In any event, I am inclined to think that Socrates' famous quip about the unexamined life not being worth living is a gloss on the ODYSSEY.
Now, in the past certain people have described liberal arts education, or humanities education, as involving learning for the sake of learning, as distinct from learning for the sake of making a living. This is an understandable distinction. But why in the world should we want to learn something for the sake of learning it? To show ourselves that we are capable of learning it, which should bolster our confidence in ourselves as learners.
When we learn something for the sake of making a living from it, we might have to consider that life may not work out as we have planned it. To be sure, we would in such circumstances be able to fall back on our professional learning as a source of confidence in our ability to learn whatever it is going to take for us to cope with the twists and turns that life is throwing us.
But liberal arts education, or humanities education, says, "Forget about your professional learning. Instead, plan for the twists and turns of life. Learn how to learn, and you'll be well prepared for the twists and turns of life"
But if you want to play it safe, you can hedge your bets and try to get a mix of the two:
(1) professional training and (2) liberal arts education, or humanities education.
Making a living will be hard enough. But living an examined life, instead of living an unexamined life, will probably prove much harder for most Americans today.
But the American experiment in representative democracy requires that we should raise up more people like Socrates than ancient Athens managed to raise up during its experiment in limited participatory democracy. The quality of our American civic life depends on our having an army of people like Socrates to serve as intellectual gadflies to provoke the body politic into thinking and acting in ethical ways, as Martha Nussbaum herself admirably aspires to do in her various books, including her new book with such a terrible title. In any event, I hope that people disregard the title of her book but profit from it.
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