ResponsAbility - Dialogues on Practical Knowledge and Bildung in Professional Studies

Edited Podcast Transcript: 

ResponsAbility  

Dialogues on Practical Knowledge and Bildung in Professional Studies 

By Michael Noah Weiss and Guro Hansen Helskog 

#10 Not for Profit. The Silent Crisis in Higher Education | Martha C. Nussbaum

00:00:03 Michael Noah Weiss

Welcome to the ResponsAbility podcast. As always, co-hosted by Guro Hansen Helskog.

00:00:10 Guro Hansen Helskog

And hosted by Michael Noah Weiss.

00:00:12 Michael N. W.

Today we have one of the most distinguished and well-known thinkers of our times with us: Martha C. Nussbaum. Thank you very much for joining us. It is a pleasure and honor to have you with us as a guest.

00:00:25 Martha C. Nussbaum

Thank you very much! It's really great to be talking to you.

00:00:27 Michael N. W.

Martha, currently your Ernst Freund Distinguished Service Professor of Law and Ethics at the University of Chicago, appointed in the Law School and the Philosophy Department. And as a philosopher, you published on a wide range of topics like ethics, feminism, political philosophy, as well as ancient Greek and Roman philosophy. You also received several prizes, like the Kyoto Prize in Arts and Philosophy, the Berggruen Prize as well as the Holberg Prize and the Balzan Prize. Furthermore, you have been considered a candidate for the Nobel Prize for Literature and among your most well-known books are the "Fragility of Goodness”, “Cultivating Humanity”, as well as “Not for Profit", which just came out in the Princeton Classics Edition. And your most recent books are “Justice for Animals” published in 2023 and “The Tenderness of Silent Minds” in 2024.

00:01:26 Guro H. H.

And first of all, referring to your book “Not for Profit. Why Democracy needs the Humanities”, we simply would like to start by asking you why does democracy need the humanities?

00:01:39 Martha C. N.

Well, actually I wrote that book in 2010, so this new edition is just a re-edition. And I wrote it because I had just finished doing a big philosophical project and I noticed that there were all these attacks on the humanities and they were starting to cut out humanities programs. And so, I felt it was time for me to take time off from my main philosophical projects and to write something addressed to the general public.

So, I decided to do was to make it not just American. My previous book on education, “Cultivating Humanity,” was all about American higher education. But this, as you know, it's both about schools and universities. And it tries to be robustly international and I make the case that democracy needs citizens who have 3 abilities which are cultivated through humanistic education.

Number one, the ability to conduct Socratic self-examination that is exchanging questions and answers, trying to figure out exactly why you believe what you believe, leading the examined life. And that's an ability that is so important in polarized societies, where people just come to say “This is what I think” and the other one says “This is what I think.” But in a Socratic class in philosophy you learn that that's not all there is. You can ask “Why do you believe that?” and you reconstruct the structure of your argument and then it usually turns out that the two sides share certain assumptions. And then we try to dig in and find out exactly where the disagreement kicks in. And that's so valuable because in a society that is the kind of dialogue we need. And Socrates was not just thinking about internal self-examination, but about how a society that was a democracy could sustain itself by conducting respectful dialogue.

Then the second one, which I call the world-citizenship, is the ability to think about oneself not just as a member of some local group but as the citizen, first of all, of a larger and diverse nation. But then beyond that of a whole world where people are striving to address very urgent problems that need cooperative solutions. And I think that's more crucial now than ever before, because if you think about the climate crisis, for example, how can these problems even be stated much less solved unless we have a robust international dialogue. So that leads us in the direction of history and fact finding. And of course, there has to be a partnership with science too. But anyway, thinking about history in a broad way. When I went to school, I only studied American history. But we can't just do our own country. We have to think about the whole world and how the different challenges fit together. And we have to talk to one another as people who respect one another.

So, the 1st and the 2nd already have to go together. But then the third, which of course is infused in both of the others, is what I call the literary imagination. That is to say, the ability to think from the point of view of a person who has very different background, different feelings and so. And try to understand subjectively what a person so placed might actually have and feel. Now that ability can be cultivated in many ways, through reading works of literature, of course, through listening to works of music, but also through actual theater. And through putting on – little kids especially learn this – by putting on plays in the classroom. We found in the US that one of the main ways of teaching history of racial animus in the United States is to ask white kids in a classroom to put on a play about the person on the bus, Rosa Parks, who was told “G o to the back of the bus because you're black” and if the child not only hears that from the outside, but has to play that role with their own body, they learn something in a much deeper way. So that's the third one and it's, you know, woven through the other two.

00:05:56 Michael N. W.

Thank you very much for that. And in that respect – because you were now describing the three abilities that you have to develop in order to face what you call the silent crisis in the beginning of that book – my question would be on that silent crisis. Because you say, this silent crisis is about a paradigm shift from “Educating for democratic citizenship” towards “Educating for economic growth”, and my question is, before we go further into the three abilities, why is there a crisis as you see it? That is, this paradigm shift, this movement away from educating for democratic citizenship towards economic growth...

00:06:37 Martha C. N.

Well, first of all, I think the old paradigm which is associated with Bildung was not perfect because it did assume too much deference on the part of students. We just absorbed great ideas rather than being active in the Socratic way. So, that paradigm was in need of change and refreshing. But what is happening instead is that countries want economic growth and they put that before other things. And they think that the topics that lead students to contribute to economic growth are things like applied computer science. And of course, these days, AI. But in short, not even very profound scientific research, but applied science. Things that can quickly turn into profit or industry. And so you know, everyday – I mean the reason I think it's a crisis – the news comes in every day; I read today about a liberal arts College in New York that I have visited you years ago. That it has just closed its doors and that happens all the time. There are other programs that I know, liberal arts programs in universities, which have been closed down in favor of focusing only on science. So yes, it's a crisis that’s silent because people don’t even notice it. And so, we have to keep talking about it and make people realize what's happening.

I've written-up eds in the chronicle of higher education, and so on. My colleague Brian Leiter on his blog (leiterreports.com) writes about this all the time. But it is happening elsewhere too, and I think in Europe it's in a way worse because in the US at least, there's a tradition. They're all undergraduates, in addition to a major subject, have two years of general education. So, they don't have just one thing. When you are at a university, you go on and you do have a major subject which you study for about two years, and that might be in the sciences, it might be in the humanities. But everyone takes required courses in things like history and philosophy. So it's harder to prune that away. And so the cuts have not cut so deeply. But in Europe, of course, people usually go for just one subject. So if the government says, all right, we're going to cut out philosophy, then no one gets any philosophy. And either all philosophy or no philosophy. So, I think things are happening in lots of different European countries. There are lots of hats and of course in Asia the system is very similar. I think the reason that I call it science, it's not a subject of very heated debate. No one is very upset about it, and in fact, no one really knows what's going on. So, I think even our trustees and our donors, and since our university is a private university, are not even aware. The previous president built a molecular engineering lab, but he didn't pay for, and so this one economies, and make a lot of money. And he's just cut slashed humanities graduate program. So people don't even realize that that's going on. I think most of our donors, most of our trustees don't realize that. So you can't protest against something, if you don't have a clear sense of what's happening and why it might be a bad thing.

00:09:57 Guro H. H.

So, why is it bad that the humanities are kind of cut out?

00:10:02 Martha C. N.

Well, I again, I don't want to focus on people who are going to be humanities professors or professionals because I think the humanities are for all students. Now, if you don't have a liberal arts program at the university level, you're not going to get required humanities courses at university. But you can at least get very good humanities courses in school. And I think they are for everyone because, well, I think there are actually three things. I focus on citizenship. So let me say first, we're all citizens. We have to inform ourselves. We have to conduct dialogue with our fellow citizens. And we need these three abilities for that. But then there are also two other things. There's also the fact that even business needs the imagination to be trained. In fact, luckily the head of our board of trustees, David Rubenstein, he goes to Davos all the time and he says we don't need in business just STEM, STEM, STEM all the time. We do need the humanities. And he has this funny equation. It's H=MC: Humanities equals more cash. Well, I think that's a little coarse. And some people say “Oh, I should denounce him” and so. No, I mean if there are multiple arguments leading to the same conclusion, I'm happy. And then the third is of course giving meaning to the individual's life.

We notice that when people are in retirement humanities programs are very popular because people suddenly think “I've spent all this time making money. Now I have to figure out what my life is all about.” And if they've never focused on literature and history and so forth, now is time we need to do that. And the search for meaning is then the third one.

00:11:47 Guro H. H.

And the first ability that you were talking about is the Socratic ability to critically reflect over one's history and to think for oneself. And in more general terms, you call that Socratic pedagogy. What do you mean by Socratic pedagogy and how do you yourself Practice it with your students?

00:12:09 Martha C. N.

OK, well, of course it has to be done in a way that fits the particular students in teaching their age, their educational background, and so. But good Socratic pedagogy energizes and enlivens the students and gets them to be active participants in the classroom. So, if you have to give a big lecture, which I had to do when I was teaching at Harvard – I had to give a big lecture on an auditorium stage – then you have to first of all make the lecture dialogical. I would always take two opposing positions and I would dramatize them and go back and forth. But of course then you have to have discussion sections, led sometimes by me and sometimes by graduate students, who would get the students themselves to dissect those positions and go through it. And they would do it in the sections but then they would do writing assignments. They would ask them to take this argument in Plato's Republic and think about, What is its structure? What assumptions underlie it? What's wrong with it? and so on. And then the writing would have to have copious comments given back to the student by the professor. Now, today I teach several different kinds of things, and I have this funny joint appointment in law and philosophy, which doesn't mean some courses for each because it's designed so that each course has some students of each kind. Law in the US is a second degree. So, a lot of our law students were undergraduate philosophy majors, and they want to go on doing some philosophy. So, they're very much on a par with the graduate students in philosophy. So, some of my courses are quite advanced seminars where the students are doing research style presentations. But of course, they all, given that they’re graduate students in philosophy or law students with a similar focus, they have to be about interchange of argument. And then I exchange ideas with them and the whole seminar is quite dialogical. In the larger courses, law schools are always very dialogical. The thing that used to be called the Socratic method was not really very Socratic, because professors had a right answer in mind. An then they would humiliate students who didn't get the right answer. But that's not what we do today. What we do is we call on students. We don't wait till they volunteer because if you wait till people volunteer, you get an asymmetry there. People who want to get the professor’s notice and they volunteer, they're called gunners because they wave their arms in the air like a gun, and so we don't want just that. And there are quiet ones who really are thinking, and they might be thinking better, but they don't volunteer because they're shot. So instead, the general custom is to call on people at random, and that means everyone has to come to class prepared. If they don't wanna say anything, then they just say well, please pass to somebody else. But usually they take part and the big course that I'm teaching this year is a course on animal rights. Of course very controversial, and the students are mostly people who have a serious interest in that. So, I don't get people signing up unless they think it's a serious problem. But still, of course we don't all agree. And if there's no one there who says “Everyone should keep the meat industry going” then I have to supply those arguments myself, so we have a real dialogue. And some students are going to go out to be philosophers, some are going to be lawyers. A lot of my former students go to work for big law firms and they say “I'm not going to accept your offer unless I can design a pro bono project that deals with animal rights.” So, they're going through careers that may not involve just that but they include that as part of what they do. So, that's how I teach and I mean it's delightful because you don't want a class where you're just droning on and on and saying the same things. I do some lecturing and, of course, being a person who's written quite a lot, they're always going to be reading some of my stuff. But the important thing is that they have a vivid exchange in the classroom. And I try to get opposing positions represented. So, I see there's someone who has a very strong view of one sort, then I'll say “Well, Cameron, how would you criticize what José just said?” And then we go on from there and that's what Socrates had in mind.

Now there's a colleague of mine, well known, I think. Well, she will be even more well known: Agnes Callard, who just wrote a book about Socrates (Open Socrates, 2025). She does something even more extreme, and it's mainly with undergraduates. She doesn't lecture at all. She waits for the dialogue to come up from the students and they ask the questions. I don't know how to teach that way, but that's just not my personality and I think there are different ways of doing this well. But Agnes is a wonderful teacher and she also does things outside the classroom. She has a thing called night owls. Where students like to stay up late and so they can come in at midnight and they can talk philosophy. And there's the topic is announced and Agnes is always there with some person who has a different view on the topic. It's always some personally urgent topic, like getting divorced or the polarized society. You would not think that American University students would want to come talk philosophy at midnight. 250 average attendance in the night owls. So, there are just many different ways we can create a Socratic community. And of course, in schools, you know, it's different and I think schools also have to impart knowledge. So, the tricky thing in schools is how the teacher is going to both in part knowledge and cultivate Socratic dialogue. But good teachers know how to do that. And I myself was lucky to be taught by teachers who did that very well.

00:18:13 Michael N. W.

In that respect, I would have another question. Because you just explicated the role of dialogue with respect to developing the three abilities, and here I have to mention that Guro and I, we have our background in the movement of philosophical practice were also different forms or formats of dialogue play a central role. And I was just wondering, while you were telling about the different ways of how to do dialogue: For these three abilities to be developed, do you need specific classes or can you integrate learning activities into whatever kind of subject, you understand what I mean?

00:18:52 Martha C. N.

I understand what you mean. I think you can, but it really helps if there is some required core of philosophical classes. Because the unfortunate thing is that not all faculty, and let's say in English department, are convinced of the Socratic values. They like to just lay out some literary theory and they don't want anyone to question. There's a sense of orthodoxy and political correctness there. So, I would not want to rely on my colleagues in English, or even anthropology, or even in history, to cultivate the Socratic virtues. I think I just like my own field, I think it has good values and I think it keeps itself pure from ideological contamination, which is pretty common in other humanities disciplines.

00:19:42 Guro H. H.

Well, the third ability that you mentioned is about cultivating imagination. Would you go a little bit deeper into this? And also maybe, how would you connect it to the American tradition of liberal education?

00:19:59 Martha C. N.

Well, I think it is. That's what it is, really. And the American traditional liberal education was really not like European Bildung because it wasn't based on the idea of absorbing the great books of the past. That was a version that emerged much later with Alan Bloom and the Straussians (see e.g. The Closing of the American Mind, 1987). But they imported that, I think critically from Europe. The traditional American liberal education was more genuinely Socratic. And it was really about learning how to be a citizen by learning to question where you're coming from and your own values. So, I think that's what we're about and we're trying to keep it alive. We're trying to make it better and of course, wherever you are, you do it in different ways. If you're in a small liberal arts college, then I think there's much more room for doing it across different disciplines. I visited a lot of campuses, so basically, undergraduates in America who are very talented, have a choice whether they want to go to a university, in which case they're likely to have pretty large classes, or whether they want to go to one of these liberal arts colleges that has usually no graduate programs. But with Princeton and Dartmouth you do have a few. But basically, they're all about undergraduate liberal arts education. Now our university happens to be both, because the University of Chicago hides itself on having a what's called the college, which is an undergraduate liberal arts college surrounded by lots of high-powered graduate programs. But anyway, these undergraduate liberal arts colleges are some of the best places to get an education in the US. And if I had a child applying to college these days, I would urge them go to Swarthmore, go to Carlton and so. And not necessarily to Harvard or Yale, because then you're going to be lost in the crowd.

So anyway, those are the places where liberal education is all there is, and the faculty usually work together across disciplines. So, you don't get this ideological polarization of certain disciplines. But the people from the English department, the people from the Classics Department, they're all in there together trying to figure out what liberal education should be. I think that's wonderful. Often, they include the arts. Now, it all depends. They all include literature. But I'm a great lover of music and all my career I've regretted the fact that liberal arts education doesn't have enough about music in it. The new book that I have out this year “The Tenderness of Silent Minds” (2024) is about Benjamin Britten and his War Requiem. And I'm writing a big book now about the opera which will come out next year. So, you know, I thought where in the liberal arts education is music? And I think the answer is it’s almost not there. And the reason is, we can expect professors of all different backgrounds to read Homer and to be able to teach it. Or to read Greek tragedy and to be able to teach it. But if you're weird, as somebody who's musically illiterate, which is the case with most Americans, I'm afraid, you can’t go into the classroom and teach a Mozart opera well. So, what are you going to do? You just leave the whole thing out. So, I think music should play a much bigger role. And there are places, there are schools which happen to have a conservatory attached. One of the best liberal arts colleges is Oberlin College and that has a conservatory. And there's another one called Lawrence University in Wisconsin where I've visited quite often. Lawrence has also a conservatory. And there the list of required undergraduate liberal arts books so-called, includes not only books of literature, but also works of fine art and works of music. And I think that's the ideal, because of course the arts are all important in cultivating the imagination. In the end of the day, the visual arts, maybe more... You know, if you're working in a city, you're more likely to be able to bring people together around a new building, having a discussion about what values that new work of architecture should express. Then you are to get them all to sit down and read the same novel. So, you really need to think about all the arts, I think. And so, we don't live up to our ideas fully, but that's what I would want. When the little kids are learning, I think then it's easier because all kids are learning some music and they're learning to dance and use their bodies to express what their emotions are. And they, of course, they learn to make and appreciate works of sculpture and fine art. So, at that level I think it's easier to be fully inclusive.

00:24:45 Michael N. W.

Well, we already went deeper into two of the three abilities, and I would like to do that with the third one too: The ability to think as a citizen of the world. And in that respect, I would like to mention Stanley Fish from the New York Times who wrote about “Not for Profit” (2024): “For Nussbaum, human development means the development of the capacity to transcend the local prejudices of one's immediate (even national) context and become a responsible citizen of the world.” Now, since we talk about essential human abilities, and since this podcast is called ResponsAbility, what do you think: Is our human capacity of transcendence the key to develop responsibility?

00:25:29 Martha C. N.

Well, I think we're all narrow. And that's part of our evolutionary mechanism. I think there's a lot of work that's been done showing that people, evolutionarily speaking, gravitate to people who they see as like them, and you're afraid of somebody who's different. So that's a prejudice that's rooted in our DNA, if you will, that we really have to overcome if people are going to be able to be responsible voters on a measure that affects all citizens if they're going to be able to deliberate well. So, we have to think, how do we overcome that? And I think the first question is how do we get to see our own country as more than just a certain group? And people may think “Oh, I'm a member of such and such group.” And they may not know anything about the experience of other groups – economic groups, racial groups, gender groups. We have to expose people to different experiences. But then, of course, we also have to open up the whole world. Most people grow up not knowing anything much about any country outside their own Well, I'm sure this isn't so true in Norway because it's a small country. I spend a lot of time in Finland and I think people know a lot more about my country than most Americans would ever know about Finland. But anyway, Americans, because United States is so powerful, you can walk all over the world and not learn anything about it. You know, just speak English all the time and think “Oh well, I can always find a McDonald's” and you don't have to learn anything about the traditions of the country that you're going to. But that's terrible. It is the recipe for a too scorn policy. So, what you need is history of the world, global history. But then more specific, you can't teach in-depth history of any one region, but some examples of more specific inquiries. So, suppose you have a general introduction to world history, then the student might select a specialization and say “Oh, now I'm going to become an expert on the history of Italy” and then learn the culture.

I had a wonderful high school French teacher and this was all done in the course of learning French and we were speaking French the whole time. But she thought the way to learn was to put everything together. So we would take a century, let's say 19th century, and we reviewed the literature, the fine art and learn about the music of that century, particularly as it impacted France. But then as France made a contribution to the whole world. So we need that inclusiveness. And of course, these days people have to learn something about countries other than their own that are very distant. I spend a lot of time in India and I know a lot about India, but I find most Americans are absolutely dead ignorant about India. Yes, if I took a poll without warning people in advance most of my acquaintances, even in the university, would think that Indira Gandhi was Mohandas Gandhi’s daughter. Now that's pretty shocking, you know. Her husband Feroze Gandhi was a Parsi, not even a Hindu and of course had absolutely no connection to Mohandas Gandhi. She was Nehru’s daughter. But anyway, so those are the things that make it absolutely impossible for people today to understand what's going on in India, which is very ominous and very frightening. And America needs to have a lot more to say about that.

00:29:03 Guro H. H.

Talking about India, would you like to say some more about your engagement with India and with the great philosopher and poet Tagore? And also, what you think we can learn from him both in our part of the world and also in India?

00:29:22 Martha C. N.

I was working at an institute called the World Institute for Development Economics Research, which was actually located in Helsinki, as it happened, but I was working with Amartya Sen who later became a lifelong collaborator and close friend. And he is, of course, an Indian and he won the Nobel Prize for economics in 1998. And Sen was himself a student of Tagore. So, very early on, he introduced me to the thought and the educational practice of Tagore. Now, Tagore won the Nobel Prize for literature 1916. Great poet, great novelist, writer of short stories. He was also a very distinguished painter and composer of music. He wrote over 2000 songs which are very popular all over India and Bangladesh. So, you know, he did everything, really. But what he did, he thought children needed to be educated through developing their emotions and their ability to be sympathetic with others through the arts. He wrote a great book called The Religion of Man (1913), where he talked about this need for an education based on sympathy.

Now what he did in his school, which became very famous, was to have children... First of all, they were educated Socratically. They sat outside on the grass and they had open discussions about everything. But then they learned a lot by putting on plays. He wrote the music and the words. For these elaborate dance dramas, you can see quite a few of them online, you can see the style of dance they learned. He was also a very gifted dancer and choreographer. So, unfortunately you don't have any films of Tagore himself dancing. There are still photos. But there are people who do it quite well today. And think about a child who most of whose education is hardly in that medium of dance drama where you're expressing things with your body. And he thought this was crucial for developing emotional connection between students. And particularly for women, because women in those days were likely to be very ashamed of their bodies. But they would not be ashamed if the great Tagore said “All right, now you're going to leap across the room.” Then they would lose their shame and they would do this. And they were very joyful. The book that Amarty Sen's mother wrote about the school was too called Joy In All Work (1999). It's all about how that experience of the joy of using your body and your mind in exploring the world was woven into the whole fabric of the education. Now, Tagore was very similar to the American educator John Dewey. So far as we are able to figure out, they never met. But Dewey did the same sort of thing, a little less focused on the arts, but very similar. And so that era saw an explosion of very interdisciplinary education where children use their emotions and their imagination in a new way. And Maria Montessori was actually a consultant in Tagore’s school. And there are a lot of letters between the two about education. So anyway, he's a wonderful figure. And he understood that in order to move beyond the prejudices of the past, you need a new mode of education. Now today I actually teach a class. It just came about partly because in American universities there are so many second generation Indians. And they're there and they're second generation, but they don't know anything about their history. So there was a demand and not every year, but certainly next year I'm teaching a class called Indian Political and Legal Thought. And I teach the works of four people: Tagore, Gandhi, then B. R. Ambedkar, who was the great legal thinker who wrote the Indian constitution, and finally Amarty Sen. So, I teach only works that I can read myself, so they have to be works written in English. But Tagore did write in English, he wrote his philosophical works in English. So, anyhow, and then in each class we show videos of the actual people in their pedagogy as assisted in real life. So that turned out to be a very exciting class, not just for second generation Indians, but partly for those who want to see how Indian education has declined into rote learning and into a kind of orthodoxy where there's no cultivation of sympathy. So anyway, that's what I do. But it's a very, very popular class and it's mainly for law students and graduate students but of course it could be for a larger group.

00:34:12 Michael N. W.

Well, the next question is more pragmatic in nature, because Guro and I are working at a university of professional studies. That is, our students are educated in a certain profession, like becoming a teacher, becoming a nurse, and so on. And our question would be how could you integrate liberal education in professional studies like teacher education? Or at least certain aspects or dimensions of it?

00:34:40 Martha C. N.

I think it's different with each profession. I've focused, of course, on law, which is, I mean, after all, I am in a professional school. Now, the law schools in America, as I say, they are more academic because everyone has BA degree in something else. But nonetheless it is a professional school and I've made the case and right now we're choosing the dean. Shortly, I'll be interviewing the candidates and I always ask them about this humanities component of their education. What does it contribute to the practice of law? In Madison it is a big discussion because I think the origin is that people understand the doctors are very technically proficient, but they don't know how to think about the human being. It's a standard criticism of doctors that they have no sympathy, they don't know how to think from somebody else’s viewpoint. So, my own primary care physician was just retired, but a great doctor named Mark Siegler, decided to make this a big deal in medical education –clinical medical education (see e.g. Clinical Ethics: A Practical Approach to Ethical Decisions in Clinical Medicine, 2015): The cultivation of humanistic ways of understanding. Sometimes through reading literature, sometimes through classroom exercises, and so on. But anyway, it's a very big deal these days. He was himself a person of great sympathy and warmth. And a very rich woman noticed that she had seen hundreds of doctors in her life, and not one of them had treated her with sympathy. But Mark Siegler did treat her with sympathy. So, she gave him a very large amount of money to create clinical medical education, and I, you know, I still notice the kind of arrogant all-knowing kind of young doctor, but usually they're the youngest ones who haven't yet had that kind of education. The older doctors are much more aware that they have to listen to people. They have check off short stories. They're very popular in medical education because they are short and they show the nuances of listening to another human being, trying to figure out what the world looks like from another viewpoint. So anyway, there are lots of ways to do this, and I think that's very popular. Business education – I have a former student who's a leader in business ethics, and he introduces all these things in the business schools.

I don't know so much about it but I assume nursing would be easier than doctory because nurses are more oriented toward caring in the first place. And they're not likely to be so arrogant and know-it-all as the doctors. But anyway, I think in all these fields we need to weave it into the clinical part of the education in such a way that is appropriate to that field.

00:37:35 Guro H. H

Well, did you hear about the IMRaD structured articles? You know, introduction, methods, results and discussion.

00:37:44 Martha C. N.

No, I don't know that.

00:37:45 Guro H. H.

No, you don't know that. That's kind of a form of scientific writing that is inspired by the natural sciences. And this is really kind of colonizing all kinds of academic writing nowadays, probably also in the US, but at least in our university. But we are trying to really promote the traditional essay as an academic form of writing that is also philosophical. And we find this very problematic, actually. You know, the idea that all scientific writing or all writing should be in this IMRaD structured form. Can we ask you, how would you characterize your own writing style?

00:38:33 Martha C. N.

I guess, you know, what I always try to do is to write for people both within the profession and outside the profession. There are some philosophers who write only for other professional philosophers and they write in a very kind of unpleasant technical jargon laden language. Then there are others who decide “Oh, forget about the profession” or just “Forget about the norms of clear analytic argument. I'll just address the general public.” You know, I want to do neither one or the other. I want my arguments to be worked on in such a way that they satisfy the norms of analytic precision in the profession, but you wouldn't necessarily see that. You would see the clarity will be there and I would be able to answer questions about it, but it would also be addressed to anyone who's concerned with the problem. And that means writing in a way that makes people care about the problem, that draws them into the problem. So, all my works tend to start with examples. So, my book on India started with an example of three women who are struggling to live in a certain way. Real women, as it happened. But then, sometimes, like the philosopher Seneca, I mine my own life for such examples. So, my book about the emotions of people's of thought started with the death of my mother (Anger and Forgiveness, 2016). Now, of course, everyone thinks that's an autobiography, but it isn't. That’s not the whole purpose. The purpose is to set up a philosophical inquiry, and I chose the death of a parent because almost everyone who reads the book, by the time they get to that book, they've experienced something like that and they can, as Proust says, use the book as a magnifying glass to look into themselves (Time Regained, 1931). So, I tried to set up the subsequent arguments by detailed discussion of that example. And it has to be done well from a literary point of view. It has to be well written. It has to be engaging. It has to, you know, have enough specifics that people actually care about it. So that's what I do and I think, you know, there are different ways of engaging people. But I think specificity and trying to show people why the problems matter is crucial to a good philosophical essay.

00:40:58 Guro H. H.

And that's music in our ears.

00:41:02 Martha C. N.

Yeah, I mean, I think the traditional essay could be bad. There are plenty of bad uses of that that could be formulaic, you know. But when it's good, it shows you why does this matter? And that's what you have to get students to see. That you don't just write because you're assigned to write it, but you write because the problem is important. Well, why is it important? What makes you think it's important? Well, then you might talk about an example. And I have a seminar that I teach from time to time on Greek tragedy and I asked them to read these tragedies, but also to think of examples from their own lives. Where these kinds of problems arise. Why do we care about these plays? Why do we care about them? Well, we care about them because our lives encounter similar, comparable problems.

00:41:52 Michael N. W.

Considering the current situation in the world with increasing political polarization, tension and conflict, it seems that perspectives from your classical book The Fragility of Goodness are more relevant than ever. How do you see this yourself? I know this is a very big question, but how do you see this?

00:42:12 Martha C. N.

Well, I don’t know which perspectives you're thinking about, but I'm planning to write a book on Greek tragedy next – after I finish my book on opera – and to think about the question why does tragedy still matter to us. And what I want to do is to make it a kind of alternation between a memoir of my own grief at my daughter’s death and the experience of Greek tragedy. But that's something I had to work up to over many, many years, and I couldn't even touch it. I’m just now, five years after she died, ready to start, you know. But that's what I want to do. I think most people experience profound losses and they relate to Greek tragedy because it's highly general and beckons to them as a way of thinking about their experience. What's striking is that all over the world, people have been drawn to Greek tragedy. Nelson Mandela, when he was in prison in Robben Island put on the antiquity with his fellow prisoners, and you have examples after examples. I have a former student who teaches at Carleton College, one of the best liberal arts colleges in the US, and he sent me a bunch of student responses. They were reading Sophocles’ Philoctetes and they were asked how does this theme summon-up thoughts about your own life. And you know, they wrote the most amazing things. And so, I think that's the kind of way in which Greek tragedy is so many sided. It's not limited by time and place. The reason it's stuck around so long is that it's kind of an abstract template into which you can pour your own experiences and your own family. Everyone has a family that fights. Everyone has experiences of war. So, all the central topics of Greek tragedy are in there. That's what I would say.

00:44:11 Guro H. H.

Also, your book Anger and Forgiveness (2016) is an important contribution when it comes to perspectives on overcoming divides caused by different forms of conflict, for instance. And why do we need to think about anger and forgiveness also today?

00:44:30 Martha C. N.

Well, if we don't think what we will do is act on our simplistic prejudices. In America, the prejudices in favor of retributive anger is the solution to all problems. I mean, why is the US one of the few countries, not the only one but one of the few wealthy countries that still favors the death penalty and uses it? Well, it's because people think you solve problem by killing the other person. That's a very American way of thinking. And so, your child has been killed by somebody, “Well, now, I'll put that person to death. So that will solve my problem.” And of course it's a stupid way of thinking. It doesn't bring your child back and it just gets you embroiled with negative emotions, which are going to poison your whole life. If you think about divorce, you can see how stupid it is. “Oh, I'm going to get my revenge on that person who cheated on me. I'm going to deny him access to his children. I'm going to poison his life.” But of course, if you think that way, your life becomes entirely about poisoning the future of someone else, which also poisons your future. And usually, you become very unpleasant. No one wants to hear endlessly, “Oh, my ex was terrible” etc., etc. And you don't look for happiness and you don't look for any new future for yourself. Your future becomes entirely about the past, so I think that's why everyone needs to think critically about their own anger.

I learned that very early because I found that I was very angry at my mother, who was an alcoholic. And I felt frightened of my own anger. And so, I started thinking about it very, very early on. And for a while, I thought that that was just my own pathology that I didn't like, which I did of anger just because of my own childhood experience. But then I came to the conclusion that no, actually I have been correct. But there is something pathological about retributive anger. And that's when I decided to write these lectures, which became that book about that topic.

I think there is a use for a kind of anger that faces forward and I call this transition anger. It turns around and says, “Well, that was outrageous now. We must make sure it doesn't happen.” So, for example, in the case where your child has been killed by somebody, there is a group called Mothers Against Drunk Driving (MADD) that instead of pursuing capital punishment for these people, it establishes preventive laws. It says, “Well, if you've driven drunk, first of all, you lose your driver's license. You can't start your car without blowing through a tube to prove that you're not drinking.” But also, new customs are taught. I mean nowadays in college, you would never think that you would drive drunk. You would have a designated driver. And everyone learns that and it's just part of daily life. So, you know, you change the culture and you make it better for everyone. That's the right way to use your experience of anger.

Sometimes forgiveness means, “Oh, you grovel in front of me and then I'll give you a pat on the head.” That's what I call transactional forgiveness and unfortunately the practices of the Orthodox Christian Church have bought into that to a great degree. Now, and you see why I don't like it. It's transactional, it requires humiliating the offender in front of you and saying, “Well now, I'll give you the benefit of my forgiveness.” But I think there's an unconditional kind of forgiveness. That's much better, but it can still be used as a cudgel to beat the other person with. In one of the epistles of Saint Paul, it says, forgive them, for in so doing, you will heap coals of fire upon their head (see Romans 12:20). And I think a lot of people think that way. “Oh, I'll forgive this earring spouse, because in so doing I'll make him feel so bad and so small.” So that's not good either. It's a disguised form of retributive anger. So, the kind that I like is unconditional love. And it's very interesting that Nelson Mandela never used the word forgiveness. I've looked through all his letters and all his speeches, and he used only the word love. I think that's what we should think about: Loving the person who wronged you, and then we go on from there and we think, well, what can that love create in the future? You think of the story of the prodigal son in the Bible. Well, the prodigal son did some bad stuff. He wasted his father's money. He comes home in a pathetic condition. The father does not say, “Ah, come home! Grovel in front of me and apologize. Bow down and then I might forgive you.” No, he goes right out to meet him and he hugs them and he says, “I love you.” And then, of course, in the wake of that, he's going to give him some lessons about how to construct your life better in the future. But the love comes first.

00:49:34 Michael N. W.

We are almost arriving at the end of the podcast episode. But let me ask you a last question. Namely, looking back at your impressive record of well known, important publications, how would you summarize your main message and contribution to the world?

00:49:51 Martha C. N.

Well, I wouldn't try to do that. I think other people can do that. I would not want to say I have one message. I think that the philosopher who tries to have a single message has probably become dead and is not moving anywhere. I always want to move to the next place and see what new interest opens up. I do recur to certain topics, obviously. In my book on opera, I have quite a lot about operas that dramatize the sterility and badness of retributive anger. It's not surprising that I gravitate to similar topics. But, you know, I always want to open-up new issues and I want people to challenge me and make me see what I've left out and what I've done wrong because then I'm alive. I don't like, you know, philosophers who say, “Oh, this is my message!” Often, they've become dead and they don't have anything new that excites them. So that's not me. I mean, look at the work on animals. Until about 15 years ago, I had never written on this topic. But my daughter opened my eyes to the great importance of this topic, because she was a lawyer for animal rights. And now I think about it all the time and I write about it all time. Excuse me. So, I think you just need to move and you need to keep learning and opening your eyes. And then you become a much better philosopher.

00:51:14 Michael N. W.

I think that is a good and beautiful final word. And with that we would like to thank you very much for joining us today. It was an inspiring and very insightful conversation. We would also like to thank our listeners and we hope to welcome them in one of our other episodes too. And with that, we can only say thank you and goodbye.