Episode #207 ... Fear is toxic to a democracy. (Martha Nussbaum)

Hello, everyone. I'm Stephen West. This is Philosophize This. Thanks for supporting on Patreon. So today, we're talking about the philosopher Martha Nussbaum. She's one of the names that often comes up in conversations about the greatest living philosophers. We did an episode on some of her work, episode one ninety. And for whatever it's worth, that episode has become the most listened to episode in the last year of the show, which is pretty nifty. I'm sure she cares a lot about that whole title. But if you don't remember the episode, we talked about her concept of neo stoicism. We talked about how to Martha Nussbaum, the history of Western thought has been filled with this mistaken way of thinking about the emotions. But when we're trying to learn more about the world around us, people typically just assume that there's two ways you could be looking at it. You got clear thinking on the one hand, that is rational thinking where we use logic and deduction to figure things out. And then on the other hand, we have unclear ways of thinking that are more emotional, more irrational. The assumption by so many over the years has been that to base your understanding of something on an emotional response you have to it, well, that just makes you a moron. Emotions are irrational things. For the love of Christ, man, pull yourself together and start thinking more rationally and logically about stuff. That's what a lot of people would say here. But as we laid out on episode one ninety to Martha Nussbaum, this is the wrong way to be thinking about it. That in reality to her, when you pay attention to what the emotions are, when emotions are properly examined, they are actually extremely valuable appraisals of our reality, and people are always making these sorts of appraisals about the things that matter to them. So as she says, if we don't pay close enough attention to these emotions, we run the risk of completely missing huge pieces of what makes our societies and our relationships with other people even function at a basic level. And to set the stage for the piece of her work we're talking about today, let's give a concrete example of the sort of thing she's talking about here. You may remember from the episode her comparing the two emotional responses of shame and guilt. The example I used in the episode was to imagine yourself getting into a car accident, rear ending someone where it's 100% your fault. And when you get out of the car there after crashing into that someone, staring at the smoking cars on the side of the road, do you feel shame or do you feel guilt when you're in that moment? And as we talked about to Nussbaum, the specific emotion that you're feeling there actually matters a lot, And you need to examine it because it can tell you important things about …