Humanities and Human Development Author(s): Martha C. Nussbaum Reviewed work(s): Source: Journal of Aesthetic Education, Vol.

36, No. 3 (Autumn, 2002), pp. 39-49 Published by: University of Illinois Press Stable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/3333596 . Accessed: 29/09/2012 22:46
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A Beginning in the Humanities

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realistic, and ultimately more encouraging conception both of what unites us as colleagues in the life of the mind, and of the remarkably various ways and means of our different disciplines. Susan Haack University of Miami Humanities and Human Development I replied to their question by reading aloud from the President's address to the artists attending the Festival: "Your art is not a political weapon, yet much of what you do is profoundly political, for you seek out the common pleasures and visions, the terrors and cruelties of man's day on this planet. And I would hope you would help dissolve the barriers of hatred and ignorance which are the source of so much of our pain and danger..." a statement to which I was sympathetic, both as a foreshortened description and as the expression of a hope. Ralph Ellison, "The Myth of the Flawed White Southerner," in Going to the Territory As Ellison (and his President) say: the humanities confront issues of great political significance, and they do so in a way that typically cuts beneath specific questions of policy. Though the different humanities disciplines have to some extent different content and different methods, and although differences of both content and method abound within each discipline, all of this diversity is held together by a set of themes and problems: roughly, the problem of how to live with dignity as a rational animal, in a world of events that we do not fully control. Issues of human vulnerability and need, of terror and cruelty, also of pleasure and vision, are its subject matter, a subject matter as capacious as life itself, but pursued with a reflectiveness and rigor that life itself rarely attains. In real life, people typically seek to avoid the challenge that the humanities pose: they live unreflective lives, lives that are often cramped and narrowed by the pursuit of gain or bare security, lives in which the imagination of human suffering is frequently allowed to lapse, if, indeed, it ever existed. Every age has its own reductive intellectual strategies for turning away from the reality of human lives, and so often these strategies have been forms of reductive pseudo-science, which comfort the mind that it is being elegant and active, while in truth it is being lazy and evasive. Economic thought is, perhaps, our own current favorite type of reductionism, although evolutionary psychology is another. If we want only one reason why the humanities are essential to public life in this era of rapid globalization, a sufficient such reason is that the humanities keep our eyes on the human meaning of public policy and on a rich human and ethical set of

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ends for human action, while economic science too easily narrows its vision, lending itself as a tool to the forces that already are committed to the all-out pursuit of profit. This means that the humanities, as Ellison said, are key to dispelling barriers of hatred and ignorance that divide people the world over by class, caste, race, sex, and religion, and thus key to the formation of a just set of policies in the area of human development, and not only in that area. When I entered graduate school, this public face of the humanities was quite hidden. I recall being taken up to the rooftop of Widener Library by a renowned Roman historian, and being told, as the salient fact about that place, how many Episcopal churches could be seen from there. This same parochialism and elitism infested the ways in which Classics and Philosophy were taught: as cultivated forms of study for young gentlemen, in which it was bad form to raise a question such as, "What has all this to do with the suffering of people at a distance?" Many of us loved the Greek tragedies and thought they had a huge amount to offer for people wrestling with the tragedy of the Vietnam war; but you would not have known that from the classroom, where all we heard in the way of reference to daily life was rumination about the former great athletes of Eliot House. In Philosophy things had begun to move, spurred on by the political engagement of so many philosophers; but change was slow to affect the intellectual world itself. It was not until the publication of John Rawls's A Theoryof Justice in 1971, two years into my graduate career, that it became all right to talk about issues of social justice as a philosopher. And even then, the direct application of these insights to areas such as medicine, law, and international relations was much frowned on. Today the humanities have become much more capacious, and I think on that account much truer to the mission Ellison describes. There are reasons for optimism - but also reasons for caution - in what we see when we look back. In these brief remarks I want to focus on three large changes that have taken place in the humanities and ask what they mean for its performance of the sort of public role I have just sketched here, illuminating the face of our injustice and our strivings for justice, our mortality and our hope. Interdisciplinarity It is not news that all the humanities have become more interdisciplinary, and that some of the most exciting work is work that breaks down disciplinary walls. I was ahead of the game by being trained as a classicist: for, as I like to tell critics of new developments in education, that paradigm of a respectable discipline is also, and has also been, a paradigm of interdisciplinarity. Scholarship in the humanities during the past two decades has been greatly enriched by interdisciplinary perspectives of many kinds. Philosophy,

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which used to have a lordly abstractness about it, indifferent to both science and history, is now much more in touch with other relevant disciplines. Political philosophers make contact with economists, legal theorists, and political scientists; people writing about ethics, with psychologists and education theorists; and so forth. Much the same is true of literary studies, history, and art history. For the most part, this trend is very much to the good, enabling the humanities to confront their own problems more richly and adequately. All interdisciplinary studies raise questions of disciplinary integrity and responsibility. I do not like all the interdisciplinary work I see. I think that a lot of the new interdisciplinary scholarship in law, for example, is sloppy and second-rate, well inferior to the level of work in the relevant disciplines. That is partly because law reviews are edited by students who like trendy stuff and cannot always judge its content. But there is always danger when people write about what they have not deeply studied. I think the best work is done by people who retain a very solid disciplinary base and expand it in some way. Thus, within the burgeoning interdisciplinary scholarship in literature I like best the work that keeps engaging in detail with works of literature, and does not forget that that is what the business is about. When literary scholars forget about literature and talk like philosophers, it is not always done so well. I think that some of the work on objectivity and truth that is produced within literary theory, for example, is well below the level of discussion of these same topics in the work of philosophers such as Hilary Putnam, Nelson Goodman, and W.V.O. Quine. Among the fashionable theorists who are taught regularly in literature departments, the only one who strikes me as a major philosopher (besides Habermas, who sometimes gets a hearing) is Foucault, and Foucault is a figure whose insight and brilliance require supplementation by someone else's rigorous arguments. Too often that is not done, and the terms and ideas are bandied about without much rigor. Another thing I worry about is gurus and authority figures. When there is no accepted common method, and when reason itself is suspect, what takes its place? Authority, often, and trendiness. Kant put it well, in "What is Orientation in Thinking?" (1786), criticizing the dominance, in the public culture of his time, of Romantic ideas of genius and irrational inspiration. The proponent of genius, says Kant, scoffs at the idea that reason has imposed laws on itself and that all thinking worthy of the name must follow those laws. Genius, he will say, sees further when not so restricted. So this person's genius indulges in daring flights, captivating his audience, and "now appears to have set itself up on a throne on which slow and ponderous reason looked so out of place; nevertheless, it still continues to use the language of reason." In the next phase, the proponent of genius now announces that the "supreme legislation of reason is invalid, a maxim which

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we ordinary mortals describe as zealotry, but which those favorites of benevolent nature describe as illumination."This leads, in turn, to "a confusion of tongues" in which nothing mutually intelligible is said; and inner deliverances take the place of public facts. The final stage of this progress is the subjugation of reason to authority and superstition: the audience of the genius intellectual is now ready to be bossed around by power, having sacrificed the one thing that can reliably oppose power: Naturally enough, the result of this is that, if reason does not wish to be subject to the law which it imposes on itself, it must bow beneath the yoke of laws which someone else imposes upon it; for nothing not even the greatest absurdity - can continue to operate for long without some kind of law. Thus, the inevitable result of self-confessed lawlessness in thinking (i.e. of emancipation from the restrictions of reason) is this: freedom of thought is thereby ultimately forfeited and...this freedom is in the true sense of the word thrownaway. Kant argues convincingly that a robust critical public culture, prepared to question authority in the name of morality, rests on a respect for reason and its constraints. Intellectuals who seduce their audience into forgoing careful reasoning ultimately jeopardize the existence of such a culture. Although initially this Romantic impatience with reason's laws may seem innocuous, a way of injecting new life and emotional energy into a ponderous process of argument, it is all too likely to end up in some new type of deference to authority, and to a consequent inability to question the deliverances of any authority. I agree with Kant: forming a deliberative and thoughtful public culture requires protecting and defending the laws of reason: teaching the young, and the public in general, that these constraints are not tyrannical, but a necessary condition of all thought, including courageous moral thought. That is one thing I worry about in our new interdisciplinary era dominated by postmodernist approaches. There is no doubt that postmodernist thinkers have questioned things that ought to be questioned, and that the challenge to dogma has initially been healthy. But I fear a loss of rational standards, of critical rigor, and thence of the enlightened public culture that we need to build if we are, as educators, to make our political debates more than a collection of sound bites. That is why in Cultivating Humanity I have given such a large place to philosophy courses in undergraduate education: because I think that no amount of interdisciplinarity displaces the fundamental value of finding out how to argue with yourself, to lead, in Socratic fashion, the examined life. Finally, in the era of interdisciplinarity I fear that scholars may sometimes lose the thread of what is wonderful and lovable in their own discipline, whatever it was that made them originally care about it. In much of the theoretical writing in literature departments, I sense a tiredness, a cynicism, that seems quite removed from the tone of someone who actually

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loves literature and thinks that it can illuminate the predicaments of human beings. There are practical worries about this: the worry expressed, for example, by Andrew Delbanco in a fine article in the New YorkReview of Books, when he asked why students will take courses in the humanities if the humanists themselves do not seem to value the works they teach. But the deeper worry is that material of human significance is lost, and that people will come to think that it is unsophisticated or naive simply to love a poem, or a song of Mahler, and to show, in your writing, that you love it. GenderStudies and OtherMinority Studies A very important part of the story of the humanities during my lifetime has been the shifting role of the study of women, and of racial and ethnic and sexual minorities, in the scholarship and the teaching in the humanities in our universities. This change is still underway. Although the University of Kansas had a program in Women's Studies in 1972, the University of Chicago acquired one (gender studies, really) only in 1998. These studies are still resisted in some quarters, and we still have to justify our claim to a place at the intellectual table. Let me stick with women's studies as my salient example; but the points I will make apply mutatis mutandis to studies of race, ethnicity, and sexual orientation. In Cultivating Humanity I make two points about women's studies that I shall here just very briefly recapitulate. First, exclusion of topics from the dignity of academic study always went hand in hand with the exclusion of the relevant people from the dignity of scholarship. Yes, it would have been notionally possible to have lots of openly gay scholars while resisting gay studies, to have many African-American faculty while refusing to teach their experiences. But typically the refusal to include lives in the curriculum betrayed a sense that the lives themselves were shameful, or contemptible, or in some other way beneath notice. If women wanted to do history, they would have to study men like everyone else. So if for no other reason than human dignity, it was very important to include these topics alongside the traditional studies of men, whites, and heterosexuals. Second, inclusion of the previously excluded means more than adding some new content to the old curriculum, Jane Austen and Virginia Woolf alongside Dickens and Henry James. It means challenging the methodologies that produced the exclusions. In classics, for example, including the lives of women means studying the economy of the household, not just the famous battles; in all of history, the lives of women can only be studied by thinking up methods adequate to study them, and so the development of women's studies has brought about a revolution in the techniques of the profession as a whole. In philosophy, taking women seriously means challenging the justice of distributions of resources and opportunities within the family. Plato already saw this issue as raising an important problem of justice; and yet the problem has been sufficiently neglected by mainstream

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political philosophy that my decision to devote my Presidential Address to the issue could still earn the label "a kick-ass talk." Women's studies has broken open old dogmas of both content and methodology in many salutary ways. What are my worries in these areas? In Cultivating Humanity I urged that we see these new studies as cultivations of understanding and citizenship for all students and scholars, not as places where a minority can affirm a minority identity. With Skip Gates, I think that you do not need to belong to a group to teach about it - otherwise, as he puts it, to teach Milton you would have to be male, elderly, and blind. Again, we need to insist that the imagination can cross these barriers, and we need to insist that both classrooms and faculty be pluralistic and inclusive. We also do not want to lose hold of interests that link human beings across group lines. Thus I intend to write a large book on the capabilities approach that is not focused on women. The focus on women is legitimate because the problems of women are in many ways particular, in ways that do cross national and regional lines, and they are urgent. But a theory of justice is a theory for all human beings, and that, too, we should not forget. It is no accident, then, that I put Ralph Ellison at the top of this essay because I think that his humanism is a good guide-rail as we try to chart our course in these difficult matters. Ellison saw, who more clearly, that the disease of racism in America was a disease of the eyes, which had to be cured through an opening of the eyes and the imagination. But he also knew that the issues of exclusion and human vision that were central to his art were human issues, issues that could reach across racial and national lines. (Characteristically, he lamented that there were not more young Negro boys named Henry James!) In his use of the wonderful quote from Lyndon Johnson with which I have opened this paper, he referred to a set of common human predicaments, common resources, and to the hope that we might use those resources to get the better of prejudice and hatred. I do not think this is naive, and I think we should not allow our fondness for the ironic and sophisticated to stop us from embracing, in our scholarship and teaching, the hope of which he speaks. Study of Non-Western Cultures When I began to be involved in development work with the United Nations University and the UN Development Program, I knew nothing about Hinduism or Islam, nothing about the histories and cultures of non-Western peoples. Now India is at the heart of my development work, and I have tried hard to make up for my educational deficiencies. It is my ardent hope that today's undergraduates are getting a better education than I did, in part because of faculty who have broadened their own sense of what a classic work of literature is, or what world history is. Here, however, I am

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somewhat more pessimistic than I have been so far. America is so arrogant, so totally indifferent to learning about the rest of the world. The level of our cultural indifference to Asia and Africa is astonishing. Let me mention four recent grounds for pessimism. Last fall I met with two outstanding television commentators from Public TV in Chicago. They wanted to know what I could talk about, if I were interviewed on their program. Characteristically, I regaled them with stories of women's literacy projects in India. Their eyes glazed over. When I mentioned gay rights and the death penalty, it was another story completely: their eyes lit up, they could relate to what I was saying, they could see it as a news program for Americans. During our conversation, one of the journalists confused Iran with Afghanistan (speaking of the allegedly new edict in "Iran" that confined women to their homes); the other confused India with Bahrain (telling a story of an "Indian" princess who married a foreigner). I should add that later on I really did a program with them on the election and its relationship to Greek tragedy, and I found them first rate and deeply humanistic. So the ignorance that irritated me was not a result of general mediocrity: it is specific to America's relationship with the developing world. Second ground. Last fall I also attended a huge conference at the Aspen Institute called "Globalization and the Human Condition," which had an audience of over 2000 people and about fifty speakers. Money was not in short supply. The only speakers invited from developing nations were Queen Noor of Jordan and Oscar Arias, President of Costa Rica. Since Queen Noor was there because her father is a big donor of the Institute, this means that Arias was the only gesture in the direction of a serious representation of the voices of people in developing countries. (And there were only a couple of Europeans.) I was on a panel called Globalization, Women, and Culture. I spoke about women's education as a key issue in international development, using examples from India. My three fellow panelists, all outstanding scholars, spoke only about America. (In this context, I felt that even Queen Noor, who spoke just before us, and who is hardly an intellectual, was ahead of the game: for at least she was speaking about Jordan and its culture, in a way that showed genuine affection and engagement.) This was the way the whole week went. Everyone wanted to talk about globalization as something affecting Americans, but nobody wanted to know about its effect on people elsewhere, or to hear their voices. Third ground. A conference is being organized on "Philosophy and Global Feminism," at a prominent U.S. university. I agree to speak. Then I receive an e-mail telling me the names of the other three primary speakers. All are Americans, and none knows anything much about the rest of the world. The organizer, himself a man from India, has thought this a good way to organize a discussion of global feminism! I told him that I refuse to

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participate unless at least half of the speakers are from outside the United States and I have given him a list of names that he can afford. Eventually he did invite one speaker from Mexico, one from India, and two Americans of Asian and Latino origin respectively. Fourth ground. Last January I brought to the United States one of the world's most interesting writers about feminism and Islam in the Indian context, a political scientist whose work is of the greatest interest for anyone thinking about cultural diversity, religion, and sex equality. I brought her first to the American Philosophical Association, giving the event wide publicity as a panel on Multiculturalism and Indian women. Knowing that it was very difficult to get people to come hear a person from India, I also invited two very famous Americans to speak on the panel. When the panel began and Zoya Hasan gave her lead-off paper, there were about fifteen people in the room. By the time the two famous Americans spoke, there were sixty people in the room. People decided who they considered important and walked in accordingly. (I should add that neither of the famous Americans addressed the topic of Indian women, although that is what they had been invited to do; they confined themselves entirely to issues about diversity, religion, and culture internal to the U.S. context.) So far, I have held up my own profession as a good example, but at this point I have to draw the line. Philosophers are just as ignorant and parochial as anyone else in the humanities, when it comes to world affairs. Perhaps they are even more so than other humanists, because of their combination of arrogance and abstraction. Last year we were filling a position for a young moral or political philosopher who would have the duty of teaching one course every year in our Human Rights program. Of course it was a good job, and many young people wanted it, so they had to get their act together and present themselves as people who could teach such a course. But how woefully thin was their knowledge of the world. You just cannot learn about other cultures in two weeks if you have been ignorant up to that time. Such howlers we heard, such crude generalizations about "non-Western cultures." There was only one person who had sufficient knowledge to fill the job. Luckily, that person was also, by my colleagues' other standards, the best philosopher, and luckily that person, Michael Green, accepted our offer. But the process gave me a pessimistic feeling about the contributions of my own profession to humanity in this crucial area. I argued in Cultivating Humanity that the type of ignorance and indifference I have described is pernicious. I think it is a sickness in our nation that poisons our relations with other nations. I think we are beginning to do something about it. But it sure is difficult. It is so much easier to introduce women's studies into our lives, because women are all around us, half of America is made up of women, and women's lives are therefore visible. Lives of people in Iran and Nigeria and India are far away and it is convenient to forget them.

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Are things really getting better as a result of curricular changes? The changes I described in CultivatingHumanity are real. Courses in world history and world civilization are to some extent replacing the earlier course on Western civilization and history. And students gain at least a little knowledge, usually, of the major world religions. But I fear that a lot of the instruction is thin, well-intentioned but full of stereotypes. How could it be anything else, when overworked faculty do not have release time to go and really learn about another culture? And the development of knowledge cannot occur in colleges and universities alone. It must begin in primary and secondary education, if colleges are to be able to build on it productively. And the media must help - whereas they are now so driven by market forces that they will not risk intelligent programming in an area for which there is no already waiting audience. A Futurefor the Humanities? I feel that I need to conclude this essay with a more general fear - that the illumination and human understanding that the humanities have given, and are still giving, to our undergraduates and our culture, may gradually be lost. When administrators, parents, and students focus narrowly on the bottom line, it is difficult to see the relevance of literature and philosophy. They look like useless frills, distractions from the real business of education, which is all too often seen as preparation for a job. This utilitarian approach to the humanities did enormous damage in Thatcher's Britain, where universities were asked to justify their humanistic pursuits by showing that they contributed to economic growth. I recall an especially sad document written by the Classics Faculty at the University of Birmingham, arguing that they should not be cut because Classics produces efficient managers for industry. Of course once one reaches this point, true though the instrumental claim may be, the game is basically lost. American colleges and universities have never held this narrow utilitarian conception of education. One thing we really can be proud of is that we (and I mean both left and right) have stuck to the idea that college education is a general preparation for citizenship and for life, and a formation of citizens for our public culture. It is not difficult to see that the humanities provide essential ingredients for citizenship: clarity of mind, knowledge of the world, an expansive and subtle imagination. I wrote Cultivating Humanity to make the case for the humanities as essential in the formation of citizenship and the public culture, as well as to say something more specific about how they might best perform that role. Many administrators and boards of trustees (Boards of Regents) understand the importance of the humanities, and so far our institutions of higher education have not been eviscerated as some in Europe have been. But we need to be vigilant. As a jobs placement officer for our graduate students in philosophy, I know that

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there are many fewer jobs than the number of retirements would lead one to expect, and this in a time of prosperity. Philosophy is being cut back, in favor of more job-relevant disciplines. One thing that my work in development has shown me very clearly is that a public policy made without the influence of the humanities is likely to be a cramped and crude policy. The cultivation of the imagination that comes with the study of literature, the cultivation of the ethical sensibility that comes with the study of philosophy and religion, these are essential equipment for citizens and policy makers in a world increasingly united, and driven forward, by the profit motive. The capacity to look at a single life with understanding and love is not automatic, and can also be lost. We need to think clearly about this danger, and try as best we can to prevent it, through strong support for the future of these disciplines. Thus I agree with Ellison (and Lyndon Johnson): artists and humanists, who "seek out the common pleasures and visions, the terrors and cruelties of man's day on this planet," are people of great political significance, even and especially when what they do is not simply about politics. It is difficult to see how we can have any hope of overcoming barriers of prejudice and ignorance without them. Like Ellison, I say this both as a "foreshortened description" and as the "expression of a hope." Martha C. Nussbaum University of Chicago About the Authors
Peter Brooks is Sterling Professor of French and Comparative Literature at Yale University and founding director of the Whitney Humanities Center. His books include the recently published TroublingConfessions:SpeakingGuilt in Law and Literature; PsyReading the Plot; TheMelodramatic for Imagination; choanalysisand Storytelling;BodyWork; and TheNovel of Worldliness. W.B. Carnochan is Richard W. Lyman Professor of the Humanities, Emeritus at Stanford University. His most recent books are The Battleground of the Curriculum: LiberalEducationand American Experienceand Momentary Bliss: An AmericanMemoir. Jonathan Culler is Class of 1916 Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Cornell University. His most recent book is LiteraryTheory:A Very Short Introduction. Paul H. Fry is William Lampson Professor of English and Master of Ezra Stiles College at Yale University. He has authored several books and most recently edited Samuel TaylorColeridge:The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. Susan Haack is Cooper Senior Scholar in Arts and Sciences, Professor of Philosophy, and Professor of Law at the University of Miami. She has authored several books; her most recent book is Manifesto of a PassionateModerate:UnfashionableEssays. Barbara Johnson is Professor in the Department of English at Harvard University. Her most recent book is TheFeminist Difference.

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Seth Lerer is Avalon Foundation Professor of the Humanities and Professor of English and Comparative Literature at Stanford University. He has authored over sixty articles and four books, including Chaucerand His Readers. Donald Marshall is Professor of English at the University of Illinois at Chicago. He has authored numerous articles and most recently written a chapter in Maps and Mirrors:Topologiesof Art and Politics. Martha C. Nussbaum is Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago. Her most recent books are Women and Human Development and Upheavals of Thought:The Intelligence of Emotions. She has also edited ten books. Wendy Steiner is Richard L. Fisher Professor of English and Director, Penn Humanities Forum at the University of Pennsylvania. Her most recent book is Venus in Exile: The Rejectionof Beauty in Twentieth-CenturyArt.