Cultivating Humanity

A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education

Martha C. Nussbaum, Martha C. Nussbaum

• Publisher: Harvard University Press
• Year: 1998
• Print ISBN: 9780674179493, 9780674179486
• eBook ISBN: 9780674735477
• Topic: Education
• Subtopic: Education General

How can higher education today create a community of critical thinkers and searchers for truth that transcends the boundaries of class, gender, and nation? Martha C. Nussbaum, philosopher and classicist, argues that contemporary curricular reform is already producing such "citizens of the world" in its advocacy of diverse forms of cross-cultural studies. Her vigorous defense of "the new education" is rooted in Seneca's ideal of the citizen who scrutinizes tradition critically and who respects the ability to reason wherever it is found—in rich or poor, native or foreigner, female or male.

Drawing on Socrates and the Stoics, Nussbaum establishes three core values of liberal education: critical self-examination, the ideal of the world citizen, and the development of the narrative imagination. Then, taking us into classrooms and campuses across the nation, including prominent research universities, small independent colleges, and religious institutions, she shows how these values are (and in some instances are not) being embodied in particular courses. She defends such burgeoning subject areas as gender, minority, and gay studies against charges of moral relativism and low standards, and underscores their dynamic and fundamental contribution to critical reasoning and world citizenship.

For Nussbaum, liberal education is alive and well on American campuses in the late twentieth century. It is not only viable, promising, and constructive, but it is essential to a democratic society. Taking up the challenge of conservative critics of academe, she argues persuasively that sustained reform in the aim and content of liberal education is the most vital and invigorating force in higher education today.

CHAPTER ONE

Socratic Self-Examination

If I tell you that this is the greatest good for a human being, to engage every day in arguments about virtue and the other things you have heard me talk about, examining both myself and others, and if I tell you that the unexamined life is not worth living for a human being, you will be even less likely to believe what I am saying. But that’s the way it is, gentlemen, as I claim, though it’s not easy to convince you of it.

Socrates, in Plato, Apology 38A

The Old Education, in Aristophanes’ portrait, acculturated young citizens to traditional values. They learned to internalize and to love their traditions, and they were discouraged from questioning them. As Aristophanes sees it, the most dangerous opponent of this Old Education is Socrates, whose questions subvert the authority of tradition, who recognizes no authority but that of reason, asking even the gods to give a reasoned account of their preferences and commands. Socrates’ “Think-Academy” is depicted as a source of civic corruption, where young people learn to justify beating their parents. This fictional attack fed a real suspicion of the Socratic way of life. Athenian leaders, unsettled at the idea that young people would search for arguments to justify their beliefs rather than simply following parents and civic authorities, blamed Socrates for the cultural disharmony they sensed around them. Charged with corrupting the young, he eventually forfeited his life.

The ancient debate between Socrates and his enemies is of value for our present educational controversies. Like Socrates, our colleges and universities are being charged with corruption of the young. Seeing young people emerge from modern “Think-Academies” with many challenges to traditional thinking—about women, about race, about social justice, about patriotism—social conservatives of many kinds have suggested that these universities are homes for the corrupt thinking of a radical elite whose ultimate aim is the subversion of the social fabric.¹ Once again an education that promotes acculturation to the time-honored traditions of “Western Civilization” is being defended against a more Socratic education that insists on teaching students to think for themselves. At institutions of the most varied sorts, students are indeed asking questions and challenging the authority of tradition.

At Notre Dame University in South Bend, Indiana, students in a course on science and human values, taught by philosopher Philip Quinn, fulfill the institution’s two-semester philosophy requirement. Quinn, a Catholic who left Brown University for Notre Dame because he wished to teach in a Catholic institution, sees the requirement as a way of getting even the most passive students to think for themselves and to argue for their beliefs. Most students in the class say that the philosophy requirement has made them better Catholics by forcing them to defend their choices with arguments. Several students dissent. Speaking for this group, Kevin Janicki, a tall, athletic blond man, says that philosophy has led him to question his Catholic faith by forcing him to notice how little rational argument is in evidence when the university administration handles issues relating to women and homosexuality. They ask you to take philosophy and ask questions, and then they ask you to obey authority and to ask no questions. He stands in the back of the crowded classroom puzzled.

At Belmont University, a Baptist institution in Nashville, Tennessee, I spend the day talking about ancient Greek ethics to a group of remarkably eager and well-informed students.² Then I go over to Professor Ginger Justus’ house for an informal supper with philosophy majors. Justus, a gifted young philosophy teacher, greets the students warmly; her voice crackles with humor. As we all sit around on the floor eating, the students tell me of their decision to major in philosophy at a time when that department has recently won permission to separate itself from the religion department. They love what they are doing, they tell me, but many of their friends have dropped them. They are under strong parental pressure not to associate with them, since philosophy majors are thought to be tainted by “secular humanism.”

At Brown University just before Christmas I meet with my three senior honors thesis advisees for 1995. Amy Meselson is writing about the Stoics and Aristotle on free will and determinism. She trudges in early to discuss the twenty single-spaced pages of meticulous textual analysis she has given me that morning. Nicole Li, a second-generation citizen of Chinese and British origins, is writing about women and revenge, connecting ancient Greek accounts with modern ethical and legal arguments. She brings me a new book on justifiable homicide, asking me to be sure to read it in the next two days (along with two others she gave me the week before) so that she can take them all home to Seattle for vacation. Liliana Garcés is writing about philosophical and religious arguments for and against abortion in her native country of Colombia, from which she emigrated to the United States at age twelve, speaking no English. (Her mother worked as a janitor to send her through parochial schools, and now works as a beautician.) A serene, lucid woman with a lightly accented voice (and a 4.0 average in philosophy), Liliana is about to return to Medellin to conduct interviews over the vacation. We go over her interview questions before discussing her law school application. Two of these three thesis topics would have been unknown in an American philosophy program even fifteen years ago. And yet those two are just as much in the ancient Greek tradition as the first one—like the writings of Seneca and Marcus Aurelius in the tradition of critical reflection stemming from Socrates, applying concepts from philosophy to the analysis and criticism of one’s own culture.

At the Cambridge health club, Billy Tucker has received a good grade in his first philosophy test, about Socrates and his arguments. As we talk across the counter, he exudes pride and enthusiasm. He thought philosophy was for people in the Ivy League, and now he knows he can do it. Krishna Mallick has been asking them to use the techniques they learned in thinking about Socrates to analyze arguments in the newspaper. Tucker reports that he is detecting lots of fallacies. Next week they will stage a classroom debate about Dr. Kevorkian and the morality of his conduct. Tucker is surprised that he was asked to find arguments for a position that he does not hold.

Philosophical questioning arises wherever people are. These students are discovering that philosophy is not an abstract, remote discipline, but one that is woven, as Socrates’ arguments were woven, into the fabric of their daily lives, their discussions of life and death, abortion and revenge, institutional justice and religion. Philosophy breaks out wherever people are encouraged to think for themselves, questioning in a Socratic way. For all these students, philosophy supplies something that formerly was lacking—an active control or grasp of questions, the ability to make distinctions, a style of interaction that does not rest on mere assertion and counterassertion—all of which they find important to their lives with themselves and one another.

In colleges and universities around the country, students are following Socrates, questioning their views to discover how far they survive the test of argument. Although Socratic procedures have been familiar for a long time in basic philosophy courses, philosophy is now reaching a far larger number of students than it did fifty years ago, students of all classes and backgrounds and religious origins. And philosophy, which at one time was taught as a remote and abstract discipline, is increasingly being linked to the analysis and criticism of current events and ideas. Instead of learning logical analysis in a vacuum, students now learn to dissect the arguments they find in newspapers, to argue about current controversies in medicine and law and sports, to think critically about the foundations of their political and even religious views.

To parents in contemporary America, as to parents in the time of Socrates, such developments can appear very unsettling. Argument seems like a cold strange invader into the habits of the home. The father in Aristophanes came home one day to encounter an argument in favor of father-beating. The parents of the philosophy majors at Belmont may encounter “secular humanism” at the end of the semester, where previously there had been traditional Christianity. Nicole Li’s parents send her to Brown and find her making arguments in defense of women who take extralegal revenge against their abusers. The Socratic emphasis on reason seems not only subversive but also cold. To kind and affectionate people, it can seem insulting to demand an argument for some political belief they have long held and have taught to their children. It can appear that their cherished traditions must now undergo scrutiny from the point of view of an elite intellectual world that is strange to them. It is not surprising that the proliferation of “applied ethics” courses, and of philosophy generally, in our colleges and universities should alarm many parents.

Tradition is one foe of Socratic reason. But Socrates has other enemies as well. His values are assailed by the left as well as by the right. It is fashionable today in progressive intellectual circles to say that rational argument is a male Western device, in its very nature subversive of the equality of women and minorities and non-Western people. Socratic argument is suspected, here again, of being arrogant and elitist—but in this case the elitism is seen as that of a dominant Western intellectual tradition that has persistently marginalized outsiders. The very pretense that one is engaged in the disinterested pursuit of truth can be a handy screen for prejudice. Such critics would look askance at the thesis projects of Liliana Garcés and Nicole Li: as powerless, marginalized people, they are allowing themselves to be co-opted by the dominant liberal tradition when they devote their energies to rational argument in the Socratic tradition.

But Socrates’ opponents on the left make the same error as do his conservative opponents, when they suppose that argument is subversive of democratic values. Socratic argument is not undemocratic. Nor is it subversive of the just claims of excluded people. In fact, as Socrates knew, it is essential to a strong democracy and to any lasting pursuit of justice. In order to foster a democracy that is reflective and deliberative, rather than simply a marketplace of competing interest groups, a democracy that genuinely takes thought for the common good, we must produce citizens who have the Socratic capacity to reason about their beliefs. It is not good for democracy when people vote on the basis of sentiments they have absorbed from talk-radio and have never questioned. This failure to think critically produces a democracy in which people talk at one another but never have a genuine dialogue. In such an atmosphere bad arguments pass for good arguments, and prejudice can all too easily masquerade as reason. To unmask prejudice and to secure justice, we need argument, an essential tool of civic freedom.

Liberal education in our colleges and universities is, and should be, Socratic, committed to the activation of each student’s independent mind and to the production of a community that can genuinely reason together about a problem, not simply trade claims and counterclaims. Despite our allegiances to families and traditions, despite our diverse interests in correcting injustices to groups within our nation, we can and should reason together in a Socratic way, and our campuses should prepare us to do so. By looking at this goal of a community of reason as it emerges in the thought of Socrates and the Greek Stoics, we can show its dignity and its importance for democratic self-government. Connecting this idea to the teaching of philosophy in undergraduate courses of many sorts, we shall see that it is not Socratic education, but its absence, that would be fatal to the health of our society.

Socratic Inquiry

Greek philosophers before Socrates claimed to have authoritative knowledge of the topics on which they spoke. Parmenides’ poem depicted the philosopher as an initiate who has received insight into the truth from a goddess who holds the keys of justice in her hands. From this vantage point he denounces the ordinary opinions of “mortals” as riddled through and through with error. Empedocles claimed special knowledge on the basis of his own long cycle of incarnations as “a boy, a girl, a bush, a bird, and a dumb sea fish.” “Know well,” he asserted, “that the truth is in what I say to you.” Heraclitus compared his pithy aphorisms to the sayings of the Delphic oracle, implying that they contained a hidden wisdom that the listener must work to extract. Followers of Pythagoras thought of their teacher as a wonder-working sage, and formed communities bound by vows of silence to perpetuate his wisdom.

None of these teachers had a democratic idea of learning. For none was the truth something publicly available to all who can think;³ for none was it the case that “everyone has something of his own to contribute to the truth.”⁴ Furthermore, the preferred subject matter of these thinkers was usually remote from the daily choices of a democratic citizenry—the creation of the cosmos, the number and nature of the elements, the relation between thought and being. For these reasons, such philosophical thinkers—who operated in Ionia and in southern Italy, not in Athens—did not have a close rapport with the developing Athenian democracy.

That democracy, however, had home-grown thinkers of other types, who supported better the emerging regime’s desire for public evidence and public argument. Historians such as Herodotus gathered data about populations of many kinds in order to reflect about political values. Medical writers publicized facts about epidemics and about the structure of the body. Tragic poets depicted scenes of reasoning about central moral issues that imitated, and in turn shaped, the evolving culture of public debate in the democratic assembly. The distinctive contribution of Socrates was to bring sustained unrelenting philosophical argument to bear on these issues of communal concern—as Cicero later put it, bringing philosophy from the heavens down to earth.⁵ His activity did not please everyone who encountered it.

Socrates walks up to a leading politician—a person who “seems knowing and clever to many people, and especially to himself.”⁶ He engages him in questioning about his alleged expertise, asking him no doubt, as Socrates does so often, for a coherent, contradiction-free account of some central legal and political concepts, concepts such as equality, justice, and law. The expert proves unable to answer Socrates’ questions in a satisfactory way. Socrates professes surprise. He goes away, concluding that he is after all a little more knowing than this expert, since he at least knows how difficult the concepts are, and how much his own understanding of them stands in need of further clarification, whereas the expert lacks not only an adequate understanding of the concepts but also knowledge of his own inadequacy. Socrates concludes that he is a very useful figure for democratic government to have around—like a stinging gadfly on the back of a noble but sluggish horse.⁷

When intellectuals behave this way, the people they intend to benefit are not always happy. Socrates proposed that he should be given a salaried position for life at the city’s expense. The citizens of Athens had a different idea. To people who are deeply immersed in practical affairs, especially in a democracy, the questioning intellectual—especially, perhaps, the philosopher—is always a slightly suspect character. Why is this person so detached? What is his field of empirical expertise? What gives him the right to walk up to people and question them, as if he had the right to tell them what was wrong with them? Today too, when our campuses “sting” students into rethinking their values, there is likely to be anxiety and resentment. It is very natural to feel that the faculty who are causes of this rethinking must be a self-appointed radical elite, detached from and insensitive to popular values.

Socrates said that the unexamined life is not worth living for a human being.⁸ In other words, this life of questioning is not just somewhat useful; it is an indispensable part of a worthwhile life for any person and any citizen. What did he mean by this?

Most of the people Socrates encountered were living passive lives, lives in which, in the most important things, their actions and choices were dictated by conventional beliefs. These beliefs inhabited and shaped them, but they had never made them truly their own, because they had never really looked into them, asking whether there were other ways of doing things, and which ways were truly worthy of guiding them in their personal and political lives.⁹ To this extent, they had not made their own selves fully their own. Many of their beliefs were no doubt true, and possibly noble; this Socrates acknowledges, when he holds that education progresses not through indoctrination from the teacher, but through a critical scrutiny of the pupil’s own beliefs. When he compares democracy to a noble though sluggish horse, he implies that much of the material of conventional belief is on the right track. The real problem is the sluggishness of thought characteristic of these democratic citizens, their tendency to go through life without thinking about alternatives and reasons.

It is not surprising that they were this way, given the education they had had. Aristophanes’ humorously nostalgic portrayal no doubt exaggerates: was there ever a time in any part of human history when young people asked no questions? But its very exaggeration shows the depth of a certain cultural ideal: that of the strong, manly young citizen who is quick to sing the old warlike songs and horrified by the thought of questioning or innovation. It is this sort of citizen whom Socrates intends to awaken.

We might wonder how such questioning can bring a practical benefit. When a skeptical culture looks at today’s campuses from a distance, it is easy to judge that young people who question convention are rude and disrespectful, rootless and hedonistic. Their Socratic tendency to ask for reasons and arguments makes them insolent without making them wise. But if we look more closely at Plato’s account of Socratic questioning, we will begin to understand how it could be beneficial to democracy; and we will begin to recognize some of those same benefits in our colleges and universities.

In the first book of Plato’s Republic, Socrates and a group of his friends gather at the home of Cephalus, a wealthy elderly man. The dramatic setting chosen by Plato makes the reader vividly aware of problems of justice and right action. For the reader knows what the characters do not know—that some years after the peaceful scene of philosophical discussion depicted here, they will be embroiled on opposing sides in a violent political conflict that will result in death for three of them and risk of life for them all. A group of oligarchs known as the Thirty Tyrants will seize power in Athens, led by members of Plato’s own family. Using slogans appealing to the notion of justice (“we must cleanse the city of the unjust”), they will set about enriching themselves in any way they can, arranging political charges against wealthy citizens in order to seize their property. Plato intends his reader to recall a famous speech by the orator Lysias—a silent character in the Republic, brother of the prominent characte...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• Contents
• Preface
• Introduction: The Old Education and the Think-Academy
• Chapter One: Socratic Self-Examination
• Chapter Two: Citizens of the World
• Chapter Three: The Narrative Imagination
• Chapter Four: The Study of Non-Western Cultures
• Chapter Five: African-American Studies
• Chapter Six: Women’s Studies
• Chapter Seven: The Study of Human Sexuality
• Chapter Eight: Socrates in the Religious University
• Conclusion: The “New” Liberal Education
• Notes
• Index