Nussbaum Discusses Philosophies Of Responsibility
by Cori Anne Winrock

Last Tuesday, philosopher Martha S. Nussbaum spoke at Oberlin as a part of the College’s 2001-2002 Convocation Series.
Over the past 15 years Nussbaum has received five invitations to speak at the College, each coming from a different academic department.
In this visit she delivered two separate talks. Her earlier talk Tuesday afternoon was addressed to a small group of students in Wilder, while her convocation speech later that evening in Finney Chapel attracted a large crowd of faculty and students.
The first session addressed her most recent book, Upheavals of Thought: The Intelligence of Emotions. Nussbaum, with her legs curled up on a chair, addressed her book chapter by chapter. The book’s premise is to discuss the relation between emotions and reasons, linking academic studies with real life. She opened her discussion by speaking of her intense fascination with the Greeks and Romans, in particular the Stoics, and their beliefs on emotions. Noting that when writing a book such as this people need to be able to more easily relate, Nussbaum said, “It is important to get an example from life on the table, and mine it.” In her book on emotions, Nussbaum chose the death of her own mother in reference to a personal account of grief in her own life.
Nussbaum explained the intelligent perception contained in emotions such as grief, by exemplifying that we grieve over something specific. Nussbaum showed how grief includes things, such as the thought of a person. Nussbaum said, “[Grief] may contain lots of bad pain and feelings, but it also contains thought. Grief would be easier if it was just a stomach ache.” The goal of her book was to break down the sharp dichotomy between thoughts and emotions. Each chapter highlighting a different historical sense of emotions in Greek and Roman history, while contrasting it with arguments that are at once empowering and enlightening to the human perspective on emotion. Nussbaum focuses in on the emotion as a belief, an inscription of value or importance to each specific person.
Nussbaum challenges the Stoic view of emotions being surges of energy by stating that emotions are much more work than that. She argues that there has to be a distinguishing factor between emotions of current issues, and those of the background or lurking emotions. A basic premise is that we have emotions and beliefs that we do not always notice, such as the fact that the chairs we sit on are solid, and we believe them to be so.
Nussbaum continued to speak of later chapters in her book, detailing her beliefs on animals having emotions, as well as cross-cultural differences in emotions. She also included a section on psychoanalytic viewpoints through child-development. She closed her afternoon session with audience question and answer sessions, based around compassion and the aftermath of the World Trade Center bombings. She spoke about the need for cross-cultural understanding.
Nussbaum has dedicated her career to putting plans such as these into action. From 1987 to 1993 she held a position as advisor to research at the World Institute for Developmental Economics Research in Helsinki. At the same time, Nussbaum has worked to articulate ideas concerning injustice, in particular towards women, in the writing of two books and a lecture series.
In her evening convocation speech Nussbaum gave an address entitled “Global Duties: Western Philosophy’s Problematic Legacy.” Her address opened with the illuminating statistics of life expectancy of an American child, 76.4 years, in comparison to Third World nations, where there is a drop to around 37.4 years. Her point was to drive in that survival is based on basic human goods, and that matters of chance dictate where one is born, and thus one’s life expectancy and living environment.
Nussbaum highlighted her many insights toward justice, while accrediting Cicero as the first historically to write significantly about justice. To demonstrate the centrality of Cicero’s discourse on justice, she uses his passages as the grounding against which most of her arguments are made. Nussbaum addresses the contradiction of immediate action against crimes of humanity, while deliberately ignoring the need for basic human goods such as food, as a perfect example of flaw in Cicero’s view on justice. She argues that duties of justice should also be duties of aide. Nussbaum continues on through a series of arguments against Cicero’s concept of the insignificance of external blows in comparison to the will. Quoting lengthy passages of Cicero’s text, Nussbaum delicately dissects details that she uses in argument against what she believes is a fiercely wrong view of world matters.

Martha Nussbaum attended Wellesley College and New York University, as well as Harvard, where she received her M.A. and her Ph.D. Nussbaum has written ten books, and given many lectures world-wide. She also runs up to ten miles a day. Next year she will be helping to run a conference in India on ethics and globalization.