Michael Bérubé on Martha Nussbaum

“I said that Nussbaum has only one card to play in this position, but then again, in Nussbaum’s deck of cards, reason always trumps, and all those holdouts who don’t like the rule of reason must ultimately be persuaded to reason differently — that is, similarly to us reasonable folk. Personally, I find this eminently reasonable. But I’m less sanguine about what reason can and can’t do when it’s confronted with political and religious opposition to gay and lesbian studies; fundamentalist Muslim clerics, evangelical Christian preachers, and even popes have so far seemed unmoved by Nussbaumian appeals to our common humanity and our shared capacity for reason. It seems prudent, then, at the very least, to entertain reasonable doubts about the reach of reason.”

“One of the strengths of Cultivating Humanity is that it explicitly explores the conflict between authority and reason, even if the book does not entirely resolve this conflict. Nussbaum’s untrammeled confidence in both the universality of reason and the diversity of human life makes hers a challenging and curious book, one that strongly endorses multicultural study while distancing itself from nearly everything typically associated with it, including postmodernism, identity politics, and the critique of philosophical universalism. Here, in other words, we have an emphatic humanist who rebukes the ethnocentrism and willful ignorance of her fellow self-described humanists and the relativism and irrationalism of her postmodernist colleagues. Who knows? If her book is read as carefully and as sympathetically as it was written, it might just give humanism a good name again. But can it convince readers who don’t understand “reason” as she does? That’s another question entirely.”