Martha Nussbaum - The Value of the Humanities

This is Philosophy Bites with me, David

Edmunds, and me, Nigel Wbertton.

Philosophy Bites is available at

www.filosophobites.com.

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with the Institute of Philosophy.

If you study engineering, perhaps you'll

invent an ingenious widget that'll

improve the lives of millions and may

even increase national GDP. If you study

philosophy, well, frankly, what good is

knowing about Schopenhau or epistemology

going to do you? Surely then, it's a

positive development that under

budgetary pressures, Western governments

are squeezing university humanity

departments.

The distinguished University of Chicago

professor Martha Nuspam thinks not.

Martha Nuspam, welcome to philosophy

bites.

Hi, Nigel. It's very good to be there.

The topic we're going to focus on is the

humanities and why they matter in a

democracy. First of all, who is the

enemy here? Who could think that the

humanities don't matter?

Well, I'm afraid that the humanities are

being cut back in pretty much every

country in the world. And they're being

cut back because the attitude to

education that now dominates is that

education is about building short-term

profit. And so the skills that we want

are the ones that help our nations and

individuals to make short-term profit in

business and industry. And the

humanities look like they don't do that.

So this is the result of people doing

costbenefit analysis and being naive

about what possible value the humanities

could have for an economy.

Well, yeah. I mean, I have no objection

to costbenefit analysis if you get all

the costs and all the benefits lined up.

But I think people are not thinking

about the long-term cost to democracy

that we get when we cut back on the

humanities. Democracy requires a certain

kind of self-examination,

a certain kind of critical ability.

Socrates in ancient Athens, which was

the world's first democracy, noticed

that people were making decisions very

hastily. They were doing what people

always do, that is deferring to

tradition and authority. And he wanted

them to stop and analyze what they were

saying and really ask what do I stand

for? What is my view? And to do that you

have to learn skills of argumentation

and you really have to lead the examined

life as Socrates said. And for all of

that you need philosophy. Now then I

think the humanities supply yet other

ingredients for successful democracy.

They supply a knowledge of world history

which we badly need if we're going to

come to grips with the problems that

affect the world today. They supply a

knowledge of the major world religions

which help us avoid narrow stereotyping

of other religions that we are not

familiar with. And then finally and I

think in a way the most important of all

they cultivate our imagination so that

we are not obtuse toward other people.

so that we can see the world and think

how it looks through the eyes of someone

who's different from ourselves.

So let's take those three areas that you

discussed. First of all, there's a

critical thinking that comes from the

kind of dialogue that particularly

philosophy teaches. Then there's a sense

of world history and understanding our

place in relation to other cultures. And

thirdly, there was the idea that

imagination is important that we need to

have a sense of something beyond our own

perspective. Yes, I think that captures

it very well. And of course, those are

interconnected because you don't

understand history well. If you simply

learn to repeat by wrote some narrative

that someone feeds you, you only do

history well when you learn to do it

critically and to think, how do I assess

this evidence here? And then finally,

you you only do history well if you do

it with imagination. Trying to think

about what you're learning as the

experiences of real people. So I think

the the philosophical critical aspect,

the historical aspect and the literary

artistic aspect enrich each other.

But with Socrates, he was deliberately a

gadfly. I mean, he annoyed his

contemporaries. He made life difficult

for people who stopped people in the

marketplace. they were confidently going

about their business thinking they knew

what they were talking about and he

showed that they didn't. Now, is that

valuable in a democracy? Isn't that

actually obstructive to have people

constantly niggling away at the

consistency of people's arguments and

the coherence of their definitions of

terms?

Well, I think it's immensely valuable

because democracies cannot survive if

propaganda is allowed to hold sway.

Politicians are often bringing bad

arguments one's way and you need to be

able to look at the argument. There's

also the question of how we interrelate.

In my country, the US, people are often

relating to each other with sound bites.

They see political argument as a way of

boasting and scoring points for their

own side. And that's not good for

democracy because it makes people think

of the two parties as contesters on a

playing field rather than on as people

who are trying to figure out what's good

for the country. If you think Socrates

way then you'll think we'll take the

argument apart and we'll try to figure

out what's the difference between your

side and my side. Now it might be let's

say we're arguing in US about the death

penalty that the two sides share certain

premises of their arguments and if we

get clear about what is shared and where

the differences lie then we talk

respectfully and we don't just see the

other person as an enemy

but to play devil's advocate I mean

there are some philosophers who are very

skillful at reasoning Frager for

instance or possibly not such a great

reasoner but Haidiger as well who

despite their learning despite their

education in philosophy ended up with

some pretty extreme anti-semitic

viewpoints. They were both of them very

sympathetic to the sort of thinking that

emerged in in national socialism.

Well, I'm glad that you said perhaps

Haidiger wasn't such a great reasoner

because I fully agree. I think there was

nothing Socratic at all about his

procedure. What I'm recommending is the

study of Plato's dialogues of the

contribution of Socrates and the study

of good moral and political philosophy

that asks us what justice is and teaches

people how to think about the

utilitarian theory of justice about

contean theories about theories that

treat the human being as an end rather

than a means and people should learn to

argue with each other about the relative

merits of those theories and they should

do it in a democratic way. You know, I

think the thing I actually object to the

most about Haidiger was that he was a

guru. He practiced philosophy not as a

Socratic practice of exchange where you

and I are equal and it's just a matter

of who has the better argument, but no,

he was an authority figure and he fed

people's desire to submit themselves to

authority. So I think actually his way

of teaching was anti- philosophical. So

this sense of dialogue is incredibly

important in philosophy because from

outside some people think that to learn

philosophy is to learn what the great

thinkers of the past thought so that you

almost count out to those people that

you are in awe of them.

Well if that's the way it's taught then

that's bad teaching. But I actually

think most philosophy teachers don't do

that because we are brought to the

subject by a love of Socrates questions.

And I think you know one loves seeing

students come alive and learn to be

troublesome and learn to ask those

questions. And actually I think one of

the best things to teach is Plato's

dialogues because they don't let you

stand still. You don't know what the

position actually is and you really have

to figure it out for yourself and so you

couldn't it would be very very difficult

to teach it in a kind of authoritarian

way.

Does that apply even to teaching

children? Because I know there are a

number of people who are teaching

philosophy, maybe not calling it

philosophy, but teaching it to primary

school children, to very young children.

Don't they need certainties before they

dispute things?

Well, I think children can awaken their

critical faculties very early because of

course when you learn to grow up in if

you're in a good family, you learn to

love your parents. You're learning

certain fixed points of love and

attachment. And that is very important.

But you better be learning to question

at the same time because your own

parents might make some very bad

arguments. My own father was a racist

from the deep south. So while I

certainly loved my parents and I learned

certain fixed points from them, I also

quickly learned that I better be

questioning the arguments that they gave

me.

Let's move on to the second area that

you raised with the humanities. The idea

that we get some kind of cultural

knowledge that allows us to understand

our place in the world. that doesn't

come so much from philosophy. Which

sorts of humanities disciplines

encourage that way of thinking?

Well, history above all, but I also

think economics and the study of the

history of religion and comparative

religion. Boy, that is so important

because certainly in most of Europe and

the US, if you ask people what a Muslim

is, they give you an extremely crude

answer. And I really think that all

children very early should be learning

to understand the variety and complexity

of the major world religions. And as far

as history is concerned, they need to

learn the rudiments of world history.

But then I think it's very useful to

learn how to inquire in much more depth

into one unfamiliar culture because you

can't possibly learn everything about

every society in depth. But you need to

learn the kind of ignorance that you

have. You need to learn for example that

you don't really know what a family is.

When I went to India for the first time,

I understood that what a household is,

what a family is, was something quite

different from what it is in the US. The

house is open to callers at all times.

The sense of family is much more porous.

It embraces the whole village. So those

things are the kinds of things that

people should be learning about one

culture and then when they get to a

different one they know the questions

that they need to ask.

What if I don't want to be a citizen of

the world though that is your position

that cosmopolitanism is a good thing but

there are people who want to be narrowly

nationalistic about this and they say

look we've got to focus on the local and

the very specific conditions of our of

our own history. Well, I would

understand cosmopolitanism as the

position that you should always give

your first loyalty to the whole world

and not to your nation. Now, I don't

even hold that position myself, but

nonetheless, we're in the world and

we're making decisions all the time that

affect the other people of the world.

And so, even if in the end of the day,

we want to do it in a way that promotes

the interests of our own nation above

other interests, we better know what

choices we're making. And we better know

how the decisions we make about

consumption, about energy use, and so on

are affecting the lives of other people.

Then we're really making a decision.

Otherwise, we're just going by

authority.

What about imagination, though? Plenty

of people live their lives without ever

reading and engaging with a novel or

watching a play or reading poetry. Are

they the worst for that? particularly in

relation to to democracy. Surely they

can know about society without knowing

about TS Elliott.

Well, what I'm looking for is the

ability to put yourself in the shoes of

somebody different from yourself. Now,

that's an ability that actually it's

part of our evolutionary heritage. Apes

have it. Elephants have it. We come into

the world with the basics of that

ability, but it's often in a very crude

form. We might quickly take on the

ability to read the mind of our parents

because every child has to try to figure

out what is my mother thinking now, what

is my father thinking now. But often we

don't extend that to other people that

we come into contact with. And

particularly in every society, there are

groups that we almost deliberately

freeze out of our imaginations. The

great American novelist Ralph Ellison

wrote a novel called Invisible Man. And

it was really about, as he put it, the

inner eyes of white America, which made

the black man invisible, meaning they

just saw him as a thing, as a body, but

didn't try to imagine the inner

experience of suffering under racism.

Now that is promoted of course not by

every piece of literature but literature

in general trains the muscles of the

mind. So I think even reading TS Elliott

expands your imaginative capacity in a

general way.

Martin Espam. Thank you very much.

Thank you very much Nigel.

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