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Sunday, May 04, 2008
Nussbaum on Philosophy does Shakespeare
Martha Nussbaum reviews three Shakespeare books in The New Republic. She sets up three criteria early in the article:
To make any contribution worth caring about, a philosopher’s study of Shakespeare should do three things. First and most centrally, it should really do philosophy, and not just allude to familiar philosophical ideas and positions. It should pursue tough questions and come up with something interesting and subtle--rather than just connecting Shakespeare to this or that idea from Philosophy 101. A philosopher reading Shakespeare should wonder, and ponder, in a genuinely philosophical way. Second, it should illuminate the world of the plays, attending closely enough to language and to texture that the interpretation changes the way we see the work, rather than just uses the work as grist for some argumentative mill. And finally, such a study should offer some account of why philosophical thinking needs to turn to Shakespeare’s plays, or to works like them. Why must the philosopher care about these plays? Do they supply to thought something that a straightforward piece of philosophical prose cannot supply, and if so, what?
A.D. Nuttall, Shakespeare the Thinker, does poorly on all three counts. Colin McGinn, Shakespeare’s Philosophy: Discovering the Meaning Behind the Plays, does better, but not much: “McGinn does not offer anything subtle or new; he just identifies familiar philosophical themes that figure in the plays. The impression conveyed is that Shakespeare has gotten a good grade in Phil 101, with McGinn as his professor and his superior in understanding. This is a terrible way to approach Shakespeare’s complexity.”
Nussbaum then goes on to praise Stanley Cavell’s work on Shakespeare by way of getting to the third book under review, Double Vision: Moral Philosophy and Shakespearean Drama, by Tzachi Zamir. Cavell scores high on her first two criteria, but not the third. Zamir scores well on all three.
Zamir understands that it is crucial not just to show that there are themes in the plays that philosophers have also discussed, and not just to show, through interpretation, what the plays contribute to our understanding of those themes, but also to say why it is important to turn to plays in particular, and to literary works in general, for philosophical guidance. His argument is complicated, but we may summarize it as follows. Literary works offer their readers a range of experiences that philosophical prose cannot provide, reshaping their perceptions in a variety of ways. Some of these experiences are varieties of emotional response; some are experiences of dislocation and a loss of meaning; some are experiences of losing a sense of meaning and then finding it again; some are experiences of not being able to figure out who or what a certain person is, or even what a person or self might be. And sometimes the experience is that of following the shifting trajectory of a human relationship.
In particular, Zamir offers compelling readings of erotic love in Romeo and Juliet, Antony and Cleopatra, and Othello. She is particularly impressed with Zamir’s discussion of mature love in A&C, which she regards as a real contribution:
What does all this have to do with philosophy? Well, in the first place, no philosopher has ever given a decent account of the complexities of “mature love. “ (John Stuart Mill’s letters and autobiography come close, but they are not philosophical works, and Mill, despite his many virtues, is not exactly the man to describe the role of jokes and erotic teasing in love.) Nor is this failure just an accident, or a social fact about cultural reticence. Zamir plausibly argues that philosophical prose all by itself could not convey the quirky and uneven nature, the incommensurable particularity, of this type of love, the way genuine feeling is embodied in a fish story. And so he contends that the experience of the spectator or reader, as she goes through the variegated moods of this relationship, is epistemically significant, putting her in a position to make claims about love, and to assess claims about love, as no abstract account could do.
In making her exit, Nussbaum observes: “The philosopher needs to turn to literature because literature gets at depths of human experience, tragic or comic, that philosophical prose does not reach; but then the philosopher will need to show the imprint of that complexity, to reveal something of the pain or the joy that the work evokes from his or her own character.”
Zamir’s book may well be fine, but I’m skeptical about what Nussbaum is up to, as are two commenters. One of them, basman, observes:
She does not want the plays to be mere springboards for philosophical discussion, or mere grist for argumentation, such that, once launched, the plays are left behind. But how does the philosopher discussing Shakespeare “really do philosophy” without ... leaving the plays behind? ... Why *must* anyone care about the plays? But that cannot be Ms Nussbaum’s question. Her question is: why should philosophers in the way of doing philosophy care about the plays; which is to ask, what in the plays helps philosophers fill in gaps in the ordinary doing of philosophy such that they help fill out the philosophical project? She has not satisfactorily answered that question; nor has she demonstrated by the discussions of Shakespeare she reviews that the question can be answered.
Perhaps she simply wants to do literary criticism and call it philosophy. Or does she want to do philosophy and call it literature? Probably neither, but she seems confused about the distinctions between literature, its criticism, and philosophy.
Comments
Isn’t the real questions: are philosophy and literature different; if so, how so; and if so, is it a difference worth perpetuating?
If philosophy and literature have grown through their divorce, have they also lost something they might recover through such meetings as these writers offer?
That said, I think Nussbaum offers useful criteria for judging a philosopher’s work on Shakespeare as such. By definition, such a work would need to contribute to the professional community of philosophers, but it would need to do so by attending to the complexity of Shakespeare’s art. Importantly, she suggests that a philosopher on Shakespeare shouldn’t perform mere “readings,” to go back to a distinction I made in the thread about arguments. The philosopher must *do* philosophy, albeit in dialogue with Shakespeare.
(That said, there’s nothing in Nussbaum’s review of Zamir that suggests to me that Zamir is doing something that, say, Terry Eagleton or Steven Greenblatt don’t do when they read Shakespeare. It would seem that her criteria stand not just for a philosopher’s book on Shakespeare but for *any* critic who wants to get at Shakespeare’s thematic material.)
Perhaps she simply wants to do literary criticism and call it philosophy. Or does she want to do philosophy and call it literature? Probably neither, but she seems confused about the distinctions between literature, its criticism, and philosophy.
I would say rather that she wants to do a kind of philosophical criticism, blurring those distinctions.* The philosophical significance of literary form is the central concern of the essays collected in Love’s Knowledge and addressed in a lot of Nussbaum’s other work. I actually think she’s on to something when she argues that philosophers ought not to simply mine literary texts for colourful examples of philosophical theories (Louis Pojman’s anthology The Moral Life, for instance, does just this). If that’s “all” literature has to offer, we might well ask why bother presenting its elements in such complicated forms rather than writing up neat philosophical abstracts. Her idea is that the form itself is communicative, that we learn things from fiction or drama or poetry that a standard philosophical analysis would not be able to explain. It’s a provocative idea but one that I think rightly insists we move past saying, for instance, “In Hard Times Dickens indicts utilitarianism” to asking why it is appropriate, and what the effects are, of his saying this in a novel of the particular form he chose. It would be more efficient, you might think, just to make the argument, unless there’s some argumentative or other advantage to writing a novel. My problem with Nussbaum is usually that I don’t find her a very good literary reader, at least of fiction.
Another standard line among philosophers with this kind of literary bent is also to praise literature for raising and complicating, rather than answering, philosophical questions. I don’t completely buy this--not least because this rather rules out as philosophically significant any literature that is more definite (Pope or George Eliot, anyone?).
*At the risk of being found guilty of similar confusions, I’ll ‘fess up that I wrote about these issues in an article that came out in Philosophy and Literature a year or so ago (“Martha Nussbaum and the Moral Life of Middlemarch“), as well as a bit more indirectly in an essay that juxtaposed contemporary ethical criticism with 19thC criticism.
If philosophy and literature have grown through their divorce...
You mean the divorce that dates back to the pre-Socratics?
Her idea is that the form itself is communicative, that we learn things from fiction or drama or poetry that a standard philosophical analysis would not be able to explain. It’s a provocative idea but one that I think rightly insists we move past saying, for instance, “In Hard Times Dickens indicts utilitarianism” to asking why it is appropriate, and what the effects are, of his saying this in a novel of the particular form he chose.
Not being polemical here, but how is that not just plain old literary criticism of the new critical style (or, if they are seen to be different, new criticism meets thematic analysis)?
I agree with Bill on this one: “Perhaps she simply wants to do literary criticism and call it philosophy”.
Regarding, then, the question of what “doing philosophy” with literature would be, that largely depends on what you understand to be “doing philosophy”. Doing philosophy to me (as someone raised more or less on the continental side of the great divide) means something like speculating on concepts. Hence, literary theory—understood as a tradition that attempts to answer the question, “what is literature?”—amounts to doing philosophy with literature, which means of course that quite a bit of literature does philosophy with literature (Cf. Lacoue-Labarthe and Nancy).
In terms of “doing philosophy” not just with the “form” of literature but also with the “content” of any specific work of literature, I again can’t help but see certain moments in the field of literary theory as exemplary. E.g. Derrida’s reading of Hamlet, or Barbara Johnson’s work on the critical difference (esp. her study of the readings of Billy Budd), or Peggy Kamuf’s reading of Melville’s The Confidence man in The Division of Literature.
But I’m 100% certain that Nussbaum would see such works as the very antithesis of “doing philosophy with literature”—precisely because they don’t proceed from the humanist and utterly mundane conception of literature ("Literary works offer their readers a range of experiences that philosophical prose cannot provide, reshaping their perceptions in a variety of ways") that she takes as unquestionable.
I’m open to other conceptions of “doing philosophy”, but I just can’t imagine them at this point. Most attempts to read literature philosophically tend to look at how a work thematises a particular philosophy. So The Matrix—I know: film not literature, but it’s the only example that comes to mind at this point—presents Baudrillard’s thesis on simulation in narrative rather than argumentative or speculative form, etc.
Spectres of Marx, anyone? That book seemed to me to take its major approach to Marx through Shakespeare. I’m not entirely sure what genre it would be considered to be in, but I suppose that anything written by Derrida’s default genre is philosophy.
Rob asks the right question – what does doing philosophy involve? – but Nussbaum might reject his answer, ‘speculating on concepts’. I think Nussbaum would want to say that philosophy is rational therapy (I’ve been reading her The Therapy of Desire recently). Philosophy aims to help us think through our problems, with the practical goal of promoting flourishing. If that’s right, then doing philosophy with literature starts to make more sense: therapy involves more than just gaining knowledge or conceptual facility. It requires living through experiences of the kinds Nussbaum talks about in her review: emotional response, loss and recovery of meaning, loss of self or even of what selves are, following through a human relationship. These are things that reading literature can do, but thinking about a bare-bones thought-experiment can’t.
"""""And finally, such a study should offer some account of why philosophical thinking needs to turn to Shakespeare’s plays, or to works like them. Why must the philosopher care about these plays?"""""
Philosophers search for truth. So, they would presumably ask if Shakespeare’s plays were “true.” Then, after reading them, they would discover that the plays do not offer statements about confirmable facts, scientific, historical, or otherwise), and they are not deductive arguments or “tautologous.” So the philosopher then might ask, how best to rid the academy of Shakespeare.
Bill, I’m curious what you think the difference is between philosophy, literary criticism and literature is. I would seem that Martha Nussbaum is trying to level these distinctions. I’m not sure that this is as unusual or as much of a problem as you seem to think.
the humanist and utterly mundane conception of literature ("Literary works offer their readers a range of experiences that philosophical prose cannot provide, reshaping their perceptions in a variety of ways") that she takes as unquestionable
Do you mean that literary works do not “offer their readers a range of experiences” etc.? To be sure this description of literary experience does not exhaust the possibilities, but many readers would surely recognize it as familiar.
how is that not just plain old literary criticism of the new critical style?
I think the novelty in her project is meant to be the attempt to get philosophers of a certain analytic bent to acknowledge that form matters, including to philosophical debates. That is, in many ways (at least in the work of hers that I’m familiar with) her audience is not literary critics or theorists but people committed to what she describes in Love’s Knowledge as “the conventional style of Anglo-American philosophical prose” who believe the ideas or arguments (philosophical content) of a text can be extracted from the original form with no loss of meaning. This is not all philosophical writing (certainly not Continental philosophy). But I am certainly familiar with writing (and writers) of the sort she’s talking about.
Much of the material in Love’s Knowledge deal specifically with moral philosophy, the basic question of which (at least on the accounts I’ve read) is “How should I live?” (or some variant)--"promoting flourishing,” as Sam C says above. The [moral] philosopher would care about Shakespeare’s plays, then, based on how they address that goal--which may not be a question of producing a “deductive argument.”
Philosophers search for truth. So, they would presumably ask if Shakespeare’s plays were “true.” Then, after reading them, they would discover that the plays do not offer statements about confirmable facts, scientific, historical, or otherwise, and they are not deductive arguments or “tautologous.” So the philosopher then might ask, how best to rid the academy of Shakespeare.
Well, maybe. Then again, Plato’s dialogues take the form of stories. Nussbaum’s focus on Zamir’s focus on love got me to thinking of the philosophy of love in The Symposium, which offers a particularly literary example of “doing philosophy.” Not sure where to take this next, except to say that if we’re interested in the boundaries between literature and philosophy, or looking for examples of philosophical content and literary form, or whatever, we might want to go back to this example of Plato’s. FWIW, I think The Symposium works better as a story about philosophers than it does as philosophy per se. Ditto for the Phaedo. Maybe by this time, after a few thousand years of philosophy, philosophy is better defined in “meta” terms, not as “the search for truth” but as “the story of the ongoing, long-running dialogue about people searching for truth,” that is to say, maybe it should be defined as The Symposium writ large.
I’m not quite sure what I find odd about Nussbaum’s review. I do think I was taken aback by reading what I regard as an ancient New Critical truism (with which I agree) introduced as though it were somehow a new idea. It led me to think she would be doing something new with it. And she didn’t, at least not that I can tell. If, as Rohan, suggests, she’s used to writing for a philosophical audience that doesn’t recognize that point, well that may explain what she’s up to. And I’m not the audience for it.
(As an aside, I’m guessing that our resident analytic philosopher, John Holbo, would be receptive to that New Critical notion.)
I guess I’m a bit puzzled by that penultimate sentence of hers: “The philosopher needs to turn to literature because literature gets at depths of human experience, tragic or comic, that philosophical prose does not reach” - yes, OK I got that. She continues, “but then the philosopher will need to show the imprint of that complexity, to reveal something of the pain or the joy that the work evokes from his or her own character.” Why? I suppose the philosopher can do that, if he or she so desires. But I don’t see why that is necessary. I can even imagine that some philosopher who reveals nothing “of the pain or the joy that the work evokes” might give a better account of the work than some other philosopher who’s all about the pain and joy. She seems to be saying that a genuinely philosophical account of a literary work must somehow, in its rhetorical mode, embody the experience of reading that literary work. I can see why someone might want to do that, but I don’t see that it’s a necessary requirement.
Bill: You can’t agree with the premise and deny the consequence. Nussbaum is saying something Aristotelian (which predates New Criticism by a few 1000 years): the importance of literature is in the experience of reading/viewing/hearing it. The consequence of that is that you cannot simply strip mine it for “ideas”; the reader must attend to the effects of the aesthetic experience on the self. She’s saying that “living through” Shakespeare’s drama of, say, adult love is different from reading a philosopher’s analysis of adult love. The difference is in the aesthetic experience one has lived through.
Also, Nussbaum isn’t claiming to make some “new” point. She actually seems to be frustrated that she needs to emphasize her criteria at all, and she takes out that frustration on the first two works. In the end, it’s a pretty normal review. She sets up her criteria at the beginning, and then uses them to test three works.
Finally, anyone who has read certain historians on literature (*Mystic Chords of Memory*, anyone?) knows exactly what annoys Nussbaum. It’s the idea that literature is either (a) transparent evidence for one’s professional claim or (b) a simple analogy for thinking about one’s profession. She suggests that doing A is pointless—why use literature as an example?—and B is selfish—do we really need *The Matrix* to understand Hegel on Sensation?
She’s saying that “living through” Shakespeare’s drama of, say, adult love is different from reading a philosopher’s analysis of adult love.
Sure. I understand that. But what does that have to do with having “to reveal something of the pain or the joy that the work evokes from his or her own character.” I don’t think she’s arguing for a confessional criticism - which could be OK if done very well - but it’s not clear to me just what kind of criticism she’s arguing for.
She tells us that “Zamir plausibly argues that philosophical prose all by itself could not convey the quirky and uneven nature, the incommensurable particularity, of this type of love, the way genuine feeling is embodied in a fish story.” OK. Nor would I expect philosophical prose to do that kind of work. If that’s what I want, I’ll go to literature. It’s not at all obvious to me that I’d go to Zamir for that, or even Nussbaum. They’re philosophers. They may grant literature powers that other philosophers don’t, but they’re still philosophers and they write philosophical prose; the fact that they grant certain kinds of claims doesn’t change the nature of their prose; it doesn’t give their prose new powers.
On the face of it, her own prose is ordinary expository prose. It doesn’t produce the kinds of effects that one gets from seeing a Shakespeare play. I’m guessing that kind of prose about Antony and Cleopatry isn’t going to produce the kinds of insight I’d get from the play itself. But if that kind of insight is what’s important, then why do I need her prose about it or, more to the point, Zamir’s? Isn’t it superfluous?
Rohan: “Do you mean that literary works do not “offer their readers a range of experiences” etc.? To be sure this description of literary experience does not exhaust the possibilities, but many readers would surely recognize it as familiar.”
No, I don’t mean that at all. My point is simply that this conception functions normatively in her account of doing philosophy with literature. And it’s not even a question of whether that concept adequately describes literary experience in all its possibilities, but rather of its very limitation of literature as such to literary experience, which is to say to a particular moment in a much broader, multifaceted process: the experience of reading literature (where “reading” is understood in a fairly simple, unmediated or immediate fashion).
By noting this I don’t mean at all to criticise Nussbaum or to reject the possible utility of her conception or of her questions. All I’m saying is that to the extent that she privileges this conception of literary experience, she immediately excludes a whole range of ways of doing philosophy with literature that do not follow the two forms that Luther says annoy her: “the idea that literature is either (a) transparent evidence for one’s professional claim or (b) a simple analogy for thinking about one’s profession.”
If Nussbaum’s beef is with those two ways of using literature, then I’m pretty much on her side, at least insofar as I find them to be very tedious ways of using literature, even if I can appreciate that they might have some value nevertheless: e.g. pedagogical value. But I still don’t see how her account of doing philosophy with literature is a model for “doing philosophy with literature” as distinct from a model for what she would perceive as reading as such (although how it could be “reading as such” if it needed to be organised according to a model is beyond me). Rohan’s description of her intended audience helps explain it, I guess, but in that case the phrase “doing philosophy” has only a rhetorical or strategic value in her argument: i.e. to convince analytic philosophers to read as such, to “experience” literature, by describing that act as “doing philosophy” with literature, and thereby rejecting other conceptions of doing philosophy with literature.
Bill, I believe Nussbaum is suggesting that the critic/philosopher perform a phenomenology of the aesthetic experience. The critic would then be a sort of geiger counter, registering the effects—joy or pain—of the drama as it unfolds. It’s not confessional because, as in Aristotle’s *Poetics*, the critic is taking a normative, if highly sensitive, stance toward this experience.
This suggests why we *need* the philosopher/critic’s prose. Sophocles’s audiences might have experienced fully what Aristotle brought to light, but they did so without necessarily reflecting on it. Aristotle puts himself not in the shoes of any single member of the audience but in the shoes of the ideal audience, the sum of the audience, so to speak. The great critic in Nussbaum’s terms would not experience differently but would experience fully and articulately.
But this dilemma is exactly what the deconstructionist critics highlighted when they analyzed the host/parasite binary. The critic should be a parasite, telling us nothing we couldn’t see for ourselves in the text. But in reality, the critic “constructs” the text for us; after we read the strong critic, we cannot return innocently to the text.
The point isn’t that the philosopher-critic’s prose produces the sames effects as the original. It instead registers and reflects on those effects, effects we might have missed the first or sixth time we, as an audience, watched the drama. But, I’d argue that the critic’s relation of his/her aesthetic experience opens up new receptive possibilities for our own experience.
I’d argue that the critic’s relation of his/her aesthetic experience opens up new receptive possibilities for our own experience.
Exactly. And that’s always (or largely) my main defence of literary criticisms of all stripes, and what I try to argue if ever I’m met by a student with the claim that we’re “overthinking” the text or the experience or the process.
The problem, Luther, is that all sounds like the self-justifying mythology of a small elite. All those people who saw Shakespeare’s plays on the Elizabethan stage, who read Milton as it came off the press, etc. they didn’t have the benefit of so many strong critics with their sophisticated methodologies. Given the importance of these strong critics, it’s hard to see how they had any literary culture worth spit back in those benighted days. They experienced the works and just walked around in some kind of inchoate zombie fog.
No one is saying anyone *needs* the critic in the sense that anyone *needs* food or water.
But first off, there were strong critics in every period. Second, art itself can be aesthetic criticism—that’s the only thing Harold Bloom got right. Shakespeare clearly reconfigured his audience’s sense of drama; we know this from his extreme popularity across a wide spectrum of his society. (Peter Ackroyd makes the argument that Shakepeare, among others, made drama respectable. He also makes the argument that very few Elizabethans experienced a Shakespeare play with anything like the attention of a modern reader. They responded to plots they knew in advance; they responded to conventions of costume and gesture that made “close reading” or “close listening” unnecessary; the actors spoke too quickly for ponderous reflection on Shakespeare’s art; and the plays were probably cut down on many occasions to a skeleton of the modern play. One question Nussbaum ignores is *what* Shakespeare is being understood by the philosopher-critic.)
Third, and most importantly, the critic tells us how things happen, just like the biologist. We don’t need a scientist to tell us that things happen; we need them to tell us why. An audience might have a full experience of a work of art; the critic reflects on that experience and shows exactly *how* and *why* we have a particular experience of a particular work of art.
It’s not elitist, any more than anything enjoyed by a subset of people is elitist.
Shakespeare wrote to please; his “philosophy” is mutable, manifold.
Do we discern Escoffier’s hatred of his mother in a plate of eggs?
Pollock’s abandonment fantasies from the paint he drips?
Mind/body; art product/art producer.
Seperate things split long ago, thank you.
Everything else is nostalgia and sophistry.
Nice to see La Nussbaum get her whacks in on dusty ol’ Nuttall, however.
Fourth, who says things today have to be the same as they were in days of old? Can’t the “sophisticated methodologies” of literary criticism be understood as one (albeit very modest) way through which contemporary existence is “enriched” (for want of a better word).
I’ll pay the “self-justifying mythology” to the extent that I don’t doubt that one of the functions of such defences of literary criticism (of all stripes) is to grant privilege to the critic and perhaps a stronger social value to the work of literary criticism than is warranted. But I don’t think that’s its only function or that litcrit therefore has no value. In other words, I buy Lyotard’s arguments about science’s shift to self-legitimation, but that doesn’t mean I find no value in the kinds of knowledge, discovery, invention, etc. that science still produces.
Sorry if that seems to take the discussion off-topic, but I just wanted to head off what looked to be a possible implication of Bill’s last point…
No one is saying anyone *needs* the critic in the sense that anyone *needs* food or water.
Glad you agree.
Third, and most importantly, the critic tells us how things happen, just like the biologist. ... An audience might have a full experience of a work of art; the critic reflects on that experience and shows exactly *how* and *why* we have a particular experience of a particular work of art.
I’m not so sure about that last clause. An awful lot of criticism focuses on why characters do what they do, think what they think, feel what they feel. That’s not about anyone’s experience of the work. That’s about the imaginary world. Nussbaum may assert that literary works afford certain kinds of important experiences but, judging from her review, she mostly talks about the characters in the work and not much at all about reader psychology.
Drop by wisdomofthewest.blogspot.com. This is one of the major themes running through my 100+ posts. My most recent post, in fact, happens to be about this very article.
My take: Nussbaum is spot on, as far as she goes. However, when the philosopher relies on the novel as a stand-in for “experience” we understand where philosophy’s rubber fails to meet the road; we see the shallowness of philosophy in its failure to touch us where we live. Moreover, there is some benefit in turning the perspective around and examining how novelists, etc. look at philosophers: they show us their humanity. After all, they are not gods!
Best,
Jim H.
Jim—Nussbaum isn’t relying on the novel as a stand-in for experience. She’s talking about the particular ways in which aesthetic experience can model a way of thinking about other life experiences.
Indeed, you’re right, Luther. Nussbaum says the philosopher must do more than that when looking at literature, and she proceeds to list the three things. My take centered on her third prescription: “Do they [Shakespeare’s plays] supply to thought something that a straightforward piece of philosophical prose cannot supply.” If the philosopher is doing philosophy a la Heidegger surveying his lamp and his desk and his ink and his paper and his pen etc., the fictional worlds of Shakespearean plays, e.g., are simply too far removed from the ready-to-hand world of experience that must form the platform for any realistic philosophy. As she says: “The philosopher needs to turn to literature because literature gets at depths of human experience, tragic or comic, that philosophical prose does not reach; but then the philosopher will need to show the imprint of that complexity, to reveal something of the pain or the joy that the work evokes from his or her own character.” That is to say, philosophy and the mirror of literature, which, all things told, sounds a bit solipsistic to me.
And finally, such a study should offer some account of why philosophical thinking needs to turn to Shakespeare’s plays, or to works like them. Why must the philosopher care about these plays?
Why should the philosopher advance a claim that philosophy needs Shakespeare? I mean—I know Nussbaum thinks that. But if Cavell doesn’t, I don’t see why that makes his writing on Shakespeare not worth caring about. It just makes it not in Nussbaum’s spirit.
The fourth chapter of Alice Crary’s Beyond Moral Judgment is on this general topic and seems to me to be much more plausible (and less moralistic*) than what I’ve read by Nussbaum on fiction and philosophy.
Ben, I suppose “needs” here is not the best word. I understand Nussbaum as asking: What is to be gained for philosophy in turning to Shakespeare’s plays? That is, why literature and not “worldly experience”? And why Shakespeare and not Jonson or Donne or Henry James? Her point seems to be that too many scholars draw on Shakespeare without articulating why—beyond the huge social acceptance of Shakspeare, the immense cultural capital across nearly all ideological and disciplinary boundaries—Shakespeare’s work offers something special to the philosopher or historian or whathaveyou.
As I wrote above, Nussbaum, a committed Aristotealian in many ways, seems to be returning to the *Poetics* here. Aristotle wasn’t just defending drama from the Platonists. He was suggesting that such drama has distinct aesthetic and social effects, that the two were inextricably interrelated, and that any study of a society that values drama must think through the functions that drama serves. (This is also why I find Jameson such a strong critic, even when I feel sick at his Marxism: he always attends to the artistic *and* social functions of art.)
Nussbaum’s ethics are...fragile. She was a press reader for Zamir’s book, so she shouldn’t have reviewed it; and Nuttall is very fierce against her in an earlier book, Why Does Tragedy GIve Pleasure?, a fact which she should have mentioned before trashing his book. IMHO.