Genealogies of Philosophy: Susan Neiman (part I)

Part One: Letters to Sartre

I first came across Susan Neiman’s work in 2008. Reading Evil in Modern Thought, I was struck by Neiman’s claim that the problem of evil is so central to Western philosophy that it profoundly shaped the development of modern philosophy, even more than Descartes’ problem of the external world. Neiman’s historical account of the problem of evil is not other-worldly. She weaves together social upheavals and philosophy, showing how, for instance, the Lisbon earthquake of 1755 was also an upheaval of thought. The earthquake changed the course of thinking. It “set the Enlightenment wondering” (as she says in our interview below) – and not wondering about other minds, but about whether the world could make sense at all to people with a moral compass. I thought back to another earthquake, 250 years after Lisbon, in Pakistan where my family is from. That earthquake raised acute questions of sense and meaning for me as an undergraduate philosophy student in the United Arab Emirates. It made me think about my moral responsibilities and about my place in the world.

I agree with Susan Neiman that philosophy’s attempt to make sense of the world is centrally a search for moral meaning. In recent years, I have returned to her work in order to develop a series of lectures on Kafka and the problem of evil. I found that her most recent book, Learning from the Germans, answers many of the questions that the Evil book raises. Neiman makes the powerful suggestion that reckoning with the past (what Germans call Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung) gives us a model for how societies can take collective moral responsibility for the evils that they have produced. To me, Neiman’s work is genealogical, because she wants to understand how concepts emerge historically through people’s engaged, moral life in the world. In other words, Neiman thinks of sustained conceptual work in response to our moral predicaments as generative of philosophical history.

I sat down to talk with Susan peering into her Berlin apartment through my computer screen (and she into my Amsterdam flat). Jeremy Bendik-Keymer joined us too from his Ohio basement. Susan generously gave us her time, walking us through her thoughts — and the various rooms of her apartment as she looked for better WIFI — on a variety of subjects: her childhood during the civil rights movement, her views on the Enlightenment, Foucault’s cultural reception, and the new genre she is recently said to have created, “investigative philosophy.” There was another past at work in our conversation too. Jeremy took Susan’s first seminar on the problem of evil at Yale and returned to that seminar as teaching assistant. Years later Jeremy became one of my professors at the American University of Sharjah, but I had never met Susan.

Sidra: I’d like to start with your philosophical biography. What were you like as an undergraduate student?

Susan: My educational biography is really weird, because I dropped out of high school when I was 14. In 1969, many people thought a revolution was around the corner, and it wasn’t just about the war in Vietnam. I spent a couple of years illegally out of school in communes and demonstrating against the war. And then in 1972, I discovered de Beauvoir and Sartre and wanted to become a philosopher. I moved to New York City for two years because it was the only place where I could study without a high school degree. I was working in a little publishing company downtown and reading lots of Russian literature on the subway on my way to night classes at the City College of New York. That was basically the beginning.

Then I got to Harvard. At first, the courses had lots of proofs of the external world. I was so disappointed. I got into Harvard as a transfer student (I used to joke I was the token high school dropout that year.). [The atmosphere] was just very dry and very far away from anything I had dreamed of doing. So I spent a lot of time in the library drafting letters to Sartre (who was still alive at the time), asking if I could come and study with him. I would hand out copies of Humanité on street corners with him. I never sent any of the letters, because I thought my French wasn’t quite good enough, but I kept drafting them. Knowing what we now know about what Sartre did with young women, it would have been a disaster [if I had gone]!

Sidra: OK. So what philosophical questions did you have back then? 

Susan: My time as a graduate student at Harvard was wonderful. I studied with brilliant people who cared passionately about philosophy and deeply about their students, and there was a strong sense of community among graduate students.  But it was also the least political time of my life. The people in whom I was mostly interested were all concerned with Wittgenstein. They spent, I think, an unconscionable amount of time thinking about the nature of philosophy and whether one could do philosophy at all. A lot of time [went into] thinking about meta-philosophy.

Then, I discovered something which became important for me. I wrote my master’s thesis on one of the popular essays of Kant, “What is Orientation in Thinking?” He wrote it in response to a particular debate [between Mendelssohn and Jacobi] that was going on in Germany at the time about nihilism and whether reason had power or whether you just had to take things on faith. It struck me as an incredibly modern debate! Getting involved in that debate from a historical perspective allowed me to first use the word nihilism. I did worry about nihilism and brought that concept into the debates that were going on about meta-philosophy at Emerson Hall.

Sidra: The environment you describe reminds me of other things. Philosophy has been – and continues to be – a male-dominated field. Did the challenges of working in these conditions shape your approach to philosophy?

Susan: There were so many things that we took for granted that I know my daughters would not. When I was twenty-one, a professor said to me, “Well, Susan, I’d like to believe that women can do philosophy as well as men, but I’ve just never seen it happen!” I didn’t like it, but I just I sat there with, like, the weight of the entire future of women in philosophy on my shoulders! It was a demand that I prove something he doubted, and I was as uncertain as anybody else is at the age of twenty-one.

I’ll tell you one thing that I very consciously did or rather didn’t do, partly because I had very deep universalist convictions but also because I did not want to be part of a self-ghettoization. I never did feminist philosophy.

Now I’ve read some of it, I’m not entirely ignorant. But every university department in the world has decided philosophers need somebody to teach feminist theory and historians need somebody to do women’s history, et cetera, et cetera. I think this is hugely problematic. I think it’s a way of ghettoizing women. “Women’s history” should be part of “history.”

My contribution to feminism was to say: I’m not going to talk about feminism, I’m going to talk about good and evil and growing up and whatever else. If there’s anything that I can talk about that will encourage young women, I will do it, but I will not address so-called “women’s issues!”

Having children and a serious professional career is still considered a woman’s issue, though it should be an issue for all of us.  When I can serve as a role model in that way [having children, of which Neiman has three, and a stellar career] I will do so. Although I don’t do feminist philosophy, I consider myself a feminist.  I hope that distinction makes sense to you, because I think it’s an important one.

I’ve noticed now that things are changing a little bit. You will see in publications women who are asked to talk about general stuff. But that’s quite recent. And the older I get, the more I’m convinced that sexism is still a pretty big problem.

Sidra: Why have you engaged so much with history in your philosophical work?

Susan: If you start from the idea that philosophy is not about whatever pedantic games people play, but that it really is about trying to understand, comment on, and be involved in the major moral and political events of your day, then to understand the major events of our day, you have to know how they arose. 

There were sort of two things that made me turn to history. One is that I simply found historical philosophers, particularly those of the Enlightenment, more interesting than anything else that was going on in contemporary analytic philosophy. The history was not only more fun, but more relevant. Kant and Rousseau were more relevant to thinking about things in our times, than reading the contemporaries was. Even Kant wrote 15 popular essays for what you could say was the 18th century equivalent of the New York Review of Books. Even Kant was an engaged philosopher. 

The other reason for turning to history is I kept being mystified about the use of sci-fi examples in contemporary analytic philosophy. I guess the sci-fi examples and discussion of possible worlds, brains in vats, or Twin Earth are trying to help us question our assumptions about what’s possible. But my feeling was: why not turn to history or anthropology? It is so much more interesting to look at continuities and discontinuities in other cultures and in other historical periods if we really want to question our contemporary assumptions. There is something lifeless about the sci-fi examples, and it’s just more full of life and empirically interesting to look at the ways in which other times and other cultures treated the same questions. 

Sidra: Your work does not speak only to academic philosophers. What sorts of things got you to practice philosophy in this way?

Susan: My very first book [Slow Fire] was a non-traditional book. I didn’t see any contradiction in that, even though it didn’t stand me in good stead with certain conventional philosophers. I simply wanted to write in a way that people would enjoy reading and that would be fun to read, not just easy to read — there’s a difference, right?

I care a lot about style and I don’t see an absolutely hard and fast line between philosophy and literature. I have been deliberately trying to write for an increasingly popular audience for a long time, because I think what so many more conventional philosophers don’t realize is that there is a huge desire for philosophy on the part of the general public. If we don’t provide it, they go to so-called “theory.”

One of the things that bothers me about various instances of theory is that it claims to be devoted to questions that are genuinely important. And theory’s questions often are genuinely important, but they’re usually done in an extremely obscure way! I want to write first of all about real problems and, secondly, reach real people who are thinking about those problems.

Start with Foucault. He was important and constructive as a historian, bringing in topics of inquiry that traditional history hadn’t addressed. That was progressive and good. But philosophically he suggests that truth and power are the same thing.

I think you can definitely be anti-colonialist without swallowing post-colonial theory. And, you know, you can agree that much traditional Western thinking has bypassed women or non-Europeans, but without conflating truth and power! Once you conflate truth and power, you really do away with ethical ideas. I’m committed to empowering people who have been disempowered. I will probably go into this more in the next [book] that I’m writing.

Sidra: I want to turn to the book that made me want to interview you! In Evil in Modern Thought, you argue that two historical events, both earth-shattering in their own way, altered the course of thinking – the 1755 catastrophe in Lisbon and the Holocaust. These both raised – and continue to raise – fundamental questions of their own. How did they do that? 

Susan: There is a completely non-genealogical way to answer your question, at least to start with, and that’s by quoting a philosopher I don’t particularly like, namely, Schopenhauer: “If the world were as it should be, we wouldn’t philosophize at all.” I think there’s something right about that. I think the gap between the way the world is and the way it ought to be is the most important metaphysical fact about the universe. If everything really were perfect, we would have no reason to ask the question “why?”—we just wouldn’t. 

So when you have a major catastrophe or a major injustice, when something like the Lisbon earthquake happens, it does cause a major question in the way philosophers and thinkers saw the world. Now, it wouldn’t have happened that way without an interesting set of assumptions—and I think that’s important. I think [the confluence of rational assumptions and an event of earthshaking importance to them] is very rare. 

Sidra: Which presuppositions and circumstantial factors would you say made it possible for the Lisbon earthquake or the Holocaust to have the intellectual impact that they had?

Susan: So here is an interesting example with the Lisbon/Auschwitz parallel. What the Lisbon earthquake shattered for the 18th century was the idea that at least the natural world made sense. Science in the 18th century was about discovering the wonders of the universe and finding that the world was a place you could be at home in. With the Enlightenment, the wonder was how beautifully the system worked, at least after Newton had shown that it worked according to simple laws. It fit in with a kind of democratic sense that was beginning to grow, the idea of feeling at home in the world, that the world was not a place of irrational, mysterious forces, but forces that we could understand now. These discussions have been going on basically since the end of the 17th century. And then the earthquake hits Lisbon.

Lisbon never really recovered from the earthquake even over 250 years later. Lisbon was a major European capital, one of the richest cities in the world. There had been an earthquake not long before Lisbon, the Port Royal earthquake in Jamaica [1692], and the reason that didn’t cause any intellectual upheaval at all is, first of all it’s “off there” – it also happened to be the biggest city in the Caribbean, but the Caribbean was “off there somewhere” —and it was seen as a “wicked city”, a place with pirates and whores and crime. The idea that they should all be immediately destroyed, that fit in with everybody[in Europe]’s immediate sense of cosmic justice.

The question was, unlike the Port Royal earthquake, Lisbon was no more or no less wicked than London or Paris. So how come that London and Paris were spared while Lisbon was not? Now Lisbon was a port, and it was a place where news came from. If God wanted to broadcast a message, Lisbon would be a good place to send it from.

It’s the Enlightenment that the earthquake set wondering, not, as you might think, traditional Catholic theology. For traditional Catholic theology, God is always intervening. He’s sending thunderbolts when we don’t expect it. We can’t predict it. The world is mysterious; we’re all sinners; we’re all ready to get zapped at any moment. The earthquake was seen by orthodox Catholics as actually a good sign, a blow against the Enlightenment. Obviously, all those things have to come together for a particular catastrophe to make a difference. 

Jeremy: Historical situations are complex. What about the parallel?

Susan: There is a connection with Auschwitz here. I hate to say it, but if the Holocaust had been somewhere else, in a place that is considered less a center of civilization than Germany was considered — all the important science was thought to come from Germany in the 19th century, and not only science—it would have been less of a shock.

One reason why an awful lot of Jews in the Ukraine and on the borderlands were killed is that when the Soviet Union told them the Germans were murderers and they ought to please relocate to Kazakhstan, there was this historical memory of pogroms from the Russians. There were pogroms from the Russians for hundreds of years well into the 20th century and not from the Germans. So, the idea was, we’re staying here, we trust the Germans to be more decent than the Russians. If the Nazis’ crimes had happened in a place that hadn’t been seen as a center point of civilization, both morally and scientifically, it would not have caused the kind of shake-up that it did. 

At the same time, European thought, since Nietzsche at the latest, was consumed by questions about the nature and legitimacy of the modern. Not only within philosophy: there were movements in the arts, in literature, in architecture and elsewhere. There was both excitement about modernism but also a lot of fear, even before World War I. So all of the doubts about the modern world that were intensely discussed in the 20s and 30s were present in people’s minds when the extent of Nazi crimes were revealed, leaving open the question: is this a consequence of modernity or a rejection of it?

Sidra: Religion can be a source of consolation. Can philosophy serve that role as well? Is there a connection between making sense of things as we do in philosophy and consolation?

Susan: There are interesting examples of this also from the concentration camps, which show that for people who had a sense of why they were being arrested – people who had actually done something, whether these were petty criminals or whether these were communists who had been politically working against the regime – it was psychologically easier for them to survive. 

I think – and that goes back to what I was saying before – the deepest metaphysical fact about the world is the gap between is and ought, and we have this incredible need to bring the two together. The beginning of Kant’s first Critique is about the fact that we have a longing to bring them together. At the same time, we know we never will. Being grown up, it seems to me, or being modern, is accepting that we have this urge to try that is never going to be satisfied. If the gap is too big and too relentless, people really will despair.

At the same time, we don’t want philosophy to be a sort of Leibnizian quietism. I mean, Leibniz tells us that things we think are evil are really not evil, because they were made by God that way. If we only knew enough to follow all the causes, we would figure it out. You can be happy knowing that there is a reason for why evil happens even if you’ll never find it out. Leibniz comes up with these absolutely awful examples too: it rains on your picnic, but the farmers need the rain. Well, but we’re not talking about rain, a picnic...!

In Part Two: Investigative Philosophy, we will discuss Neiman’s book Learning from the Germans, how she came to write it, even the idea of “leading words home” through justice – and many more things.

This is an installment of Into Philosophy.