The Mail

I read Rachel Aviv’s Profile of Martha Nussbaum with a mixture of awe and dismay (“Captain of Her Soul,” July 25th). I loved Nussbaum’s call for a “blushing patriarchy” and for feminists to return to the abject body; her embrace of the Stoic notion that thought and feeling are divisionless; and her belief that being a good human or living a virtuous life requires “a kind of openness to the world . . . that can lead you to be shattered.” But although Nussbaum espouses the value of vulnerability, she seems to strive to exist in an entirely different realm. It’s as if she were speaking to those humans, over there, the herd, while her tanned, toned, leggy self—running as she recites opera, living methodically, and eating like a bird while cooking Indian feasts—is exempt. I am left wondering whether a writer has to live what he or she writes. The woman who accuses relativist feminists of circling Dante’s vestibule of Hell is a walking contradiction herself, a Nabokovian nymph who argues philosophy like a man. For that kind of unapologetic power, I salute her. But there’s a self-satisfaction that I imagine resides in spinning a narrative of being superhuman.