{"id":193798,"date":"2026-06-17T15:05:51","date_gmt":"2026-06-17T23:05:51","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=193798"},"modified":"2026-06-17T17:20:38","modified_gmt":"2026-06-18T01:20:38","slug":"martha-nussbaum","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/lukeford.net\/blog\/?p=193798","title":{"rendered":"Martha Nussbaum"},"content":{"rendered":"

Martha Craven Nussbaum<\/a> (b. May 6, 1947) is the most widely read female philosopher. Her work reaches across ancient Greek ethics, the theory of emotions, feminism, constitutional law, development economics, education, and animal welfare, and through all of it she holds to one conviction. A society earns its standing by the real opportunities it gives people to live with dignity, not by its wealth or its power. She holds the Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professorship of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago<\/a>, with appointments that run through the law school, philosophy, classics, the divinity school, political science, and South Asian studies.<\/p>\n

She was born Martha Craven in New York City. Her father, George Craven, practiced law in Philadelphia. Her mother, Betty Warren, worked as an interior designer. Nussbaum has described the home as East Coast WASP elite, sterile, and fixed on money and status, and she traces her later impatience with mandarin philosophy to a rejection of that world. She studied for two years at Wellesley College<\/a>, left to pursue theater in New York, and took her bachelor’s degree in theater and classics from New York University<\/a> in 1969. At Harvard University<\/a> she moved toward philosophy, earning a master’s degree in 1972 and a doctorate in classical philology in 1975 under G. E. L. Owen<\/a> (1922-1982), the Aristotle scholar. Her dissertation treated Aristotle’s account of the motion of animals and opened a lifelong engagement with Greek thought. She became the first woman elected to Harvard’s Society of Fellows<\/a>.<\/p>\n

In 1969 she married Alan Nussbaum<\/a>, a linguist she met in a Greek prose composition class. She converted to Judaism during the marriage and kept the name and the faith after the couple divorced in 1987. Their daughter, Rachel Nussbaum Wichert<\/a> (1974-2019), would shape the final turn of her mother’s work.<\/p>\n

Her first major book set the terms for much that followed. The Fragility of Goodness<\/a> (1986) challenged the old philosophical ideal of self-sufficiency. Reading Aristotle alongside Sophocles<\/a>, Euripides<\/a>, and other classical authors, Nussbaum argues that human flourishing rests partly on goods a person cannot command. Love, friendship, health, family, and a stable political order all lie open to luck. The book made her a known figure across the humanities and helped revive interest in virtue ethics<\/a>. It also showed her method early, the willingness to read literary form as a carrier of philosophical content.<\/p>\n

Conflict marked the same years. The classics department at Harvard denied her tenure in 1982, and she left for Brown University<\/a> in 1983. She has called the decision sex discrimination and has said the department mocked her clothes while declining to read her work. She considered a grievance and chose against it on the advice of the classicist Glen Bowersock<\/a>, who warned that a lawsuit might force her detractors to read her work and then invent objections to it. She took offers elsewhere and moved on. The episode sharpened her interest in gender equality, institutional reform, and the obstacles women face in elite academic life. She taught at Brown until 1995, when she joined the University of Chicago.<\/p>\n

A second strand of her work concerns the emotions. She rejects the picture of emotion as blind impulse set against reason. Emotions, she argues, carry judgments of value. A person grieves, fears, rages, or loves because that person sees something as precious and at risk. Upheavals of Thought<\/a> (2001) gathered this into a full account that drew on philosophy, psychology, literature, and psychoanalysis. Hiding from Humanity<\/a> (2004) carried the argument into the law, examining how disgust and shame shape legal judgment and often distort it. The work influenced legal theory, political science, and moral psychology.<\/p>\n

Her most consequential contribution grew from her exchange with the economist Amartya Sen<\/a> (b. 1933). She advised the World Institute for Development Economics Research<\/a> in Helsinki for one month a year over seven years, beginning in 1986, and there the two developed what became the capabilities approach. She and Sen were partners for several years after her divorce, and the intellectual collaboration ran alongside that connection. The approach asks a plain question. Rather than measure progress by wealth or growth alone, it asks what people can do and become.<\/p>\n

Her version parts from Sen’s on a central point. Sen leaves the content of the capabilities open to democratic deliberation. Nussbaum names a list. She holds that justice requires every constitutional democracy to secure a specific set of fundamental opportunities, and she sets out ten Central Human Capabilities: life, bodily health, bodily integrity, the senses and imagination and thought, emotions, practical reason, affiliation, concern for other species, play, and control over one’s political and material environment. Under this view poverty reads as the deprivation of capability, not merely the lack of money. The framework has shaped development economics, constitutional law, disability studies, education policy, human-rights discourse, and feminist theory across the world.<\/p>\n

Human dignity sits beneath the project. Nussbaum holds that every individual carries intrinsic worth and deserves a real chance to flourish, and that commitment has informed her writing on global poverty, disability, women’s equality, gay rights, religious liberty, and democratic citizenship.<\/p>\n

She stands among the leading liberal feminist philosophers of her generation. Where many theorists drew on post-structuralism, she has defended universal human rights, rational argument, and legal reform. The commitment showed in her 1999 essay “The Professor of Parody,” published in The New Republic<\/a>, a sharp attack on Judith Butler<\/a> (b. 1956) and on the broader turn toward abstraction in feminist theory. Nussbaum argues that opaque theoretical language cuts feminist scholarship off from the concrete legal and social harms women face. The essay set off a lasting debate and marked her preference for practical reform over theoretical radicalism. Sex and Social Justice<\/a> gathered related arguments, treating sex and sexuality as morally irrelevant grounds that hierarchy has pressed into service.<\/p>\n

Her public arguments have often reached the courtroom. She served as an expert witness in the litigation over Colorado’s Amendment 2, the case that reached the Supreme Court as Romer v. Evans<\/a>. During those years she carried on a long and public dispute with the legal philosopher John Finnis<\/a> (b. 1940) over Greek attitudes toward same-sex relations and the reading of ancient texts. The exchange ran for years in scholarly journals and became a notable episode in debates over sexuality, law, and classical scholarship.<\/p>\n

Literature and the arts run through her thought. Novels, tragedies, poetry, and music cultivate what she calls the narrative imagination, the capacity to enter the experience of people whose lives differ from one’s own. This conviction grounds her defense of liberal education. Cultivating Humanity<\/a> made the case for the humanities and for multicultural learning on American campuses. Not for Profit<\/a> (2010) argues that a democracy needs citizens able to reason, to imagine other lives, and to feel for them, and that technical training alone cannot supply this.<\/p>\n

Political concern grew more central in her later books. The Monarchy of Fear<\/a> (2018) names fear as the most dangerous of the political emotions. Fear, she argues, breeds anger, disgust, scapegoating, and the pull toward authoritarian rule. A stable democracy depends on hope, compassion, and mutual respect. Citadels of Pride (2021) turned to sexual assault and the law, weighing how institutions might pursue accountability and reconciliation after the #MeToo reckoning. She wrote much of it at her daughter’s hospital bedside.<\/p>\n

Her later work extended justice past the human. Justice for Animals (2023) applies the capabilities approach to non-human animals. She rejects both the utilitarian frame of Peter Singer<\/a> (b. 1946) and the rights view of Tom Regan<\/a> (1938-2017), and she argues that justice requires letting animals flourish according to the form of life proper to each species. An elephant, a bird, and a dolphin hold different capabilities and so call for different protection. The turn was personal as much as theoretical. Rachel Nussbaum Wichert, an attorney for Friends of Animals, worked on cetacean law and co-authored four papers with her mother. Rachel died on December 3, 2019, from a drug-resistant infection after transplant surgery. Nussbaum has said she wrote the book to carry her daughter’s ideas to a wider audience, and she has established the Rachel Nussbaum Animal Law Scholarship at the law school in her memory.<\/p>\n

The honors have come steadily. They include the Princess of Asturias Award<\/a> in the Social Sciences (2012), the Kyoto Prize<\/a> in Arts and Philosophy (2016), the Jefferson Lecture<\/a> in the Humanities (2017), the Berggruen Prize<\/a> (2018), the Holberg Prize<\/a> (2021), the Balzan Prize<\/a> (2022), and the Order of Lincoln, the highest civilian honor of the State of Illinois. She holds honorary degrees from dozens of universities across several continents, and in the early 2020s observers counted her among the candidates for the Nobel Prize in Literature.<\/p>\n

Nussbaum occupies a place at the meeting point of Aristotelian ethics, liberal political theory, feminist thought, legal scholarship, and the humanities. She works as a systematic philosopher and as a public combatant at once. She has argued over feminism, sexuality, constitutional law, development economics, citizenship, religion, and the standing of animals, and through all of it she has held the same measure. A just society is known by the real chances it gives each being capable of flourishing to live a life of dignity and agency amid the vulnerabilities none of us escape.<\/p>\n

Martha Nussbaum and the Heroism of Vulnerability<\/strong><\/p>\n

She writes in the hospital. The laptop rests on her knees in a chair pulled to the bed where her daughter lies after the transplant. Rachel Nussbaum Wichert is a lawyer for the wild animals, the whales and the dolphins, and her mother sits beside her and drafts. Some of the pages become Citadels of Pride<\/em><\/a>. More of them become a book about justice for animals, the work the two have shared. The daughter, even from the bed, keeps editing. When Rachel dies on December 3, 2019, the book does not stop. It changes office. It becomes the place where the daughter’s ideas go on living, and the mother says as much. She writes so she will not feel powerless. The cover she chooses shows a whale breaching against flat blue.<\/p>\n

Ernest Becker<\/a> (1924-1974) has a name for that chair. The human animal knows it will die and cannot live with the knowing. So it builds a project larger than the body and pours the self into the project, and the project carries a promise the body cannot keep, that something of the man survives the rot. Becker calls the project a hero system. He calls the belief that holds it together the vital lie. Every culture hands its members a script for becoming a hero of cosmic significance, a soldier, a saint, a father, a builder of cathedrals or fortunes or theories, and the script works because it lets a man forget for a while that he is meat that spoils.<\/p>\n

Becker reads the chair one way. The strange thing about Martha Craven Nussbaum is that she has spent fifty years arguing against the very lie Becker says all heroism rests on.<\/p>\n

The standard hero denies creatureliness. He pretends he is not the sweating, aging, leaking, dying animal. He armors the body and calls the armor virtue. Nussbaum takes the armor off and calls that virtue. The Fragility of Goodness<\/em><\/a>, the book that made her name, argues that the good life lies open to luck, that love and friendship and health and a child’s safety stay forever at the mercy of forces no man commands, and that the wise course faces this rather than flees it. She returns to the theme for half a century. Upheavals of Thought makes the emotions into clear-eyed judgments about what we cannot control and cannot afford to lose. Justice for Animals extends the open hand past our own species. Where the Stoic hardens, she softens on principle, and she makes the soft, exposed, dependent body the ground of her ethics and her politics.<\/p>\n

Here is the turn worth sitting with. Her refusal of the lie is its own hero system. Naming yourself the one who tells the truth about fragility, while the others hide from it, is a bid for significance as large as any cathedral. The philosopher who will not pretend does not escape the need for a project. She finds a grander one. She becomes the witness who cannot be erased, because she alone looked straight at what the brave men flinched from. The daughter poured into a book is the project at full power, grief converted into an argument that outlasts the grief and the daughter and one day the mother. Becker would not call this a flaw. He would call it the thing he was describing.<\/p>\n

So her values are sacred, and the words she uses for them are common words, and the common words mean different things inside other men’s projects. Set them side by side. They will not line up.<\/p>\n

Take dignity.<\/p>\n

A man free-solos a granite wall in the Sierra at dawn. He has left the rope in the truck on purpose. He has chalked his hands and read the route a hundred times and he climbs alone, two thousand feet of air under his heels, because to climb roped is to admit he might fall and to admit he might fall is to give the mountain a vote. Ask him what dignity is and he will not answer in words. He will point at the wall. Dignity is needing nothing and no one, the body that obeys, the mind that does not shake. Vulnerability is the fall. Nussbaum’s whole project sounds to him like a long elegant excuse for being weak. He does not hate the weak. He simply does not see why a man would build a philosophy around staying that way.<\/p>\n

A founder in Los Altos measures his sleep in stages and his blood in eighty markers and his age in two numbers, the one on his license and the one his data report. He spends a fortune to push the second number down. Dignity, for him, is command over the body’s clock, the refusal to decay on schedule. The dying body is the adversary, not the teacher. He reads Nussbaum on the elephant and the dolphin and their separate forms of flourishing and he hears sentiment, a woman making peace with a defeat he intends to cancel. Dignity is more years and full control of them.<\/p>\n

A Trappist rises at three for vigils in a stone church and owns nothing and speaks little and has given his name to God along with everything else. Dignity, for him, is the soul God made, conferred before he could earn it and impossible to lose, equal in the genius and the man who cannot feed himself. The ten capabilities Nussbaum would secure by law, the senses, play, affiliation, control over one’s surroundings, name much of the world he has walked away from on purpose. She adds capabilities. He subtracts them, on the theory that the self stuffed full of doing and having is the self farthest from God. Two people kneel beside a dying man. One asks what the state owes him. The other asks what God is about to give him.<\/p>\n

Now take vulnerability, the word she has made holy.<\/p>\n

A Navy corpsman works a bleed in the back of a moving vehicle with his knee on the wound. Vulnerability is the soft place where the round goes in, the thing you close fast or the man is gone. Dignity is bearing. You do not show the soft thing, because the soft thing shown spreads, and a squad that feels its own softness dies. He loves his men. He loves them by hardening them, by making them able to keep moving when the body screams to stop. To him a philosophy that calls exposure sacred is a philosophy that has never had to carry anyone out.<\/p>\n

A risk manager at a fund watches a screen of positions. Vulnerability is unhedged exposure, the open trade that the market can take from him in the night. His craft is the removal of vulnerability, the hedge, the stop, the diversified book. Flourishing, in his world, compounds. It has a number and the number goes up. Dependence is a liability he marks against the book. Nussbaum’s poor man, whose poverty she names as the deprivation of capability rather than the lack of cash, registers for him as an unpriced cost on someone else’s ledger, a sad fact, not a claim.<\/p>\n

Watch what happens to flourishing as it crosses these lines. For Nussbaum flourishing is doing and being, the full human range secured for every man as a matter of justice. For the monk it is renunciation, the emptying that the world calls loss. For the founder it is biomarkers trending the right way. For the risk manager it is alpha. The same five letters, four projects, four cosmologies. None of them is lying. Each word makes sense inside the project that issued it and turns strange the moment it crosses into another.<\/p>\n

And compassion, the faculty she trusts most, the narrative imagination she says the novel trains, the power to enter a life unlike your own. The drill instructor on the yellow footprints has a different reading. Compassion that coddles gets recruits killed in the first firefight. He breaks them so the world cannot, and he calls the breaking love, and by his lights he is right, because the men he softens are the men who do not come home. Nussbaum and the instructor both claim to act for the good of the dependent. They mean opposite things by it.<\/p>\n

Behind her sacred words sit two terrors, and they are not the standard pair. Her first terror is not her own death. It is the loss of what she loves to luck, the child taken, the friend taken, the body’s frailty carrying off the beloved while she stands by with no rope to throw. The Fragility of Goodness<\/em><\/a> is that terror named and turned into a life’s argument before the worst of it arrived, and then the worst arrived in a hospital room and she went on arguing. Her second terror is humiliation, the reduction to a creature that disgusts, the body that leaks and fails and draws the sneer. Her work on disgust and shame in the law studies that terror in cold daylight. The men who denied her tenure in 1982 and mocked her clothes while declining to read her work pressed on exactly that nerve. She took the wound and built from it an account of how disgust degrades a legal order, and she walked out of Harvard in 1983 carrying the theory like a tool she had forged in the fire that burned her.<\/p>\n

You can read her hero system backward from its losses. A childhood she has called sterile and fixed on money and status, which she repudiates and keeps repudiating, every disavowal a brick in the new structure. A tenure denied. A daughter dead at forty-five. Each subtraction feeds the project. The pattern is the one Becker drew. The man does not collapse under the loss. He metabolizes it into the thing that makes him significant, and the more it costs him the more significant the thing becomes.<\/p>\n

Three things follow, and they do not resolve into a verdict.<\/p>\n

The first. Her vulnerability is sacred only inside her own project. To the climber and the founder it reads as defeat in fine clothing, surrender sold as wisdom. They are not fools for thinking so. They have built lives on the opposite bet, that the body can be commanded, and their lives reward the bet daily. Her sacred word is their cautionary tale.<\/p>\n

The second. Of all the projects on the table, hers runs closest to the bone of the truth. Becker held that the healthiest illusion is the one that hides the least, that a man does better to look at his condition than to paper it over with money or muscle or doctrine. The body does fail. Luck does take what we love. The climber falls in the end, the founder’s numbers turn, the markers go red. Nussbaum says so first and builds for the saying. Her hero system earns its strength by conceding the premise the others spend their force denying.<\/p>\n

The third. The project still serves the one who builds it, and this is no charge against her. The witness to fragility secures her own significance by the witnessing. The book at the bedside saves the daughter from oblivion and saves the mother from helplessness in one motion, and the whale on the cover carries both. To name this is not to expose a fraud. It is to describe what a hero system is and what it is for. She would, I think, agree, because her own books say the wise man does not pretend to stand outside the human need. He sits inside it and works.<\/p>\n

So return to the chair. The laptop is open. The daughter is gone and the argument is not. A woman who has told the world for fifty years that we cannot save what we love from luck sits in the wreckage of that exact truth and does the only thing her project allows, which is to write it down so that something survives. The climber would not understand the chair. The founder would try to engineer it out of existence. The monk would empty it and pray. She fills it with words. Each of them is building the same thing against the same dark, and only the shapes differ, and she has chosen the shape that admits the dark is real.<\/p>\n

What Love Knows: Martha Nussbaum and the Mortal Beloved<\/strong><\/p>\n

He wakes before her and watches her sleep. The early light comes gray through the blind and lands on the back of her hand where it lies open on the sheet, and he knows the hand, the small scar at the base of the thumb from a knife and a lemon twenty years back, the way the third finger bends a little where the ring sits, the heat of it when she reaches for him in the night without waking. He could not write the knowledge down. It is not a list of facts about a hand. It is the hand, and the woman, and the years, and the knowing of her is the loving of her, and he cannot say where the one ends and the other starts.<\/p>\n

Martha Craven Nussbaum (b. May 6, 1947) says the man at the bedside knows something, and that the knowing has the structure of love. Upheavals of Thought ends on love after six hundred pages on the emotions, and the argument the whole book builds toward is that love is a way of knowing. The emotions are not the weather that blows across reason. They are appraisals, judgments about what holds value in a world a man cannot control, and love is the highest reach of that intelligence, the grasp of another mortal creature as real and precious and irreplaceable. She refuses to file love under weakness. She files it under knowledge.<\/p>\n

Nussbaum knows the danger and walks toward it. The last movement of her book traces what she calls ascents of love, the great attempts to climb from the particular beloved toward something higher. Plato climbs from the beautiful boy to the Form of beauty and leaves the boy behind. The Christian ascent climbs from the creature to the Creator and loves the neighbor for the sake of God. Each purifies love by subtracting the mortal, particular, embodied thing at the bottom of the ladder. Nussbaum refuses the purification. She wants the ascent that keeps the body, the one she finds in Whitman (1819-1892) and in Mahler (1860-1911), love that climbs without ever leaving the hand on the sheet, that grows wider without growing thinner, that reaches the whole world by way of the one mortal man and never by stepping over him. Love is knowledge because it sees the other as he is, finite and unrepeatable and going to die, and holds him precious in the seeing.<\/p>\n

Set her word against the men who have made their peace with love another way, and there are many, and each has found a road around the bedside.<\/p>\n

A teacher sits on a cushion at the front of a silent hall on the last morning of a ten-day retreat and tells the room to love without grasping. Metta, he says, goodwill toward all beings, the warmth that asks nothing and holds nothing. Watch the craving arise and watch it pass. To fix the heart on one impermanent form, one face, one hand, is to sign a contract with suffering, because the form will change and the face will age and the hand will go cold, and the grasping is the rope that ties you to the wheel. He loves widely and lightly and lets each thing go as it goes. Love, to him, is the attachment a man learns to loosen. The bedside is the trap.<\/p>\n

A case officer meets his asset in a flat with the blinds down and the television on for the noise, and he has read the file, and the file says the man across the table loves a woman who is not his wife. The officer files it under access. Find what a man loves and you have found the seam you can open. The mistress, the son with the gambling debt, the daughter who needs the visa, these are the soft places where a life can be turned. And the officer guards his own soft places, because his service flagged a colleague’s affair last year and pulled his clearance, on the sound theory that a man in love can be made to choose, and the choice can be made to cost. “Everyone loves something,” he tells the new recruit. “Your job is to find it before the other side does.” Love, in his trade, is leverage in the target and exposure in yourself.<\/p>\n

A composer works past midnight in a room with one lamp and a piano and a manuscript that will not come right. There was a woman, years ago, and she wanted the ordinary things, the house and the evenings and the children, and he sent her away because the work asks for all of a man and leaves nothing for the evenings. He has chosen the score over the woman, the thing that will outlive him over the thing that would have warmed the years and then died with them. He is married to the work. The symphony does not age or leave or grieve. Love, to him, is the mortal comfort he renounced for the deathless one, the lower tie cut so the higher could hold.<\/p>\n

A man on the train scrolls the app and lets his thumb decide. The faces come up and he swipes and the next face comes up, and he has three conversations going and a date Thursday and a better profile already loading under his thumb. He keeps the rotation full and the options open, and he treats the settling as the failure, the closing of the account while the market still trades. “Why lock in,” he says to his friend, “when there’s always someone a swipe away who clears the bar by more.” Love, to him, is a market that never shuts, and the man who commits has stopped reading the tape.<\/p>\n

A researcher pulls up the scans and points to the bright spots, the reward circuit lighting like a slot machine, the oxytocin on the bond, the vasopressin in the vole that makes the male stay by the female and guard the burrow. “This is the thing the poets cried over,” he says, not unkindly. “It is a wet program that evolution wrote to keep us mating and minding the young.” To call it a way of knowing is to mistake a feeling for a faculty. Love is a state, a chemistry, a bias the genes installed, and a serious man names the molecule and moves on. Love, to him, is not knowledge. It is the absence of it dressed in feeling.<\/p>\n

One man stands apart, because he does not flee the bedside out of strategy or doctrine. He had it. Forty years of it. He held her hand at the end in a room with the rails up on the bed, and he knew every line of that hand the way the man in the gray morning knows his wife’s, and then the hand went cold and stayed cold. He will not love again. He is courteous to the widow at church who would have him, and he goes home alone, and he keeps the door shut, because love is the door that loss comes through and he has been through that door once and once is the whole of what a man can bear. Here is the hardest disagreement in the room, because he and Nussbaum agree on every fact. Love opens you to the worst that can happen. She says love anyway, with open eyes, because the loss is the price of the knowing and the knowing is the best thing a life affords. He says never again, and he knows exactly what she knows, and the same truth sends the two of them down opposite roads. She loved her own daughter and lost her and went on loving and writing. He shut the door. Neither can prove the other wrong, because the difference is not in the knowledge. It is in what a man decides to do with it.<\/p>\n

Behind the rest stands the fear Becker drew. Love is the place a man stakes everything he cannot afford to lose, and the bedside is the proof that he is a creature, bound to another creature, both of them headed the one way. The monk dissolves the stake. The officer turns it to use. The composer trades it for the work that will not die. The optimizer keeps it liquid so no single loss can ruin him. The researcher explains it down to chemistry so it cannot hurt. Each has found a way to love without standing in the open where love leaves a man. Nussbaum stands in the open. She says the knowing is worth the exposure, that a man learns what another life is worth only by letting it become necessary to his own.<\/p>\n

The honest reader turns the knife on her too. To crown love the summit of the knowing life is to lay on the beloved the weight Becker warned no mortal can carry, to make of romance the highest truth a secular age has left. And the philosopher who alone defends love’s knowledge while the cold men reduce it has made love her own mark of depth, the proof that she sees what the reducers miss. Even the praise of love can serve the one who praises it.<\/p>\n

And yet hers takes the fewest lies to hold. The monk must deny the worth of the particular face. The officer must deny the other man his standing as an end. The composer must call the warmth he gave up a lower thing. The optimizer must treat a person as a position. The researcher must deny that the feeling knows anything at all. The widower must deny himself the joy on the theory that the grief will follow. Love, as Nussbaum holds it, denies none of these. It grants the face its worth and the other his standing and the warmth its height and the person her wholeness and the feeling its truth, and it takes the grief into the bargain with open eyes, because the grief is only the size of the love and a man who fears the one has already refused the other. Her wager is that a creature can love another creature he is certain to lose and call the loving knowledge rather than folly.<\/p>\n

The light goes from gray to white. She stirs and her hand closes and her eyes come open and find him watching, and she says, what, and he says, nothing, go back to sleep, and she does. He knows she will die, or he will, and one of them will sit in the chair the widower sits in, and he watches her breathe and learns the hand again in the new light. The optimizer reloads the app. The researcher names the molecule. The composer scores another bar against the dark. The monk loosens his grip. The officer closes the file. The widower turns the lock. The man in the bed does the one thing not one of them will do. He stays, and he knows her, and the knowing is the love.<\/p>\n

The Need No One Outgrows: Martha Nussbaum and the Lie of Self-Sufficiency<\/strong><\/p>\n

The old man cannot hold the spoon. His right hand lies in his lap where the stroke left it, and his daughter sits on the edge of the bed in the rehab ward and brings the applesauce to his mouth, slow, and wipes his chin with the bib they tie on him at meals. He ran a freight company for thirty years. He fired men and bought rivals and never once asked another soul for help that he did not pay for. Now he opens his mouth for the spoon and closes his eyes while he swallows, and the daughter says, easy, Dad, no rush, and brings the next one up.<\/p>\n

Martha Craven Nussbaum (b. May 6, 1947) looks at that bed and says the scene is not an embarrassment to hurry past. It is where ethics begins. The man in the bed is the truth about the human animal, and the truth runs at both ends of the life. Sixty years before this someone held the same spoon to the same mouth and wiped the same chin, because the human infant comes into the world the most helpless of all the newborn creatures and stays helpless for years. The dry stretch in the middle, when a man earns and lifts and pays his own way and imagines he needs no one, is the short season, not the rule. Need is the rule. We are born into it, we end in it, and we pass through a brief clearing where we forget.<\/p>\n

Nussbaum returns to the cradle and calls it the foundation. The Fragility of Goodness argues that the good life rests on goods no man commands, the love and friendship and health and safety that fortune can take in an afternoon, and that wisdom faces this rather than flees it. Frontiers of Justice turns the argument on the great tradition of the social contract, the picture of citizens as free, equal, and independent men who come together to trade for mutual advantage. That picture, she writes, leaves out the infant, the sick, the aged, the man with the profound disability, everyone whose need cannot be repaid in kind. It writes out half of every life and calls the remainder the human condition. She refuses the edit. She puts the dependent man back at the center and builds a justice that begins with him.<\/p>\n

Set her word against the men who hear it as an insult, and there are many, and each has built a life on the dream Becker named.<\/p>\n

A man takes the stage at a founders’ conference in a black t-shirt and tells the room he came from nothing. “Nobody handed me a thing,” he says, and the room nods, and he does not mention the loan from his father that cleared the first payroll, because the loan has fallen out of the story the way a name falls off a building when the new owners buy it. He owns the building now. His name is on it. The whole architecture of his pride rests on the claim that he needed no one, that he stands where he stands by his own hand, and to have needed help is a stain he has scrubbed from the record. Need, to him, is the mark of the lesser man, the one who took the handout, the one who could not do it alone. His monument is the self he built, and the self he built owes nothing to anybody.<\/p>\n

A man in the Idaho panhandle walks the rows of his cache by headlamp, the shelves of rice in mylar, the diesel, the solar bank, the seed vault sealed against the year the trucks stop coming. He has cut the cords one by one, the grid, the county water, the supermarket, the government he expects to fail. Dependence, to him, is the throat the world holds a knife to. When the collapse comes the dependent die first, the ones who waited for the trucks, and he will not be among them. “You rely on the system, you’re already dead,” he tells his son, handing him the rifle. Self-reliance is his salvation, the needing of no man the whole of his faith.<\/p>\n

A monk in white walks a dusty road in Gujarat with a broom of soft wool, sweeping the path before each step so he crushes no living thing, a cloth tied over his mouth, his hair plucked out by the roots at the last festival because a razor is a possession and a possession is a chain. He owns nothing. He eats what the householders place in his hands and no more, and on the chosen day he will eat nothing at all and welcome it. Need, to him, is the rope that binds the soul to the wheel of return. He has spent his life killing his wants one by one so that nothing on earth can hold him, and the killing of need is the road to release. To want is to suffer. To need is to be owned.<\/p>\n

A man films himself in a ring light and posts the rules. Never chase. Hold the frame. Abundance, always abundance, because the woman reads need in a man the way an animal reads fear, and need ends desire the moment it shows. He keeps the rotation full so no single woman becomes a need. He works the gym and the wardrobe and the screenshots, and the whole craft, the entire discipline of it, is the performance of a man who wants nothing he cannot walk away from. “The second she thinks you need her, you’ve lost,” he says to the camera. Need, in his world, is the one tell that cannot be hidden and cannot be forgiven, the leak that sinks the ship.<\/p>\n

A woman of a certain family sets her back straight at the dinner her son has ruined by mentioning, at the table, the money. One does not discuss money. One does not complain of pain, or ask for help, or let the face show what the day has cost. She learned it at the school they sent her to at twelve, the cold dormitory, the rule against tears, and she has carried the bearing through a widowhood she described to no one. Need, in her code, is vulgar. The man who shows it has no breeding. The spoon at the end, the bib, the chin wiped by a stranger in a ward, this is the indignity the whole code exists to forbid, and the code will fail her in the end as it fails everyone, and she does not know that yet. Nussbaum knows the code from the inside. She came up in a home she has called sterile and fixed on money and status, and she turned against it, and the turning runs under everything she wrote.<\/p>\n

One gaze stands apart from these, because the man who holds it does not flee need out of the old terror. A woman drives her power chair to the statehouse to testify against the cut to her personal-assistance hours, the hours that pay the aide who gets her out of bed and into the day. She has heard the word needy her whole life, from the telethons that wept over her, from the institutions that locked away people like her on the theory that the dependent cannot live among the rest. She rejects the word. Not care, she says, but rights. Not pity, but the ramp and the budget and the door I can open on my own. Nothing about us without us. She and Nussbaum stand on the same ground and read it opposite. Nussbaum says dependency runs through every human life and carries no shame, that the cared-for man is a full citizen owed the conditions of his life. The advocate says the word dependency is the cage, that it justified the ward and the institution, and that what the disabled man wants is the world built so he can move through it on his own terms. Both defend the same dignity. They split on whether to honor the need or to engineer it away. This is the hardest disagreement in the room, because it is a quarrel between allies, and it does not resolve.<\/p>\n

Behind the rest sits the cradle Becker drew. The mogul, the prepper, the ascetic, the man in the ring light, the woman with the straight back, each has built a life around never again being the infant who cannot feed himself, never the old man in the bed. The self that owes nothing, depends on no one, wants nothing it cannot leave. Becker calls it the project against helplessness, and Nussbaum calls it the lie, and they are describing the same thing from the two sides. The hero spends his strength fleeing the bed. Nussbaum sits down beside it.<\/p>\n

The honest reader has to turn the knife on her too. To proclaim our neediness is its own bid for significance. The philosopher who alone looks at the dependency the brave men flee, who stands above the deniers by naming the thing they cannot say, has found a way to convert helplessness into authority. She makes need work for her. Even the embrace of dependence can serve the self that embraces it, the thinker made large by the size of the truth she will hold.<\/p>\n

And yet hers runs closest to the bone, because need is the bone. The mogul will be fed. The prepper will weaken and call for hands. The ascetic starves by a discipline that is one more thing he needs. The man in the ring light will grow old and want someone in the room. The woman with the straight back will take the spoon, and the code will not save her, and the bib will go on at meals. The lie of the self that needs nothing cracks at the cradle and cracks again at the deathbed, and only the dry clearing in the middle holds it up. Her wager is that a man can look at his own dependence and not flinch, and find there not the shame the others spend a life outrunning but the tie that binds him to the ones who fed him and the ones he will feed before the end.<\/p>\n

The daughter wipes his chin and sets the spoon in the empty bowl. The old man opens his eyes. Thank you, he says, the words slurred on the slack side of his mouth, and she says, anytime, Dad, and means it, and somewhere ahead of her a bed is being made up with the rails on the side, and she does not know it yet either. The spoon comes for everyone. One way of living meets it without shame.<\/p>\n

The Wonder That Asks Nothing: Martha Nussbaum and the Creature<\/strong><\/p>\n

The elephant stands over the bones in a dry riverbed in Amboseli. She is the matriarch, forty years old, and the bones are her family. She lifts a jawbone with her trunk and turns it, slow, and holds it a long moment, and the younger ones go quiet and gather close and reach their trunks toward the same gray relics in the dust. The researchers in the truck have seen this before. The animals return to their dead. They handle the bones of their own kind and pass over the bones of buffalo and zebra without a touch. Whatever the word for the standing and the turning, it is not nothing.<\/p>\n

Martha Craven Nussbaum looks at the elephant and grants her a world. In Justice for Animals she makes wonder the root of the whole project. Wonder, for her, is the gaze that stops at the creature and lets the creature be an end. The elephant has a form of life of her own, her own goods, her own losses, her own striving to live the life proper to her kind. Wonder beholds that and asks nothing of it. It does not price the animal, eat it, mount it, or cut it open. It looks, and the looking grants the creature standing in the world. From the wonder comes respect, and from the respect comes the claim that the elephant is owed the conditions of her flourishing.<\/p>\n

So wonder, in Nussbaum’s hands, is the refusal to use the animal to deny that we are animals. Set it against the gazes that do the using, and there are many, and each enlists the creature in a project against death.<\/p>\n

A bloodstock agent works the yearling sales at Keeneland in a linen jacket with the catalogue rolled in his fist. Hip 214 walks the ring. He watches the walk, the set of the hock, the way the colt tracks up behind, and he reads the page in his head, the sire standing for a hundred thousand, the dam’s first foal already black type. “Correct. Good shoulder. He’ll make a two-year-old,” he says to the man beside him, not turning. Wonder, to him, is the soft money, the sentimental bid that pays too much for a pretty head. The horse is a position. It carries his eye and his judgment into the future, and the future is where his name lives, on the winners his picks throw. The bloodline is the immortality project, and the colt is the vehicle of it.<\/p>\n

A client lies behind a fallen log on a concession in the Selous with a professional hunter at his shoulder and a rifle that cost more than a car. The bull is old, past breeding, the ivory heavy and worn. “Take him on the shoulder when he turns,” the PH breathes. The shot, the long tracking, the photograph with the head lifted on a propped tusk, the score for the record book, the mount that will fill the wall of the trophy room in the gated suburb back home, brass plaque, date, place. Wonder is here too, the awe before the largest thing that walks the earth, but the awe credits the man. Look what I stood before. Look what I took. The creature confirms his significance by dying at his hand, and the head on the wall is the monument that says a man was here and prevailed over the wild and the death in it.<\/p>\n

A postdoc badges into the vivarium at six in the morning under the hum of the air handlers. The macaque in cage nine has a number, not a name. The protocol has a number too, and the approval form, and the endpoint that the calendar already holds. “You can’t get attached to the model,” the senior tells the new tech, who has been standing too long at the cage. The animal is a system to perturb and read, and the reading buys human years, the paper, the grant, the therapy that might one day keep a man’s mother out of the ground a while longer. This is the trade Becker drew in its cleanest line. The beast dies so the man might not. Wonder, if it comes, is curiosity bent on the data, the elegant result, the mechanism laid bare, and the curiosity stops at the use.<\/p>\n

A preacher opens to Genesis on a Sunday and reads that man has dominion over the fish of the sea and the fowl of the air and every thing that creeps. The animals come to Adam to be named. Man alone bears the image of God. Man alone is saved. The creatures are a gift and a charge, and their worth descends from the Creator, and the wonder runs upward, to Him, never resting on the beast as on an end. The animal points past itself to the One who made it. And under the doctrine sits the old comfort Becker named, that man is not a beast, that the breath in him came from a height and returns to a height, that he will not lie down in the dust like the ox and stay there. The creature exists, in part, to mark the line that keeps man on the saved side of it.<\/p>\n

A wildlife cinematographer waits in a blind on the Pacific with a six hundred millimeter lens and a drone charging beside him and a delivery date from the streaming service. He needs the breach, the calf, the kill, the money shot that opens the episode and holds the subscriber through the credits. “We have to have the predation sequence by Thursday,” the producer says on the sat phone. He loves the whale. He has given his life to the cold and the waiting for it. And the whale, in his hands, becomes the sublime rendered into product, the awe packaged and sold and credited to his reel, the wonder real in ten million living rooms and converted, at the source, into standing for the man who shot it. He does not use the creature as the hunter does. He uses the image of it.<\/p>\n

A conservation ecologist runs the numbers on a fenced reserve where the elephants have bred past the land’s carrying capacity, and the acacia is stripped, and by August the whole population starves if nothing gives. He orders the cull. The helicopter, the darts, the families dropped in family units so none is left to mourn alone, the spreadsheet that balances after. He loves the savanna in its working order. He serves the species and the system, and the individual elephant is a figure against a limit. Here Nussbaum draws her sharpest line, because she centers the single creature and her single life, the matriarch with her own bones to grieve, and she will not write that life off to keep the ledger of the herd. The ecologist’s wonder rests on the whole. Hers rests on the one.<\/p>\n

Six men look at the animal, and the animal looks back, and the worlds divide on what the men can bear to see in the eye. The breeder sees a position. The hunter sees a conquest. The lab sees a model. The preacher sees a charge from above. The cameraman sees footage. The ecologist sees a unit of a system he loves. Each gaze keeps the man on his own side of the old line, above the creature, in command of it, exempt from its fate. Wonder asks him to cross back. It asks him to see in the matriarch’s standing over the bones a grief that rhymes with his own, and to take the rhyme not as a demotion but as a kinship, the news that he too belongs to the order of things that strive and lose and die. The terror Becker named is the news itself. Wonder is the gaze that hears the news and does not flinch.<\/p>\n

The honest reader has to turn the knife once more, against wonder too. The gaze is not free of the project. The man who wonders performs a higher kind of seeing, and the performance sets him above the breeder and the hunter and the lab, the cosmopolitan soul refined enough to grant the elephant her world. Wonder confers distinction on the wonderer. I am the man who sees the creature whole, and the seeing is my fineness, my proof that I have risen. Even the refusal to use the animal can curdle into a use, the elephant made the occasion of a man’s display of his own depth.<\/p>\n

And yet. Of the six gazes, hers takes the least. The breeder needs the colt to win, the hunter needs the bull to fall, the lab needs the macaque to die, the preacher needs the beast to mark his exemption, the cameraman needs the breach, the ecologist needs the cull to balance. Wonder needs the elephant to do nothing at all. It asks her for no win, no death, no data, no doctrine, no footage, no place in a count. It leaves her standing in the riverbed with her bones. Of all the ways a man can look at a creature, the wonder that asks nothing is the one that lets the creature be, and that, in a species built to break the mirror, is close to the rarest thing there is.<\/p>\n

The matriarch turns the jawbone once more and sets it down in the dust. She stands a while. Then she moves off down the riverbed and the herd folds in behind her, and the truck does not follow, and the bones stay where they have always been.<\/p>\n

The Therapist of Desire: Martha Nussbaum and Philip Rieff<\/strong><\/p>\n

Martha Craven Nussbaum (b. May 6, 1947) titles a book The Therapy of Desire and means the word straight. The Hellenistic schools, she argues there, treat philosophy as medicine for the soul. The Epicurean offers his fourfold cure for the fear of gods and the fear of death. The Stoic teaches the patient to stop wanting what fortune controls. The Skeptic suspends the judgments that torment him. Each school runs a clinic, and the sick come for relief from terror, grief, rage, and the desire that gives no rest. Nussbaum recovers the model and commends it. Philosophy heals, and a life without the healing goes sick.<\/p>\n

Philip Rieff (1922-2006) spent a career watching that word travel. In Freud: The Mind of the Moralist he read the new psychology as the latest in a line of moral teachings. In The Triumph of the Therapeutic he named the figure the teaching produces. He calls him psychological man, the heir to religious man and economic man, anti-heroic, shrewd, counting his satisfactions and his costs, treating deep commitment as the chief risk a sensible person avoids.<\/p>\n

A culture, in Rieff’s account, is a system of moral demands. It binds men with interdicts, the thou-shalt-nots that sink so far into the self they need no argument, and it grants remissions, the licensed releases that keep the burden bearable. Faith installs the demands. Guilt enforces them. Salvation rewards the man who carries them to the end. The therapeutic order dissolves this arrangement. It honors no interdict it cannot defend by appeal to health. Its man seeks well-being, not salvation. Religious man went to church to be saved. Psychological man goes to the clinic to feel better, and Rieff’s hard line follows: the hospital succeeds the church.<\/p>\n

Set Nussbaum’s lifework beside this.<\/p>\n

Begin with the gift in the title. The Stoics she studies run an interdictory clinic. Their cure demands apatheia, the extirpation of the passions, the killing of attachment so the sage stands beyond the reach of luck. The regimen is renunciation, hard and total. Nussbaum keeps the clinic and fires the regimen. Across her work, and in Upheavals of Thought above all, she argues against extirpation. The emotions are not diseases to cut out. They are judgments about what a man values and cannot control, and a good life keeps them, tends them, schools them toward better objects. She takes a renunciatory tradition and turns it into a tradition of cultivation. She drops the interdict and keeps the comfort. Rieff names that exact substitution as the signature of the therapeutic.<\/p>\n

Move to the capabilities approach, the heart of her political philosophy. Rieff says every culture makes demands. Nussbaum makes demands too, and her ten capabilities carry the force of a moral code. But the vector reverses. The old order makes its demands on the self, that the self renounce, obey, and bear. Nussbaum’s order makes its demands on the institutions, that they secure for each man the conditions of his flourishing. Life, bodily health, bodily integrity, the senses, emotional development, affiliation, play, control over one’s surroundings. She worked these out through the World Institute for Development Economics Research in Helsinki and tested them against the lives of poor women in India, and she holds that a constitution must guarantee them as a matter of justice. The state becomes the great clinic, chartered to provision well-being and answerable when it fails. Rieff watched the hospital rise where the church had stood. Nussbaum draws the blueprint and files it with the founding law.<\/p>\n

Her theory of the emotions supplies the charter for a regime of emotional cultivation. If feelings are appraisals, a man can train them. Compassion can be grown, and Not for Profit hands the growing to the schools and to the novel, the instrument she trusts to build the narrative imagination. Fear can be governed, and The Monarchy of Fear reads as the manual for a democracy learning to manage its panic. Disgust and shame can be disarmed, and her work on the law sets out to strip them from legislation and the courtroom. Each book cultivates feeling toward health. That is the therapeutic ideal written up as a research program.<\/p>\n

Watch which emotions she trusts and which she expels. The affects she most distrusts, disgust and shame, belong to the old interdictory order, the guardians that police the boundary and divide the clean from the unclean. She treats them as pathologies and asks the law to remove them. She raises compassion, the sympathy that crosses the boundary and dissolves it, into the central political emotion in their place. In Rieff’s vocabulary she dismantles the interdicts and enthrones remission. She retires the guarding emotions and crowns the welcoming one.<\/p>\n

Rieff’s later work, the Sacred Order volumes and My Life Among the Deathworks, mourns the loss of sacred order, the authority above man that confers worth from a height and stands over the self as judge. Nussbaum grounds human dignity in the creature’s own powers. The worth inheres in the capacity to flourish, owed across the level field by institutions to selves, descended from no source above. She converted to Judaism and keeps the faith, yet her arguments run immanent throughout. Man’s dignity rests on what man can do and be. Rieff files this with the third culture, the modern settlement that denies the sacred order and seats the self on the ground the sacred used to hold.<\/p>\n

Rieff’s therapeutic is anti-creedal. It holds nothing sacred, refuses all binding content, and sells permission under the name of health. Nussbaum binds. She insists on a list and a must. A regime that denies a man bodily integrity is unjust, she says, and she will not soften the claim into a taste or a mood. Her demands have teeth, and teeth are interdictory in form even when the content speaks of flourishing rather than obedience. She moralizes. She does not peddle release. She attacks narcissism in Citadels of Pride and defends a constructive guilt that answers to real wrongs. She separates flourishing from contentment, eudaimonia from the pleasant feeling, and so she refuses the reduction Rieff dreads, the collapse of the good into the manipulable sense of well-being. Her Aristotle hands her an objective account of human function that no mood can satisfy and no mood can fake.<\/p>\n

Nussbaum is the most developed answer the therapeutic order has produced to Rieff’s charge against it. He predicted that a culture stripped of the sacred could not hold a moral demand system in place, that it would thin toward permission and at last toward nothing. She rebuilds the demand system from inside the therapy. She regrows binding content out of the human alone, an account thick enough to obligate and immanent enough to need no height. She is the therapeutic order at its most intelligent, the version that declines to become the empty thing Rieff said it must become.<\/p>\n

Whether the rebuild holds is the question he leaves at her door. Her order carries obligation without transcendence, the interdict with no source above the self it commands. She bets that the dignity of the creature can bear the load the sacred once bore, that a man will renounce and sacrifice and endure on the strength of his own worth and his neighbor’s, with nothing standing over him. Rieff doubts the bet. He spent his last books arguing that the demand needs a height to issue from, and that an order resting on the self in the end releases the self. The argument between them does not close. It marks the seam. She has built the finest therapeutic ethics anyone has on offer, and the open question is the one Rieff put to the whole order. Can it make a man carry a weight, across a lifetime, against his own comfort, with nothing holding the weight in place except the man who is asked to lift it.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

Martha Craven Nussbaum (b. May 6, 1947) is the most widely read female philosopher. Her work reaches across ancient Greek ethics, the theory of emotions, feminism, constitutional law, development economics, education, and animal welfare, and through all of it she … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"om_disable_all_campaigns":false,"_monsterinsights_skip_tracking":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_active":false,"_monsterinsights_sitenote_note":"","_monsterinsights_sitenote_category":0,"footnotes":""},"categories":[27596],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-193798","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-philosophy"],"aioseo_notices":[],"aioseo_head":"\n\t\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t\n\t\t