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Martha Nussbaum
Not for Profit


Op 4 september 2011 was Martha Nussbaum te gast op de Internationale
School voor de Wijsbegeerte. Zij gaf daar de tweede Van Eedenlezing, en nam
het eerste exemplaar in ontvangst van Niet voor de Winst, de Nederlandse
vertaling van haar in 2010 verschenen boek Not for Profit. De volledige lezing
is te zien en horen op de website van de Internationale School voor de
Wijsbegeerte: http://www.isvw.nl/nl/nussbaum/.
Hier volgt een schriftelijke weergave van een deel van haar lezing.
Monique Leygraaf



Were all in midst of a crisis of massive proportions and grave global significance. () A world wide crisis in
education. Radical changes are occurring all around the world in what democratic societies teach the young.
And those changes have not been well thought through. Eager for national profit, nations and their education
systems are heedlessly discarding the skills that are needed to keep democracy strong. If the trend continues
nations all over the world will soon be producing generations of useful machines as John Dewey once put it
talking about the bad education systems he was criticizing, rather than complete citizens who can think for
themselves, criticize tradition and understand the significance of another persons sufferings and
achievements.
()
If a nation wants to promote and then sustain that type of humane, people-sensitive democracy, one dedicated
to promoting opportunities for life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness as Thomas Jefferson put it, to each
and every person, what abilities will it need to produce in its citizens? At least the following seem crucial:
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The ability to deliberate well about political issues affecting the nation, to examine, reflect, argue,
debate, deferring to neither tradition nor authority.
Second, the ability to think about the good of the nation as a whole, not just that of ones own local
group, and to see ones own nation in turn as part of a complicated world in which issues of many
kinds require intelligent cooperative deliberation for their resolution.
And third, the ability to have and to sustain concern for the lives of others, to imagine what policies of
many types mean for the opportunities and the experiences of ones fellow citizens, of many different
types, and for people outside ones own nation.
But before we can say more about education, I think we need to understand some of the problems we face on
the way of making students and young people generally responsible democratic citizens who might possibly
seek out and implement a human development agenda. So what is this about human life that makes it so hard
to sustain egalitarian and democratic institutions and so easy to lapse into hierarchies of various types or,
even worse, projects of violent group animosity, as a powerful group attempts to establish its supremacy?
Whatever these forces are, its ultimately against them the true education for human development must fight.
So, as I would put it following Gandhi, it must engage with the clash of civilizations
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within each person as
respect for others contends against narcissistic aggressions. This internal clash can be found can be found in all
modern societies in different ways, since all contain struggles over inclusion and equality, whether the precise
locus of these struggles is in debates about immigration, or the accommodation of religious, racial and ethnic
minorities, or gender equality or affirmative action. In all societies too, there are forces in the human
personality that militate against mutual recognition and respect, as well as also forces of compassion and
respect they give egalitarian democracies strong support.

1 In Not for Profit noemt Nussbaum op deze plaats zeven punten, die ze in haar lezing opnieuw ordent en samentrekt tot drie
punten. Deze drie punten komen overeen met de drie vermogens waar een kritisch burger over dient te beschikking / waar opvoeding tot
menselijkheid aan dient bij te dragen.
2 Vergelijk Not for Profit, p 29 ev.

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So what do we know by now about the forces in a personality that militate against democratic reciprocity and
respect? First we know that people have in all places a high level of deference to authority. Psychologist
Stanley Milgram showed, and these experiments were replicated in many different countries, that
experimental subjects were willing to administer a very painful and dangerous level of electric shock to another
person at least thats what they thought they were doing, of course they really werent doing it so long as
the superintending scientist told them: Go ahead. You have to go ahead. Even when the other person was
screaming in pain (which, of course, was faked for the sake of the experiment). Solomon Asch, earlier and
again, these were experiments that were replicated in many different countries showed that people have a
high degree of deference to peer pressure. Experimental subjects were willing to go against the clear evidence
of their senses when all the other people, who were paid by the experimenter, were saying the wrong thing.
()
Other research on the emotion of disgust () shows that people are very uncomfortable with the signs of their
own animality and mortality. Disgust is an emotion that initially leases the boundary between ourselves and
the other animals, but then in virtually all societies its not enough to keep ourselves free from determination
by bodily waste products, corpses and so on the other things that psychologists call animal reminders.
Instead, people also create subordinate groups of human beings who are identified as disgusting and
contaminating. Saying that theyre smelly, dirty, bearers of disease and so on. Theres al lot of good work done
on how such attitudes figure in history of anti-Semitism, in American racism, in prejudice against women in
many times and places, in the Indian caste hierarchy, in prejudice against people with disabilities, and in
prejudice against the people who have same sexual orientation. () Similarly, when people are ashamed of
need and helplessness they tend to want to project that shame on other people, saying that theyre the
shameful ones, theyre the ones who should blush for who they are. So both disgust and shame work together
to create a stigmatized identity for many groups in our society.
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What else do we know? We know that these forces take on much more power when people are anonymous or
not held personally accountable. People act much worse under the shelter of anonymity, as parts of a faceless
mess, than they do when theyre watched and made accountable as individuals. The internet shows that in
many ways that are deeply disturbing.
Second, people behave worse when no one raises a critical voice. Aschs subjects went along with a wrong
judgement when all the other people that preceded them were saying the wrong thing. But if even one person
spoke up and said the right thing, then they were freed up to follow the evidence of their own senses.
Third, people behave much worse when the people over whom they have power are dehumanized and de-
individualized. In a wide range of situations people have behaved much worse when the other is portrayed as
like an animal, or as bearing a number rather than a name. In other words, detouring your imagination from
entering that life and seeing it as a full life.
So in thinking how we might help individuals and societies to win that internal clash of civilizations we would
do well to think about how these tendencies can be used to our advantage. The other side of the internal clash
is each persons growing capacity for compassion and concern, for seeing another person as an end and not a
mere means. We now know through the research of Paul Bloom at Yale, that babies as young as one year old
can think perspectively, that is see the world from the point of view of another person. () Yet, of course, this
is a very rudimentary ability, and its deployed instrumentally. Children think: How can I get my parents to
bring me what I want?. Of course it can be used to control other people and not to respect that person as an
end and not as a means. Well, () as development goes on, if all goes well in the family and in the schools, the
child can come to feel genuine concern and compassion for the needs of others and can see them as real
people with rights equal to its own. But that has to happen.
Now that we have a sense of the terrain of which education goes to work, I want to return to the ideas I
mentioned earlier saying some things that of course are very tentative and incomplete and is still quite radical
in the present world culture, about the abilities that a good education will cultivate at different stages. So,
three values I think are particularly crucial for decent global citizenship:
The first is the capacity for Socratic self-criticism and critical thought about ones own traditions.
Socrates argues that democracy needs citizens who can think for themselves rather than deferring to
authority and peer pressure. () Democracy needs, he thought, citizens who can reason together
about their choices rather than simply trading claims on count of claims. Critical thinking of the
Socratic sort is particularly crucial for good citizenship in a society that needs to come to grips with the
presence of people who differ by ethnicity, class, and religion. Well only have a chance at an
adequate dialogue across cultural boundaries if young people learn how to engage in dialogue and

3 In Not for Profit betrekt Nussbaum het gedeelte over disgust meer op het jonge kind (p 32-33).

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deliberation in the first place, rather than simply viewing the confrontation as a way of making boosts
and assertions about your own group. And theyll only know how to dialogue if they learn how to
examine themselves and to think about the reasons why theyre inclined to support one thing rather
than another. Rather then seeing political debate as a way of boosting or getting advantages for their
own site. When politicians bring simplistic propaganda their way as politicians in every time and
place have a way of doing young people will only have a hope of preserving independence and
holding the politicians accountable if they know how to think critically about what they hear, testing
its logic and examining alternatives to it. So I think this is what Socrates meant when he compared
himself to a gadfly on the back of democracy which he then compared to a noble but sluggish horse.
() Students exposed to instruction in critical thinking learn at the same time the new attitude to
people who disagree with them. They learn to see people who disagree not as an opposing sports
team to be defeated, but instead as people who have reasons for what they think. When their
arguments are reconstructed and they turned out that they even share some important premises with
ones own site. And both will understand better where the differences come from. We can see how
this humanizes the political other making the minds see that opposing form is a rational being who
may share some thoughts with ones own group. *Example student Business College taking liberal arts
courses during a philosophy course he learned about Socrates debates in class he was assigned
to produces arguments against the death penalty when he actually supports the death penalty. This
was the first time he realized that is was possible to produce arguments for a position that you dont
call yourself. He understood there was a structure of thought over there and that some points they
actually share, and then the interesting question is: where do the differences come from?]
Critical thinking is a discipline that can be taught as a part of the schools curriculum, but of course it
wont be taught well unless it informs the spirit of a schools pedagogy. Each child must be treated as
an individual whose powers of mind are unfolding and who can make an active contribution to
classroom discussion.
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[32:30 Importance of critical thinking to businesses and economic success.]
By emphasising each persons critical voice, we also promote a culture of accountability. When people
see their ideas as their own responsibility they are more likely too to see their deeds as their own
responsibility. That was the point that Tagore was making in Nationalism when he said that the
bureaucratization of social life and the relentlessly machinelike character of modern nation states had
deadened peoples moral imaginations leading them to acquiesce in atrocities with no twinge of
conscience.
The second key ability of modern democratic citizens I would argue is what I call the ability to think as
a citizen of the world. That is to see oneself as a member of a heterogeneous nation and world,
understanding something of the history and the character of the different groups that inhabit it.
Knowledge is no guarantee of good behaviour, but ignorance is a virtual guarantee of bad behaviour.
Simple cultural and religious stereotypes in our world, for example the facile equation of Islam with
terrorism. And the first way to begin combatting these is to make sure that from a very early age
students learn a different relationship to the world. Issued gradually come to understand both the
differences that make understanding difficult between groups and nations, and shared human needs
and interests that make understanding a central of common problems are to be solved. This
understanding of the world will promote human development only if it is itself infused by searching
critical thinking. Thinking that focuses on differences of power and opportunity. And so history will be
taught not as a set of pre-established facts, but in a way that encourages students to ask how the
historical narratives are put together; from whose point of view; with whose interests and so on.
Things that have been happening, gladly, more and more. At the same time, traditions and religions of
major groups in ones own culture and in the world will be taught in ways appropriate to each age, but
students will gradually come to have a more sophisticated understanding of those, and capable of
appreciating nuances, differences of sub-group and so on. In curricular terms, these ideas suggest that
all young citizens should learn rudiments of world history and should get a non-stereotypical
understanding of the major world religions, again with increasing sophistication as they get older, and
then should learn how to greater depth into at least one unfamiliar tradition in this way acquiring
skills that can later be used elsewhere. ()
The third ability of the citizen, closely related to the first two, is what I would call the narrative
imagination. This means the ability to think what it might be like to be in the shoes of a person

4 Vgl Not for Profit, p 55.

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different from oneself, and many different sorts of such people. To understand what the problems are
that that person faces. To be an intelligent reader of that persons story and therefore to be able to
understand at least some of the emotions and wishes and desires that a person so placed might have.
The cultivation of sympathy has been a key part of the best modern ideas of progressive education in
both Western and non-Western nations. () Learning to see another human being not as a thing but
as a full person doesnt come automatically. It must be promoted by an education that refines the
ability to think about what the inner life of another person might be like, but also to understand why
one can never fully grasp that inner world, why any person is always to a certain extend dark to any
other including oneself to oneself.
The arts can cultivate students sympathy in many ways through engagement with many different
kinds of works of literature, music, fine art and dance. But thought needs to be given to what a
students particularly blind spots are likely to be. And works can be chosen in consequence. For all
societies at all times have their own particular blind spots: groups within the culture and also groups
abroad that are specially likely to be dealt with ignorantly and obtusely. Works of art can be chosen to
promote criticism of this obtuseness, and more adequate vision of the unseen. The great African-
American novelist Ralph Ellison, in a later essay about his novel Invisible Man, wrote that a novel like
his could be a raft of perception, hope, and entertainment on which American culture could
negotiate the snags and whirlpools that stand between us and our democratic ideal. Well, his novel
takes the inner eyes of the white reader as its theme and its target. Inner eyes is a phrase he uses.
The hero tells us at the beginning: Im an invisible man. And then he goes on to say that his invisibility
in American society is not the result of a chemical accident (). But its the result of a deficiency of the
inner eyes of the people who are looking at him. And what we find out, as this wonderfully surreal,
funny, and tragic novel goes on, is that what people are seeing when they look at him, are always
projections of their own fantasy in one way or another. Theres really no genuine curiosity about what
hes experiencing and what its like. Theyre all using him in one or another way. So his idea is the
invisibility is an imaginative and educational fail on the part of white society that can be addressed by
a novel such as this. Through the imagination we can gain a kind of insight into the experience of
another group or person, which is very difficult to attain in daily life. Particularly when our world is
constructed sharp separations between groups and suspicions that make any encounter difficult.
[42:02 Example of the Chicago Childrens Choir Not for Profit, p 112-117] Three stories illustrate
what Stone is talking about. One day, she came into rehearsal room of the Concert Choir and heard a
group of African American girls singing a complicated passage of a Bach motet that they had been
rehearsing. So, she said, youre getting in some extra rehearsal time? No, they said, were just
chilling. The fact that these African American girls from inner-city schools felt that an natural way to
chill out, to relax together, was to sing a Bach motet, showed that they did not feel ashamed in the
face of so-called high culture; they didnt feel confined to black culture; they could claim any culture as
their own and take membership of it. It was theirs as much as the world of the spirituals.
Teaching of the sort that Ive been recommending needs small classes, or at least sections in larger classes,
where students get copious feedback on frequent writing assignments, and are encouraged to talk and debate
in class.
() [T]he abilities of citizenship are doing pretty poorly I think in more or less every nation in the most crucial
years of childrens lives, the years known as K through 12. Here the demands of the global market have made
everyone, including parents, focus on technical proficiencies as the key thing, then the humanities and the arts
are increasingly perceived as useless frills whod we can prune away to make sure that our nation (whether its
India or the US) remains competitive. To the extend that theyre the focus of national discussion, they are
recast as technical abilities themselves to be tested by quantitative multiple-choice examinations, so the
imaginative and critical abilities that lie at their core are left aside.
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() At least my first and third ability are
testable by quantitative multiple-choice exams. And the second, the historical one, well, () it would be very
hard to construct the right sort of history test.
If the real clash of civilizations is, as I believe, a clash within the individual person, s greed and narcissism
contend against respect and concern, all modern societies are losing the battle, as they feed the forces that
lead to dehumanization and fail to feed the forces that lead to cultures of respect. If we dont insist on the
crucial importance of the humanities and the arts, they will grow smaller, because theyre not making money.
They only do what is much more precious than that: make a world that is worth living in, people who are able

5 Vgl Not for Profit, p 133. K thought 12: sum of primary and secondary education.

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to see other human beings as full people, with thoughts and feelings of their own that deserve respect and
sympathy, and nations that are able to overcome fear and suspicion in favour of reasoned democratic debate.
Thanks.