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The Philosophy of Love about:reader?url=http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/18/books/the-philoso...

nytimes.com

Th e Ph i l osoph y of L ove

Wendy Steiner

This position bucks the Platonic-Stoic tradition in which, as Nietzsche put it, ''to offer pity is as good as to offer
contempt.'' The notion that laws protecting women from harassment or providing special benefits to minorities
are patronizing and ultimately dehumanizing is a contemporary expression of what Nussbaum calls ''the
Stoics' egalitarian cosmopolitanism'': ''All human beings are equal in worth, and we are fundamentally not
members of families or cities, but kosmopolitai, members of the 'city-state of the universe.' This means that we
should have equal concern for all.'' Nussbaum's contrary claim is that we are all subject to forces beyond our
control; feeling compassion for those who suffer disproportionately and experiencing sorrow because our own
interests have been threatened are reasonable and humane responses. ''Agency and victimhood are not
incompatible: indeed, only the capacity for agency makes victimhood tragic.''

Since our present feelings are inevitably ''shadowed'' by those in our past, Nussbaum considers the narrative
arts especially illuminating about ''emotion-histories.'' Tragedy provides perhaps the most powerful training in
compassion, causing us to look with sympathy and fear on the misfortunes of worthy people, but all art allows
us to connect the pleasure of exploration ''to the neediness and insufficiency that is its object. . . . Exercising
this sort of understanding preserves us from a hard arrogant feeling of self-sufficiency that would in many ways
mar our dealings with others in life.''

Though Nussbaum does not identify her book as a feminist or even a specifically feminine argument, its
consistent target is the stoical insistence on emotional control that our culture idealizes in ''masculinity.'' Men
are brought up to feel shame at vulnerability, Nussbaum says, and to hold themselves back from the
attachments that make them dependent on what is beyond their control. Women, perennially less the rulers of
their fate, their bodies, their emotions, are traditional objects of male loathing. Indeed, Nussbaum attributes
all refusals of empathy and compassion to a training in shame toward the body and the mother. In extreme
form, it produces the Nazi ''fantasy of male omnipotence -- steel replacing flesh, will effacing need'' -- blotting
out connection to those less strong, making them contemptible objects to be dominated or eliminated.
Emotions like grief, compassion and love, which she considers the cornerstones of a humane society, result
from our seeing our interests reflected in others who should become beneficiaries of concern and support.

Love is the ultimate vulnerability, but philosophy, religion and art throughout time have pictured it instead as a
path to a higher level of existence beyond the pain and vicissitude of the everyday. In an illuminating history of

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The Philosophy of Love about:reader?url=http://www.nytimes.com/2001/11/18/books/the-philoso...

these ''ladders of love,'' Nussbaum shows shame in action. Plato left out of his account everything about the
beloved that is less than ideal, and consequently espoused ''an illiberal perfectionist politics.'' Augustine felt he
must repudiate his tie to his mother to perfect his love of God, and the other representative of Christianity in
this account, Dante, conceived of heaven as a place of self-sufficiency incompatible with ''the idea of ongoing
compassion for human life.'' Romantics like Emily Brontë focused on the process of ascent rather than its
otherworldly end, but Brontë presented the uncontrolled attachment to real people as too terrifying to be
realized. Gustav Mahler comes closer to Nussbaum's ethical ideal, with his Jewish focus on worldly justice and
physicality and his conception of love's ascent as a kind of feminine receptivity to the world spirit, but
reluctantly she notes his utter contempt for the everyday. Even Walt Whitman, whose vision of democracy is a
vision of embodied, sexualized love and a triumph of compassion toward people in the commonest of
situations, thought of all-encompassing nature as a grand unity, immortal and therefore subversive to human
sadness.

It is only in James Joyce that Nussbaum finds what she considers an emotional ideal suitable for a
compassionate society. ''Joyce steals back the sacramental vocabulary for the frying of a kidney,'' and shows
love as a descent into disorder and eroticism. ''Ulysses'' asked us ''to climb the ladder and yet, at times, to turn
it over. . . . Only in that way do we overcome the temptation, inherent in all ideals, to despise what is merely
human and everyday.'' Nussbaum gives Joyce the last word: the mock-epic passage where Leopold Bloom
ascends to heaven, a latter-day Elijah, ''like a shot off a shovel.''

If love is made of such incongruous juxtapositions, their intrusion into ''the exalted context of academic
philosophy'' is the only way, Nussbaum asserts, for philosophy to tell the truth about emotion. And yet, if there
is any flaw in this magnificent book, it is the result of one such intrusion: the account of Nussbaum's own grief
and remorse at failing to be present as her mother was dying. This Joycean ''agenbite of inwit'' elicits our
sympathy, but there is something chilling in the appropriation of her personal grief for scholarly illustration.
We cannot but cringe when we hear that the ''propositional content'' of her grief was ''My wonderful mother is
dead,'' or that the ''real question'' posed by the difference between her initial agony and her current calm is
whether it is ''a cognitive difference, or a noncognitive difference.'' Nussbaum's mother would have understood
why this question flies to pieces in the asking, for she associated ''hyper-logical'' argument, we are told, ''with a
failure of love.''

In light of the extraordinary achievement of this book, it would be sad to conclude that philosophy is finally in
some deep sense a failure of love. In this case at least, a personal ''upheaval of thought'' cannot be contained
within the discourse of reason. The literature and music that Nussbaum so sensitively examines succeed much
better in conveying her idea. And when she leaves her own grief behind, she creates an argument for the dignity
and moral efficacy of emotion that is not only an intellectual tour de force but a moving triumph of humanistic
thinking.

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