YLVA BOMAN, BERNT GUSTAVSSON and MARTHA NUSSBAUM

A DISCUSSION WITH MARTHA NUSSBAUM ON “EDUCATION

FOR CITIZENSHIP IN AN ERA OF GLOBAL CONNECTION”

Ylva Boman:
To begin with, Bernt and I would like to give a background on the way we
understand Martha Nussbaum’s contribution Education for Citizenship in
an Era of Global Connection and her idea of cultivating humanity.
I would like to start in your book Cultivating Humanity, and say that
when we ask about the relationship of liberal education to citizenship we
are asking a question with a long history in the Western philosophical
tradition. You use Socrates’ concept of examined life, Aristotle’s notions
of reflective citizenship, and the Greek and Roman Stoic notions of an
education that is “liberal” in that it liberates the mind from the bondage
of habit and custom, producing people who can function with sensitivity
and alertness as citizens of the whole world. This is, as I see it, your
understanding of what Seneca means by the cultivation of humanity. The
idea of the citizen as a well-educated person has had a formative influence
on Western thought about education. We can go to philosophers such as
Immanuel Kant and the German Bildung philosophy, in the continental
Enlightenment tradition; John Stuart Mill in the English tradition; and
John Dewey in the American pragmatist tradition. In our tradition, in our
democracy, the way it emerged and developed under the Swedish welfare
state is closely related to the development of educational institutions and
of equal rights for everyone to be educated. This concept of education as
a social right is also well integrated into higher education. What I believe
that you authorise is the possibility of highlighting the political dimension
of education and citizenship. And, one might say, a possibility of concep-
tualising the person as a political person. In other words, what you offer to
do is to introduce a debate, here in Sweden, on the role of higher educa-
tion, and discuss how we can understand education and its relationship to
citizenship within a concept of deliberative democracy. You also give us a
philosophical argument about what “cultivating humanity” ought to mean
in our context today. What I am trying to say is that we can discuss the
moral, political and ethical dimension of education and that, I believe, is
a discussion to which many speakers at this conference will be seeking to

Studies in Philosophy and Education 21: 305–311, 2002.

© 2002 Kluwer Academic Publishers. Printed in the Netherlands.
306 YLVA BOMAN ET AL.

contribute. The aim and purpose of our questions is mainly to open the
way for further discussion.
The first question I would like you to comment on has to do with
the relationship between education and society; I call it the relationship
between campus and polis. And, again, let me first give an outline on how
you developed this question. I understand that your concept of deliberative
democracy is entwined with modernity’s consciousness of time, which
can be conceived as an urgent and inescapable question of how we can
self-critically renew our traditions. If we are to respond authentically to
our historical time we are compelled to take an ethical perspective on a
historically accountable future present. What I understand to be the urgent
and inescapable problem of self-consciously renewing our traditions raises
the question you raise in your work: what citizens should know. Your
“classical defence of reform in liberal education” is built upon Socrates and
the Roman Stoics’ argument that the campuses provide a vital democratic
service. Our campuses have a major role to play in the project of producing
citizens who do examine traditions in a self-critical way. According to you,
democracy is weakened as long as it is seen as a market place of competing
interests. Democracy needs a community of citizens who genuinely reason
together about a problem, and in order to create such communities we
need to cultivate our humanity, which is why education is so important.
But this part is crucial, because this way of qualifying democracy by
educating people to be educated persons is easily conceived as patronising.
My main question is how we can conceive of the relationship between
campus and polis. When you discuss higher education, you mention it in
terms of producing citizens with certain capacities, and discuss the role
of the campus as that of producing citizens with a capacity to critically
examine their own lives. Then education, more or less, happens to be a
preparation for something that occurs later, or outside the campus. Would
you agree that education, and academic life, can be conceived of as part
of a deliberative reconstruction of shared meanings, of shared traditions,
of shared moral norms and values? Would you agree that the campus
can be seen as one of society’s important public spaces, nurturing public
communication on the common good? This differs to some extent from
education as preparation for something that will occur later in life.

Martha Nussbaum:
We have a very good question to open up with. First of all, obviously
these undergraduates that I am talking about are able to vote and are
participating in political life already. And if you remember that of over
one third of US undergraduates are over 25 years of age, so they have
 A DISCUSSION WITH MARTHA NUSSBAUM 307

come to university after a period of work, in order to get the money to

go to university, so they are always preparing for something that they are
also doing. But I think your question opens up a larger one, that is the
life of the campus itself, as a public space. I did not address that in my
book. Primarily because American universities are so enormously diverse:
there are some universities where almost all students live at home, some
where almost all the students live their life at campus. There is such a
tremendous variation in the degree to which the campus community is in
itself a deliberative community, and I was an undergraduate in an institu-
tion at New York University that simply had no campus centre. I think we
lost a lot. I remember during the Vietnam War, when we wanted to express
our view against the war we had to go to Columbia University, because
they had a campus space. We just had the streets of New York, and the
police would have been there directly. We had no place to deliberate. The
other thing that needs to be discussed, not just that the campus can be
a deliberative space, but also how we can interact productively with the
surrounding community. My own university has had a very ugly history
of trying to fence out the local African-American community. We are now
trying to undo that and become a partner and investing in mixed income
housing for the surrounding African-American community. So those are
very important issues. I think every university has a responsibility to create
a rich network of connections within its surrounding community.

Bernt Gustavsson:
A question connected with this problem is your standpoint in relation to
universalism and particularism, the global and the local. Self-examination
is a way of transcending tradition, a step towards meeting the foreigner,
or the other, to open up the possibility of being globally connected. How
do you relate this position of yours to other positions, such as those of the
communitarians, the post-modernists?

Martha Nussbaum:
My standpoint is that we have very profound obligations to other parts of
the world. So we need to redistribute a great part of welfare and income
as well: I did not dwell on that in my book on education, but that is my
position. I think that some kinds of identity politics are greatly helpful in
working towards social justice in this world, with such staggering inequal-
ities within it. Some forms of identity politics are not. I am thinking in
particular about the politics that urges members of minority groups to
define themselves in terms of that group membership first and foremost –
because I think it tends to take their energy away from the goals of justice
308 YLVA BOMAN ET AL.

for all people in the world. Somebody whose life is bound up with a partic-
ular kind of identity politics is correspondingly less likely to think globally
about what forms of redistribution of wealth and income are required by
justice in the whole world. I think any kind of identification that militates
against seeing all of our duties is a danger. I also think another problem
with the communitarian politics of identity is that it often ignores the fact
that groups are not monolithic, but contain internal hierarchy. Giving these
privileges or rights to groups could be a way to further marginalise their
women, for example. In the politics of my own city, Chicago, for example,
the African-American community as a whole has tended to support a
certain policy that causes teenage African-American men to forfeit certain
basic rights they have to be free from unwarranted search, so you see a
community is not a single thing. Being a teenage African-American man
places you in a particular kind of subordinate position within a larger
community, and if you forfeit rights because that community as a whole
gets political power, that I think is a danger. I suppose my view is that each
person is the basic subject of justice. We need to be very sure that benefits
that we give to groups do not result in a further subordination of people
within those groups.

Ylva Boman:
On the concept of narrative imagination I find that you, like the American
pragmatist John Dewey, call for the discussion on literature and art to be
part of the public discourse. Public literature, and literary imagination,
is understood to some extent as public rationality. I am a little puzzled
about what meaning you would give to narrative imagination, because I
understand that there is a way of me meeting the other – or for us to meet
“otherness,” a different culture, a person different from ourselves – that
enriches my life and my perspectives on what is good, bad, right or wrong.
Through literature we have a possibility of creating a space for ethical
experience, which is indispensable for political life and politics. But on
the other hand I also think that what you mentioned in your address today
– “the ability to think what it might be like to be in the shoes of a person
different from oneself, to be an intelligent reader of that person’s story,
and to understand the emotions and wishes and desires that someone so
placed might have” – that that is a crucial aspect of democracy. But are
there limits to my ability to understand someone else? Is there not also an
ethical responsibility to let someone else go beyond my understanding of
him or her? I think this is a crucial element of solidarity and tolerance.
Could we ask citizens of the world, of a multicultural society, to feel trust
without taking possession of the other?
 A DISCUSSION WITH MARTHA NUSSBAUM 309

Martha Nussbaum:
Well, that is an important question. I think each person is very “dark”
to every other person, and that is what I think that everyone also is to
oneself. I think one never fully grasps one’s own motives for acting. There
is always a limit to our ability to understand. Proust once said that any real
person who is not a fictional work possesses what he called a dead weight
that our sensitivity can never remove. I think, of course, that this dead
weight is often great when we are dealing with people whose whole way
of life is very different. I think of another novelist whom I like very much,
Richard Wright who wrote about the African-American experience. He
said he had deliberately created a hero, Bigger Thomas in Native Son, who
could not be an object of sympathetic identification to a white reader. He
was strange, he was frightening, he repelled identification. And precisely
what he wanted to show is how the inner world can be shaped by forces of
racism, so much so that it is a dark, mysterious and frightening world to the
white reader. Now what I think he wanted to promote thereby was a larger
and deeper sympathy. That is, in the end, just by encountering Bigger
Thomas, while you cannot fully understand his world, you do understand
something about what you have done, as a white in a white society, to
create lives in which people experience life so differently, through such
different hopes, expectations and aspirations. So I think hopefully we can
promote a deeper kind of understanding, the understanding of how not
only external circumstances, but also the inner world are the creation of
circumstances that are withinyoung people’s control. But having said that,
I want to say that we should not assume, without trying to the utmost,
that people distant to ourselves are not possible to understand. Sometimes
our own family members are almost too difficult to understand, because
we have relations of jealousy and rivalry. We have barriers that we do not
always have when we meet with a stranger. In the women’s development
project in India there are of course many things that my activist friends
from India can understand while I cannot, but maybe there are also some
things that being an outsider gives you the freedom to get into, where a
different position in the same tradition creates a greater obstacle. I think
for example when I’m involved with projects that work with sex workers,
I have a kind of freedom to contemplate what life might be that another
caste Indian woman does not have. This is a very complicated issue. It is
not just at a great distance that these obstacles obtain, but in any human
relationship. But then again, they can also to some degree, although never
entirely, be overcome.
310 YLVA BOMAN ET AL.

Bernt Gustavsson:
My question is about rationality and knowledge. You draw, in your work,
on a wider concept of rationality. Your concept of rationality contains
emotions, imagination, compassion and desires. Within the Enlighten-
ment, rationality is reduced to distanced cold right. This wider concept
gives us the possibility of making room for different sources and forms
of knowledge. The power of the cold brain is still a strong concept at the
universities, thinking of knowledge as a commodity on the market and the
human being as a source of investment. How do we best work to create a
space for other forms of knowledge, such as phronesis?

Martha Nussbaum:
First of all, I would not like to make that critique of the Enlightenment
as a whole. I think it is Kant in particular that happens to have a very
impoverished concept of emotions, and who knows why that is so, because
the figures who influenced him, such as Rousseau and Adam Smith, had
richer conceptions. In Adam Smith I find one of the most sensitive and
provocative thinkers about the intelligence of the emotions in the history of
Western thought. He certainly thinks both that emotions embody practical
intelligence and that they are often good guides in one’s life. Not all of
them, not always, but basically he agrees with Aristotle that many emotions
are indispensable ingredients in good moral thinking. That is why his two
major works deal with that topic. I guess I would say that it has become
the case in philosophy, for whatever reason, not to talk of emotions – at
least when I was in graduate school no one talked about this topic, and one
regarded it as suspect if you even mentioned it. Women especially could
not mention it, because then they would have betrayed themselves for
being female. What is interesting is that it took really strong male figures
like my teacher Bernard Williams to dare to mention this topic. Then it
became all right for other people to talk about the indispensable nature
of emotions. But now it is one of the most interesting and talked about
topics in philosophy and a lot of good work has been done in this field. So
then how could we recognise that in the way we reconstruct the curriculum
for our undergraduates? Well first, I think, by including philosophy in the
curriculum: some of these very rich discussions about the nature of virtue
ethics, the nature of phronesis, what are emotions like. We can do it by
teaching on Aristotle, by modern works on emotions, and also by incor-
porating literature into philosophy courses. Of course what I’m thinking
about is a kind of teaching about literature that really steps back and asks
how does this work form a partnership with the reader? What emotions
and desires are constructed? How does it shape my internal imaginative
 A DISCUSSION WITH MARTHA NUSSBAUM 311

structures? Again, there is a lot of fine work in this area, so what we really
need to do is simply to incorporate it, but it is certainly there.

Bernt Gustavsson:
I also have a very short question. You create a beautiful picture, borrowed
from Socrates I think, to do with being a gadfly on the back of a horse. I
wonder, how do we achieve that, how do we best create gadflies?

Martha Nussbaum:
Well, I think it has to be done by some part of education that is basically
built on the small classroom, where there really is a discussion among
students and teachers, questioning back and forth. Now, of course, in
most modern universities we need to use lectures. I have thought, if I am
standing in front of 300 people, how am I going to be a gadfly? Socrates
would not, of course, have liked that, insisting on teaching one by one,
but we cannot always do that. Plato, though, is a good guide. He wrote
dramatically, he showed the give and take of arguments in dramatic works
that drew the reader into the text. So I guess what I have always tried to
do, in teaching undergraduate students, is to use dramatic power. I have
tried to dramatise the issue, so that students can feel the compelling nature
of the problem, and then I keep presenting good arguments on both sides.
Then we hope that they will go home and talk with each other, that they
will continue the discussion. We hope we enthuse them to analyse, write,
and work out their position towards this or that problem. Despite the large
size of classes we can still have that same kind of gadfly effect.
YLVA BOMAN
Department of Education
Örebro University
SE-701 82 Örebro
Sweden
BERNT GUSTAVSSON
IBV,
Linköping University
SE-581 83, Linköping
Sweden
MARTHA NUSSBAUM
University of Chicago Law School
Chicago, IL 60637
USA