Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education by Martha C. Nussbaum

Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education Reviews

• 
  Rachel

  “There is no greater threat to democracy than the unreflective, assertive citizen.”
  
  Martha Nussbaum’s Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education is an inspiring guide to how to teach the liberal arts in a way that promotes critical reflection and stimulates sympathy for others. Nussbaum surveys various programs and profiles numerous educators to assess the state of Culture Studies in America. The results are mixed. Anyone teaching Culture Studies, whether in a formal program or simply as an integrated component of their existing curriculum, should carefully study Nussbaum’s findings and consider integrating her suggestions for improving their pedagogy into their curriculum.
  
  Many universities and colleges have initiated programs to promote a more diverse curriculum on their campuses; however, Nussbaum shows that their success (measured by student development of their critical and emotional faculties) is dependent on whether they are grounded on a world-citizen view or an identity-politics view. An identity-politics view sees the polis as a “marketplace of identity-based interest groups jockeying for power, and views difference as something to be affirmed rather than understood” (110). On the other hand, the world-citizen view aims for students to transcend differences via communication and dialogue and deliberation in a democratic process which promotes a more just and equal society (110). Identity politics under the guise of “multiculturalism” can be an anti-humanist view, especially when it asserts that “only female writers understand the experience of women” (111); or, that only Black writers understand the experience of Black people. Nussbaum refutes this notion by appealing to our common sense experience of simply being human and our capacity to imagine ourselves as other. Her citing of Ralph Ellison’s self-proclaimed purpose of writing Invisible Man as being to reveal the human universals within a black American is particularly persuasive (110).
  
  Nussbaum proceeds to identify the most common errors in Culture Studies programs: chauvinism, romanticism, normative chauvinism, and normative Arcadianism. Chauvinism occurs when one fails to appreciate the differences between one’s own culture and the culture under investigation. However, when one focuses exclusively on the differences between one’s own culture and another’s, you are committing the error of romanticism. Normative chauvinism occurs when you use your own culture as the standard, the “norm”, by which you evaluate other cultures. Finally, normative Arcadianism is viewing another culture as mystical, markedly spiritual, and pastoral. This particular error most frequently occurs when an investigator focuses on the culture’s past instead of present. Cultures are plural and have a present as well as a past (127-8). A good example of how to do Culture Studies right is Daniel Bonevac’s Beyond the Western Tradition: Readings in Moral and Political Philosophy; Derrida’s discussion of Chinese culture is an example of the wrong way (see Zhang Longxi’s critique of Derrida). Other examples include Herodotus’ Histories, the right way; Tacitus’ Germania, the wrong way. How do we do Culture Studies right? Focus on human problems. Examine how different cultures deal with our shared problems, and then critically evaluate their respective effectiveness.
  
  Narrative prose is a particularly fecund way to examine our shared human condition. It bridges the gap between self and other: “By inviting the spectator to identify with the tragic hero, at the same time portraying the hero as a relatively good person, whose distress does not stem from deliberate wickedness, the drama makes compassion for suffering seize the imagination” (93). “The artistic form makes its spectator perceive, for a time, the invisible people of their world—at least a beginning of social justice” (94). For example, in the chauvinistic and misogynistic culture of classical Greece, the male “is brought up against the fact that people [barbarian women, for instance] as articulate and able as he face disaster and shame in some ways that males do not; and he is asked to think of that as something relevant to himself” (94). Of course, not all narratives are equal. Wayne C. Booth points out in his brilliant work The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction, the necessity of asking: “How does the text invite us to view our fellow human beings; with cheap cynicism and disdain, cheap sensationalistic pleasure that debases human dignity, or with ‘respect for the soul’” (100). Nussbaum’s conclusion that “sympathetic and critical reading should go hand in hand” is an opinion that I fully endorse. George Eliot, my favorite author, defines morality as “a delicate sense of one’s neighbor’s rights, an active participation in the joys and sorrows of our fellows, a magnanimous acceptance of privation or suffering for ourselves when it is the condition of good for others—in a word, the extension and intensification of our sympathetic nature.” Reading, if practiced with acuity, enlarges the soul.
  
  
  
  
• 
  Richard

  I'm not enough of a scholar to evaluate Nussbaums's treatment of "The Clouds" or Rousseau (are you?) but her treatment of the major topics is thought provoking -- and thus the book is well worth reading.
  
  The only significant flaws I stumbled upon were her dismissal of the paradox of democratic change, and of the objections of ideology.
  
  The former: when is a minority (perhaps 'elite') position a legitimate corrective/adjustment to a democracy, and when is it an extremist and illegitimate distraction? The astonishing fact is that the problem in distinguishing one from the other interferes greatly with Nussbaum's laudatory depictions of "diversity" education, without providing even a hint of the underlying dilemma. For instance, arguments against racial bigotry are implicitly conflated, in Nussbaum's book, with arguments against homosexuality. Personally, I agree with this... but how is a democracy to arrive at such a conclusion? Any controversy must, inevitably, be advocated at first by a minority. When is such a minority to be granted the academic privilege (as Gender Studies have, in todays University) and when not (as the 'pro-life' or 'creationist' perspectives)? Nussbaum completely ignores the problem, treating the liberal perspective as the only rational one.
  
  This is related to the latter problematique: sometime a "received" doctrine discerns a threat in the argument for "diversity". To a liberal, this perspective seems absurd. But where is the line to be drawn? If an alien culture (or domestic minority) were to advocate something extreme -- perhaps human sacrifice or infant euthanasia? How are 'believers' to discern which moral positions are too extreme to be defended (bias against miscegenation; homosexual behavior) and which are defensible? (suttee? abortion?) Nussbaum provides no guidance; nor -- more importantly -- does she elaborate on how the academy is to respond to questions regarding such a delineation.
• 
  Tracy

  This is a terrific book that accomplishes something rare: It argues in favor of both a fairly classical education and a strongly multicultural education *at the same time*.
  
  Nussbaum's aeguments are sharp and even handed (even if she is too harsh on Derrida), and she is able to sound reasonable and caring too. This in itself is a fine representation of her thought because she is always able to bring both thought and heart to her philosophy and when she does, she shows how we need both to fully understand and act in the world.
• 
  Rebecca

  The basis of this book is that democracy relies upon developing "citizens of the world" who ask questions about their beliefs and traditions and try to learn as much as possible about other cultures and people different from themselves, in a critical but respectful manner. The author, Nussbaum, focuses on courses and programs about women, non-Western cultures, and homosexuals in various colleges across the U.S. as case studies and devotes a chapter to two religious universities' attempts at providing a Socratic education while maintaining religious cohesion.
  
  Nussbaum is an academic with training in philosophy and the classics. It makes sense that an author will try to write from what they know best, so I can understand why she would feel the urge to focus on the importance of philosophy in a college education. But that urge should have been dampened somewhat so that readers weren't left with the impression – which Nussbaum doesn't bother correcting – that philosophy is the single most important and valuable field for fostering critical thinking skills in college students.
  
  I agree that it is one important and valuable field for doing this, but I think Nussbaum's own allegiance to her discipline was biasing her judgment. The important thing to note is that the subject matter of the class doesn't matter as much as the pedagogy and thought process of both the instructor and the students. You can teach a philosophy course critically or uncritically, and you can teach a history class critically or uncritically. Nussbaum assigns to philosophy a privileged position and only pays mere lip service to the other humanities disciplines, which gives short shrift to work being done in other fields (it's not clear how much she actually knows about what's really going on in fields outside her own domain, aside from what her research assistants gathered during their surveying).
  
  Nussbaum does emphasize that it's more important to teach students how to inquire than what to inquire about – which takes some of the pressure off of content and puts more on the learning process itself – but she's working under the assumption that philosophy is better-equipped to do this than any other discipline, and that assumption needed to be debated more openly.
  
  Another issue I found problematic was Nussbaum's tone and approach to argumentation throughout the whole book, but especially in the chapter on the religious universities Notre Dame and Brigham Young. Given her repeated mantra about thinking critically and not shying away from controversial subjects, I expected the book to contain more controversial positions. While she does say a few mildly negative things about the universities – most notably for stifling academic freedom and squelching open inquiry – she expresses these negative assessments in a polite, discreet way and doesn't seem nearly as outraged as someone with her views should justifiably feel, and I can't help but think that this is because she's an apologist for religion. This is ironic because Nussbaum is very determined to convince her readers that everyone has the right to express diverse, dissenting views and that classrooms should be a place of debate and argument; yet her own claims and expressions of "dissent" about religious universities are often bland and toothless. There is something to be said for not wanting to alienate a general audience, but there is also something to be said for making claims that will galvanize a general audience into discussion, which I don't think this book is capable of doing (I'm not even sure anyone besides professors and educational nerds would even read this book).
  
  Nussbaum makes it clear from the beginning of the chapter on Notre Dame and Brigham Young that she is not anti-religious (she is a practicing Jew and gave her daughter an explicitly religious education), which to me felt like her apologizing in advance for criticizing religious institutions. In what I can only assume was an effort to be diplomatic, she balances nearly every negative assessment throughout the chapter with a positive one ("They routinely fire professors for expressing views out of line with church dogma, but they have a new women's center on campus!") or expresses a hope that the university in question will eventually do better and be able to "reach its full potential." This makes the assumption that these universities even have the potential to be places of Socratic inquiry at all, which is not an assumption I'm willing to grant, at least not without some discussion.
  
  By declining to make a general judgment about the compatibility of Socratic inquiry with religious dogma, Nussbaum leads the reader to believe that as long as a few minor reforms are enacted from within a religious university – a required course in philosophy or an offering on women's studies, for example – religious schools can go on to do great things and be just as good as secular institutions. She seems to think that the marginalization of women at Notre Dame and the harsh limitations on freedom of speech at Brigham Young are mere surface imperfections that can be cleaned away with a few discussion panels and new course offerings focusing on minority groups.
  
  But I instead see these problems as symptoms of a deeply bigoted, ignorant community willfully ignoring the variety of human experience, and as long as people sharing that ignorance are all gathered together in one setting and defining themselves above all else as adherents of a specific religion (rather than first and foremost as students and scholars), any attempt at educational reform will be unsuccessful or will at most lead to mere cosmetic changes that the university can then pat itself on the back for. The only result of offering women's studies courses on a deeply sexist campus will be to whitewash the PR image of the university and allow them to say that they offer a "diverse" selection of courses. The homogeneity and conformity required of the student body at a religious university is so powerful that no such institution can give their students an education worthy of the Socratic tradition. That is the kind of claim I wanted to see Nussbaum defend, but for whatever reason she was reluctant to go that far.
  
  Interestingly, Nussbaum has a new book out called Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, which as far as I can tell takes the same exact premise of Cultivating Humanity and goes over the same argument yet again (although hopefully updated a little for the 21st century). Given Nussbaum's penchant for repeating herself throughout Cultivating Humanity, I'm not hopeful that this new book will actually be "new" in any meaningful sense.
• 
  Julia Chirila

  Muy interesante sobre todo el capítulo 3: La imaginación narrativa.
  
  Como decía Aristóteles, la literatura es más filosófica que la historia, porque nos prepara para el tipo de cosas que podrían suceder, para las formas generales de lo posible y su impacto en la vida humana. «La forma artística (especialmente, la novela) hace que el espectador perciba por un momento a las personas invisibles de su mundo, y eso, por lo menos, es un comienzo de justicia social».
  
  Martha Nussbaum enfatiza en la importancia de la literatura y las obras literarias para la estimulación de la imaginación y esto tiene mucho que ver con la labor del filósofo o filósofa en el aula: «para producir estudiantes verdaderamente socráticos debemos alentarlos a leer con espíritu crítico» y a «formular preguntas críticas sobre esa experiencia». La obra literaria se convertiría en un amigo con quien se ha decidido pasar el tiempo y cuya amistad tiene determinados efectos sobre la mente del lector. Las preguntas que reformulamos como lectores y estudiantes de filosofía a ese amigo deberían ser: «¿Qué me pide que observe, desee, o en qué quiere que me interese? ¿De qué manera me invita a ver a mi prójimo?». ¿En qué nos hemos transformado mientras disfrutamos de esa obra? ¿De qué manera ha moldeado la obra literaria nuestro carácter y de qué forma ha construido nuestro deseo y pensamiento?
  
  «Las obras literarias que escogemos inevitablemente responderán a nuestro sentido de quiénes somos y quiénes podríamos ser». ¿Qué impacto tendrían entonces las obras literarias para una propuesta de educación ciudadana? ¿Qué obras literarias podríamos escoger para la educación en valores democráticos?
• 
  Lidia Calamia

  Gli ‘studia liberalia’ adatti ad uomini liberi per i coevi di Seneca, a coloro che sono liberi e possono dilettarsi con analisi epistemologiche e filosofiche o ‘studia’ che rendono liberi seguendo il principio socratico per cui una vera EDUCAZIONE mira a formare uomini liberi, capaci di intessere razionalmente dialoghi strutturati e consapevoli. Solo chi matura convinzioni libere riesce ad aderire pienamente all’idea che sposa. Chi vuol mantenere un organo precostituito imponendo la traduzione e l’abitudine come garanzia, rischia di creare robot che seguono alla cieca idee che non comprendono e che per questo facilmente abbandoneranno o sovvertiranno. La nostra sfida è proporre il dialogo socratico come base della formazione. Coltivare l’umanità presente in ogni allievo promuovendo conoscenza e studio. Nessuna supremazia cognitiva o normativa, nessun romanticismo cognitivo: analizzare le diversità culturali, razziali, sessuali schivando pregiudizi, stereotipi ed esotici buonismi.
  Utile l’analisi di vari modelli universitari messi in atto, fonte di spunti concreti per gli addetti al settore.
• 
  Jimmy Ardila-Muñoz

  Martha Nussbaum touches an important topic about education for the 21st century: know the Other to construct the global citizen. The book shows some experience about liberal education, review Socrates's method, explain the importance of the humanities to construct a critical though. The author makes a defense of the inclusion of the plurality at the classroom, but too, the inclusion of the plurality like a topic to teach and learn. Read the book is really enriching.
  ---
  Martha Nussbaum toca un tema importante en la educación del siglo 21: conocer al Otro para la construcción de una ciudadanía global. El libro muestra algunas experiencias en torno a la educación liberal, revisa el método socrático, explica la importancia de las humanidades en la construcción del pensamiento crítico. La autora hace una defensa de la inclusión de la pluralidad en el salón de clase, pero también, enuncia la importancia de incluir la pluralidad como un tema que se debe enseñar y aprender. Leer el libro es realmente enriquecedor.
• 
  Cop Deb

  Interesante libro, aunque se nota debilidad en el manejo de los temas de género y diversidad sexual. No es tan fuerte como la primera parte
• 
  Roberto Tarantino

  Ottima analisi di varie argomentazioni relative ai programmi universitari negli Stati Uniti, ponendo alla base l'autoesame socratico e il cosmopolitismo
• 
  Michael

  This was an excellent book. Nussbaum writes and thinks clearly, and unlike most popular writers on the topic of higher education, has actually gone to some effort to find out what other academics are up to. In an era of almost unprecedented cynicism about universities—and particularly their humanities departments—this book is a welcome tonic.
  
  Nussbaum's faith in the ideal of liberal education is infectious. She shares Newman's strong thesis about university education, that its purpose is to instil "Socratic" values of free inquiry in its students. Her own great faith in the importance of reasoning and self-scrutiny makes this an extremely even-handed book. Her main opponents are conservative thinkers who decry liberal education altogether, and she also makes frequent attacks on "postmodernists" and "English departments" whose "faddish" theories undermine the spirit of free inquiry. But she nonetheless treats these opponents with respect, and makes a serious effort to understand and respond to their criticisms of her own ideal of rational inquiry.
  
  Perhaps book's greatest strength is its use of case studies. To find out how liberal education takes place in America, she actually visited a range of other universities of different types, spoke with faculty, inspected curricula, sat in on classes and researched each institution's history and traditions. Her final chapter, comparing Notre Dame to Brigham Young, was particularly impressive for its broad-minded, morally engaged and extremely rational analysis. Most famous books on the subject of higher education are mindless screeds of barely-researched partisan prejudice. This one was refreshingly factual.
  
  For me, this book had two flaws, one major and one minor. The minor flaw is that Nussbaum, a professional philosopher, has the idea that philosophy is the most important discipline of all, and that the "logic and rigour" of analytic philosophy is the benchmark for all rational argument. I have great sympathy with this view, and she does go to some lengths to justify it, but it does undercut her overall argument that the essence of liberal education is the way it exposes the student to a variety of viewpoints. Her association of "logic and rigour" with philosophy departments also does a disservice to other departments—particularly my own discipline of English, which often gets a hard rap in the book.
  
  The major flaw is simply that Nussbaum does not go deep enough into her philosophy. I perhaps would not have felt this was a flaw if I had not recently read Newman's The Idea of a University, to which Nussbaum's book is clearly indebted. Newman roots his notion of liberal education in a broader theory of knowledge and the disciplines. Like Nussbaum, he thinks his own discipline—theology—is the most important. But unlike her, he does not think that theological instruction should be compulsory, and he presents more compelling reasons to think that theology is supreme than she does that philosophy is supreme. If she had presented, with such depth and clarity as Newman, a theory of knowledge that underpinned her particular notion of education, I think this book's argument would have been well-nigh incontrovertible. As it is, it is merely excellent.
• 
  Kurt Xyst

  This book is largely a defense of the western tradition of faculty-centric education in the model of Socratic force of personality. Students in humanistic disciplines (her primary focus) can a) be brought to realization of ignorance with proper techniques of rational argumentation and then b) lead to knowledge with proper techniques of the natural sciences. (More Platonic and Aristotelean than Socratic but she stays focused on Socrates.)
  
  Especially illuminating is the chapter on narrative imagination in which he seems to suggest that literature professors could benefit from studying how physics goes about making its arguments and drawing its conclusions. In taking this overall approach Nussbaum falls into the tradition of others who have tried to justify the humanities/ human sciences using the tools of the natural sciences. She must objectify the human experience with enough distance to identify universal facets of all peoples but in doing so she loses touch with the very historical details that make the study of other cultures fruitful and meaningful. She rightly wants to argue against ethnocentrism but ultimately cannot do so with any force because objectification ignores the ways in which cultures come to be what they are. She realizes that either/or thinking is too crude, especially in matters of culture, but is trapped by an epistemology that dichotomizes facts and values.
  
  For Nussbaum, to be properly educated, and thus properly human, is to be subject (in all senses) to the Kantian "demands of reason." Taken seriously this reinscribes a hierarchy of being that, especially since WWII, has become morally problematic in philosophy. She is left defending a position that seems increasingly out of touch.
  
  Disappointing that she can't seem to find her way out of this blind-alley, but it's not clear that she really tried. She off-handedly dismisses nearly all thinkers who call her assumptions into question as unworthy of consideration. That seems to fly in the face of the very Socratic virtue she's so strongly advocating, namely boundless questioning and the rejection of tradition that cloaks itself in a sense of inevitability. Indeed, she's more interested in defending academic philosophy as a viable concern for the contemporary university than on defending humanity as a complex and self-evident educational project.
• 
  Jenny

  Generally ok; I mostly skimmed and then read the last chapter because a friend had asked me about it a while back (Socrates and the Religious University). The chapter felt dated at this point, and the disparity in sources/experience (Nussbaum has better sources for Notre Dame than BYU) was a bit rough. Still, worth thinking about in terms of the ongoing debates surrounding academic freedom at religious universities.
• 
  Shaun

  Forgot to mark I finished this.
  
  Eh, the book was alright. She repeats the same information a lot and a few times I just wanted to skip chapters because it was the same as a few pages before... but overall a pretty decent book... nothing ground breaking, but a good read for anyone. She made great points for more Women's Studies, African American studies, and various others, but nothing that at this point hasn't been said everyone else (the book is almost 2 decades old).
• 
  Derek Pyle

  very academic...lots of info, the info is very well supported (supported too much I might say)
  reading it for a class, we pull interesting stuff out of it in class but...
• 
  Nohea

  Read Chapter Eight: Socrates in the Religious University
• 
  Pablo

  Capítulo dedicado a la Imaginación Narrativa muy interesante y prof. Lectura para complementar filosofía; Nussbaum es una reformista liberal con muchas cosas que decir. Su curiosidad franquea cualquier pereza ideologuizante.