Campbell Corner Language Exchange
Martha Nussbaum, Poet's Defender
by Alan Jacobs
From First Things Vol 66, October 1996:
37-41 Copyright (c) 1996
Review of Poetic Justice: The
Literary Imagination and Public Life. By Martha
C. Nussbaum. Beacon. 143 pp. $20.
I
Even in Plato's Republic Socrates can
already speak of "the ancient quarrel between
philosophy and poetry," quoting dismissive remarks
now-unknown poets made about philosophy as though
such jibes were common intellectual currency in
his fourth-century b.c. Athens. But for us the
"quarrel" begins when Plato banishes the poets
from his ideal commonwealth-and the quarrel, as
Martha Nussbaum often laments, continues even
today.
The poets, Socrates complains early on in the
Republic, thoughtlessly arouse emotions
that cloud the citizen's judgment; they present
pictures of the gods' behavior that young persons
should be shielded from, lest they copy the shameful
actions of the immortals. Socrates' argument here
is politically pragmatic, unconcerned whether
the poets' stories about the gods are true. But
in the final book of the Republic, he returns
to the poets to offer a further condemnation.
In the intervening books he has developed the
theory of the Forms (the ideal heavenly realities
of which our material world offers mere copies),
and so is now able to point out that poetry is
not true, since its objects of representation
are the things of this world. It presents us with
mere imitations of imitations, copies of copies.
But of course Plato is a lover of poetry, and
moreover a great poet himself. So it may not be
surprising that he finds a possible means by which
poetry may redeem itself and gain readmittance
into the ideal polis: Poetry can defend itself,
Socrates says, but it must speak philosophically,
it must make an argument, it must put aside
at least some of its power to charm the senses
and the emotions. In short, poetry may enter the
polis only on philosophy's terms, not on its own.
From time to time, poets have taken up this challenge;
in the English tradition one thinks especially
of the sixteenth-century Sidney and the nineteenth-century
Shelley. But still more poets have refused to
play the game by the philosophers' rules. Must
poets, then, accept their permanent banishment?
Not necessarily, for Socrates invites "those who
aren't poets but lovers of poetry" to show that
poetry is "not only pleasant but also beneficial
to regimes and human life. And we should listen
benevolently. For surely we shall gain if it should
turn out to be not only pleasant but beneficial."
Some scholars have suggested that in his Poetics
Aristotle does just this. Certainly that is what
a modern (self-proclaimed) Aristotelian has done.
In her recent book, Poetic Justice, Martha
Nussbaum directly accepts the Socratic challenge.
By the second page of her book, she has already
linked modern political economists with Mr. Gradgrind,
the fictional Benthamite educator and poetry-hater
of Dickens' Hard Times. Now she echoes
(but goes beyond) the words of Plato:
If one should have some doubts about the
books Mr. Gradgrind favors-as to their adequacy
as visions of humanity, expressions of a complete
sense of social life-one might then see in
the very zeal of Mr. Gradgrind's repudiation
a reason to invite idle storybooks into the
house to plead their cause. And if they should
plead their cause successfully, we might have
compelling reasons to invite them to stay:
not only in our homes and schools, shaping
the perceptions of our children, but also
in our schools of public policy and development
studies, and in our government offices and
courts, and even in our law schools- wherever
the public imagination is shaped and nourished-as
essential parts of an education for public
rationality.
The claims for poetry that emerge at the end
of this passage are not only bold, they are very
general; their boldness and their generality are
alike problematic. Literary experience is defined
too narrowly to do justice to the diverse worlds
of poetry, and the poets whom she seeks to enlist
in her army are not, by and large, conscientious
objectors to the public sphere. But how these
problems come to beset Poetic Justice is
best understood in the context of Nussbaum's longstanding
determination to make literature useful.
II
Martha Nussbaum has devoted the greater part
of her career to the rehabilitation of poetry
for philosophical purposes-or, if that seems to
make poetry merely instrumental to the greater
task of philosophizing, Nussbaum can put it in
another, more evenhanded way:
For the Greeks of the fifth and early fourth
centuries b.c., there were not two separate sets
of questions in the area of human choice and action,
aesthetic questions and moral-philosophical questions,
to be studied and written about by mutually detached
colleagues in different departments. Instead,
dramatic poetry and what we now call philosophical
inquiry in ethics were both typically . . . seen
as ways of pursuing a single and general question:
namely, how human beings should live.
In brief, philosophy and literature were different
means by which the same goal was sought: eudaimonia,
a key word often translated as "happiness" but
more accurately rendered (by Nussbaum among many
others) as "human flourishing."
In the Introduction to her Love's Knowledge:
Essays on Philosophy and Literature (1990),
Nussbaum relates that when she was in high school
and college, she wrote papers about literary works
that explored questions that she would later learn
to call "philosophical" questions. Reading ancient
literature especially, she says, "I always wished
to ask, What does all this mean for human life?
What possibilities does this recognize or deny?"
And she found that her teachers encouraged such
reflections, such pursuits. But graduate school
was a different matter. Here she encountered pressure
to choose: the literary classicists understood
their task to be "philological and to some extent
aesthetic" rather than philosophical, while the
ethical theories she encountered in studying philosophy
were in different ways and for different reasons
"hostile to literature." The value of Nussbaum's
work derives chiefly, I think, from the steadfastness
with which she has refused such choices.
An especially noteworthy and brilliant example
of how this refusal can bear fruit is found in
Nussbaum's reading of Plato's Symposium
in her first book, The Fragility of Goodness:
Luck and Ethics in Greek Tragedy and Philosophy
(1986). To the conventionally trained philosopher,
the sudden appearance of the drunken Athenian
general Alcibiades just after Socrates finishes
his speech seems to be little more than a way,
perhaps a rather clumsy way, for Plato to bring
the dialogue to an end. Indeed, in G. M. A. Grube's
classic commentary, Plato's Thought-as
in a number of other accounts-a detailed summary
of the Symposium ends with Socrates' argument;
one would never learn from Grube that Alcibiades
had entered at all.
But the scholar trained in literary reading smells
a rat. Why would Plato, who as a writer obviously
knows what he is doing, use such an artificial
means to end his dialogue? And stranger still,
why would he allow Alcibiades to go on for several
pages in a rambling confession of his love for
Socrates? Nussbaum contends that the speech of
Alcibiades enacts a refutation of the speech which
Socrates has just completed. For Socrates, true
love is a matter of ascent (this is the famous
scala amoris) from the physical and the
individual to the spiritual and universal: the
purest form of love is love of the Forms, or of
Being itself; love in its highest and best sense
is undifferentiated and abstract. But for Alcibiades
it is senseless to speak of love-in- general:
the only way to talk meaningfully about love is
to celebrate the particular person whom one loves,
and in his case that is Socrates.
Plato, then-this is the heart of Nussbaum's argument-presents
us with a "harsh and alarming" picture of love:
"We see two kinds of value, two kinds of knowledge;
and we see that we must choose. One sort of understanding
blocks out the other. The pure light of the eternal
form eclipses, or is eclipsed by, the flickering
lightning of the . . . unstably moving body."
The traditional philosophical interpreters of
Plato, like Grube, do not see the choice because
their disciplinary training has already eclipsed
one of the possibilities. It is Nussbaum's determination
to understand the philosophical and the literary
as different means to the same end (eudaimonia)
that enables her to recognize the choice that
we are offered.
But, unlike Plato in his thinking about the
divergent ways of love, Nussbaum does not seem
to believe that we must choose between the two
disciplinary ways of philosophy and literature.
Her books remind us that when we are engaged in
abstract, theoretical reflection we occasionally
need to ground our thought in the particular and
historical, and by that grounding to find out
if our theories work; likewise, when we
are caught in the flow of particular events and
historical experiences, we need to pause long
enough to consider where we are going, what all
these particulars add up to. Philosophy and literature
thus need each other.
But because Nussbaum has addressed most of her
work primarily to philosophers rather than to
literary critics, her emphasis has typically been
on the poverty of a moral philosophy that fails
to use the great resources provided by literature.
In the essays that make up Love's Knowledge,
she focuses on the novel as the literary genre
most useful in tracing the lineaments of our moral
lives. The sheer length and complexity of great
novels, their patient playing out of the consequences
of our moral choices, make them infinitely more
useful than the brief schematic narratives that
are commonly employed by moral philosophers to
illustrate their claims. Indeed, says Nussbaum,
any philosophical examples that were to develop
"the particularity, the emotive appeal, the absorbing
plottedness, the variety and indeterminacy of
good fiction" would by that very development become
works of literature.
What Nussbaum finds most compelling in great
novels is their accounts of the richness of our
emotional lives. In Love's Knowledge
and elsewhere Nussbaum uses the fiction of Proust,
Henry James, Dickens, and others to buttress her
claim that the emotions are not necessarily opposed
to reason-that, in fact, a truly rational person
will experience certain emotions as the consequence
of proper understanding. (It would be irrational
not to feel grief upon hearing of the Oklahoma
City bombing.)
Moreover, Nussbaum argues, there are some kinds
of knowledge that are accessible to us only when
we experience certain emotions such as love. There
is a reciprocal relationship between love and
knowledge: we love people because of what we know
about them, to be sure, but we also come to know
them more fully because we love them. Novels are
particularly rich in their explorations of these
issues, though such understanding need not be
gained only from novels: In The Therapy
of Desire (1994) Nussbaum seeks-not always
successfully-to discover in certain Hellenistic
thinkers a distinctively philosophical account
of the value of the emotions. She is particularly
fond of the stoic thinker Chrysippus, whom she
thinks to be "the most profound thinker on emotion
in the entire philosophical tradition."
In sum, Nussbaum has been engaged for some years
now in a fascinating and important project in
ethical thought. Her work has distinct and troubling
limitations, to be sure: one would never learn
from Nussbaum that there are people called Jews
and Christians who have had a thing or two to
say about what constitutes human flourishing.
Moreover, as Donald Marshall has pointed out,
Nussbaum never considers what might happen if
one were to formulate one's personal telos
as "holiness" or "righteousness" rather than goodness.
(Nussbaum's lack of a discernible interest in
religion has not prevented the University of Chicago
Divinity School from assigning her a course in
Theological Ethics.) But her work has been exciting
and provocative nonetheless-or only somewhat the
less.
And in Poetic Justice she seeks to expand
her range: from a primary interest in the personal
dimensions of ethics to the social and political
implications of the philosophical-literary enterprise.
Which is appropriate, after all, since most of
the ancient thinkers who have inspired her work
certainly understood that our quest for eudaimonia
is profoundly dependent upon the social order
in which we live and think. But this transition
exposes certain flaws in Nussbaum's project.
III
Poetic Justice seeks to employ literature
as a tool for training the minds, and more particularly
the emotions, of the Guardians of the state. It
is thus a characteristically Platonic project:
Nussbaum simply disagrees with Plato about the
role of the emotions and in the growth of mature
persons. She quite explicitly states that many
of the ideas of this book started to take form
when she began to teach a course called Law and
Literature at the University of Chicago Law School.
To these future lawyers, judges, corporate leaders,
and politicians, Nussbaum wishes to present a
vision, a distinctly literary vision, of
a more just and moral polity. Though she uses
a number of texts (by E. M. Forster, Richard Wright,
Walt Whitman), her key and recurrent model is
Dickens' Hard Times. What she wants above
all is to formulate a philosophical and political
justification for Dickens' repudiation of Benthamite
utilitarianism, and his replacement of it with
an imaginative sympathy for others. Nussbaum is
not at all afraid of speaking in the classic terms
of liberal earnestness: she celebrates "the value
of humanity as an end in itself," she encourages
empathy and understanding, broad-mindedness, toleration.
The virtue of literature, she says, is that it
encourages these tendencies.
What Nussbaum wants above all is a political
economy that does not reduce persons to mere digits
or counters. This is a goal both admirable and
common; but how is it to be accomplished? I find
it interesting that Nussbaum chooses to emphasize
the education of the leaders, not of the people
themselves. In other words, her project suggests
that if our governments are going to treat people
more humanely, that will not be because the people
are sufficiently educated and articulate to demand
humane treatment, but rather because their Guardians
have been convinced through the imaginative sympathy
engendered by the novels they read to be kinder
and gentler toward their charges. So they read
Hard Times in order to gain sympathy for the
poor, Wright's Native Son in order to gain
sympathy for racial minorities, and Forster's
Maurice in order to gain sympathy for homosexuals.
(E. D. Hirsch, Jr., in his book Cultural Literacy,
understood that the problem with making novels
work publicly is that the reading of them is private.
His solution to this problem was to recommend
that as many Americans as possible read the same
novels, and other works, in school, so that there
would be a common fund of knowledge on which we
could draw to help form a more unified polity.
This recommendation, of course, earned Hirsch
the label of white male cultural imperialist.
Nussbaum dodges this kind of problem by making
her recommendations only to the Guardians.
What the underlings read does not here concern
her.)
So primarily, what literature does for our Guardians
is to cultivate in them a richer and more responsive
emotional life: this adds vivid color to the bland
landscape of Benthamite economic thought, and
puts human faces to political decisions. I don't
see how anyone could object very strenuously to
this, provided (as Nussbaum does provide) that
"rules and formal decision procedures, including
procedures inspired by economics," are not supplanted
but rather supplemented and corrected by the emotional
knowledge provided in literature; and provided
also that we caution ourselves against using emotional
affect frivolously and sentimentally. Those ubiquitous
network news stories about the "common people"
whose lives are destroyed by out-of-touch policy
wonks inside the Beltway do not meet any reasonable
criteria for the appropriate political use of
emotion and narrative particularity. Nussbaum
knows this too, and that is why (I think) she
warns that "the emotions have limitations and
dangers . . . and their function in ethical [and
political] reasoning must be carefully circumscribed."
But what are the particular emotions that are
to be cultivated in Chicago's Guardians by their
reading of literature? It soon becomes apparent
to the reader of Poetic Justice that Nussbaum
has an extremely limited range of emotions in
mind. Indeed, as far as I can see, literature
does little other than inculcate in our future
leaders a sympathy for the downtrodden, the oppressed,
the marginalized. In part this emphasis stems
from Nussbaum's repeated claim that we need literature
to help us "concern ourselves with the good of
other people whose lives are distant from our
own," and the experiences of the Guardians are
likely to be quite "distant" from the poor, from
racial and ethnic minorities, and from homosexuals.
But I think it stems more fundamentally from Nussbaum's
apparent conviction that ethical and political
flourishing are defined by the virtues
of sympathy and toleration. Granted that there
is a place, and a significant place, for sympathy
and toleration in our public life; but might there
not also be a place for more fully and carefully
developed faculties of judgment?
Nussbaum has loaded her dice by using novels
whose overt purpose is precisely to generate sympathy
for marginal figures. But what if she had chosen
another kind of book-say, for instance, Tolstoy's
Anna Karenina? Anna's tragic story, the
terrible price she has to pay for her adulterous
relationship with Count Vronsky, certainly and
properly elicits our sympathy, but Tolstoy would
have us recognize Anna's moral culpability as
well. The book's celebrated and controversial
epigraph-"Vengeance is mine, I will repay, says
the Lord" (Romans 12:19)-points to this twofold
message. It encourages us to recognize that Anna
has sinned and put herself in moral and spiritual
danger, that she has alienated herself from God
(as she perfectly well knows and admits to herself);
but it also warns us against condemnation from
some supposed position of moral authority and
superiority. We are invited to acknowledge the
immutability of the moral law, and to place ourselves
under its judgment even as we also recognize Anna's
placement.
Here, then, is a work of literature which calls
for something more than sympathy, and moreover
which distinguishes sympathy from toleration.
For the careful reader of Anna Karenina will
wonder if pure tolerance is indeed the most charitable,
the most sympathetic, of responses to Anna's
adultery-and to the society which loudly condemns
adultery at one moment and winks slyly at it the
next. To take one of Nussbaum's examples, it should
be possible for a reader of Forster's Maurice
to grow in understanding of, and even sympathy
for, homosexuals without automatically endorsing
governmental recognition of gay marriages. The
possible meanings of the words "sympathy" and
"toleration" are not exhausted by a recitation
of the preferred policies of the left wing of
the Democratic Party.
All this is not to say that Nussbaum does not
employ judgment in her book-she certainly does,
as do her novelists. Wright is scarcely tolerant
of racism (nor should he be), Dickens is scathing
towards the utilitarian Gradgrind and his cohorts,
and Nussbaum, in claiming that the enemies targeted
by Wright and Dickens are her enemies too, joins
their condemnations. The problem is that Nussbaum
fails properly to account for the political
uses of moral censure. What are the potential
political uses of Dostoyevsky's terrifying portrait
of one kind of criminal mind in Crime and Punishment,
or of others in Truman Capote's In Cold Blood
or even Norman Mailer's The Executioner's Song?
Could it be that the reading of some novels might
arouse the courage necessary to decree that there
are some persons who disqualify themselves from
participation in our polity? Dorothy Parker once
wrote that a performance by the young Katherine
Hepburn "ran the gamut of emotion from A to B."
Nussbaum allows literature a similar range of
feeling.
IV
The question of what possible role poetry can
play in the polity suggests the question of what
role poetry wants to play in the polity.
Nussbaum has failed to take into account the historical
development of literature in relation to its surrounding
culture, especially in the two centuries since
the advent of Romanticism. If indeed in ancient
Athens poets were willing to serve the community
that sought to know itself and its commitments,
for two hundred years now modern poetry has reveled
in its dissociation from the colorless and quotidian
concerns of petty politics.
Shelley, it is true, famously said that "poets
are the unacknowledged legislators of the world,"
but one would be sorely mistaken if one concluded
that Shelley wished for these legislators to be
acknowledged. If the poets' legislative role were
to be publicly recognized and accepted, then poets
would be in the position of having to acknowledge
their responsibility and accountability to those
on whose behalf they are legislating. But such
an acknowledgment would be utterly at odds with
the Romantic belief in the autonomy (which is
to say the unaccountability to anything but itself)
of the poetic imagination.
Nussbaum appears not to know this, and so in
a grotesquely inappropriate move appropriates
Walt Whitman to buttress her project. She speaks
of the conviction, which she shares with Whitman,
that "storytelling and literary imagination are
not opposed to rational argument but can provide
essential ingredients in a rational argument."
But Whitman, in company with virtually every other
figure in American Romanticism, would scarcely
have accepted this endorsement of reason: like
most Romantics, he accepted the Enlightenment's
radical distinction between reason on the one
hand and on the other hand emotion and imagination,
and merely inverted the hierarchy. Instead of
seeking to use reason to master feeling, he saw
the great cultural task of his time as the liberation
of feeling and imagination from the tyrannies
of reason. This can only happen if feeling and
imagination break the shackles of accountability
to the public sphere.
Whitman says this about as plainly as it is possible
to say it. When society does not heed its poets,
"things are grotesque, eccentric, fail of their
full returns." The poet does not, and if he is
to be a poet cannot, listen to others, but woe
unto those others if they do not listen to him.
"He is the arbiter of the diverse, he is the key,
/ He is the equalizer of his age and land." In
case anyone has failed to get the point, Whitman
restates it: the poet "is no arguer, he is judgment
(Nature accepts him absolutely.) / He judges not
as the judge judges but as the sun falling round
a helpless thing." "Not as the judge judges"-
that is, not according to precedent and law, before
which he stands as a humble interpreter; not according
to constitutional criteria for a responsible judiciary.
The poet's judgments cannot be argued with any
more than the brilliance of the noonday sun can
be gainsaid: the light the poet sheds on humanity
and Nature is just like that, clear and vivid
and plain enough for all with eyes to see.
Astonishingly, Nussbaum quotes just these lines
to support her claim that poets can be useful
servants to a polity in quest of general eudaimonia.
To her, Whitman's comparison of the poet to the
sunlight simply means that the poet's vision is
detailed and specific and complete, that it "illuminates
the situation of the helpless," that it "does
not yield to bias or favor." The titanic arrogance
of Whitman's claims for himself and his fellow
poets utterly eludes her. Caught up in her enthusiasm
for readmitting poets to the Republic from which
Plato banished them, Nussbaum fails to notice
that the poets have not only grown accustomed
to banishment, they have come to like and prefer
it. They don't want back in. They prefer
their little shacks just outside the walls of
the great city because there no one tells them
what to do, and left to their own devices
convince themselves that it is really the great
city that lies beyond the pale of their settlement.
More precisely, they are like Milton's Satan,
newly deposited in hell, who says, "Here at least
we shall be free. . . . Better to reign in hell
than serve in heaven." Nussbaum cheerfully tells
the post-Romantic literati that in her
ideal commonwealth they can be useful,
not suspecting that there is nothing in the world
they find more horrifying.
Martha Nussbaum has never written a boring book,
and Poetic Justice is no exception: it
is usually stimulating and provocative, though
not as often or as much as her earlier work, especially
The Fragility of Goodness. But her project
of bringing about a specifically political
reunion of reason and emotion, economics and poetry,
is fraught with errors and inconsistencies. Perhaps
it can ultimately be done, but first Nussbaum
must convince poets that the radical autonomy
they earned through the Romantic movement came
at far too high a price. And she must be able
to demonstrate that this glorious reunion of poetry
and (economic and political) philosophy will do
more than provide further support for the already
agreed-upon policies of American left-liberalism.
Literature and politics alike are richer than
that, and cut out for better things.
* Alan Jacobs is Associate Professor of English
at Wheaton College.
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