Background

Susan Neiman was born on March 27, 1955, in Atlanta, Georgia, United States, in a Jewish family.

Education

Susan Neiman dropped out of high school at the age of fourteen to join the anti-Vietnam War movement. Her interest in Simone de Beauvoir's and Jean-Paul Sartre's books led her to study philosophy. In 1977 she received a Bachelor of Arts degree at Harvard University. There she also received a Master of Arts degree in 1981 and a Doctor of Philosophy degree in 1986 under the direction of John Rawls and Stanley Cavell. During graduate school, she also spent several years of study at the Free University of Berlin.

Career

Susan Neiman was an assistant and an associate professor at Yale University, New Haven, from 1989 till 1996, then five years as associate professor at Tel Aviv University. Her professional domain includes morality, history of philosophy, political philosophy, and philosophy of religion. In 2000 she became the Director of Einstein Forum in Potsdam.

In 1992 she published a memoir about her life as a Jewish in Berlin titled Slow Fire: Jewish Notes from Berlin. Her other books include The Unity of Reason: Rereading Kant (1994), Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy (2002), Fremde sehen anders. Zur Lage der Bundesrepublik (2005), Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grownup Idealists (2008), Why Grow Up? (2014), Learning from the Germans (2019). Her new work Heroes ReViewed will be published in 2022.

Neiman's shorter pieces have appeared in The New York Times, The Boston Globe, The Globe and Mail, The Guardian, and Dissent. In Germany, she has written for Die Zeit, Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung, and Freitag, among other publications. In 2018 she was elected to the American Philosophical Society.

Achievements

• Susan Neiman's books are translated into twelve languages. She has been invited to give the Gifford Lectures and the Tanner Lectures (twice). She has also received the August Bebel Prize, the Sander Prize, honorary doctorates at two universities, the Lucius D. Clay Medaille, International Spinoza Prize, Ribicoff Prize for Teaching Excellence in the Humanities from Yale University in 1991, Carrier Dissertation Prize in 1987 and Bowen Prize in 1980 from Harvard University.

Works

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  • Learning from the Germans: Race and the Memory of Evil

    (As an increasingly polarized America fights over the lega...)

    2019
  • Why Grow Up?

    (Our culture is obsessed with youth - and why not? What's ...)

    2014
  • Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists

    (Susan Neiman is a moral philosopher committed to making t...)

    2008
  • Slow Fire: Jewish Notes from Berlin

    (Berlin - "East" and "West," day and of course night - thr...)

    1992
  • Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy

    (Evil threatens human reason, for it challenges our hope t...)

    2002
  • The Unity of Reason: Rereading Kant

    (The Unity of Reason is the first major study of Kant's ac...)

    1994

Politics

After George W Bush was re-elected in 2004, Susan Neiman was enraged that the most immoral regime in US history was claiming moral clarity, when everything it did was a travesty of both words: neither moral nor clear. The hope is simply to reclaim moral concepts for progressive forces. She thinks President Obama, given an almost insoluble set of problems, has been doing a reasonable job.

She certainly thinks Donald Trump is evil. Trump's behavior in the White House is not normal to her mind. He seems to be one of those rare human beings who have no sense of morality whatsoever. In her opinion, Trump seems driven by the urge to dominate and lacks the ability to grasp that others might be moved by different goals. She criticizes him that Trump has made open and violent racism acceptable. She fears that he has made it acceptable not to have values at all - except grasping for power and money. She worries about the effect his example will have on young people who are already uncertain about whether or not any value but power and money is real.

Views

Susan Neiman thinks that the main problem with American exceptionalism is that Americans confuse the idea of America with the realization of it. America was founded on exceptional ideals; most other countries developed because some collection of tribes found themselves in one place and worked out some political structures for better and worse. It was exceptional to find a country on a set of ideals, and people all over the world saw hope in that uniqueness. Now, she trusts most people are aware, in the meantime, that the genocide of Native Americans - which, by the way, was a conscious model for Nazi policy in Eastern Europe - and the centrality of slavery to the American economy both provided a terrible contradiction to those ideals from the time the nation was founded.

Quotations: "Progressives never know what to do in power."

"Like many others, I came to philosophy to study matters of life and death and was taught that professionalization required forgetting them. The more I learned, the more I grew convinced of the opposite: the history of philosophy was indeed animated by the questions that drew us there."

"As long as your ideas of what's possible are limited by what's actual, no other idea has a chance."

"One great function of the arts is to keep ideals alive in a culture that does not yet realize them."

"Growing up means realizing that no time of one's life is the best one, and resolving to savor every second of joy within reach. You know each will pass, and you no longer experience that as a betrayal."

"If life is a gift, then the more you partake in it, the more you show thanks."

"Ordinary goodness is fraught with veins of vanity and self-interest and above all with pleasure--because goodness makes you feel more alive."

"Vitality is not the denial of mortality, but the grown-up way of facing it."

"The problem of evil is the guiding force of modern thought."

Membership

Susan Neiman was a Sheldon fellow in 1982, a Fulbright fellow in 1983, a Henrich Heine fellow in 1984, an American Council of Learned Societies fellow in 1999, a Rockefeller Foundation Center at Bellagio fellow in 2000, and is a senior fellow Shalom Hartman Institute since 1996. She is a member of the Berlin-Brandenburg Academy of Sciences and Humanities and Phi Beta Kappa.

Connections

Susan married Felix de Mendelssohn after the death of her first husband. She has three children: Benjamin Wagner, Shirah Wagner, Leila Wagner.

Late Husband:

Felix de Mendelssohn

Felix de Mendelssohn lived and worked as a psychoanalyst and group analyst in Vienna and Berlin. The focus of his work was in his practice as a teaching, individual and group psychoanalyst and in teaching at institutions. On October 7, 2016, he died after an illness.

Son:

Benjamin Wagner

Daughter:

Shirah Wagner

Daughter:

Leila Wagner