Envy, propelled by fear, can be even more toxic than anger, because it involves the thought that other people enjoy the good things of life which the envier can't hope to attain through hard work and emulation.
Martha NussbaumRead
I have spent a lot of my career working on normative political philosophy, developing the 'capabilities approach' to social justice. I have also spent a lot of my career working on the structure of the emotions, and their role in human life.
Interpretation
What this quote means
Martha Nussbaum emphasizes the importance of combining political philosophy with the understanding of human emotions for achieving social justice.
In this quote, Martha Nussbaum reflects on her dual focus in her career: one on political philosophy, specifically the capabilities approach to social justice, and the other on the exploration of emotions and their significance in human existence. She suggests that an understanding of human emotions is crucial for the implementation of philosophical principles in social justice, highlighting the interplay between reason and emotion in our ethical considerations.
Themes
Political PhilosophyCapabilities ApproachEmotionsSocial JusticeHuman Life
In practice
Example use cases
In a lecture on social justice, one could use this quote to illustrate the necessity of including emotional intelligence in political philosophy discussions.
More from Martha Nussbaum
All quotes →This is true across every single society; we project grossness onto a racial or gender subgroup or caste. A big part of social subordination and discrimination is to ascribe hyper-animality to other groups and use that as an excuse for subordinating them further.
Martha NussbaumRead
Often, we feel helpless in lots of situations in our lives. The way anger gets a grip on us is it seems to be a way to extricate ourselves from helplessness.
Martha NussbaumRead
Courses in the humanities, in particular, often seem impractical, but they are vital, because they stretch your imagination and challenge your mind to become more responsive, more critical, bigger.
Martha NussbaumRead
I find so often, you know, just on a very mundane level; you've got a meeting and your child's acting in a school play. You can't do both things. And it's not simply that you can't do both, but whatever you do, you're going to be neglecting something that's really important.
Martha NussbaumRead
Look at the great tradition of Western political philosophy. Those people were all immersed in revolutionary movements. Most weren't career academics - often, they were too radical to be accepted in the academy. Rousseau's books were banned. Jeremy Bentham and John Stuart Mill couldn't hold academic positions because they were atheists.
Martha NussbaumRead
Similar quotes
You can’t repeat the past.” “Can’t repeat the past?” he cried incredulously. “Why of course you can!
F. Scott FitzgeraldRead
We often wonder: "How will I be when I die?" The answer to that is that whatever state of mind we are in now, whatever kind of person we are now, that's what we will be like at the moment of death, if we do not change. This is why it is so absolutely important to use this lifetime to purify our mindstream, and so our basic being and character, while we can.
Sogyal RinpocheRead
If we don't accept the uncomfortable proposition that every perpetrator of virtually every act of evil in our history has been a human being like us, then we actually foreclose the possibility of understanding how we do this to one another and therefore make it impossible to figure out how we might prevent these things.
Joshua OppenheimerRead
God does not die on the day when we cease to believe in a personal deity, but we die on the day when our lives cease to be illumined by the steady radiance, renewed daily, of a wonder, the source of which is beyond all reason.
Dag HammarskjoldRead
...it's my hypothesis that the individual is not a pre-given entity which is seized on by the exercise of power. The individual, with his identity and characteristics, is the product of a relation of power exercised over bodies, multiplicities, movements, desires, forces.
Michel FoucaultRead
There were a lot of gods. Gods always come in handy, they justify almost anything.
Margaret AtwoodRead