Tag: Martha Nussbaum

The L.A.-based billionaire celebrated philosopher Martha Nussbaum, who received the Berggruen Prize, at a New York event that drew A-listers including Karlie Kloss, Wendi Murdoch, and David Rockefeller. We are experiencing an almost unprecedented challenge to democracy in this country at the moment. And that comes from thinkers, from philosophers. And exactly now that we are in a crisis, democracy — not just here, I would say every democracy all around the world — you need thinking that is long-term, very deep, outside of the box, and probably not from political thinkers. We are at a moment where the world is asking, "Where are we going? And what I think is needed is that the people who shape culture, which includes philosophers, need to come up with a way to communicate to people about a shared future. The idea of a shared future needs to be developed. And the challenge is not only how do you bring people into a future — into a horizon that may be shared and then how do you communicate to them? The most important part of our work is helping develop the ideas and helping develop the questions. Only new ideas may take a while.

Philosopher Martha Nussbaum wrote her latest book, “The Monarchy of Fear,” to better understand the 2016 election. She tells Jeffrey Brown that when fear gets into the mix, we fail to work out actual problems. Martha Nussbaum: Well, OK, so emotions, I think, are not just jolts of electricity, but they involve thoughts about what’s happening to us, what’s good and bad. And so fear is then something that philosophers have talked about ever since the Greeks. And it’s always been thought to be a terrible problem for democracy. Jeffrey Brown: So, the subtitle, “A Philosopher Looks at Our Political Crisis,” so that’s the next term I want you to define, political crisis. Martha Nussbaum: Well, what I see is that people are being stampeded by their emotions, and they’re not stopping to figure things out and to work on the real problems. But where does — where does emotion and fear come into what makes sense or what’s rational? Jeffrey Brown: You said at the beginning that this goes back and the work you have done to the Greeks, right? And it’s terrible to say, I’m just not going to talk to anyone who voted for Trump.

Image The philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum wants Americans to get in touch with their feelings; not in a fit of self-indulgence but as a righteous act of civic duty. In “The Monarchy of Fear: A Philosopher Looks at Our Political Crisis,” she writes against a (mostly male) tradition of philosophical and political thinking that minimizes emotions as merely a source of irrationality and embarrassment. With more than two dozen books to her name, Nussbaum has been here before. But the 2016 presidential election made her realize she “hadn’t gone deep enough.” A self-described “liberal social democrat,” she was so shaken by Donald J. Trump’s victory — having been “reasonably confident that appeals to fear and anger would be repudiated” — that she felt an overwhelming sensation of alarm. She believed fear was what had gotten Trump elected, and here she was, so scared that she was momentarily incapable of being “balanced or fair-minded”: “I was part of the problem that I worried about.” An elegant and precise stylist, Nussbaum has always seemed a peculiar spokeswoman for bringing unruly emotions into the fold. She writes about gut feelings like envy and disgust with an air of serene lucidity. She has spent decades parsing the role of negative emotions while resisting their seductive pull. Once she realized she might be able to wring some insight from upheaval, she “went back to sleep with a calming sense of hope.” Since we’re talking about feelings, I’ll confess to experiencing pinpricks of irritation when I came across that self-satisfied line, which appears on the second page of Nussbaum’s preface, before she has even started to make her argument. “On the one hand, I am helpless, and the universe doesn’t care about me,” Nussbaum writes. When the vulnerability of children becomes less a reason for protection than an opportunity to do harm, perhaps some fear really is in order.