Humanism in action: Martha Nussbaum
Earlier posts in this series:
Introduction: A Long Overdue Essay
Myth of Origins: Ursula Goodenough
The first time I heard of Martha Nussbaum was in the context of a heated blog debate about various “isms”–feminism, misogynism–as well as biases like homophobia and racial bigotry. My position was that, while separate phenomena, the intersection of gender and race together bring about something unique (the experience of a black lesbian is not the same as a white woman). My antagonist argued I was merely complaining, pushing a victim mentality without a solution. Why didn’t I do something useful with my critique, like Martha Nussbaum, in her investigation of the link between homophobia and disgust?
Then I came across her review of Harvey Mansfield’s Manliness. In philosophical terms, she “rips him a new one.” Later, while looking for books on gender theory, I came across Judith Butler, whose work I partially slogged through–and Nussbaum’s review, “The Professor of Parody.” Again impressed by her writing and thorough analysis, I picked up Sex and Social Justice. I’ve been hooked–and find philosophical strands from Kant, Korsgaard, McDowell and others put to practical use.
Origin stories like Goodenough’s give us an orientation towards the world. But what about the hard questions of daily living? Having established that “the universe doesn’t owe us meaning” (in the words of Richard Dawkins), how do we go about carving meaning, justice, fairness, etc. from this life?
I’m a human–the result of evolutionary processes and damn lucky to be where I am today, an extremely affluent, educated and privileged woman compared to the overall arc of history. But I’m also a humanist, taking my focal point for meaning from biological and experiental facts about others of my kind. Nussbaum has given me a way to do so that is universal, but not oppressive, specific, but not inflexible.
I’ll talk about a few areas where her thoughts are useful: in terms of humanity, freedom and rationality. Because we’re dealing with biological “facts” about humans, as well as rational “oughts”, I want to lay out the tensions here, and a bit of my approach to it. This will probably take more than one post, I’ve realized.
Once I’ve sketched these themes out to my satisfaction, I’ll conclude with thoughts about Buddhism and how it does (and does not) fit into Goodenough and Nussbaum’s view of reality. At the end, my string of hyphenations* may make more sense–and the (reviseable, but for the moment, solid) base upon which I stand will be more explicit.
*I could be hyphenated as a lesbian-feminist-religious-humanist-Buddhist-leaning-Unitarian-Universalist (to which you could add specific hyphens for philosophical views)
Image: Cezanne’s “Large Bathers”