Love’s Knowledge by Martha Nussbaum - A Community Response

In February 2022 the Reading Network came together to discuss excerpts from Love’s Knowledge by Martha Nussbaum. A fresh approach to introducing the book and coming up with opening questions/provocations was taken, with a different member contributing their take on each chapter. No expectations or structure were communicated beyond the expectation of a single question. Below you can find the generous and thoughtful responses of the community.

Chapter 5

Moral communication, moral imagination, and love are tied to the singularity of others. To what extent does an attention to singularity complicate and/or complement pedagogical approaches otherwise committed to social transformation/change?

Chapter 9

Do we agree with Martha Nussbaum that ethical literary criticism gives a fuller appreciation of Reading for Life than philosophical criticism, and if so, why?

https://jennymackness.wordpress.com/2022/02/06/reading-for-life-martha-nussbaum/

Chapter 11

Chapter 11 contrasts three ways of thinking about how we can come to know the contents of our heart (i.e. an aspect of self-knowledge, the main example being whether we love someone). Nussbaum argues, largely through literary examples, that this kind of self-knowledge involves attention to our emotions, but that reflection also plays a role. Further, love itself—in the form of a contextual and relational trust—helps us obtain this kind of knowing. Assuming that education should help students better know themselves, what role(s) can literature and/or philosophy play in this process? What conceptions of the emotions and the intellect might hamper/help in this regard?

Chapter 12

As plants or animals sometimes fight over the territory essential to their subsistence and their growth, humans fight over the cultural universe that they have constructed when they have not succeeded in inhabiting themselves and coexisting as living beings. They struggle for their survival through cultural substitutes because they have not created, amongst themselves, links that can provide them with an additional life rather than a death threat. (Irigaray, 2015, p. 105)

One thing that becomes very clear, as we read these novels, is that we are hearing, in the end, but a single human voice, not the conversation of diverse human voices with diverse structures of feelings. Beckett emphasises this fact by identifying Moran with the author of this other novels. And the solipsism of this voice’s sense of life is so total that we get no sense of the distinctive shape of any other lives in this world. An implicit claim is made by these voices to be the whole world, to be telling the way the world is as they tell about themselves. But is there any reason to suppose that this one life is, in that way, representative? (p. 308)

Along with an absence of human diversity, we find in Beckett, as well, an absence of human activity that seems foreign to our experience of emotional development, even at the cultural and social level. Beckett’s people are heirs of a legacy of feeling that shapes them inexorably. They cannot help being shaped in this way, and they feel like “contrivances,” like machines programmed entirely from without: “You think you are inventing, and all you do is stammer out your lesson, the remnants of a pensum one day got by heart and long forgotten” (p. 31). They are made, and the only thing they make is a child in their own image. This is not a convincing picture either of an individual child’s development or of a society’s evolution. Children actively select and interpret; and the society around them contains a plurality of active voices, striving to persuade us in new directions.  (Pp. 308-9)

It is as if Beckett believes that the finite and frail can only inspire our disgust and loathing—that life…can be “a thing of beauty and a joy” only if it is “forever”…[M]ortality in Beckett’s world is seen not as our neutral and natural condition but as our punishment for original sin. (p. 309)

But, we might ask, why is it that these voices are so intolerant of society and of shared forms of thought and feeling? Why aren’t they willing to allow that common-to-all might be and say themselves? Isn’t it, really, because they are in the grip of a longing for the pure soul, hard as a diamond, individual and indivisible, coming forth from its maker’s hand with its identity already stamped upon it? Don’t they reject shared language because they long for a pure language of the soul itself by itself and for pure relationships among souls that will be in no way mediated by the contingent structures of human social life? Everywhere the voices turn, they find the group and its history. They cannot go beyond that. But this is a tragedy for them only because they are gripped by the conviction that nothing man-made and contingent could ever stand for them. (p. 310)

Provocation:

Reading Nussbaum’s reading of Beckett and the excerpt from Irigaray’s 2015 essay through one another, (and bearing in mind that Beckett was born at the turn of the century and began to publish his literary works in 1930s) what are your thoughts on relation, life, and education?

Perhaps some of the following (binary) pairs would provide some ideas on where to start:

Inhaling and exhaling/life and death/children and adults/active moulding and letting it be/nature and nurture