Susan Neiman
Author of Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy
About the Author
Susan Neiman is Director of the Einstein Forum, Potsdam
Image credit: Einstein Forum
Works by Susan Neiman
Associated Works
Tagged
Common Knowledge
- Birthdate
- 1955
- Gender
- female
- Education
- Free University of Berlin
Harvard University - Occupations
- philosopher
essayist - Nationality
- USA
- Places of residence
- Berlin, Germany
- Associated Place (for map)
- Berlin, Germany
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Reviews
This was awesome. Recommended by a friend of mine, I don't agree with everything Neiman believes (I'm not a socialist nor a communist, and I feel humans are just a bit too flawed at birth for utopias), but her arguments are incredibly lucid and worth reading given the stasis of social, economic, and moral progress we're stuck at now in the United States. Her stances are all consistent and very inspiring, and her takedowns of Foucault were wonderful to read--She put into words my anger at his show more work and his adherents in much more elegant terms than I ever could. Definitely a read for either those aligned on the left and feel something is missing (like the ability to actually do anything), or those wishing to read a cogent critique of the philosophical underpinnings of the left c. 2020. Anyway, great read and I am interesting in reading more of Neiman! show less
Starts with a powerful idea borrowed from Tzvetan Todorov: “Germans should talk about the singularity of the Holocaust, Jews should talk about its universality.” The former is taking responsibility, but a German who discusses genocide as a universal phenomenon is “seeking exoneration; if everyone commits mass murder one way or another, how could they help doing it too?” Neiman argues that, as a Jewish author, she need not argue for exact equivalence between the Holocaust and the show more crimes of other nations: “it’s a matter of taking responsibility for the latter,” and she is an American Jew. She investigates how Germans have confronted their pasts and compares that to the American experience. The Germans of course have several long compound words, one of which roughly translates to working-off-the-past. “The German word for debt is the same as the word for guilt; both, it seems, can be worked off with sufficient effort.” She argues that East Germany did a better job confronting and overcoming the Nazi past than West Germany, because anti-Communism was an acceptable thing for an ex-Nazi to emphasize in the West. If Germans (who might be fathers and grandfathers of the Germans confronting these questions) were after Bolsheviks, then Jews were just in the way; if fascism and communism were equal, then their fathers/grandfathers were fighting evil too. Though Westerners thought of antifascism as imposed on the East from above, by Communist rulers, Neiman suggests that’s too simple. An amazing paragraph:
Between Nazi propaganda about barbaric Bolshevik ordes and their own fear of retaliation for what the Wehrmacht had done in the Soviet Union, most Nazis preferred to await defeat in the American zone. This meant that East Germany had fewer big fish on their hands from the start, but they tried far more of those Nazis who were left than West Germany did. Most important, although the majority of the population in both East and West had been equally entwined with the Nazi cause, this was not the case with the leadership. East German leaders—in politics, civil service, media, and the arts—were antifascists in their bones, and some of those who survived had paid for it with their blood. West German leaders had been, at the least, complicit …. West Berlin refused to allow resistance heroes to speak of their wartime experiences in public schools because most of those who survived had been communists. In West Germany, serving communism was always worse than serving fascism. This became clear in monetary terms when a new pension law was passed after reunification. The years you may have spent as an SS officer or driving a cattle car to Auschwitz were counted toward your pension. The years you may have spent doing obligatory military service in the GDR or driving an ordinary train there were not.
(In 1953, sufficiently documented Auschwitz survivors could receive $450 for each year spent there, less than the pensions paid to former SS guards and their widows.) That isn’t to say that East Germany didn’t use antifascism “as an excuse to conceal its own injustice and repression”; she agrees that it did. But even if it was in part a foreign policy tool, antifascism was itself a good thing, just like civil rights legislation in the US that was in part anticommunist propaganda to rebut Soviet critiques of US segregation.
Neiman suggests that the recent rise of right-wing sentiment in the East comes from resentment at longstanding Western scorn for East Germans. This contempt became economic policy: since pensions were calculated on the basis of lifetime salaries, and since East Germans had most basics like rent and food subsidized and correspondingly low salaries, they now get less in retirement, and can be furious at refugees getting state support.
Neiman also compares US memory and forgetting, including how James Meredith objects to the monument to him at the University of Mississippi that includes a “butchered, out-of-context quotation from my 1966 book … expressing my love for the land of Mississippi but making no mention of my hatred of its ruling system of white supremacy.” But I learned less simply because I already know much more about our history of reckoning with atrocity, or mostly of failing to do so. (I read this months ago, before the news cycle became full of too many whites’ demand that we forget most of our racist history.) show less
Between Nazi propaganda about barbaric Bolshevik ordes and their own fear of retaliation for what the Wehrmacht had done in the Soviet Union, most Nazis preferred to await defeat in the American zone. This meant that East Germany had fewer big fish on their hands from the start, but they tried far more of those Nazis who were left than West Germany did. Most important, although the majority of the population in both East and West had been equally entwined with the Nazi cause, this was not the case with the leadership. East German leaders—in politics, civil service, media, and the arts—were antifascists in their bones, and some of those who survived had paid for it with their blood. West German leaders had been, at the least, complicit …. West Berlin refused to allow resistance heroes to speak of their wartime experiences in public schools because most of those who survived had been communists. In West Germany, serving communism was always worse than serving fascism. This became clear in monetary terms when a new pension law was passed after reunification. The years you may have spent as an SS officer or driving a cattle car to Auschwitz were counted toward your pension. The years you may have spent doing obligatory military service in the GDR or driving an ordinary train there were not.
(In 1953, sufficiently documented Auschwitz survivors could receive $450 for each year spent there, less than the pensions paid to former SS guards and their widows.) That isn’t to say that East Germany didn’t use antifascism “as an excuse to conceal its own injustice and repression”; she agrees that it did. But even if it was in part a foreign policy tool, antifascism was itself a good thing, just like civil rights legislation in the US that was in part anticommunist propaganda to rebut Soviet critiques of US segregation.
Neiman suggests that the recent rise of right-wing sentiment in the East comes from resentment at longstanding Western scorn for East Germans. This contempt became economic policy: since pensions were calculated on the basis of lifetime salaries, and since East Germans had most basics like rent and food subsidized and correspondingly low salaries, they now get less in retirement, and can be furious at refugees getting state support.
Neiman also compares US memory and forgetting, including how James Meredith objects to the monument to him at the University of Mississippi that includes a “butchered, out-of-context quotation from my 1966 book … expressing my love for the land of Mississippi but making no mention of my hatred of its ruling system of white supremacy.” But I learned less simply because I already know much more about our history of reckoning with atrocity, or mostly of failing to do so. (I read this months ago, before the news cycle became full of too many whites’ demand that we forget most of our racist history.) show less
Not to give away major spoilers or anything, but yes, the author is in favor of growing up. It's a third path between starry-eyed idealism and the bitter cynicism of adolescence. This book is in an annoying limbo for me. I think the author is making important points, and I want to run around to various friends and show them parts of the book and tell them to read it. But then again, a fair chunk of the book is devoted to explaining bits of Rousseau and Kant. And while this is Rousseau and show more Kant as "translated" by an intelligent modern author, they're still a pair of heavy-duty philosophers. There were parts of this book where I could only read for a short time, and then I had to go do something else and let the ideas sink in for a while. But even if you end up skimming those middle chapters, I think the book is worth the effort. show less
I was searching the library catalogue for some novel or other when I came across this book and was intrigued. Given the randomness of this discovery, it was especially pleasing to find it fitted well with other recent reading. Neiman refers to a number of philosophers ancient and modern, although her focus is on Kant. I appreciated her ability to make his work digestible, as she and Kant himself acknowledged it is very difficult to read. The theme of the book is how we grow up and why show more adulthood is a desirable state. I must admit, my first impression from the vague blurb was that Neiman would in fact suggest that there’s no need to grow up, to refute the checklist of adulthood signifiers (car, job, home ownership, marriage, kids, blah blah). I was ready to read that book, but also found the very different thesis that she was in fact advancing to be well-argued and powerful. She does in fact critique the neoliberal conception of adulthood as consumption of big ticket items, as well as using a selection of philosophical references to argue for growing up as psychological development. For instance: ‘Acknowledging that your best efforts to think and act autonomously will never entirely reach fruition, without acknowledging this as defeat, is part of growing up.’
To my mind the strongest parts of the book are the first two chapters, when Neiman considered the significance of childhood and how best to teach children to become happy, virtuous adults. This included much discussion of Rousseau’s [b:Emile or On Education|326679|Emile or On Education|Jean-Jacques Rousseau|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1334836441s/326679.jpg|2854373], which I found very interesting:
Neiman is a clear, articulate writer, which is essential considering the complex questions being dealt with here. I thought she was a little unfair to Stoicism, however. As she puts it, ‘The Stoics imagine we can can remedy our dissatisfaction with the world by working on the dissatisfaction. By whittling down our passions to the point where nothing in the world can provoke them, we gain both independence and contentment.’ While this is consistent with my reading of Epictetus [b:Discourses, Fragments, Handbook|18189134|Discourses, Fragments, Handbook|Epictetus|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1373585681s/18189134.jpg|45849302] (and with the disclaimer that I haven’t read other Stoic philosophers), it ignores that fact that Stoicism also involves acting virtuously. Epictetus wasn’t advancing a passive, fatalistic way of being, indeed he argued that you should be prepared to die for what you believe is right. According to Neiman, Nietzsche ‘called Stoicism a slave morality, consolation designed for the powerless by the powerless’. It seemed much more subtle than that to me - an imperative to focus on what is within your power to change and an encouragement to be strong enough to stand up for what’s right. That said, it was fascinating to learn how Kant further developed Stoic ideas: by adding that if you are worthy of happiness but do not obtain it, your reason will rebel.
For a short book, I found ‘Why grow up?’ disproportionately thought-provoking. The initial chapters are more philosophy-heavy and therefore more challenging and rewarding. The final chapter moves into critique of capitalism, which is well-written but not new. Neiman also advances her own personal view of how to adult well, as it were, which you may or may not agree with. Personally, I wouldn’t place such emphasis on travel, as I don’t think it’s that important or (to me) particularly interesting. I consider familiarity with your usual surroundings, which can only be achieved by exploration on foot or by bike, to be of more significance. Recent political developments have made me sceptical of the link between international travel and cross-border empathy. Also, while I see her point about the internet eroding our concentration, the subject is treated in a surprisingly superficial way. (Quite apart from the fact that this very evening I read the latter half of her book after getting bored with the internet.) I can’t argue that the occasional day off the internet is important, though, and I liked her take on 21st century cognitive dissonance:
Actually, that particular frustration formed the theme of a short story in [b:Tales From The Mall|13637188|Tales From The Mall|Ewan Morrison|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1336353448s/13637188.jpg|19249307]. Although Neiman is a philosopher and at one point refers dismissively to all this more modern ‘theory’, I found this book a good complement to various critiques of capitalism. The examination of philosophical debate on how children become adults was original and thought-provoking. I was not persuaded to read Kant, though. show less
To my mind the strongest parts of the book are the first two chapters, when Neiman considered the significance of childhood and how best to teach children to become happy, virtuous adults. This included much discussion of Rousseau’s [b:Emile or On Education|326679|Emile or On Education|Jean-Jacques Rousseau|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1334836441s/326679.jpg|2854373], which I found very interesting:
Emile never experiences a gap between what what is and what should be; virtue and happiness always go together. Each of his efforts is naturally rewarded: instead of empty marks or praise for memorising geometric theorems, he get the cherries on the tree when he figures out the proper angle for the ladder he needs to climb to them. What unhappiness occurs is a result of natural necessity; should he gorge himself on junk food, his belly will ache. Having been raised apart from servants or masters, he does not know haughtiness or obsequiousness, and meets the few people he does meet on equal terms, for he knows no other. Nothing seems to him unfair or arbitrary.
[...]
This means that Emile has never experienced what Kant called the gap between is and ought. This is not just any old hardship, but the basic fact that things go wrong. You may want to protect your child from many things, but if you protect them from that, how on earth can they grow up?
Neiman is a clear, articulate writer, which is essential considering the complex questions being dealt with here. I thought she was a little unfair to Stoicism, however. As she puts it, ‘The Stoics imagine we can can remedy our dissatisfaction with the world by working on the dissatisfaction. By whittling down our passions to the point where nothing in the world can provoke them, we gain both independence and contentment.’ While this is consistent with my reading of Epictetus [b:Discourses, Fragments, Handbook|18189134|Discourses, Fragments, Handbook|Epictetus|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1373585681s/18189134.jpg|45849302] (and with the disclaimer that I haven’t read other Stoic philosophers), it ignores that fact that Stoicism also involves acting virtuously. Epictetus wasn’t advancing a passive, fatalistic way of being, indeed he argued that you should be prepared to die for what you believe is right. According to Neiman, Nietzsche ‘called Stoicism a slave morality, consolation designed for the powerless by the powerless’. It seemed much more subtle than that to me - an imperative to focus on what is within your power to change and an encouragement to be strong enough to stand up for what’s right. That said, it was fascinating to learn how Kant further developed Stoic ideas: by adding that if you are worthy of happiness but do not obtain it, your reason will rebel.
For a short book, I found ‘Why grow up?’ disproportionately thought-provoking. The initial chapters are more philosophy-heavy and therefore more challenging and rewarding. The final chapter moves into critique of capitalism, which is well-written but not new. Neiman also advances her own personal view of how to adult well, as it were, which you may or may not agree with. Personally, I wouldn’t place such emphasis on travel, as I don’t think it’s that important or (to me) particularly interesting. I consider familiarity with your usual surroundings, which can only be achieved by exploration on foot or by bike, to be of more significance. Recent political developments have made me sceptical of the link between international travel and cross-border empathy. Also, while I see her point about the internet eroding our concentration, the subject is treated in a surprisingly superficial way. (Quite apart from the fact that this very evening I read the latter half of her book after getting bored with the internet.) I can’t argue that the occasional day off the internet is important, though, and I liked her take on 21st century cognitive dissonance:
I’ve been using philosophy to suggest the conceptual horror of the world we have come to, in the hope that understanding how deeply it violates our own natures will encourage us to against it. Still none of the facts I mention is new. They are so screamingly apparent that the Germand writer Ingo Schulze compares those who express thoughts like this to the child in Hans Christian Andersen’s story ‘The Emperor’s New Clothes’. Everyone knows that the rulers stand naked, but nobody cares to say it - for fear of no punishment greater than being called childish or dumb.
Actually, that particular frustration formed the theme of a short story in [b:Tales From The Mall|13637188|Tales From The Mall|Ewan Morrison|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1336353448s/13637188.jpg|19249307]. Although Neiman is a philosopher and at one point refers dismissively to all this more modern ‘theory’, I found this book a good complement to various critiques of capitalism. The examination of philosophical debate on how children become adults was original and thought-provoking. I was not persuaded to read Kant, though. show less
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