a lot more about how people live in Asia, and about Islam. I myself didn't think much about the world beyond Europe and the United States until I went to the U.N. as a consultant in 1985. It completely changed my life.
Q: Even under what we used to take for normal circumstances, your "capabilities approach" to social issues must have been called utopian. Is that more true now than before?
A: I think it's not utopian. When Amartya Sen came on the scene, most agencies measured development only on an economic basis. The capabilities approach identifies other areas equally worthy of attention. It gives very concrete directions for political practice.
The U.N. issues annual Human Development Reports. India has one for every state, and they're using the capabilities approach. Take Kerala in India. If you look just at economic growth, its progress is very poor. But there's 99 percent literacy. The sex ratio of women to men is similar to Europe's, so we know women's health is doing well. Sen has compared Kerala with Harlem and finds Kerala doing better.
Q: We've heard a lot of talk about widely shared emotions since Sept. 11. Does your theory of emotion account for collective experience?
A: Philosophers' theories of emotion haven't paid much attention to childhood because most of them have been men. But if you're going to make sense of emotion, you have to bring in the past and show how it can shadow the present. You need to look at the individual family and the social framework. When families bring up children, they instill social norms. The emotional vocabulary people use comes from the society at large and its traditions.
I think there's always a resistance to mourning on the part of Americans. There's the initial feeling that we can't be that vulnerable, and after that the shock at how vulnerable we are. Whereas in some societies this entails resignation, Americans are always trying to see how they can take charge of the situation. The downside of that is the impulse to seek revenge.
Q: How does your theory of emotion account for the power of a charismatic figure such as Hitler?
A: I've read a lot of the literature on Hitler. Everyone wants to find a single cause when there were a lot of them. With the Germans' tremendous sense of vulnerability in the wake of World War I, you found these officers who would allow no weakness or softness, nothing "female." Put that together with tremendous peer pressure. Men in the German police battalions who felt pity were ashamed of themselves. [Theodor] Adorno was right as well that there was a particular kind of authoritarian family structure present.
All these things played their part, but if the intellectuals had been stronger, if there'd been a deeper public culture, Hitler might not have come to power. John Rawls once said that he wrote "Political Liberalism" after reading about Weimar and how its intellectuals had failed to take a strong enough critical stance.
Q: You describe your response to your mother's death in explaining your theory of emotion, but were there also philosophical encounters that spurred you to write "Upheavals of Thought"?
A: I was thinking about it very early. My senior English paper at the Baldwin School in Bryn Mawr was on learning from suffering in the novels of Dostoevsky and in Oscar Wilde's "De Profundis." My family life was very unhappy at that time, and I was trying to think about how you get through such a thing.
But the one who made me think it permissible to do such a book was Bernard Williams -- his papers on morality and the emotions. He first gave me a sense of the largeness of the profession. Richard Wollheim was another important example.
Q: Do you see a relationship between philosophical capacity and emotional maturity?
A: There are lots of things in philosophy you can do without much emotional sophistication. But I think it's a hindrance in Kant's work, for example, that he doesn't have much emotional understanding.
Most of the great writers on ethics had more of an emotional life. The one I'd like to have met is John Stuart Mill. His theories about emotion are not worth much, but he did understand people. I think Hume, too, had a complex human understanding. In the ancient world quite a few of them did: Plato, Aristotle. Someone like Seneca couldn't have survived at Nero's court without it.
Q: Does the term "compassion fatigue" have any meaning to you?
A: It's because of that problem that I put such emphasis on institutional structures. It's hopeless to depend on individuals alone to make improvements in the world. You still hear the idea that economic benefits will trickle down if you simply mind growth, but that just isn't true. We need to educate people to be compassionate because only then will they make good institutions.
Q: Does the nature of institutions -- the way their structures favor certain temperaments -- make it unlikely that people in power will respond to your arguments?
A: I know academic institutions best, and I've been seeing a range of different kinds of people coming into top positions. When I was at Harvard, there was not a woman, nor even a Jew, in any dean's position. Our management team at University of Chicago is a long stretch from the old days. Our president is a musicologist. Our provost is a free speech lawyer who's a very fine and complicated person. I'm very pleased by changes I've seen.
Q: You don't refer to introspection as such in the book. What value does it have in emotional self-knowledge?
A: It's not sufficient by itself. I don't even think it should have a privileged place in that you'll always have big blind spots. Self-knowledge always requires conversation. You can't see in the book how much I learned from my partner Cass Sunstein's readings of my chapters, but I think it's generally true in life that to be seen by others is a very important part of knowing oneself.
E-mail Kenneth Baker at kenneth baker at sfchronicle.com.
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