“The First Thing Philosophers Have to Do Is to Learn”: An Interview with Martha C. Nussbaum

From Firenze University Press Journal: Rivista Italiana di Filosofia Politica

Marina Calloni, Università degli Studi di Milano-Bicocca

Paolo Costa, Fondazione Bruno Kessler

Martha C. Nussbaum is internationally renowned for being one of the leading moral and political philosophers of our time, and is highly regarded for her work on the role of the emotions in moral and political reasoning. In this interview, in dialogue with her interlocutors, she discusses her work over the past four decades, and gives insights into her book in progress on opera and its relationship to liberal political ideals, The Republic of Love. In addition to declaring her love of Italian culture, she clarifies her stance on some contemporary issues, including the controversy on sex and gender, animal rights, the relationship between philosophy and natural sciences, and the importance of liberal arts and ancient Greek and Roman philosophy.

Since the beginning of your academic career, one of your major sources of inspiration has been ancient Greek and Roman philosophy. Do you think that this tradition of thought can be instrumental to understand-ing the present crisis of liberal democracies and the rise of illiberal societies? What lesson can we learn from the past, despite the self-evident moral failings of the societies from which ancient political philosophy arose?

Greek and Roman philosophy is of course not a single tradition, it is a multiplicity of traditions, often arguing with one another. I think that fact alone makes the works of the Greek tragedians, Plato, Aristotle, and the Hellenistic Epicureans and Stoics priceless resources for teaching philosophy, to both graduates and undergraduates. I still believe, as I argued in The Fragility of Goodness, that ancient Greek tragedy yields deep insights into human vulnerability in a world where we do not control many of the most important things.

I disagree with much of what Plato offers, but he writes philosophy in a way that helps us all sharpen our critical capacities through dialogue. And his insights into love are unmatched. Aristotle is a huge source of insight about the nature of life and mind, and about the nature of a flourish-ing life. His view of eudaimonia is a corrective to simplistic views that focus on pleasure and momentary happiness. And his account of friendship is still the best one that Western philosophy offers (along with Cicero’s). The Stoics were the first who recognized that the worth and dignity of a human being is utterly independent of wealth and rank, even gender. In my recent book The Cosmopolitan Tradition, I show how the Stoics are sources of much that is fine in the modern human rights movement — although their view is too anthropocentric, neglecting animals and the environment.

Also, the Stoics’ analysis of the nature of emotions, the first we have in the Western tradition, is deep and richly insightful. I use it as the basis for my own analysis of emotion in Upheavals of Thought, altering it in various ways. Their normative view about emotions is entirely separate from their analysis, and is, I think, very misguided, holding that we should not care about anything that can be affected by events outside our control. But even this misguided view is worth engaging with, because it is right about some things: many people care much too much about money and reputation, for example. So the Stoic view challenges us to ponder why we think they are right about some things but profoundly wrong about family, loved ones, and political citizenship, concerning which the Greek tragic poets got it right: these things are, though highly vulnerable, of enormous value in a human life.There are many other topics on which the Greeks and Romans offer insight: Cicero’s wonderful work on aging, for example, the best work on that topic in the Western philosophical tradition. And Porphyry’s magnificent work on animal dignity is the best on that topic in the Western tradition until very recently. (Hindu and Buddhist traditions are wonderful non-Western sources here.) But I will stop there and let readers add their own examples.