Susan Neiman

Bio & resources

The word philosopher means “lover of wisdom.” The Greeks who first coined the term really meant and lived it: They were passionate about discovering the truths of human nature, wanting to create a culture that would represent the highest human achievement. That was then. Today, several millennia later, how many of us hear the word philosopher and think of love and wisdom? I certainly don’t. With some rare exceptions, the academic study of philosophy seems more about fine-tuning the obscure and arcane rather than exploring significant questions about living our lives. But within a few moments of meeting Susan Neiman—with her strong handshake, extraordinary alertness, vivaciousness, and passionate responses to my every question—I knew I’d met someone who truly fit the bill. The wide range of her knowledge and interests pours out of her unselfconsciously in a heartfelt torrent. Neiman is doing something rare and gutsy for philosophers these days—she’s asking questions about things that matter to all of us. In her latest book, Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists, she invites us to think carefully about the divisions that have fractured our culture so that we can realize the possibility of our moving forward together.

Neiman has an unusual capacity to uncover our differing philosophical assumptions and, simultaneously, our shared humanity. She suspends her own political judgments to get inside the hearts and minds of fundamentalists on the right, and she reveals the deeper longings that not only motivate them but motivate us all. And Neiman shows powerfully how idealism, which is what ignited the Obama campaign, is neither naïve nor empty but may be the deepest and most significant aspect of our humanness. In this period just following the U.S. presidential election, her gripping and trenchant analysis of the philosophical underpinnings of the fundamentalist right and the progressive left provides us with the kind of understanding we need to chart a new and potentially unifying course into the future.

Neiman, needless to say, is not your usual academic—despite her impeccable credentials. After training at Harvard with John Rawls, one of the leading philosophers of the twentieth century, she taught philosophy at Yale and at Tel Aviv University. These days, she is increasingly stepping outside the academy to play a public role. Currently she is director of the Einstein Forum, an international interdisciplinary public think tank near Berlin. After the success of her previous book, Evil in Modern Thought, which was in essence a history of philosophy, her readers asked her to write about good and evil in response to the events of our time. “This,” she comments, “is of course something that a person with formal philosophical training has absolutely no training to do.” But with the election of George W. Bush in 2004, she was “absolutely floored” that many people said they voted for Bush because he represented “moral clarity.” She then felt she had to write about morality for progressives, who, she notes, “have a very hard time talking in moral terms.” She is thrilled at how much Obama has transformed and reinvigorated progressives, and her hope is to provide a philosophically sound basis for progressive idealism that could change the nature of our political and social debates.

In the following interview, which I conducted before the election, Neiman explores how important idealism is to our finding a new kind of heroism that can change the world.