The excluded ought to have a good memory—the philosopher Martha Nussbaum talks to Tomasz Stawiszyński about nurturing the delicate flower that is liberal democracy, and the reason why she prefers the reformed synagogue to the Protestant church.
I couldn’t have been mistaken; the directions were more than exact. I should wait—at 2 p.m. sharp—at the second entrance to the University of Chicago Law School. Martha Nussbaum, one of the most important contemporary philosophers, who in her work references Plato and Aristotle, as well as contemporary literature, soap operas and even reality shows; the author of numerous books and texts on the concepts of community, freedom and the importance of emotion in the shaping of democratic societies, would be having lunch at one of the university campus restaurants forty-five minutes earlier.
The time she would need to eat lunch and walk to our meeting place had been calculated precisely, just like the duration of the interview—exactly one hour. Oh, and one more thing. Perhaps I should consider the medium I would use to record the interview. Taking notes is out of question, but electronic equipment can also be unreliable—words can sometimes be distorted, changing the sense of the entire argument. After all, philosophy is a subtle matter—nuance often tips the balance.
None of this surprised me much. I already knew that Nussbaum is a perfectionist. That every day she runs twelve miles along Lake Michigan, replaying favorite opera arias in her head. And that she is an extremely hard worker—as proven by her bibliography of several dozen items. And that she considers making use of her talents as a kind of moral imperative.
I won’t lie—I was a little anxious about this meeting.
As it has turned out, these were needless worries. Nussbaum was waiting for me on time—at 2 p.m. sharp—at the second entrance to the University of Chicago Law School. She greeted me warmly and led me through long corridors straight to her office, full of books and . . . small and large figurines of her favorite elephants adorning almost every surface of the room.
Since I only had one hour, I swiftly turned on the dictaphone.
This interview was conducted in October 2016, during the protests in Poland against a proposed tightening of abortion law, and prior to Donald Trump’s election as US president.
Tomasz Stawiszyński: We are meeting on a day when there have been many protests in the streets of Warsaw and other Polish cities. Polish women have been showing their disagreement with the very restrictive anti-abortion law, which the government was trying to enforce. Many of them, for the first time, felt that they needed to openly fight for their rights. And, in a way, they succeeded, as the most restrictive anti-abortion law project was eventually rejected by the parliament. We don’t know what the overall final result will be, of course, but these protests undoubtedly were a serious sign for the politicians, that they have to be very careful with such issues. But the most important thing is that Polish women who went out into the streets were angry, even furious—and that this anger, and this feeling that someone is trying to impose something on them without their consent, led them to the political sphere. You seem to be very cautious about anger, and you don’t perceive it as a positive emotion in any sense . . .
Martha Nussbaum: I don’t know if they were angry. First of all, I don’t have a reason to think that. I want to make it very clear that I see a very important distinction between the spirit of protest and the spirit of anger. And that is because anger involves not only the thought that there is something wrong, but it also involves the
