Ethical Inquiry(1)

#2(P. 32) What does she [Nussbaum] mean by “no life is 'raw'”?

The point I believe the author was trying to make here is that life is a cumulative experience. It is lived through the lens of hard lessons and stubborn preconceptions, then reflected on in the context of an ever-changing personal narrative, as fluid and changing as the demands of the present moment.

For contrast, first let us consider just what “raw” life would be. For one, there could be no a priori assumptions about the moment lived, no existing definitions or beliefs or memories to flavor one's direct, unbiased experience. Further, one couldn't be restricted to a single perspective, either physically or, as stated above, philosophically; life, if it could be said to be experienced at all in this context, should have to provide a complete knowledge of everything at once, while refusing to acknowledge the subject as a subject, or else return to an interpretive bias. Finally, if this were not unlikely enough, one's acquired knowledge should have to be entirely True, free from any obligation to future revision or reflection which might color their memory with the light of later discoveries.

It is only a slight failure of intellectual rigor to take as given that the above-described state of being is absurdly unlikely; no life as we understand it could maintain a perfect knowledge of all things while remaining completely free of self-consciousness. And yet such an assumption, in daily life, is all that keeps us sane. We need to believe we know everything, or at least everything pertinent, to act; need to think we see the world before us just as it is to function in it. The irony here is that, as Nussbaum points out, the activities we carry out in the world are precisely why we miss so much of it; lost as subjects in our own dramas, we see only one tiny slice of reality, and that only as we wish to see it. The remedy she advocates is the inflated reality of fiction. A story, analogous in every way to our own, but seen as we like to imagine we see our own lives: with the full depth and breadth of a god-like outsider looking in, blessed with a boundless opportunity for unbiased reflection and free of any personal investment in the situations being described (though even this medium may begin to fail us when we sympathize with one character over another).