Recently Published Book Spotlight: Nussbaum’s Politics of Wonder

Jeremy Bendik-Keymer and Misty Morrison live in Shaker Heights, Ohio, Once Land of Many Older Nations (OLOMN). Jeremy works as Professor of Philosophy at Case Western Reserve University and is one of the editors of the APA Blog’s Into Philosophy series. Misty is a figurative painter and printmaker whose lithography is in the Ohio University Permanent Collection. The two recently published Nussbaum’s Politics of Wonder: How the Mind’s Original Joy is Revolutionary, a verbal and visual exploration of the central role wonder plays in Martha C. Nussbaum’s entire philosophy. The book expands Nussbaum’s concept of wonder through four musically-inspired motets (from the French for “little words”): lostness, devotion, honesty, and vulnerability. The experimental essays by Bendik-Keymer and the image series by Morrison develop a politics of wonder that challenges contemporary notions of anxiety and our ways of relating to the world as well as to one another. In this interview, the two discuss the interplay of their creative processes, the role music played in the book’s development, and how a politics of wonder may help us confront the challenges presently facing democracy.

Maryellen: What did the creative process for this book look like? Jeremy, you say that the words took shape by seeing Misty paint her exploration of wonder. Misty, have Jeremy’s philosophical processes affected your artistic processes?

Jeremy: First, Maryellen, thank you for your generosity in asking us to do this book spotlight. We are grateful. I do think that Misty’s and my book is as solid as we could make it and is worthwhile. More importantly, I think that the book’s focus is important now even if and especially because it stretches politics very much. But there are many things worth reporting on. There are so many good books published every year. Before we begin with our book, can we take a moment to think about how many good books have come out recently or are appearing even as this is in the publishing queue? Over at The Philosopher, where I work as a contributing editor, our Zoom series is constantly sharing many of these books.

It’s probably best to start with some matter-of-fact context: Nussbaum’s Politics of Wonder: How the Mind’s Original Joy Is Revolutionary began in 2007 when I was invited to present a talk at New School University for the annual Human Development and Capability Association conference for a panel on animals and the capability approach. Nussbaum was the respondent to each panel paper. That paper eventually became a chapter analyzing Nussbaum’s work in Frontiers of Justice focusing on the roles of sympathy and of wonder for the logic explaining why Nussbaum now delimits claims of justice to beings who are sentient. What struck me was that there was a whole politics of wonder behind her work. I’d never considered wondering as a way of being political. 

Others felt similarly, and I was drawn into a series of papers on the capability approach and the politics of wonder, including in the Cambridge Handbook of the Capability Approach, and in some papers that caught on (for instance, one in which I showed how wonder should be basic to even something as mainstream as Rawls’s original position). It became clear to me that I could do something useful by developing my reading of Nussbaum’s work, both to explain its unity and to explore the idea of a politics of wonder from the tradition of Nussbaum’s broad-minded Anglophone philosophy (by contrast, one can find forms of a politics of wonder, I later realized, in much French philosophy of the late 20th century to the present, and not simply because of the canonical role of wonder in Descartes). Moreover, the idea of a politics of wonder personally spoke to me. That’s how this project began.

But the project itself took on a life of its own. It is very important to me that books express formally what they study in their content. Formal integrity matters to me a great deal, and it is still the stumbling block of academic philosophy, which tends to produce knowledge as information and as a deliverable. Social media has only made this situation worse, confusing people as to what meaningful form is. Moreover, I am committed to writing books relationally, which means through relational reasoning first and foremost even before theory which is the standard mode of academic reasoning. These commitments led the book to take on an unconventional form. To put things simply, the book had to wonder not just be about it, and it had to be true to a dialogue with Nussbaum as well as with the reader and between Misty and myself. That takes us to your question, Maryellen.

So, I wrote this book during the first year of my first child Emet’s life while on sabbatical and parental leave—and then during the beginning of the pandemic. Misty and I co-parent. This meant that I had to find time to write when my family was asleep. Most of the book was written between 4 and 8 AM on weekday mornings before stopping to parent. This was even so when the book became a complex process and took many rewrites.

To answer your question: Misty began her visual inquiry parallel to the book within that first year of Emet’s life, too. Not only would her attention make me look (again) and see (anew), but her patience and endurance as a new mother who was also breastfeeding gave me strength and resolve to stay focused when I had time and to make the most of what was available to me so that it would not be a waste for the family.

What happened when I saw what Misty was doing is that I found my mind slowed down. Part of this is that Misty was thinking visually, a process of mark-making that takes a lot of time and quiet (or earphones-in time, quiet on the outside for those around her). She would mark, look, mark again, step back, stand and just look, and so on. This made me do a similar thing with writing. Seeing her take time spaced out my writing and made me look at it again. Her time made the project more real by revealing a new dimension of it.

Misty: The project evolved so much from the beginning. It began as an invitation when we were working out our relationship in the first year of Emet’s life—changing from partners to parents. Then “With Wonder” became a way of visualizing our relationship as a tri-partite family. 

Before Jeremy invited me to make the work that became “With Wonder,” I had been working primarily on botanical patterns. But that process didn’t seem to fit the process of wondering. It seemed too direct, even formulaic. I went back to working representationally because it involved some uncertainty and discomfort. I was confronted with thinking about seeing from Emet’s perspective, too, and that opened up wonder for me. The reasons why things opened up and why I was confronted with how Emet sees came from the questions Jeremy asked me as he was writing (and reading). 

But the painting was uncomfortable. Before the series, I had been working so much on pattern and printmaking (see “Red Clover Extract,” 2018), which is about a stable matrix. I hadn’t returned to representational painting since my thesis work. The way that I worked representationally for “With Wonder” is a method a former teacher of mine, Fred Danziger, referred to as “fearless painting.” There is no tonal structure or underpainting. The color, the value, the relationships are all worked out at the same time!

Jeremy: Would that be like doing a philosophy argument without prior attention to logic or a deductive axiology to guide the reasoning?

Misty: Basically, it’s a way of working where you trust that you can keep all the formal relationships working throughout the painting. I had never done this before. But somehow it fit the project. It felt immediate.

The thing that I want to say is that I wouldn’t have started with fearless painting. That came out of our discourse.

Jeremy: Misty, you’re inspiring me to share that our book was freaking hard to write. I had never written such a book before. Nussbaum’s Politics of Wonder was demanding. I had to be true to a decades-long relationship with a great teacher and philosopher, even more deeply, with the original experience of wondering that is so basic to how I am in the world, and then to our new family. It was actually nuts at times. But getting lost can be good.

Misty: You were also having to be true to editorial relationships with the publisher, …

Jeremy: … Right. Bloomsbury initially wanted a more traditional book, a secondary source.

Misty: And you weren’t willing to compromise on the meaning of the book for you or for us. Or in your relationship with the publisher. That was important.

Jeremy: Yes, there were a couple really embarrassing voice notes to my editor, made while I was walking Emet around the pandemic-isolated neighborhood in a stroller! But Colleen Coalter, my editor, ended up being a straight arrow. Because she gave me practical advice and reminded me of what would allow me to find my audience, I was able to compromise and honor my various commitments. It’s so important to give care to relationships of all these sorts and to not simplify things that truly matter.

Maryellen: Jeremy—In the book, you include notes on the music that you were listening to while writing each chapter. What role did music play in the writing of this work, and in your writing process more broadly? Misty, is music a part of your artistic process? If so, what do you typically listen to? How do you think it influences your art?

Misty: That’s an interesting question with a complicated answer. Music is a part of my artistic practice, but I don’t actively listen to it in the studio.

Jeremy: What? You have earbuds in!

Misty: I do one of two things: (1) Either I leave my earbuds in and have a song playing in my head or (2) I re-listen to podcasts or young adult literature about relationships. 

About music: The thing that’s interesting is that what pops up in my head and what I tend to follow generally traces back to some kind of relationship that I’m considering in my studio work. For example, when I was working on “Wallpaper” for our series, …

Jeremy: Misty, sorry to interrupt. Maryellen, while we are writing this post for you, we are in Misty’s studio, and I just discovered Palm’s album from this Fall and the song “Tumbleboy.” It’s my new favorite song, and I can’t stop hearing it as we type our answers to your question. It fits the book, too. Misty, back to you …

Misty: So, when I was working on “Wallpaper” for our series, I had “Shadow song” by the Mountain Goats in my head. The song is literally asking someone to meet you where you are, and that seemed like the place we were with Emet’s development. I have known that song for almost twenty years. It is a part of my musical vocabulary that rises up alongside my visual imagination and that helps me stay true to the relationship that I’m considering.

Jeremy: Music literally structured our book. Martha (Nussbaum) is a musical and dramatic person. That’s one of the keys to intuiting her sensibility. Anything worthy of her work had to be musical, at least when it comes to wonder which is the central orientation of her entire body of work, believe it or not. 

Every book I write is a struggle with form. Formal decisions in philosophy are as crucial as matters of content, and, as I suggested earlier, the stumbling block for the academy is often that it lacks art when it comes to form. Life is not artless, and life cares about form. But I did not know for a while what form the book should take.

The idea for the book’s structure came to me while celebrating Emet’s first Christmas. I was spinning disks on the stereo and turned to an old cassette tape from 1989, Duruflé’s “Four Motets on Gregorian Themes.” Suddenly, I felt that the book should be four motets.

But the motet is an evolving form of music. It was a secular evolution of sacred music that came to be used in jazz and funk. I wanted to add punk, … because Martha is a punk, but she doesn’t have the ear for it (she’s all Mozart and Benjamin Britten), and I was a punk, or still am. So, I held the four motets as the spiritual kernel of the book but branched out to four unconventional motets that broadened Martha’s sonic sensibility: Steve Reich’s Music for 18 Musicians, Roscoe Mitchell’s “Nonaah,” Windy and Carl’s “Balance (Trembling),” and Fela Kuti’s “I.T.T.” The setting for the book, which provides lots of context, alludes also to Deerhunter’s “Punk!“—the live version they did on their 2013 Monomania tour that was 20 minutes of feedback (I experienced it in Cleveland at the Beachland Ballroom with my friend Mark Pedretti).

I wrote the entire book, each part, with the respective piece of music playing in my mind much as Misty describes the Mountain Goats accompanying her seeing and marking. I wrote the four main parts of the book as essays that are polyphonic and musical in structure. For instance, the first motet is on the concept of wonder and the act of wondering, which I understand as having its life in getting lost (this was fortuitously developed at the same time as Zena Hitz wrote Lost in Thought, unbeknownst to me. She is right!). This motet was written with Music for 18 Musicians in mind. As a result, it cycles and comes around just like that piece, and it is the most epic of the four parts of the book, just as the piece is. Motet four is on anger’s relationship to wonder, and it was written with Fela Kuti’s anti-colonial indignation in the background. As a result, it drives like the music, while the first motet circles.

Maryellen: This book is explicitly contextualized within our present political systems. How have recent political events, the pandemic, domestic and global responses to climate change, etc. influenced the development of your philosophical views? In what ways can a politics of wonder act as a tool for confronting these challenges facing us? (“The coldness of the present”?)

Jeremy: The book became a response to what I experienced as a legal observer during the 2016 Republican National Convention in Cleveland, something I discussed in “Reconsidering the Aesthetics of Protest.” I was struck by how reactive politics has become even on the Left, although I am not pointing a finger when the police state has become so violent and ever-present. There was literally an army of police and special tactical forces in Cleveland for the 2016 RNC. All we could do was shout at the sky.

But democracy depends on relationship. And relationship depends on wonder between people. I wanted to passionately and uncompromisingly sing an ode—polyphonic and complex—to that truth. I knew it would be true to Nussbaum’s work, too, since she is even more than she lets on a Romantic with a revolutionary sensibility for whom the social is the lifeblood of her work, despite her sometimes paradoxically detached liberalism.

I grew up with an immense amount of anxiety in my childhood home because my mother had a life-long, undiagnosed mental disability with associated and multiple mental illnesses that came from living with the disability. Only later in life did I learn that I have a sick capability to exist in discomfort and to stick with meaning in it. This is also attributable to my family, for my parents were (my father still is, and my mother is dead) fundamentally loving people. Since college, I have tried to face down the major things in my world that are blocks to a loving world, and this has taken me to confronting capitalism, colonialism, and narcissism.

Nussbaum’s Politics of Wonder was a response to the narcissism of our politics for the sake of a world that is related, authentic, and complex with human (and more than human living) reality.

Maryellen: You define wonder in the book as a mode of anxiety, the “positive anxiety of considering things.” Narcissism too, seems to come from a certain sense of anxiety. Could you say more about the relationship between narcissism and wonder? How might our relationship towards wonder change once we recognize it as a mode of anxiety?

Misty: Wonder is a form of anxiety that opens out into the world, whereas narcissism closes things in. 

Jeremy: Yeah, narcissism is an orientation to the world wherein the wills of others and the anarchic freeness of how things make sense and accrue meaning in the world have to be controlled, mastered, or eliminated. Narcissists cannot tolerate that meaning depends on meeting. They are anxious about being swallowed up in what they cannot control.

But this anxiety would not be possible if the meaning of the world between people (and with other forms of life) were not beautifully, ridiculously, and overwhelmingly overflowing and beyond our control. The truth is, deeper than what people call “anxiety” (and which they mean as negative and fraught with narcissistic worries) is a positive anxiety, an openness of possibilities of sense and meaning that structures the very possibility of finding meaning in things. It’s this to which wonder is attached, which it tracks, keeps us open to. The world is not open because of wonder, but is open before wonder, and wonder stays faithful to that.

Misty: A visual, artistic example here might be to compare Alice Neel’s to Lucian Freud’s work. In her portraiture, Neel strove to be true to her subject, whereas Freud was tormented by communicating something of himself. 

Jeremy: The subjects for Freud became objects for his negative anxieties.

Misty: Yes, read his daughter’s account of posing for him.

Jeremy: But wonder is the consideration of the openness of sense and meaning around something that is pregnant with these things. It’s about the being there in question, not the wonderer’s preoccupations about how to settle their own insecurities.

The big thing regarding wonder that I wanted to do with this book is to strongly suggest—plausibly show—that the mind’s fundamental dynamism—what Nussbaum following Lucretius calls the mind’s “original joy”—is the background presence of wonder (a point I got from Schelling). Moreover, wondering is a preeminent virtue of being human, consisting in the ability to get lost in sense and meaning (an anti-perfectionistic point I got from punk). But this virtue isn’t elite. It’s potentially ordinary, something that I saw in my working-class, Slovak elders and see many days when I am talking with folks in the locker room of the Y(MCA). I wanted to show how wondering can be a part of normal mental life—think of people who are meditative because they are in touch with a meditative layer to daily life in the midst of work. Wonder must be present to some degree for people to be autonomous when making sense and meaning out of things, using imagination to elaborate on how things can and cannot make sense or mean what they can or cannot mean. Wondering is there when people figure things out for themselves or even just mull over things with poise and ampleness.

The idea here is to strongly suggest—to plausibly show—that being healthily human is living openly with our positive anxiety, or what I more prosaically call the “mind’s excitement.” I wanted to link all of this to freedom in relationships and the capacity for us to get honestly lost together in disagreements, for this is what democracy needs.

Derrida is famous for saying that democracy is “to come.” His mentality in such moments is precisely messianic, but without the figure of the messiah. He is, of course, right, though. Democracy is the political form that refuses anything but true relationships and seeks governance through what keeps them open. Democracy is governance born over and again, iteratively, of meeting. But we cannot meet each other if we are not fundamentally and mysteriously stirred by the striving of each of our lives. If we are objects to each other—as even the Left today cynically promotes—we are screwed, and democracy is dead. That is why against the narcissistic politics of the present on both the Left and the Right, we need to see and then fortify our capacity to wonder.

And, yes, this profoundly general point came from reading Nussbaum closely.

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Interested in hearing more about Jeremy and Misty’s work? Check out their conversation with Danielle Celermajer, hosted by The Philosopher.