Martha Nussbaum’s “world citizen,” original sin,and a purpose to teaching the humanities

Critique of Nussbaum on the humanities

In a general sense, the concept of the humanities has two references. In how the humanities are academically practiced, they refer to the teaching of literature, history, religion, classics, languages, and philosophy in the university. However, in their cultural role, the humanities are the ways people explain what it means to be a human in the world. They are a people’s self-understanding told through narratives about the experience of the human condition. The various academic disciplines try to elucidate the human experience. In that humans have been telling stories for centuries and across the globe about the fundamentals of their experiences in the world, we should share Nussbaum’s interest in having the humanities teach a universal perspective. A humanist education should encourage students to seek and welcome a plurality of accounts, to approach others as though they have a compelling interpretation about the human experience, and to realize that we are not the only ones confronted by the issues of life and death, of truth and interpretation, of creativity and stability, and of family and ancestors.

However, Nussbaum’s strong advocacy for the cosmopolitan-universal outlook gives us cause to part ways with her understanding of the purposes of the humanities. For Nussbaum, we should be universalistic and promote a world citizenship because that is what liberal democrats do. Enlightened thinkers are liberal democrats. They reap the legacy of Kant’s claim that we can have ethics without a defensible metaphysic and can have a government promoting world peace without the backing of a natural law. We should unfetter our rationality from religion, tradition, and metaphysical claims, and by following the logical postulates of necessity and universality, we can reach enlightened conclusions about what it means to be free and responsible in the world. Although Nussbaum insists that we must not depend on a religious or intellectual-metaphysical tradition to inform us about the humanities and what to teach about them, she, nonetheless, relies on the Kantian tradition of an abstract reasoning agent who is divorced from the influences of the past and who aims to reach universalizable conclusions about morality, education, religion, and politics. Her alliance with Rousseau, Dewey, and Tagora shows her dependence on a two hundred-plus year intellectual mode of inquiry, and like them she is averse to metaphysics, especially traditional, religious ones. Thus, in her own way, Nussbaum’s advocacy of a world citizen who aims for the universal relies upon a tradition and borrows from its vocabulary (e.g., human rights and autonomous rationality) and mode of reasoning (e.g., her interpretation of Socratic inquiry), which makes perfectly good sense within a tradition that has its roots in Kant, but which becomes nebulous and unconvincing outside it.

Nussbaum could reply that her cosmopolitanism represents the best of our cultural progress as it has matured in its efforts to be truthful about the world and fair to all people, that it is a hard-won victory over the dogmatic authoritarianism in religion, politics, and xenophobia of the past. Of course, if we aim toward a greater knowledge and appreciation of how the human experience is told, we should agree with Nussbaum and turn away from dogmatic authoritarianism and xenophobia. We should be aware that in our cultural and intellectual tradition unwarranted and harmful prejudices have created supercilious and censorious views towards others.

However, that turning away does not require us also to turn away from metaphysics. In fact, it requires a reliance on a metaphysic. Nussbaum worries that too much reliance on tradition and authority prevents us from appreciating the universal human experience. However, she uncritically accepts the Kantian confidence in the role and power of the detached, autonomous reasoner free of any metaphysical basis to reach rational explanations about how the world, morality, religious beliefs, and politics can be compelling to us. Hegel was quick to show that Kant’s explanation of the metaphysics-free autonomous reasoner accounts for only “appearances” and not reality. “We see that in the inner world of appearance, the Understanding in truth comes to know nothing else but appearance… in fact, the Understanding experiences only itself …” (Hegel, 1977: 102–103). However, for Hegel, to understand the important issues of the nature of the world, morality, etc. correctly, we have to do more than give a priori explanations of them. We have to explicate the cultural narratives that made the issues compelling.

Hegel’s critique applies to Nussbaum, as well. Because she removes metaphysical considerations, she is disinterested in the metaphysical bases of other cultures’ morality, art, religion, and politics. She would have us appreciate only the appearance of their beliefs and values, not the fact that they are arguments about reality. If she were to engage the veracity of their beliefs and values, she would need to take seriously the metaphysical arguments of her own cultural legacy. Nussbaum’s universalism hence must be about only the customs and practices of others, not about their substantive commitments as believing, thinking, and valuing people who have tried for centuries to interpret the world rightly and to live consistently with the reality that obligates them to be and act as certain kinds of people. In her educational agenda for a world citizen, just as we must disavow the metaphysical roots of our own culture, we must focus on appearances and not the substances of other cultures.

Nussbaum’s cosmopolitan starting point is not neutral about the way a people through their traditions and authorities have presumed or articulated a metaphysical justification for their culture. In saying that traditions and authorities are impediments to a proper education, she in fact presumes the irrelevance of metaphysics (even when found in other cultures) without proving it. We may acknowledge but not engage, learn, or argue with the relevancy of their own deeper ontological commitments about substance, God, and the good. Thus, in fact, instead of accepting and appreciating them for who they say they are and why they are that way, we make them conform to our liberal images of ourselves, that is, world citizens in a heterogeneous world in which it is wrong to judge and reject others who differ from our morality, religion, and politics. Even though Nussbaum’s liberal democracy promotes itself as the open-minded, pluralistic, and tolerant mindset of a world-citizen, it in actuality advances the Western-enlightenment’s understanding of the rational-self cut off from tradition and emboldens its confidence to change the world into a liberal democracy.

Other critics of Nussbaum’s agenda make similar claims. Ayaz Naseem and Emery Hyslop-Margison argue that Nussbaum’s rejection of metaphysics naively assumes we can create a universalistic cosmopolitanism without explaining the “universal human relationship[s]” and the “assumed larger human identity” (Naseem and Hyslop-Margison, 2006: 58). They fear without a metaphysical support, “unfettered consumerism” will be what creates the world-citizen (Naseem and Hyslop-Margison, 2006: 60). Brett Bowden maintains that Nussbaum’s argument for a universalistic cosmopolitanism based on liberal-democratic values is “(at best) cultural imperial[ism], perpetuating the Western Enlightenment’s long history of universalism-cum-imperialism” (Bowden, 2003: 360). To my knowledge Nussbaum has not tried metaphysically to prove the universality of the liberal-democratic values, though she needs them to be universally viable and convincing. However, she assumes them to provide a sufficient foundation for a universalistic cosmopolitanism.

I believe her goal of universalism can be promoted, but it needs a metaphysical tradition to undergird it. Moral, religious, and metaphysical norms enable us to conceive what is important in our analyses of other cultures and to articulate a defensible way to make evaluative judgments. Frankly, we cannot totally refrain from using norms in engaging and evaluating other cultures. However, teachers of the humanities need to know the necessity of having norms and be aware that their own norms are at play in their selection, interpretation, and evaluation of what texts, events, ideas, authors, and cultural debates are important for an educated person to know and learn from.

My argument thus far leads to this question—what kind of explanation of the human experience enables us to provide intellectual defensibility to our claims but also enables us to teach the humanities in a way that can first be universalistic, second interested and instructed by other eras, cultures, and value-systems, and third safe-guard us from unfounded dogmatism and prejudice about our own cultural perspectives? We need the conceptual resources of a metaphysic that pertain to all people. We need to articulate a metaphysical account that undergirds the humanities in their efforts to take seriously the literature, art, histories, languages, religions, and philosophies of peoples.

I now want to argue that an Augustinian view of original sin can provide a useful and insightful metaphysic for the teaching of the humanities. I do not pretend it is the only one to render this benefit. However, as I hope to show, the notion of original sin explains a common feature to all human experience and also explains why both a sober realism about the world’s corruptibility and an ethical mandate to improve the world are binding upon humanity.

St. Augustine on original sin

Augustine’s explanation of original sin provides a fruitful way to account for the human experience. Yet, he has multiple viewpoints on original sin. In his polemics against Pelagius, especially in Original Sin and in On Marriage and Concupiscence, Augustine tries to account for the solidarity of all humanity in sin with the notion of the seminal transmission of the sin of Adam, which may actually be based on a mistaken Latin translation of the Greek text of Romans 5.12 (McGonigle, 2001: 18–19). However, when Augustine tries to think systematically about the reality of the human condition before God, he presents a different view of original sin. In On Free Choice of the Will, he not only tries to exonerate God from the sins and horrible evils humanity has done by the misuse of their freedom, he also offers another and more compelling interpretation of original sin (especially for the purpose of undergirding the humanities).

In chapter three of On Free Choice of the Will, Augustine integrates original sin to an understanding of God’s purposes for creation (Augustine, 1993: 87). God makes a good creation with many integrated levels of being within it, and creation’s harmony reflects an eternal beauty. The relationship between the heavens and the earth, among the angels, humans, animals, plants, and earth reveals a sanctity of existence. God orders creation to reflect the divine glory: humanity bears the image of God and nature shows the handiwork of God. Each aspect of creation should be loved and enjoyed. People are most happy when they love the layers of creation proper to their order within creation. That is, we should love God but also love people because they bear the image of God, and we should love nature because it bears the handiwork of God. However, we should not love the things of the world more than people and people more than God. If we did, then we would corrupt in our minds and hearts the proper ordering of creation (Augustine, 1993: 81).

When Adam and Eve rebelled against God, they corrupted themselves by corrupting their loves. They loved their own pride more than they loved God and each other, and consequently they perverted the order of creation (See On Free Choice and the Will: 144). They desired pleasure and self-aggrandizement above the love of God, and consequently disrupted the proper order of creation. Because we are humans like Adam and Eve, we live in the world they made, in a world of distorted images, disastrous choices, and frustrating efforts. In fact, we are part of the world, and like Adam and Eve, we are out-of-sync with the proper ordering of the world and with the Creator of the world.

However, because God creates each person to seek and love God, everyone is uniquely responsible for their own freedom and their misuse of it. Hence, we do not have the same guilt as Adam and Eve. “In the midst of their ignorance and difficulty he leaves them the free will to ask and seek and try. He will give to those who ask, show himself to those who seek, and open to those who knock” (Augustine, 1993: 110). They made themselves guilty because they misused their God-given freedom to sin. But the displacement does mean we inherit the consequences of living in a world that is not the way it is supposed to be. Each of us misuses our freedom and thus incurs our own guilt (Augustine, 1993: 109). Because we love improperly, we are in the state of original sin (See On Free Choice and the Will: 131 and 137).

According to Augustine, this state has three aspects:

1. Life is difficult—We constantly deal with the corrosive and frustrating effects of a world gone awry. The world is no longer beautiful and conducive to enabling complete human happiness. Rather, it contains brutish, poisonous, and crippling forces, and, because we also love improperly like Adam, we bear responsibility for this condition of the world.

Teaching the humanities and original sin

Augustine’s explanation of the reality of the human condition (I contend) is accurate and enlightening. In our efforts to adjust our own desires for fulfillment with the limitations and fractures of life-experiences, we sense the world is not right. Even though we intuit that people ought to respect each other, to construct lasting relationships, to honor people’s best efforts at their work and loves, and to be kind, we see lust, vanity, gluttony, wrath, sloth, greed, and envy, and worse yet, we participate in them. It expresses a fundamental feature of every generation’s experience of the world and life—that is, the world is not the way it is supposed to be, that the very best efforts of the greatest minds, most powerful nations, and most sincere and well-meaning people have not stopped humanity from wars, hatred, cruelty, malice, idolatry (both sacred and secular), greed, racism, poverty, willful ignorance, fear, and despair. We are dealing with a profound problem and are outmatched in our moral and rational skills and resolve by its persistence, subtlety, and pernicious work. This is what the doctrine of original sin explains about the universal human experience.

If our fundamental understanding of the human experience is that the world is not the way it is supposed to be and that all of us must improve it, then we also understand what we have in common with all people—the human condition of the Original Sin. Because of the basic discord between God and humanity caused by sin, we all should acknowledge our own contributions to the harm of the world and take on the serious challenge to repair that harm. Like Adam, we love what we should not (concupiscence) and do not love what we should (charity), and consequently we contribute to the world’s corruption and bear responsibility for the exhausting difficulty endemic in the world and for the profound frustration present in all generations of humanity. Nonetheless, even though we experience this difficulty and frustration, we must try to do what brings fulfillment to the world, what brings more gratifying beauty and distributive justice into people’s lives.

I contend that Augustine’s explanation of original sin offers an ontological footing for the importance and the necessity of teaching the humanities. Augustine describes the reality of the human condition as one in which we must face the difficulty and corruption of the world and our own ignorance on how to realize a final justice and beauty for the world but also that we must progress in moral development and to improve the moral state of the world. When we reflect on the long history of humanity and upon our individual developments, we realize we ought to do something right and good even though we also know it will never bring us complete happiness nor be the final solution to the perpetual and chronic malfunctions of the human heart and of the will of collective groups. Susan Neiman is right when she maintains that for us to mature into intellectual adults, we must be able to balance the “is” with the “ought;” that is, to recognize the reality of a corrupt world but also to be morally motivated to improve it (Neiman, 2014: 214ff). Of all the academic disciplines, subjects, and studies, the disciplines of the humanities alone focus on the full human condition.

Even though the humanities comprise a wide range of courses and research interests, I agree with William Levi that there is an essential feature to them. They all seem to aim at one main point—“the cultural conscience forged throughout the course of history” (Levi, 1970: 46). The cultural conscience depicts how each generation struggles to understand rightly the human condition, how not to confuse it with superficial or fanciful projections of human nature and destiny, how to acknowledge the serious, needed, and perpetual efforts to overcome human malice, envy, cruelty, and hate, how to recognize simultaneously that humans are flawed (prone to destructive and cynical ways) but also inwardly compelled to do what is morally right. Yet, every generation also knows it must improve the human condition, that it must heal the sick and lame, feed the hungry, comfort the oppressed, safely rear children, create art, and inspire the beautiful, and give causes for hope to the next generation.

I contend that the above Augustinian doctrine of original sin correctly interprets the human condition. Because the explanation illuminates the fundamental struggles and persistent frustrations of human existence and also enjoins the moral charge to improve the world, the explanation secures the necessities for the studies of the humanities. The humanities are necessary for our understanding of the human condition, because only the humanities study the stories of people who, one, try to communicate with each other in profound ways, two, try to establish a continuity with their ancestors that perhaps will also link them to their descendants, and three, try to inquire critically into the very human questions of what is truth, goodness, beauty, knowledge, God, and eternally enduring states. Hence, the study of the humanities helps us to understand the human condition and, possibly, how to love properly within a world that is not the way it is supposed to be.

The relevance of the doctrine of original sin for teaching the humanities shows in two ways what is lacking in Nussbaum’s justification for teaching the humanities to cultivate a world citizen.

First, Nussbaum’s use of the humanities to advance her notion of a world citizen is not self-aware enough of its own biases. Because we must aim for world citizenship, the teacher of the humanities must ignore the way culture has over generations formulated normative beliefs and metaphysical support for those beliefs. However, her agenda relies on a very Western tradition and authority; that is, the Kantian notion that the functioning of the self and the way it understands reality can be severed from culture. Consequently, in her approach, we are most ourselves (i.e., most free and thus most progressively ethical) when we disencumber ourselves from traditions and authorities. With this universalistic perspective, according to Nussbaum, we can approach different peoples as members of a world citizenship, free of the biases, provincialisms, restrictions, confinements, and histories of cultures. However, such a vantage point is historically and epistemologically impossible. All people in their values and judgments are products of culture, and hence reflect their own biases and provincialism. This moral and epistemological limitation is true of the enlightened self as well.

The Augustinian doctrine of original sin is more realistic to the human condition than Nussbaum’s account of the world citizen. Because we all share moral difficulties of living in a world corrupted by human sin and also share a profound need and moral drive to improve the world, we cannot divorce ourselves from our own historical and cultural context. Of course, our culture may be highly educated, democratic in government, and economically technologically advanced, but it is also guilty and thus responsible for the continued corruption of society. Even though the enlightened project intends to offer a way to overcome provincialism and sectarian conflicts, it still perpetuates the dilemma of human experience—that is, in our efforts morally to improve the world, we also morally corrupt the world. With this insight of the dilemma of the human experience, we may be morally and aesthetically superior to others, for example, in terms of distributive justice and hospitality, but we also are strapped by original sin, producing counterproductive consequences to our best moral intentions, creating conflicts with our best social and international policies for others and other nations, and causing grief for future generations by acting on what we think is politically best today.

Such awareness of the effects of original sin on our thinking, planning, and the consequences of our actions, humbles us epistemologically and politically. No generation and culture have infallible and final knowledge about what is best for all people and what is the true historical fulfillment for all peoples. The history of the social and political experiments to establish a utopia, a kingdom of God on earth, a final solution, displays the endemic ignorance of all the efforts to accomplish such. Those who overtly appeal to their traditions and authorities to justify their culture are not the only ones who are culturally and epistemologically limited in their teaching of the humanities. Everyone (even the cultural elite) reasons and offers justifications for their conclusion from a perspective determined by human failures, ignorance, and human hopes for a better world.

To accept the viability of the notion of original sin for teaching the humanities compels us who teach the humanities constantly to scrutinize ourselves in our efforts to examine and learn from others. We are more likely to understand and learn from them if we first admit that we struggle with the same fundamental problem as they do. Hence, the engagement with others also becomes an honest recognition of our own limitations in dealing with the shared original sin of all humanity, and, furthermore, a contrite acknowledgement that even in our efforts to establish a citizenship with others, we may be perpetuating hidden cultural conflicts and future social discord.

Second, Nussbaum’s approach to other cultures is actually disrespectful of them. In her approach, we must not only dismiss the moral and metaphysical importance of our traditions and authorities but we must also diminish the intellectual arguments and societal forces of the traditions and authorities of other cultures, even though they have inspired and sustained the outward demonstrations of their culture. If we were to engage their metaphysical and religious defenses of their cultural expressions, we would either tend to compare them with ours or critique them, and both of these responses would stifle the pursuit to establish a kindred world citizenship.

However, the appearances of culture are manifestations of the substance of culture, and to take seriously only the appearances is to disavow the culture’s metaphysical bases. People believe, act, formulate moral and aesthetic values, and worship a deity for reasons, and those reasons are explicit or tacit arguments for the nature of the soul, the world, and God. To engage other cultures seriously enough to say that we not only want to appreciate them but also learn from them, we must acknowledge the metaphysical commitments implied in their own traditions and authorities, and that logically requires us to consider them as arguments for the nature of the soul, world, and God. To consider them as arguments, we must also determine whether they are good arguments, and to do that, we must appeal to that which we have fundamentally in common with them—that is, we all participate in original sin. To take seriously another culture means we take seriously the moral successes and failures it has experienced in dealing with original sin. When humanities teachers engage another culture (whether of the past or present), the point is not only to show the differences or similarities but to learn how better to live humanely within the world stifled by original sin.

Teaching the humanities and divine grace

Because the notion of original sin explains why the record of human civilization reveals the frustrating inability of humanity to fulfill its own profound yearnings to improve the world morally, aesthetically, and politically, the Christian understanding of grace shows its relevance for teaching the humanities. Because our nature is to misuse our freedom and consequently to distort the world’s goodness, we could despair over the human condition. However, the grace of God restores us to love rightly the world, others, and God. Divine grace does not transform us by either making us guiltless or psychologically innocent. Rather, grace incorporates us into the righteousness of God. Karl Barth correctly points out that grace has an ontological quality. “[G]race is an inner mode of being in God Himself.” (Barth, 1957: 353) Through the revelation of the Holy Spirit, we participate with the inner triune relations of divine love. To be in grace then means to be in God, to be in a covenant that also forms a covenant community. This participation creates a state of being. We are exposed to the true nature of love in the sacrificially edifying love of the Father, Son, and Holy Spirit, and this exposure informs us how to love rightly. The consequence of divine grace is not that we become morally perfect or are given a blueprint to create a utopia. Rather, we are empowered to love—to recognize, affirm, and appreciate the goodness of God’s creation, even within a world corrupted by original sin.

Because the humanities try to highlight the true condition of the human experience, they depict the perpetual frustrations of humanity to overcome the self-defeating impulses of individuals, groups, and institutions. However, the church’s experience of grace gives hope to the human condition. It shows that, though we are indeed flawed creatures, we can possibly correctly love the world, others, ourselves, and God. This sacrificially edifying love may be stifled by the confines of living in a world that is not the way it should be. Nonetheless, the displays of love engendered by being in the state of grace reveal to us what the world should be. In grace, we live in hope that our efforts to love are not in vain.