Book by Susan Neiman - Moral Clarity

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Moral Clarity

A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists
by Susan Neiman

2 Reviews
Publisher: Harcourt
Publish Date:May 5, 2008
Hardcover, 480 pages

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Summary

An indispensable progressive guide for grappling with the most controversial and pressing issues of our time.

As Americans approach the most dramatic political choice they will make in many decades, they face far more fundamental questions than 30-second spots about red telephones or heated rhetoric. Which values divide us? Which ones can we share? Susan Neiman, a moral philosopher committed to making the tools of her trade relevant to real life, shows in Moral Clarity how resurrecting a moral vocabulary�good and evil, heroism and nobility�can steer us clear of the dogmas of the right and the helpless pragmatism of the left, and toward a reinvigorated progressive vision.

Drawing on the gift for bringing philosophy down to earth that informed her prize-winning Evil in Modern Thought, Neiman turns her attention to analyzing good and evil in immediate and contemporary terms. A masterly storyteller who writes with verve and wit, she reaches back to the eighteenth century to retrieve a framework for forming clear opinions and taking responsible action on today�s urgent political and social questions. Neiman shows that the pursuit of moral clarity is not a matter of religious faith but is open to all who are committed to the core Enlightenment ideals of happiness, reason, reverence, and hope, believers and nonbelievers alike. And she draws on literature, evolutionary theory, and other contemporary research to show why these ideals remain as potent today as they were to the Founding Fathers.

In Moral Clarity, Neiman argues that:

- American progressives have abandoned the values and intellectual traditions of the West to conservatism, with the result that moral values have come to seem the property of the right

- In place of this tradition, progressives have elevated divisive identity politics

- Renewal of the progressive vision begins with rereading and reclaiming of the Western tradition, and an unembarrassed embrace of concepts like good and evil, nobility, dignity, and heroism

Neiman brings philosophy alive, drawing on some of the great narratives of the Western canon to illustrate her arguments. So:

- The biblical account of Sodom and Gomorrah, and Abraham's response when Yahweh tells him that He plans to destroy the cities of the plain (he essentially bargains God down) exemplifies universalism, resoluteness, and the fact that in moral calculations the details matter

- The story of Odysseus, for Neiman, teaches us something about the possibilities of heroism in our own age. If, like him, �heroes can tremble and cry and falter, you could also become one.�

Cornel West calls Susan Neiman �a beacon of light and hope in our morally debased times,� while political philosopher Michael Walzer calls Moral Clarity �morally and politically compelling�a delight to read.� And Body and Soul magazine says, �Neiman wants engagement, not sheeplike agreement, and her book is meant to spark conversation.�

Praise for Susan Neiman and Moral Clarity

�Susan Neiman's profound wisdom and courage give us a public conception of goodness and a reinvigorated progressive vision that will resonate with the religious while remaining thoroughly secular and democratic. She is a beacon of light and hope in our morally debased times.�
�Cornel West, University Professor at Princeton University and author of Democracy Matters and Race Matters

Learn More

Four People Whose Lives Embody Moral Clarity

The following is excerpted and adapted from Susan Neiman's Moral Clarity. In Chapter 12, titled "Enlightenment Heroes," Neiman offers four examples of people whose lives and work illustrate the moral principles she discusses in the book.

"When we think about heroes, we think in outsize examples. The Bible and the works of Homer have starkness and grandeur no other texts share. They point to the strength of the traditions that anchor so many of our beliefs. Our moral intuitions may not come from above, but they didn�t come easily, or yesterday. Turning to Abraham and Odysseus and Job is a way of marking that depth. Yet while none of these heroes is one-dimensional, all of them are giants. How to move from them to the people you might meet�or become�on an ordinary sidewalk? [�]

"Given the years I�d spent thinking about the fit between ideals and reality, I should have found cases of goodness easy to name. But pressed for examples, my mind drew a blank. Martin Luther King? I wasn�t looking for martyrs. Mother Theresa? Still less, saints. What I sought were examples of Enlightenment heroism�people whose minds were at least as engaged as their hearts, whose moral clarity was won through reflection and ongoing struggle. Einstein? He was not the loopy genius portrayed in caricatures, but his image is too intimidating to be useful. And none of the less familiar examples seemed, well, big enough.

"And that was the point. I�d forgotten what I�d been preaching: Reality never looks like the ideals you have for it. � Once that became clearer, the heroes were not hard to find. [�]

"I settled on four people to illustrate Enlightenment values in action, and I�ll wager you know others. However hard the times they experience in public and private, all of them are people who know about joy and how to express it. All of them have formidable powers of reason: Each is as ready to learn from the classics as from the market woman on the corner, ... continue reading >

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Editorial Reviews

Review: Moral Clarity (K. Anthony Appiah, Slate.com)

If you're a philosopher, the easiest way to introduce yourself is not by elaborating a doctrine, but by telling a story. That's because philosophical views are always arguments with previous views, and so they arise within a historical narrative. Susan Neiman is a masterly storyteller; her new book Moral Clarity offers retellings of the Odyssey and the Book of Job that are themselves worth the price of admission. But she also has stories about the origins of her own position that place her in both larger intellectual narratives and more local political ones.

Neiman, an American philosopher who runs the Einstein Forum in Potsdam, Germany, worries that American progressives have drifted away from the values and intellectual traditions of the West, stretching from classical antiquity to the Enlightenment (this is the larger narrative). She is vexed that contemporary conservatism has staked an uncontested claim to these traditions. When George W. Bush was re-elected in 2004 (this is the more local narrative), she recalls, "I was stunned by the claim that voters chose George Bush because they cared about moral values. Either they had been bamboozled or the left had dramatically failed." ... (Read the full review.)

Review: Moral Clarity (Boston Globe Magazine)

In clear and vigorous prose, Neiman defends the Enlightenment values of reason, reverence, happiness, and hope--none of which are quite what you're thinking they are right now, I can guarantee you that. Defends them against what? The appropriation and perversion by the political right, and the abandonment by the political left. [...]

[Moral Clarity] makes you want to debate and reconsider and come up with your own examples and counterexamples. (The interactive nature of it would make it an excellent choice for a fairly serious-minded book club.) ... (Read the full review.)

Review: Moral Clarity (Wall Street Journal)

For Ms. Neiman, the road back to the philosophical high ground leads through the Enlightenment. The central chapters of "Moral Clarity" remind us that the Enlightenment's great thinkers, despite their often radical resistance to authority and convention, had their own robust moral lexicon. Rejecting religious fatalism, they judged societies by their capacity to produce mundane happiness. They held up rationality as the key to universal justice, and they saw in the human condition, for all its folly, a source of hope. More than that, Ms. Neiman shows, they revered the world that reason revealed to them. As Kant put it: "Two things fill the mind with awe and wonder . . . : the starry heavens above me and the moral law within me."

Ms. Neiman writes with verve and a sometimes epigrammatic wit, especially when skewering her political comrades. Of their confusion and discomfort when asked to condemn the likes of the Taliban, she writes: "Tolerance is the virtue of disappointed old men; it can never serve as a rallying cry." Nor does she go to the other extreme, showering contempt on all things religious. As she observes in a passage on the excesses of fundamentalism: "The fact that ideals can be perverted doesn't mean that we can do without them; if our need for transcendence isn't satisfied by the right kind of ideals, we may turn to the wrong ones." She even manages to pay graceful tribute to the wisdom of the Jewish Sabbath. ... (Read the full review.)

Review: Moral Clarity (New York Times)

It is very hard to write well about ethics, and especially so in a way that engages and interests that elusive phantom of writers� imaginations, the general reader. But Susan Neiman�s previous book on ethics, �Evil in Modern Thought,� was widely and favorably reviewed, and the present work is a worthy successor. Neiman�s particular skill lies in expressing sensitivity, intelligence and moral seriousness without any hint of oversimplification, dogmatism or misplaced piety. She clearly and unflinchingly sees life as it is, but also sees how it might be, and could be, if we recaptured some of the hopes and ideals that currently escape us.

In other words, like its predecessor, �Moral Clarity� is a sustained defense of a particular set of values, and of a moral vocabulary that enables us to express them. Neiman sees these values as neglected or threatened all along the political spectrum. They received their strongest defenses in the moral thought of the Enlightenment, in David Hume and Adam Smith, but more particularly in Jean-Jacques Rousseau and Immanuel Kant. So the book is not only a moral polemic, but a powerful argument in support of the resources that these Enlightenment figures left us. Neiman, an American who is currently the director of the Einstein Forum in Berlin, boldly asserts that when Marxism, postmodernism, theory and fundamentalism challenge the Enlightenment they invariably come off second best. I agree, and I wish more people did so. ... (Read the full review.)

Member Reviews

Heth	Posted on Jul 24, 2008 12:10 PM
Written with style, intelligence, and yes, clarity a great book -- rises above the daily grind of political life but never leaves it behind.
Heth	Posted on Jul 24, 2008 12:09 PM
Written with style, intelligence, and, yes, clarity a great book -- rises above the daily grind of politics but doesn't leave it behind.
Page 1

Biography

Susan Neiman is Director of the Einstein Forum in Potsdam, Germany. Born in Atlanta, she studied philosophy at Harvard and the Freie Universit�t Berlin, and taught philosophy at Yale and Tel Aviv University. She is the author of Slow Fire, The Unity of Reason, Evil in Modern Thought, and Moral Clarity.

Author Interview

Interview with Susan Neiman (Tavis Smiley Show)

Q. Let me start by asking what you mean when you say moral clarity, so that I have clarity about what we're talking about here.

A. Let me answer that with a story. I started writing this book on November 3rd, 2004. I had come over from Berlin, partly to give some talks about evil, which was the subject of my last book, and partly to celebrate the party at the end of the Bush administration.

So when I was down on the floor on November 3rd, drinking four double espressos to just try and pick myself up that day, I said, "There are two possibilities." The Republicans are saying they won because people wanted moral clarity, all right? That they had moral values and progressives did not.

And I said okay, well, either you can say all those people were being bamboozled, right, or you can look at what progressives have done wrong, and why we are scared of moral language, why we only use words like good and evil and hero in these little, silly scare quotes, right? And look at what we can do to speak to people who are desperate, are hungry for straightforward talk about morality.

And I figured okay, I'm trained as a philosopher. If there's anything I can contribute to the political climate of this country, it is offering a different moral vocabulary, so we can talk about clarity without being simple. Clarity is not the same thing as simplicity. ... (Read the full interview.)

Progressive Book Club Interview with Susan Neiman
The author of "Moral Clarity" on how progressives can reclaim the language of right and wrong

Q. You�re an academic philosopher. How did you come to write Moral Clarity, which is aimed at a general audience?

A. Right after the 2004 election I was staggered that we were in for another four years of the Bush administration and particularly by the claim that people had voted for Bush because he represented moral clarity. Now it seemed to me that there were two ways to go on that. One was to say, somebody who lied his way into a war and legalized torture is so far from representing any moral clarity that I care about, that the people who gave that as a reason for voting for him must be nuts, bamboozled, stupid, whatever�which is a direction that a lot of people on the left took. The second alternative was to say, Wait a sec, let�s clean up our own house first. What is it that progressives have been doing wrong that allows millions of people to say that we�re lacking in moral clarity? I thought, if there�s something useful that I can do with my training as a moral and political philosopher, it would be to take back words like moral clarity and moral values for progressives.

Q. And how did you start going about that?

A. One thing that seemed particularly important to me is the question of where morality comes from. An awful lot of people both left and right associate morality with religion, which is one reason progressives get nervous around moral language, language like good and evil, terms which have been used simplistically, demonically, irresponsibly, but nevertheless are the most powerful words we have in the language. And of course conservatives who insist on rather fundamentalist interpretations of religion were the ones who felt comfortable talking about good and evil.

I think it�s crucial that progressives don�t demonize religion and realize that religion has pl ... continue reading >

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