#Martha Nussbaum

[philosophybits]

You should care about things in a way that makes it a possibility that tragedy will happen to you. If you hold your commitments lightly, in such a way that you can always divest yourself from one or the other of them if they conflict, then it doesn’t hurt you when things go badly. But you want people to live their lives with a deep seriousness of commitment: not to adjust their desires to the way the world actually goes, but rather to try to wrest from the world the good life that they desire. And sometimes that does lead them into tragedy.

Martha Nussbaum, in A World of Ideas, by Bill Moyers

[studyingwithjay]

“you want to tell them to live their lives with such a seriousness of commitment that they’re not adjusting their desires to the way the world actually goes, but they’re trying to wrest from the world a good life, the good life that they desire, and sometimes that does lead them into tragedy”

— martha nussbaum (from an interview with bill moyers)

[virgin-martyr]

Tragedy happens only when you are trying to live well. Because for a heedless person who doesn’t have deep commitments to others, Agamemnon’s conflict isn’t a tragedy. Somebody who’s a bad person would, could go in and slaughter that child with equanimity, or could desert all the men and let them die. But it’s when you are trying to live well, and you deeply care about the things you’re trying to do, that the world enters in in a particularly painful way. And it’s in that struggle with recalcitrant circumstances that a lot of the value of the moral life comes in.

Martha Nussbaum: Applying the Lessons of Ancient Greece

[kebriones]

I'M FINE ACTUALLY

[radykalny-feminizm]

Martha Nussbaum is so based. She's an extremely well educated philosopher who believes that philosophy should not be limited to academic discourse and it is supposed to actually change the world for the better. She fought for women's rights in India, not giving a shit about people calling her a "white savior". She cares about animal rights. She's pro LGB. She criticised gender ideology within feminism, saying that it's focusing on non important matters instead of actually helping women who suffer from the real oppression. She's super strong both mentally and physically. She believes in discipline. She always goes like a bomb and is so full of dignity, it's truly inspiring. Her intellect is extremely admirable.

All hail this queen!

[luxe-pauvre]

Do not despise your inner world. That is the first and most general piece of advice I would offer… Our society is very outward-looking, very taken up with the latest new object, the latest piece of gossip, the latest opportunity for self-assertion and status. But we all begin our lives as helpless babies, dependent on others for comfort, food, and survival itself. And even though we develop a degree of mastery and independence, we always remain alarmingly weak and incomplete, dependent on others and on an uncertain world for whatever we are able to achieve. As we grow, we all develop a wide range of emotions responding to this predicament: fear that bad things will happen and that we will be powerless to ward them off; love for those who help and support us; grief when a loved one is lost; hope for good things in the future; anger when someone else damages something we care about. Our emotional life maps our incompleteness: A creature without any needs would never have reasons for fear, or grief, or hope, or anger. But for that very reason we are often ashamed of our emotions, and of the relations of need and dependency bound up with them. Perhaps males, in our society, are especially likely to be ashamed of being incomplete and dependent, because a dominant image of masculinity tells them that they should be self-sufficient and dominant. So people flee from their inner world of feeling, and from articulate mastery of their own emotional experiences. The current psychological literature on the life of boys in America indicates that a large proportion of boys are quite unable to talk about how they feel and how others feel — because they have learned to be ashamed of feelings and needs, and to push them underground. But that means that they don’t know how to deal with their own emotions, or to communicate them to others. When they are frightened, they don’t know how to say it, or even to become fully aware of it. Often they turn their own fear into aggression. Often, too, this lack of a rich inner life catapults them into depression in later life. We are all going to encounter illness, loss, and aging, and we’re not well prepared for these inevitable events by a culture that directs us to think of externals only, and to measure ourselves in terms of our possessions of externals. What is the remedy of these ills? A kind of self-love that does not shrink from the needy and incomplete parts of the self, but accepts those with interest and curiosity, and tries to develop a language with which to talk about needs and feelings. Storytelling plays a big role in the process of development. As we tell stories about the lives of others, we learn how to imagine what another creature might feel in response to various events. At the same time, we identify with the other creature and learn something about ourselves. As we grow older, we encounter more and more complex stories — in literature, film, visual art, music — that give us a richer and more subtle grasp of human emotions and of our own inner world. So my second piece of advice, closely related to the first, is: Read a lot of stories, listen to a lot of music, and think about what the stories you encounter mean for your own life and lives of those you love. In that way, you will not be alone with an empty self; you will have a newly rich life with yourself, and enhanced possibilities of real communication with others.

Martha Nussbaum, Do Not Despise Your Inner World: Advice on a Full Life from Philosopher Martha Nussbaum

[philosophybitmaps]

[cor-ardens-archive]

Angela Carter | Martha Nussbaum

[fourdramas]

Martha Nussbaum, 'Why Practice Needs Theory'

[esarkaye]

on nonhuman animal capabilities and flourishing

[philosophybits]

People are adept rationalizers, so insecure people seeking control are good at coming up with a rational account of what the other person has done wrong.

Martha Nussbaum, Anger and Forgiveness

[neo-somaliana]

The condition of being good is such that it should always possible for you to be morally destroyed by something that you couldn’t prevent. To be a good human being is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust certain things beyond your own control that can lead you to be shattered in very extreme circumstances, in circumstances for which you are not yourself to blame.

And I think that says something very important about the condition of the ethical life. That it is based on a trust in the uncertain, a willingness to be exposed. It’s based on being more like a plant than like a jewel, something rather fragile, but whose very particular beauty is inseparable from that fragility.

Martha C. Nussbaum, Applying the Lessons of Ancient Greek

[virgin-martyr]

MARTHA NUSSBAUM: I wake up at night thinking about Euripides’ Hecuba. That to me is a story that says so much about what it is to be a human being in the middle of a world of unreliable things and people. Do you know the story?

BILL MOYERS: Well, from a long time ago. She was the queen of Troy, whose country was destroyed by war, and her whole life was changed. She fell from here to here.

MARTHA NUSSBAUM: Right, right. She lost her husband, she’s lost most of her children, she’s lost her political power. She’s been made a slave. But up to that point, she remains absolutely firm morally. And she even says she believes that human good character is something extremely stable in adversity and can’t be shaken. But then, her one deepest hope is pulled away from her. She left her youngest child with her best friend, who was supposed to watch over him and watch his money, too, and then bring him back when the war was over. And when she gets to the shore of Thrace, she sees a naked body that’s been washed up on the beach. And she looks at it more closely, and then she notices that it’s the body of her child.

And she realizes right away that what this friend has done is to murder the child for his money, and to do it in a callous, heedless way, without even taking thought for burying the child, just has tossed it out into the waves. And all of a sudden, the roots of her moral life are undone. She looks around, and she says, “Everything is untrustworthy. Everything that I see is untrustworthy,” because her moral life had been based on the ability to trust things and people that were not under her own control. And if this deepest and best friendship proves untrustworthy, then it seems to her that nothing can be trusted, and she bas to turn to a life of solitary revenge.

BILL MOYERS: Against the friend.

MARTHA NUSSBAUM: And we see her at the end of the play putting out the eyes of this former best friend, and turning herself into, what the chorus says is in effect, a dog. I mean, they predict that she will literally turn into a dog. But we know that the story of metamorphosis from the human to something less than human has really taken place before our very eyes.

No, I think it’s pretty clear that this comes about not because she’s a bad person, but in a sense because she’s a good person, because she has had deep friendships on which she staked her moral life. And So what this play says that’s so disturbing, is that the condition of being good is such that it should always possible for you to be morally destroyed by something that you couldn’t prevent. To be a good human being is to have a kind of openness to the world, an ability to trust certain things beyond your own control that can lead you to be shattered in very extreme circumstances, in circumstances for which you are not yourself to blame.

And I think that says something very important about the condition of the ethical life. That it is based on a trust in the uncertain, a willingness to be exposed. It’s based on being more like a plant than like a jewel, something rather fragile, but whose very particular beauty is inseparable from that fragility.

Martha Nussbaum: Applying the Lessons of Ancient Greece

[dreaminginthedeepsouth]

The Speech of Alcibiades: A Reading of Plato’s Symposium, Martha Nussbaum

[alive on all channels]

[luxe-pauvre]

Let us begin with pain. Pain, clearly, is both good and bad. It is a necessary part of our self-preserving equipment, a warning signal of potential harm — as anyone who bites her tongue after Novocain at the dentist knows all too well, and as the rare people who are able to survive without any pain-responses know with fear, and with a doomed longing for the useful pain they do not feel. In athletic training, pain is typically a sign of progress. In childbirth, pain is very intense, even at times terrible, but it also a sign of something wonderful in the offing. Yet pain can be too much, unendurable, debilitating, and dehumanizing. Thus we have reason to feel a grievance against the body for giving us that type of useless pain, along with the useful signaling type. And we certainly have reasons to palliate the awful type of pain, although not to do so by totally removing the body’s entire pain mechanism, rendering the person defenseless. Pain, then, is a mixed blessing, but on balance it is not a reason to hate the body. Not so death. There is nothing good about death (apart from the fact that it may in some cases be the only relief from unbearable and unquenchable pain). The Platonic fiction shields its believers from the ugly, incomprehensible, but perfectly obvious fact that this loved person is now this corpse, decaying before your eyes. Buying into the fiction of incorporeal immortality is contrary to truth and reason, and yet it shields people from a reality so horrible that one is sorely tempted to give truth a pass. And yet the fiction has as its consequence the body-hatred that I have been deploring and the disgust behavior I have been describing. Lucretius was on the right track when he traced some of the worst in human behavior to the fear of death and the avoidance of self and truth that go with it. In short: the solace of Platonism is purchased at a large cost. Is there some less evasive and less contorted way to face our end? The fear and the hatred of death, I contend, is fully rational. Life, one’s own and that of others, is tremendous and wonderful. And the love of life, including the fear of its loss, incentivizes much good behavior: medical research, other efforts to stave off disease and ill health, prudent daily health behavior, and care for the bodies of others. As Rousseau shrewdly saw, the awareness of death, and its badness, can even encourage in fearful humans a type of egalitarian compassion, an embrace of a common humanity that transcends class and wealth and even religion, bringing people together.

Martha Nussbaum, On Not Hating the Body

[philosophybitmaps]