Martha Nussbaum on Anger

Martha Nussbaum and Anger – for Meeting October 2016

Led by Gae - 14/10/16

It’s interesting to read a bit about Nussbaum as a person. I came across her via the New Yorker article that I’m sending along with this note – she is an extraordinary character!

And of course there’s the Wikipedia article about her:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Martha_Nussbaum

As you’ll see from those articles, one of Nussbaum’s focuses is on our emotions – how they impact us, and how we deal with them. When I started looking for materials, I found her work on anger interesting, so that’s the topic!

Anger (and forgiveness)

Nussbaum discusses anger – defining it, looking at it in the different areas of life, and giving her view on what is the ‘appropriate’ response to a situation that generates anger.

She wrote a book called Anger and Forgiveness, and she covered the same material in a series of five lectures she delivered at Oxford University in 2014 (the John Locke Lecture series).

I haven’t read the book, and even though it appears possible to get the full manuscript of the lecture series, I haven’t managed to (it appears you might be able to get it by enquiring of the university, but I couldn’t identify the way to do that!). But I found enough material to get an understanding of her ideas. I’ve listed the materials here in (rough) order of usefulness.

Text resources

Her material is well written and pretty easy to read.

Extract from the book Anger and Forgiveness – Chapter 1

http://chicagotonight.wttw.com/sites/default/files/article/file-attachments/01_Nussbaum_Anger%20and%20Forgiveness_Chapter%2001_0.pdf

This chapter introduces her arguments and the structure of the book – she starts with ancient Greek ethics, but does move on to the real world!

This is an outline of her John Locke lectures (essentially a brief summary).

http://www.philosophy.ox.ac.uk/lectures/john_locke_lectures/past_lectures

Here’s an article which is a review of her book. It includes a reasonable amount of quoted material.

https://www.brainpickings.org/2016/05/03/martha-nussbaum-anger-and-forgiveness/

An essay she wrote about anger (2016) – which includes some really interesting observations about Nelson Mandela’s approach.

https://aeon.co/essays/there-s-no-emotion-we-ought-to-think-harder-about-than-anger

An article she wrote about the anger of the American people as a driver of Donald Trump’s popularity.

http://www.theatlantic.com/politics/archive/2016/05/martha-nussbaum-anger/481464/

If you prefer Youtube

This is a (one-hour) lecture on anger which she delivered at University of Chicago Law School (where she works). I haven’t watched it all myself (I prefer reading).

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=0UmWoqhkJdU

Other materials: not about anger but possibly of interest

An article about why some men are above the law when it comes to sexual assault.

http://www.huffingtonpost.com/martha-c-nussbaum/why-some-men-are-above-the-law_b_8992754.html

This is an article (written by Eric Schliesser) on “Trust among philosophers”. It’s about the fact that someone ‘live blogged’ Nussbaum’s Locke lectures and whether this was fair or not. It’s not a particularly interesting read, but it’s not long and there are a few good bits.

http://digressionsnimpressions.typepad.com/digressionsimpressions/2014/05/trust-and-its-absence-among-philosophers.html

In 1999 Nussbaum wrote this infamous essay in The New Republic about feminism: “The Professor of Parody”. It’s an attack on another philosopher called Judith Butler and her approach to feminism, and it’s really quite vicious!! [Nussbaum was criticised for the attack, and Butler also defended herself in print – which seemed fair enough to me, given how nasty Nussbaum was about her!]

http://faculty.georgetown.edu/irvinem/theory/Nussbaum-Butler-Critique-NR-2-99.pdf

Other YouTube material (not about anger at all!)

Nussbaum’s interesting and easy to listen to. So I thought I’d throw in a couple of YouTube clips which relate to other parts of her work.

Here she talks about the underpinnings of her ideas about human capability and social justice.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=cbcGbflpFzI

I haven’t watched this one, but it’s about her idea “the fragility of goodness”

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=tWfK1E4L--c

For our discussion

I haven’t (yet) come up with any specific questions for our discussion, and I’m not sure whether I will, but here are a few thoughts.

We can talk about the application of Nussbaum’s ideas about anger (and forgiveness), and our experience. She looks at anger in three ‘realms’:

    1. Intimate relationships
    2. The ‘middle realm’ – day to day interactions with people (and things!) that are not close to us
    3. The political realm.

There are lots of recent/current examples in the political realm which I think could be interesting:

    • Trump, Hanson and the like
    • Brexit
    • Anti-Islam sentiment
    • The Occupy movement, the Other 98% etc
    • Get Up and change.org
    • Political discussions about same sex marriage
    • The whole culture of Australia’s politics (i.e. behaviour in the parliamentary chambers)

And one thought I had:

I don’t recall Nussbaum talking at all about anger with oneself (which could be ‘realm zero’, even closer to home than realm 1 above). Perhaps an idea we could kick around.