Resuscitating Ethical Criticism: Martha Nussbaum and the Moral Significance of the Novel

Abstract

Concerning the discussion of the relationship between philosophy and literature, Martha Nussbaum’s work is of great importance. Particularly Love’s Knowledge: Essays on Philosophy and Literature (1990) has to be mentioned in this context, but Poetic Justice: The Literary Imagination and Public Life (1995) also offers valuable insights. I shall mainly focus on Love’s Knowledge in my discussion of the strengths and weaknesses of Nussbaum’s approach. Nussbaum ought to be regarded as part of a liberal humanist tradition of literary criticism that reaches back to such important critics as F.R. Leavis (The Great Tradition, 1948), Lionel Trilling (The Liberal Imagination, 1950), and, of course, Wayne Booth, whose work in ethical criticism culminated in The Company We Keep: An Ethics of Fiction (1988). Henry James’s The Art of the Novel (1907), to a certain degree, might be seen as a kind of urtext in this context. Undoubtedly, Nussbaum is the most significant, and most prolific, contemporary proponent of this liberal humanist tradition of literary criticism. Like Rorty, she is a liberal philosopher who argues for a different way of doing philosophy, who is dissatisfied with the limitations of analytic philosophy, and who therefore contends that an exploration of the connections between philosophy and literature might be an interesting and fruitful endeavor.1 Her insights differ from those of Rorty, Stanley Cavell, and Arthur Danto in stimulating ways.