Nussbaum: Poetic Justice/ Novels and the Public

Notes from Nussbaum:

Literature and its limitations

Nussbaum 
Wayne booth-  the company we keep. An ethics of fiction--like yagelski's writing as a way of being in public life--the act of reading  and assessing what one read is ethically valuable precisely because it is constructed in a manner that demands both immersion and critical conversation,  comparison of what one has read with one's own unfolding experience and with the responses and arguments of other readers

9 - if we think of reading in this way, as combining one's own absorbed imagining with periods of more detached (and interactive) critical scrutiny, we can already begin to see why we might find in it am activity well suited to public reasoning in a democratic society

8 - the novel constructs a paradigm of a style of ethical reasoning that is context -specific without being relativistic, in which we get to potentially inversely e concrete prescriptions by bringing a general idea of human flourishing to bear on a concrete situation, which we are invited to enter through imagination

Novels embrace the ordinary -- that which is common and close at hand  but which is often, in its significant strangeness, the object of profound ignorance and emotional refusal 10

Empathy and compassion as highly relevant to ciizenship

10-Booth shows that many popular works entice the reader

The lives of the insignificant would not be I biography or history 

32- narrative features if the novel that it shares with other genres
1. Commitment to the separateness of persons and to the irreducible quality to quantity 
2. It's sense that what happens to individuals  in the world has enormous importance
3. It's commitment to describe the events of life not from an external perspective of detachment  but from within as invested with the complex significances with which human beings invest their own lives 

Novel is more opposed than other genres to the reductive economic way if seeing the world, more committed to qualitative distinctions 32

The novel's capacity to give pleasure -35-- it binds us to the characters because it causes us to take pleasure in their company 

Fancy- fiction-making imagination, the ability to see one thing as another, to see one thing in another -- things look like other things or the other things are seen in the immediate things

52- addressing the reader as a friend and fellow agent, though in a different sphere if life, the authorial voice turns readers' sympathetic wonder at the fates of the characters back on themselves, reminding them that they too are on the way to death, that they too have but this one chance to see in the fire the shapes of fancy and thee prospects they suggest for the improvement if human life... It's claim is that the literary imagination is an essential part of both the theory and the practice of citizenship 

To argue fur literary education in the public realm we must make some defense if the emotions and their contributions to the public rationality 

What are emotions?
What is reason and does it exclude emotive elements such as sympathy and gratitude
Are emotions if a certain sort essential elements in a good decision, rational judgement 
Are emotions in a normative sense irrational and thus inappropriate as guides in public deliberation? And so what us the public role if literature?
4 objections
1. Emotions are blind forces that have nothing to do with reasoning  lacking the stability and solidity of the wise person . Stoics urged their pupils to pay attention to literature only from a viewpoint of secure critical detachment without thought 
-emotions are ways of perceiving -a belief might be false but rational if formed on good evidence; and it may be true but irrational but in no case will emotions be irrational in the sense if bring totally cut off from cognition and judgement 
2. Emotions as closely linked to judgments and beliefs about the worth of external objects 
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3. Emotions focus on the person's actual ties or attachments, especially to concrete objects or people close youth self - binding the moral imagination to the self  and not even handed not getting distant lives or unseen sufferings so novels would be encouraging a self centered and unequal firm if attention to the suffering if other humans 
4. Emotions are too much concerned with particulars and not sufficiently with larger social units such as classes 59.. Making novels useful only in the private domain 
-70-while the novel emphasizes the mutual interdependence of persons, showing the world as one in which we are all implicated in one another' s good and ill, it also insists on respecting the separate life of each person,  and on seeing the person as a separate center of experience
- 70 mass movements in the novel fare badly because they neglect the separate agency if their members, their privacy, and their qualitative differences 

There is no reason to dismiss emotions because they can go wrong 

Aristotle argued that compassion or pity requires the belief that another person is suffering in a serious way through no fault if their own and to feel thus one must believe that their own possibilities are similar to those if the sufferer 

Readers have both empathy with the plights if the characters experiencing what happens to them from as if from their pov and pity or compassion  which goes beyond empathy; involves spectatorial judgment that the characters misfortunes are indeed serious and gave arisen through no fault if their own -- necessary for social rationality  
Rousseau and Emile  

Utilitarian - each human being should count as one  and none as more than one 

Numerical analysis comforts and distances 

Intellect without emotion is value- blind; it lacks the sense if the meaning and worth of a person's death that the judgements internal to emotions would have supplied -68

69- a certain degree of detachment from the immediate - which calculations may help to district in some people - can enable us to sort out our beliefs and intuitions better and thus to get a more refined sense if what our emotion actually are, and which among them us must reliable 

Aristotle insists that removing the family, rather than ensuring impartial and equal concerns for all citizens, will ensure that nobody cares strongly about anything 

80- the poet is no whimsical creature , but the person best equipped to "bestow in every object or quality its fit proportion" duly weighing the claims I'd a diverse population , with its gaze fixed on norms of fairness and in history" both of which are always at risk in democracy 

Adam Smith - judicious spectators 

84- what we ate after is not just a view of moral education that makes sense of our own personal experience, but one that we can defend to others and support along with others with whim we wish to live in community 

92- when one idea manage for whatever reason to take up to the individual the literary attitude of sympathetic imagining, the dehumanizing portrayal is unsustainable  at least for a time 

Literary understanding ... Promotes habits of mind that lead toward social equality in that they contribute to the dismantling of the stereotypes that support group hatred 92

97- the reader perceives the character in a very different way from the way of the people around him or her ; those around the character cannot permit themselves to imagine for a moment what it might be like to be him it her but the reader dies imagine and ya fully aware all along that he is neither the same nor a monster meaning the reader is a judicious spectator aware in a way the characters are not of the stigmatizing effect if societal prejudice and if the helplessness it creates ...enlisting readers as partisans of equality by making it easy to see the character as Simons they or one if their friends might be/99

As symmetry of positions must be considered in life and do literature is good practice for such deliberation but I would argue because if the representation of discourses 

111-Is nussbaum saying that posner's argument is literary ?

120- intimate and impartial, loving without bias, thinking  of and for the whole rather than as a partisan if some particular group or faction, comprehending in fancy  the richness and complexity of each citizen's inner world, the literary judge ... sees in the blades if grass the equal dignity if all citizens -- and more mysterious images, too, of erotic longing and personal liberty 


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Reading literature, as I discuss it in my dissertation, is an intervention of sorts; however, I do not necessarily see it as a revolutionary intervention. Reading literature is a low-risk act where each person counts as another -- something democratic and antihierarchical.  How one person, out of a mass of others, may become suddenly vivid through an accident of aquaintance or perception (George Herbert Mead, pragmatist) is an essential understanding for reading literature and for being a citizen. If rational argument is essential to democratic, social participation and if we are to say that literature supports such rational argument and ultimately participation in public discourse,  how is story-telling and literary imagining essential in rational arguments? How does literature work to achieve a social intervention?

Nussbaum wants to compare aspects of law and literature.  She claims that legal discourse and literary discourse rely upon an "imaginative vision of human life and its possibilities." Specifically, Nussbaum wants to consider economistic issues that attempt to make human being and their actions measurable (Cintron). Nussbaum resists such thinking, thinking in terms of a quantifiable imaginary, to emphasize autonomy and the "irreducible singularity of each human being and the qualitative aspects of each person's experience, which is the kind of cautionary lesson that she sees literary works as driving home -- hence their value as a counterweight, or even a vaccine, against reductive economism" (Gorman). It seems that Nussbaum's intent is not to "mount an attack on the economic-determinist approach to analyzing...human behavior, but in the first place to understand it, to get inside this worldview." This position supports my own thesis,which is that literature can help students to get inside this worldview, a view of the darker side of modernity and thus the potential of literature in public life -- a public life where we make decisions that affect all our citizens.  This might be the Atticus Finch argument to "walk in someone else's shoes."

Nussbaum claims that the argument works on us by appealing to our sympathy, the ability to enter into the thoughts and feelings of others. No doubt many readers encountering Tree Girl for the first time have heard a talking wound. Nussbaum suggests that such insight is morally valuable with the potential to modify our moral understanding. Empathetic imagining cultivated in the literary experience is another way of attending to life's problems. "Economic utilitarianism" is an aspect in need of empathetic imagining...Nussbaum wants a political economy that does not reduce people to numbers, but can literature accomplish this? She suggest that leaders or "Guardians" must read literature in order to develop the necessary sympathy . Such an argument treads along the lines of cultural imperialism, such that there would be a common fund of knowledge to create a unified citizenry. By focusing, then, on literature for the purpose of generating sympathy for the marginalized, but what might be the political uses, and then once we ask for political use, we invite rhetoricality. Hesford argues that no genre is immune to spectacular and that spectacle is at the core of human rights narratology.

Narratives produce a sort of enlightenment as they draw us into sympathetic involvement with the characters as individuals, perhaps imagining what it might be like to be or be with these imaginary individuals.  This is not to say that informational texts, non-literary texts do not produce a narrative  In fact the press can elicit our sympathy. Such stories can inspire and lead readers into the public discourse and right action; nevertheless, the sympathy- eliciting function of narrative can lead readers into the "wrong" direction. If we consider Hesford's Spectacular Rhetorics, we might see how such narratives enact a spectacle, an exploitation of victims, for example, to provoke sympathy. And then, how productive is sympathy that mirrors the Western values, the values of the target audience.  Therefore, while Nussbaum encourages sympathy-based considerations, such a claim overlooks non-sympathy-based considerations.

Nussbaum writes: "For the Greeks of the fifth and early fourth centuries b.c., there were not two separate sets of questions in the area of human choice and action, aesthetic questions and moral-philosophical questions, to be studied and written about by mutually detached colleagues in different departments. Instead, dramatic poetry and what we now call philosophical inquiry in ethics were both typically...seen as ways of pursuing a single and general question: namely, how human beings should live."  Nussbaum wants literature to be useful -- to ask What does all this mean for human life? Of course, these questions are not terribly welcome in our discipline. Tension between argument and narrative -- philosophy and literary. -- as though one sort of understanding blocks out another while, perhaps, achieving the same end (eudaimonia). Nussbaum suggests that both philosophy and literature need each other. Emotions are not opposed to reason. "Moreover, Nussbaum argues, there are some kinds of knowledge that are accessible to us only when we experience certain eotions such as love.  There is a reciprocal relationship between love and knowledge: we love people because of what we know about them, to be sure, but we also come to know them more fully because we love them" (Jacobs). Just as I mention above, Jacobs notes that Nussbaum does not consider what would happen if "one's personal telos as 'holiness' or 'righteousness" rather than goodness." Jacobs further argues that , according to Shelley, "poets are the unacknowledged legislators of the world," and that "of the poets' legistlative role were to be publicly recognized and accepted, then poets would be in the position of having to acknowledge their responsibility and accountability to those whose behalf they are legislating. But such an acknowledgement would be utterly at odds with the Romantic belief in the autonomy (which is to say the unaccountability to anything but itself) but the poetic imagination."