Martha Nussbaum

Martha C. Nussbaum is internationally renowned for being one of the leading moral and political philosophers of our time, and is highly regarded for her work on the role of the emotions in moral and political reasoning. In this interview, in dialogue with her interlocutors, she discusses her work over the past four decades, and gives insights into her book in progress on opera and its relationship to liberal political ideals, The Republic of Love. In addition to declaring her love of Italian culture, she clarifies her stance on some contemporary issues, including the controversy on sex and gender, animal rights, the relationship between philosophy and natural sciences, and the importance of liberal arts and ancient Greek and Roman philosophy.

In The Republic of Love, philosopher Martha C. Nussbaum argues that opera engages in political dialogue with the other institutions of public life. Opera interrogates the underlying political culture: what human beings have to be like to sustain different political institutions. Opera’s central contribution, buttressed by the powers of the chorus and the nuances of musical expression, is its exploration of emotions in the structuring of public life, including the role of gender, rank, and class. Nussbaum argues that a distinct Mozartean strand of opera embodies the political project of the Enlightenment. These operas, starting with those of Mozart himself—The Marriage of Figaro, Idomeneo, The Magic Flute, Don Giovanni, Così fan tutte, and La Clemenza di Tito—portray an egalitarian vision, not just of republican political institutions, but of emotion. This vision calls for the rejection of feudal hierarchy based on retributive anger and fear, and an embrace of love. This project has faced complications from the power-politics, tyranny, and oppression of the modern world, and so Mozart’s heirs considered how the Republic of Love can exist despite evil. Nussbaum traces the development of the Mozartean vision from Beethoven’s Fidelio and Verdi’s Don Carlos to Heggie’s Dead Man Walking and Adams’s Nixon in China. Contrasting with this hopeful tradition, Nussbaum considers one antagonist, Richard Wagner, who envisioned a closed and unaccepting society, fearful of strangers, and with eyes forever cast backwards. Ending with hope, Nussbaum examines Verdi’s Falstaff and its joyful and humorous depiction of human frailty.

The distinction between protected freedom of speech and civil disobedience on campus is often misunderstood. Drawing on the work of John Rawls and Martin Luther King, Jr., this chapter gives an account of civil disobedience that focuses on the protester’s willingness to accept a legal punishment, thereby showing respect for the rule of law. It is wrong for this conduct to be confused with protected speech, which, by definition, should not be penalized. A close discussion is provided of a variety of examples.

While great progress has been made in regards to sexual violence and accountability, Martha C. Nussbaum argues that the culture of celebrity remains a significant hurdle. In this chapter, Nussbaum traces the historical evolution and progress of the law and social norms concerning sexual violence. Identifying the obstacles and complexities that have faced those fighting for justice, she shows how working women, feminist lawyers, and recently the #MeToo movement have pushed forward the frontier of accountability. While history provides reason for hope, a recalcitrant problem remains: lack of accountability for celebrities and sports stars. Given the big money and structures of power behind the culture of celebrity, Nussbaum argues that the public must rise up and express outrage in order to bring about change.

Funerals are occasions for grief, if the dead person was close. But they are also reminders of our own mortal condition and invitations to contemplate it. Especially when the dead person was not close, a funeral service and an ensuing trip to the graveyard are often meditative times, providing powerful signals about our own future, stimulating fear or bringing hidden fear to the surface. They create, all too often, a volatile emotional condition in which we may be susceptible to some of fear’s less savory neighbors, other painful emotions (anger, envy, disgust) that may pollute our relationship with others. But the reminder of a shared fate might also have more benign consequences (as Rousseau thought), encouraging a kind of egalitarian compassion, an awareness of a common human condition that transcends class and wealth and even religion, bringing people together.

I begin by laying out Epicurus’ argument that “death is nothing to us” and my original critique of it in _The Therapy of Desire_. Next I describe the changes in my position; I make some concessions, but I do not abandon the main lines of my defense of Epicurus. Nonetheless, I also cling to my independent reasons for rejecting his conclusion. Rejecting Epicurus’ argument, however, does not leave the philosopher with nothing to say on behalf of mortality. I turn next to two philosophical attempts at consolation: my own in _Therapy_ and that of Bernard Williams. I find them both flawed. Finally, however, these two false comforters are outdone by Lucretius, who provides far more interesting reasons for reconciling ourselves to mortality.

The usual story about Mozart’s _Le Nozze di Figaro_ (1786) is that it is a cop-out. Taking the radical Beaumarchais drama of 1778, whose essential point and emphasis is political, a denunciation of the ancien régime and the hierarchies it imposes, Mozart and his librettist Lorenzo Da Ponte have fashioned an innocuous drama of personal love, defanging the text by omitting, for example, Figaro’s long fifth-act monologue denouncing feudal hierarchy and substituting a more extensive treatment of women and their private desires. The Beaumarchais play, which is usually understood to be a major harbinger of the French Revolution, was refused production for many years, and even in 1784, when it was allowed production in France, becoming wildly popular, it remained controversial. Mozart and Da Ponte, by contrast, decided (so it is said) to escape controversy. The relatively progressive Joseph II had forbidden the Beaumarchais play to be performed in theatres within his realm. Da Ponte, however, persuaded the Emperor that an acceptable opera could be written on the basis of the play. In the process, however, so the received story goes, he and Mozart, despite producing a wonderful love story, sold out the radicalism of the original. I shall argue, by contrast, that the opera is as political and as radical as the play, and more deeply so: for it investigates the human sentiments that are the necessary foundation for a public culture of liberty, equality, and fraternity. This construction of sentiment is accomplished more clearly in Mozart’s music than in the libretto, so making my argument will require going into considerable musical detail. I shall argue that Mozart agrees (in effect) with Rousseau in understanding that a political culture requires a new shaping of human attitudes in the realm of love, but that he disagrees with Rousseau in the specific shape he gives to those new attitudes. Whereas Rousseau emphasizes the need for civic homogeneity and solidarity, a patriotic love based on manly honor and the willingness to die for the nation, Mozart envisages the new public love as something gentler, more reciprocal, more feminine_—_just “nicer,” to use the Countess’s everyday word, and connected more to Cherubino’s horror of warlike exploits than to Rousseauesque ideas of courage. In the process, he also eschews Rousseauian homogeneity, emphasizing the need for the new fraternity to protect spaces for the free play of mischief, craziness, humor, and individuality_—_all of which are connected, in the opera, to the women’s world. (MN)

This essay is a response to Myles Burnyeat’s paper that attacks an interpretation of the credibility and acceptability of Aristotle’s views of the body and soul. It begins with a discussion of Aristotle’s motivating problems. An interpretation is defended against Burnyeat, which distinguishes Aristotle from both materialist reductionism, and from the Burnyeat interpretation that perceiving etc. does not require concomitant material change, and that awareness is primitive. Aristotle’s position is then defended as tenable, even in the context of a modern theory of matter.