Genealogies of Philosophy: Susan Neiman (part II)

Part Two: Investigative Philosophy

In Part One of Jeremy’s and my interview with Susan Neiman, we spoke about how contextual factors — institutions, political climates, as well as major historical events — have shaped philosophical trajectories. 

In the recent Learning from the Germans, Neiman gives a new orientation to her past work. How should societies reckon with the past? How should they take collective responsibility for their historical crimes? In this second part of the interview, I was interested in understanding the genealogical dimensions of the new book: how did Susan come to write it? 

And there was a question of genealogy that had been haunting me. What should Western philosophy’s own past, as it developed in the historical context of colonialism, mean for how we understand philosophy today?

Recently returning to Virginia Woolf’s Orlando (which I loved as an undergraduate student), I had a sinking feeling upon reading its opening: 

“He […] was in the act of slicing at the head of the Moor which swung from the rafters…. Orlando’s fathers … had struck many heads of many colors off many shoulders.” 

It’s an experience I’ve had reading philosophy as well – Schopenhauer on women, Locke on Indigenous people, Kant on Africans.

Could Susan help me think about that trace of historical crime in philosophy? With the Berlin sky in the window behind her growing darker, our interview, which started in her study, now continued in Susan’s kitchen:

Sidra: Learning from the Germans centers on the notion of “working through the past.” Could you tell us what you found compelling about this idea and how you started writing the book?  

Susan:  I [started with] the thesis that other[s] could learn something about dealing with their historical crimes by looking at what the Germans have done. … I don’t think the Germans did it perfectly. I think they made mistakes.  They’re still making mistakes. Nevertheless, they did something historically unique that other countries have a lot to learn from.

The immediate idea for writing [Learning from the Germans] came while watching President Obama’s eulogy for the nine churchgoers who were massacred in Charleston.  President Obama was the first major American [politician] to connect the violence of the present with our unwillingness to confront the violence of the past.  

When he called for the Confederate flag to come down, it had an impact.  Two southern Republican states heeded that call.  Walmart announced it would no longer sell Confederatememorabilia.  It seemed to me – and still does – that this was the beginning of an American Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung (working through the past). 

I had been thinking about the German one for so long, [here] was something to which I could contribute.  I didn’t just want to lecture Americans from abroad, though, but to see what Americans who were working to face the hardest parts of American history were doing on the ground.  

I had a sabbatical coming, and so I decided to go to the Deep South. … Mississippi is a magnifying glass which picks up the best and the worst of the United States. If you want to study the micro things that are going on in the country as a whole, it turns out that Mississippi is a great place to do it.

Sidra: How did you approach your thesis?

Susan: What interested me in Vergangenheitsaufarbeitung is the granular and the particular: how the past affects the way people raise their children or treat their parents, what songs they sing, and what movies they make. 

I wanted to have other voices besides my own, partly because I thought they were interesting, partly because I was not a hundred percent sure what I would find. [In the end] I had all of these tapes of interviews and notes. I sat there thinking, “Oh, my God, how am I going to turn this into a coherent book?” 

People would ask me what are you working on now these days? I would say [something about the project], and they would say, what genre is that? I’d say, “It’s a mishmash…” When my friend, the journalist and sociologist Todd Gitlin, reviewed the book, he said “She’s invented a new genre: investigative philosophy.” I loved him for saying that!  

Does that mean I can’t say it’s a mishmash anymore? [laughs] People in different countries have told me that it is an unusual form, but it works. Two very different people described the book as a road movie…

Jeremy: Why were other voices central to your writing?  

Susan:  I wanted to leave questions open in the book.  My approach just seemed like a more interesting way of exploring what I was hoping to understand and to relay.  There are so many people who disagree with what I say, and although I could have used a more sociological voice, it just seemed more interesting to me to show these disagreeing voices.

Jeremy:  I remember that you studied with Stanley Cavell.  Do you relate your “investigative philosophy” and its polyphony to Cavell?

Susan: Well, I studied with Stanley but did my dissertation under Jack [Rawls].  When Stanley died, I wrote a short piece about what I’d learned from him:  American philosophers are allowed to think about culture and not just numbered arguments, and they are allowed to use the first person.  

There are quite a lot of philosophers in the canon who used the first person and took the idea of philosophy as the search for self-knowledge quite literally.  Having been a student of Cavell, I think I must have absorbed this idea.

Jeremy:  You once said that folks serious about philosophy spent time with Philosophical Investigations. Wittgenstein wants to “bring words home.”  But his view of home seems sentimental. Do you think Learning from the Germans is about bringing voices back home through social justice?

Susan:  That’s a great question!  In Wittgenstein, you also have this plurality of voices and more questions than assertions.  That is perhaps even a deeper influence on me than I have been aware of lately. 

For a gay, assimilated Jew from Vienna living in Cambridge — a total outsider — the idea of home should be weird.  Maybe that’s something he was struggling with, and maybe he came up with a fantasy of home to posit philosophically to deal with what must have been his extraordinary sense of homelessness.  Someone needs to write on this!

Sidra: So besides hidden Wittgensteinian influences, are there any philosophers and writers whom you would say were inspirations for your book?

Susan: If I had models, [it would be] Jean Amery and James Baldwin.  Hannah Arendt’s Eichmann in Jerusalem also definitely played a role. Of course, Baldwin is considered literature rather than philosophy, but he’s also someone who uses subjective experience, his own experience, in order to come to something that we could say is, if not universal, very meaningful for a huge number of people.

Sidra: The Civil Rights era plays a major role in your book. How did growing up in the American South during that time inform your philosophical thinking and practice?

Susan: My parents came from the North and we were Jews. In the Atlanta of the late 50s, early 60s, this meant we were outsiders. My sense of homelessness was very strong, something that I think did shape me in some ways. There was never an obvious community that I felt part of. 

I might have come from one of those families that was affected by the Holocaust. Mine was not, as I say in the beginning of the book. What was front and center as the moral and political issue was the Civil Rights movement, and that very much is a question of human rights.

I am to this day absolutely grateful that my mother, who was a housewife at the time and wasn’t an intellectual, was [deeply] involved in the Civil Rights movement. There was a clear right and a clear wrong. We were on the right side and things were getting better. 

It certainly left me with a clear sense of morality. It was also a clear sense that if enough good people did the right thing, the world would get better. This was a basic assumption that I got from home. 

The second thing that has also absolutely stayed with me is a deep commitment to universalism, which played a role in my basic moral framework. I have tried to call it into question, but [eventually] I came to reject the alternatives. I define universalism as the idea that the things that we have in common are more important than the things that divide us.

Sidra: What does universalism look like at home? 

Susan: At the beginning of the Black Lives Matter demonstrations last summer, [my daughter said,] 

“You know, Ma, you never told us not to be racist. You just gave me Maya Angelou’s book, Life Doesn’t Frighten Me at All. And it was my favorite book when I was three years old. And then later on, when I was much too young for it, you gave me Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye.” 

I never said to my kids, “Now this is your diversity lesson and it’s important to pay attention to other cultures.” I just said “This is literature, happy birthday.” African-American history [and literature] should be part of history and literature!  It is this universalist way in which I think things should be done. 

Sidra: Would you say Western philosophy has a historical past that it needs to work through? 

Susan:  There are two philosophers in history before the 20th century who said anything reasonable about women. One was Plato and then, two thousand years later, John Stuart Mill [or Harriet Taylor Mill]. Now, that is just how it is. If I were going to restrict my reading [of the history of philosophy] to the people who did [say reasonable things about women], I’d be reading [only] Plato and John Stuart Mill for the rest of [my life]. 

But the fact that most of [the philosophers of the past, including Enlightenment thinkers] also said [disparaging] things about Jews, indigenous peoples, [and] Africans is a problem.

At the same time, Enlightenment thinkers really were very courageous. One has to remember that. I was in the middle of teaching the course that became the basis for Evil in Modern Thought and was standing on stage giving a lecture. And it only then occurred to me that all of the texts that I had assigned for the course were either burned, banned, censored or published anonymously.  I mean, these guys really took risks… 

You’re talking about people who are fighting not only for the idea of universal rights, which was heresy in those days, but also for the idea that Europeans could learn from other cultures. Rousseau wrote that the entire continent of Africa had mostly been explored by people who were much more interested in filling their purses than their minds. 

Enlightenment thinkers [made these critical claims] under serious threats. Christian Wolff was ordered to leave his university professorship and his land, his home, because he dared to assert in public that the Chinese had morals even though they didn’t have Christianity. The government gave him 48 hours to do so, or they would have executed him.

Sidra: How about Kant? He’s come under fire for saying racist things. 

Kant wrote the most powerful denunciation of colonialism in the 18th century. Kant called colonialism evil. Not a word he used very often, and he congratulated the Chinese and the Japanese for not letting Europeans in. 

The claim about Eurocentrism and the Enlightenment being Eurocentric completely ignores the idea that the Enlightenment invented the idea of Eurocentrism as a reproach. It was the Enlightenment that told Europeans how much they had to learn from other cultures.

What has been done in the last few years or decade is to rip out a few sexist, racist quotes without ever looking at the fact that you can absolutely find the opposite too [in their work], very strongly anti-racist and anti-Eurocentric currents. And those are not accidental but essential to their most foundational theoretical claims. 

Jeremy: Can you give us an anti-racist quote in Kant? There’s lots out there now about how Kant made abhorrent racist remarks, oblivious to the “African Enlightenment“.

Perpetual Peace seems to me to be decisive; I also think he calls colonialism anathema to universal human rights in Metaphysics of Morals.  But more important is the fact that he created the metaphysics of universal human rights and insisted on it in all of his ethical works.  We have so come to take that conception for granted that we no longer think of it as revolutionary, but it was.  

One can certainly accuse Kant of not being true to his own conception of human rights through the scattered racist and sexist remarks you can find in his work.  Those remarks are definitely in conflict with the systematic universalism he defends.  But it is the latter which is essential, and revolutionary, in his work; the remarks simply show he wasn’t able to be as revolutionary as his own systematic thinking prescribed.

Sidra: Then let’s turn to Heidegger. In Learning from the Germans, you say that his remarks are essential to his philosophical perspective. How can we tell when a politically suspect view is not merely accidental to a philosophical standpoint?   

Susan: A lot of people count Hume [among] the Enlightenment [thinkers]. I don’t – for two reasons. I don’t think that atheism is central to the Enlightenment. It’s true that Hume was an atheist and wrote intense critiques of religion, which were not, however, published until after his death (interestingly enough, so much for bravery…). At the same time, there were lots of Enlightenment thinkers who were against religious dogma and religious hierarchies and religious legitimation of absolute power, but they were not all atheists. 

Hume did not think that social relations should be significantly changed. You see this in his metaphysics, in his defense of habit and custom, as the only thing that keeps the world going. He really thought the common people were too stupid to be educated. (You [also] see this in Edmund Burke’s notes on the French Revolution, which is absolutely Humean in its metaphysics.) If you try to institute social change, the world will fall apart because [after all] the world has been kept going on custom and habit. And this is of a piece with his understanding of reason as, in his words, impotent.  Hume’s anti-rationalism is starkly at odds with the prevailing tenor of the Enlightenment, which viewed reason as the emancipatory power we all have in common.

[So] when Hume writes racist stuff, I see that as actually being closer to his [core views] [in contrast to other Enlightenment figures]. I am not saying we should never read Hume in the way that I would love to consign Heidegger to the flames, frankly. I think Heidegger is really a different case [than the Enlightenment thinkers]. Heidegger was a Nazi. It’s perfectly clear in his notebooks, and explicit in his letters to his brother.  I think his influence has been pernicious and overblown. 

Sidra: Do you think there’s anything at all that the critics of the Enlightenment get right?

Susan: Critiques of racism and sexism that we are now rightly making are founded on an idea of universalism without which they never would have gotten off the ground. Whether or not the people who were asserting claims about universal human rights were able to realize them fully in their own thought [is another question]. 

[We] are still building on their foundations. Since the Enlightenment introduced the idea that we can make moral progress, [Enlightenment thinkers] would look at the progress we’ve made in attacking racism and sexism and cheer us on for going farther than they did.  We are traveling on the paths they made possible.

We’ve made moral progress. We are acknowledging that gender and race are important categories and play more of a role in our lives than people were earlier willing to admit. We see that there are things that we have to be critical about. 

I don’t see why we can’t simply say the reason why we’ve learned this and why we’re trying to think about these questions is because the Enlightenment opened up a window for us to question all kinds of categories. If you think about it, not even two hundred and fifty years ago, your life was determined by your parents’ life. You did what your parents did. You were assigned to the profession, to the job, to the place, you know, with the tiniest of exceptions, because the social categories were really seen as God-given and not something that anybody could call into question. We really ought to be grateful to our great-grandfathers for calling those things into question. Rather than casting them aside, we should build on their work.

Sidra: Do you think that working through the past connects up with more contemporary issues today?  I’m thinking of the arrival of new migrants, Muslims, people from Africa. 

Susan: We see the response of Germany, for example, which was incredible—to let in that number of migrants five years ago. The German response was so much better than the response of its neighbors, not to mention the United States, because the experience of the [past] was still in people’s minds.  Even five years later, there are more people who are actively engaged in refugee integration projects than voted for the AfD [Alternative for Germany, an anti-immigrant, far-right political party]. 

Had I had more time, I would have also written about European colonialism, which is now finally, thanks to Black Lives Matter, becoming something that’s in the public sphere, at least in some countries. [We should] think about the ways in which we have not acknowledged, in Europe, our responsibility for the situation in the world that in many ways is leading to the need for migration.

Sidra: Thank you for talking to us, Susan.  This was great.

Jeremy:  Thanks, Susan!

After our interview, I sat out in my balcony thinking for a couple of hours. We talked about so much: the philosophical past, our own pasts, and the future — of philosophy and of European societies.

But I kept returning to what has been haunting me — Western philosophy’s entanglement with some of the worst crimes in history from colonialism to Nazism. What is needed in this confrontation with the past? Susan gives us direction here: we need discernment — an honest examination of what is accidental and what is essential to the works of influential philosophers. But is it always possible to tell?

In thinking of how Germany reckoned with its Nazi past, I wondered why there is little reckoning in Germany with the colonial past. The first genocide of the 20th century occurred at the hands of the Germans in Namibia. I was reminded of what Susan said in Part One of the interview — had the Lisbon earthquake occurred elsewhere, Europe would not have been shaken. Indeed, Germany was left unshaken by its first genocide. When philosophy rarely thinks back to great inhumanities, where does this leave philosophy?

And where me, I wondered, a non-Western philosopher in Europe who cares about moral sense in the world?

~

This is an installment of Into Philosophy.

Updated 12/20/2020