Customer Reviews

Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education

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This book, like all of Nussbaum's is intelligent, well written and worthy of your time. But it is not without flaws. Cultivating Humanity: A Classical Defense of Reform in Liberal Education argues in favor of the current trends in eliminating the traditional "western canon" as it has been understood. Critics have come at Nussbuam from nearly every conceivable front, claiming that she argues that education is ultimately political, that she provides ineffectual anecdotal evidence from America's top-tier and well-funded universities, that she aims to destroy the western perspective and finally, that she is idealistic and unpractical.
Each of these points is well founded but lack viable impetus unless one other element of Nussbaum's argument is noticed. Namely, that Nussbaum's book is a book about critical thinking skills and how they are taught in our nation's universities. The peripheral issues of gender, class and ethnicity, (where most of Nussbaum's critics attack), must been seen under the overall issue of education's primary purpose, namely, to produce rational thinkers. Thus, her thesis is much more about cultivating rationality and less about carrying a torch against the Western Canon.
To explain how rationality is to be cultivated, Nussbaum devotes much of her efforts to getting clear on what it means to be a "world citizen". This discussion is thoughtful and informative, even if you ultimately disagree with her. Yet, embedded in this detailed examination are serious assumptions about morality, which many other critics have noticed as well. She breezes through claims about avoiding "retributive anger", being "empathetic" and being "non-violent"; which prima facie sound reasonable. However, it may make some nervous that she grounds her entire argument on a morality that is far from generally accepted among philosophers. Nussbaum is harkening back to her roots as an expert in ancient philosophy, and this Aristotelian bias must be remembered as one reads through her argument. If you are an Aristotelian, a Hippy, or if you accept the ideas of Natural Law, Nussbaum's argument will be more successful for you.
Finally, as Nussbaum sets out her definition of what a Liberal Education is, she ignores the certain impact that her argument, if correct, will have on college instruction and pedagogy. While it may be possible to accept her implicit moral claims for the sake of an enticing discussion, I, like many others, was disappointed that she failed to seriously acknowledge the practical implications her argument begets.

Inasmuch as this book is an account of Nussbaum's research on the success of muticultural education at a few dozen American universities, it will be read as a challenge to the doom-saying conservatives who argue that education has gone to Hell since we abandoned the Great Books tradition of the Fifties. And it works rather well as such: as well as she can while writing for a lay audience, she confronts the likes of Alan Bloom on their own terms, demonstrating that there's a lot to be said for seeing muticultural education as an extension, rather than a betrayal, of the Western Philosophical Tradition. But what's interesting is her intolerance of hypocrisy on the Left as well as the Right: she denounces the excesses of Afrocentrism and the self-validating fantasies of academic feminism as well as any conservative editorialist. She's very much her own woman, and a public moralist in the best sense.

I did not read this book as amounting to a bashing of the Enlightenment canon at all. Rather, it struck me as an all-too-uncommon commonsensical, middle-ground position, well articulated, on controversy over multiculturalism. Reading some of these negative reviews leaves me scratching my head wondering whether these reviewers and I read the same book. I understood Nussbaum to be offering a "both/and" approach that would retain teaching of the "dead white men" Western canon but add to it the best of voices from other traditions.

The practical difficulties of doing this seem obvious enough: what to leave out, then? Unless she is advocating more time spent in college curricula on humanities studies and/or more required courses than is the case in many colleges and universities for undergrads these days. I did not see arguments for either of those points of view so one question would be how to implement her suggestions even if one agrees with them? There is only so much time in a day and so much space in a curriculum. Passionate subject-matter advocates ultimately weaken their case when they don't say what should be taught less.

Still, Nussbaum is asking powerful questions and contributing what I see as all-too-infrequent well-stated middle-ground fodder to inform these discussions. So even if you find her case unpersuasive this book should help you clarify your own views on this subject.

I'm not enough of a scholar to evaluate Nussbaums's treatment of "The Clouds" or Rousseau (are you?) but her treatment of the major topics is thought provoking -- and thus the book is well worth reading.

The only significant flaws I stumbled upon were her dismissal of the paradox of democratic change, and of the objections of ideology.

The former: when is a minority (perhaps 'elite') position a legimate corrective/adjustment to a democracy, and when is it an extemist and illegitimate distraction? The astonishing fact is that the problem in distinguishing one from the other interferes greatly with Nussbaum's laudatory depictions of "diversity" education, without providing even a hint of the underlying dilemma. For instance, arguments against racial bigotry are implicity conflated, in Nussbaum's book, with arguments against homosexuality. Personally, I agree with this... but how is a *democracy* to arrive at such a conculsion? Any controversy must, inevitably, be advocated at first by a minority. When is such a minority to be granted the academic privilege (as Gender Studies have, in todays University) and when not (as the 'pro-life' or 'creationist' perspectives)? Nussbaum completely ignores the problem, treating the liberal perspective as the only rational one.

This is related to the latter problematique: sometime a "received" doctrine [...] discerns a threat in the argument for "diversity". To a liberal, this perspective seems absurd. But where is the line to be drawn? If an alien culture (or domestic minority) were to advocate something extreme -- perhaps human sacrifice or infant euthanasia? How are 'believers' to discern which moral positions are too extreme to be defenced (bias against miscegenation; homosexual behavior) and which are defensible? (suttee? abortion?) Nussbaum provides no guidance; nor -- more importantly -- does she elaborate on how the academy is to respond to questions regarding such a delineation.

This is a must read to those who oppose and fancy a "liberal" education. Nussbaum has done a remarkable job explaining how learning about other cultures and lifestyles can truly enrich a person's life. A book like this opens people's minds to new and critical ways of looking at the world and at yourself. The only way to make this world a better place to live is through education and understanding. Nussbaum's book provides valuable information on why to to question we what have learned as "normal" history. The history of African Americans, Native Americans, Women, Asians, and homosexuals have been suppressed for centuries by those in power. If we are to understand each other as individuals and human beings, we must learn of about one another. Nussbaum's book is one right step in that direction.

"Cultivating Humanity" is one of the most thoughtful examinations of the concept of a liberal education that I've read in a long time. Nussbaum tell us that Socratic questioning is still on trial, that becoming a citizen of the world is a lonely business, and that a visceral and intellectual understanding of compassion is a key requisite. This book amounts to classical thought applied to the dilemmas of postmodernism. Highly recommended.

I have had the privelige of studying and discussing Matha Nussbaum's work for the past several years at the Thomas More Institute in Montreal, a wonderful little think-tank dedicated to education and learning by the Socratic Questioning method; after learning a lifetime's worth from this one small volume, I wish that the title of my review could be the sub-title of this book. Questioning this book has answered many a question on many levels allowing colleagues and I to piece together answers to life's most important questions on education, world citizenship and what it really means to be cosmopolitan.

This book has been especially important as reading and discussing it has answered any question or doubt that I might have had about the liberal arts education - experience. Through discussion this text has been brought to life and my choice of education thus makes more sense to me today than it did when the experience was begun several years ago.

I wish that there could be a way for every educator, legislator, parent and student to be exposed to this book and the philosophy behind it; anyone who picks it up, regardless of background, will find it enriching if not enlightening. One cannot read this work without wanting to strive towards becoming a true citizen of the world.

Nussbaum makes several good points in her critique of the liberal education in her book Cultivating Humanity. She brings under the microscope such ideals as examing our own beliefs and how we must be world citizens in order to fully understand humanity. An overall excellent book, Nussbaum makes many good points and supports her idea well. Occasionally, we are lost in the wordiness of it. I feel that some of what she had to say could have been condensed, but it detracts nothing from the book.

No one can doubt the good intentions and noble sentiments of Nussbaum. But I have gone through this book very carefully, looking up her references (and noting the lack of references in critical places), and I have found its arguments to be on very shaky ground. Just take the example of her use of Plato. She says he was an elitist but that Socrates was a democrat. But she gives no quotes or citations to show that Socrates was a democrat. She admires him in the Republic for being open to other "cultures," but that she doesn't note that the philosopher-king alone philosophizes in the city of that dialogue. (She says there's a difference between Plato and Socrates and that the Republic presents the views of Socrates--though she never explains how she can tell the difference or how she knows the Republic presents Socrates' views.) She distorts Plato by claiming he shows Socrates saying philosophy is for everyone. She misunderstands Socrates' assertion in the Apology that no one in the jury will believe him if he says the best way to live is to philosophize. (N. insists Socrates thinks philosophy is for everyone, while he plainly says no ordinary Athenian values philosophy or--even after his long life--can be convinced by him of its value.) Many such flaws in her discussion of other philosophers can be found. But even more striking is that she herself is very closed-minded she deals with her opponents. She tends to be very unfair in characterizing their positions. I think it's critical that someone who insists the world needs more openness should demonstrate openness. Nussbaum doesn't.

The dominant impression that I have of Martha Nussbaum's CULTIVATING HUMANITY is one of a continuing sense of irony, probably unintended that begins with the title and continues with a near comical misreading of some prominent Greek and Roman philosophers like Socrates, Seneca, and Cicero. It is her thesis that multiculturalism has unfairly endured some cheap shots from conservative writers and sees in the above mentioned Greek thinkers some support for the multicultural ethic. It is easy to point out the many flaws of her book but the most striking belongs to her linking of twentieth century multiculturalism with Socrates, a thinker who was not satisfied with mere thinking. True, Socratic pedagogy involved the engaging of his listeners in abstract concepts that often infuriated the ruling Powers That Be, but the point that Nussbaum continually misses (surprising given her job as a college professor of classical literature) is that once Socrates made his point, he did not stop and go on to the next listener; rather, he exhorted that listener to do something concrete with that revealed wisdom. Behind her misreading of Socrates lie the various flubs inherent in MC in general. Nussbaum sees no discrepency in the irony of a philosophy that brags of open diversity while practicing a ruthless denial of same to its opposition. Supporters of Nussbaum complain of the jargon in the comments of the anti-multiculuralists while at the same time writing books and articles praising it using an even more dense version of prose. What emerges from CULTIVATING HUMANITY is that the humanity cultivated by the corrosively anti-Enlightenment miasma of multiculturalism is not humane at all even by the relative standards of its professors.