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Chapitre D'ouvrage Année : 2022

Martha Nussbaum and the Moral Relevance of Literature

Résumé

This paper aims at presenting and discussing one of Martha Nussbaum’s main contributions to contemporary moral philosophy: her idea that literature is indispensable to philosophy and more precisely moral philosophy. This view, that novels, and the works of tragic poets, embody ethical reflection is in fact related to Nussbaum’s other main philosophical contributions, in particular her approach to justice based on “capabilities,” her analysis of emotions as essentially grounded on beliefs, her views on public life in relation to the concept of “poetic justice,” and the importance she attaches to the humanities for education and public policies. I reconstruct this overall systematicity of Martha Nussbaum’s positions in moral and political philosophy, and in her early contributions in the history of ancient philosophy, before concentrating on her thesis that certain novels are works of moral philosophy because they take in charge “the original Socratic question ‘How should one live?’” After explaining this assertion from Nussbaum’s point of view, I argue that such novels might rather be works of moral psychology, i.e. works of moral philosophy viewed as a (primarily) descriptive rather than a (primarily) normative task. I try to prove my point while adopting the approach often favoured by Martha Nussbaum, namely by interpreting a particular novel: Charles Dickens’s Great Expectations. I discover in this novel a psychological analysis of the lucid inconsistency of love and a subtle description of (social) shame by the internalisation of the gaze of the upper-class. I also maintain that the hero’s progress or regeneration which appears in this novel is not in his control: Dickens’s narration rather shows it as the necessary result of a chain of external events. Now if it is because of circumstances that Pip has become (or rather has become again) a better human being, as Dickens’s insistence on necessity shows according to me, I deny that readers might draw from his adventure a lesson to live better lives. Nonetheless, I find Dickens’s analysis of love, shame, and their effects on morality deeply instructive and relevant on the descriptive level, which in my view is their rightful position: the level of moral psychology, which, I find no less relevant in terms of moral philosophy than the normative “How should one live?” question.

Domaines

Philosophie
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Dates et versions

hal-03806248 , version 1 (07-10-2022)

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  • HAL Id : hal-03806248 , version 1

Citer

Eléonore Le Jallé. Martha Nussbaum and the Moral Relevance of Literature. Thinking With Women Philosophers, Springer, p. 131-154, 2022, 978-3-031-12661-1. ⟨hal-03806248⟩
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