Nussbaum on Why We Need the Humanities

Nussbaum quotes the Indian author and public intellectual Rabindranath Tagore (1861-1941), who wrote way back in 1918 that:

“history has come to a stage when the moral man, the complete man, is more and more giving way, almost without knowing it, to make room for the political and the commercial man, the man of the limited purpose. This process, aided by the wonderful progress in science, is assuming gigantic proportion and power, causing the upset of man's moral balance, obscuring his human side under the shadow of soul-less organization.” [Nationalism (Macmillan, 1918), p. 16]

In its focus on short-term profitability, our society promotes and cultivates narrowly technical skills — which in themselves are quite important and useful, but are not what make possible a flourishing and democratic society — and in doing this we neglect the cultivation of those skills that help us interact with each other as whole persons.

Martha Nussbaum puts it this way:

“We seem to be forgetting about the soul, about what it is for thought to open out of the soul and connect person to world in a rich, subtle, and complicated manner; about what it is to approach another person as a soul, rather than as a mere useful instrument or an obstacle to one’s own plans; about what it is to talk as someone who has a soul to someone else whom one sees as similarly deep and complex. […] These abilities are associated with the humanities and the arts: the ability to think critically; the ability to transcend local loyalties and to approach world problems as a “citizen of the world”; and, finally, the ability to imagine sympathetically the predicament of another person.” [Not for Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities (Princeton University Press, 2010), pp. 6-7]

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