Philosophy Without Tears

Rachel Aviv’s New Yorker profile of philosopher Martha Nussbaum was shadowed by irony. Entitled “The Philosopher of Feelings,” the article described Nussbaum’s work on the philosophy of emotions and her advocacy of human vulnerability. Philosophy itself can provide a protective shield against luck or unluck, and she has studied the ways disgust “draws sharp edges around the self” (Nussbaum’s phrase) and alienates us from our humanity.

Yet Aviv depicts a confident, active, dominating woman, a woman who soldiered on with a lecture after her mother’s death, a woman who gave Aviv very specific directions about how to write a profile of Martha Nussbaum. It’s odd that someone who studies the vulnerability of bodies should be devoted to an exercise regimen apparently designed to mold her flesh into steel. Aviv says that Nussbaum has been drawn to those who blush in partial reaction to her unblushing father, but in person she is very much her father’s daughter.

The distance between philosophical interests and character isn’t complete. According to Aviv, Nussbaum is quite at home with bodily processes: “When she goes on long runs, she has no problem urinating behind bushes. Once, when she was in Paris with her daughter, Rachel, who is now an animal-rights lawyer in Denver, she peed in the garden of the Tuileries Palace at night.”

The irony isn’t unintended, nor is it entirely lost on Nussbaum herself. Aviv notes, “In a semi-autobiographical essay in her book ‘Love’s Knowledge,’ from 1990, she offers a portrait of a female philosopher who approaches her own heartbreak with a notepad and a pen; she sorts and classifies the experience, listing the properties of an ideal lover and comparing it to the men she has loved. ‘You now begin to see how this lady is,’ she wrote. ‘She goes on thinking at all times. She won’t simply cry, she will ask what crying consists in. One tear, one argument.’”