Susan Neiman's Moral Clarity and Rob Riemen's Nobility of Spirit
Wolin, Richard
MORAL CLARITY: A GUIDE FOR GROWN-UP IDEALISTS by Susan Neiman Harcourt, 2008 480 pp $27 NOBILITY OF SPIRIT: A FORGOTTEN IDEAL by Rob Riemen Yale University Press, 2008 116 pp $22 IN 2001...
...Through his teaching and writing, he sought to cultivate the value of autonomy, which he viewed as an indispensable prerequisite for the virtues of active citizenship...
...A new book, The Wind from the East: French Intellectuals and the Chinese Cultural Revolution, is due out next year...
...As a European friend once uncharitably pointed out: "Identity politics: that's what they had in Germany between 1933-1945...
...2. You can leave a specific percentage of your estate...
...Neiman's willingness to forswear all manner of academic trendiness and cant is one of Moral Clarity's more refreshing virtues...
...Enlightenment titan David Hume systematically mistrusted reason as a repository of inflated claims and speculative conceit...
...MORAL CLARITY: A GUIDE FOR GROWN-UP IDEALISTS by Susan Neiman Harcourt, 2008 480 pp $27 NOBILITY OF SPIRIT: A FORGOTTEN IDEAL by Rob Riemen Yale University Press, 2008 116 pp $22 IN 2001 SUSAN NEIMAN published Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy...
...3. You can leave the remainder of your estate...
...But it has also produced horrors: mechanized warfare, mass death, environmental devastation, and the risks of nuclear annihilation...
...Culture has to be defenseless, purposeless, disinterested...
...As the advocate of what he called a "third humanism," Mann realized, as did Spinoza before him, that democracy and cultural flourishing went hand in hand...
...With the exception of Kant and the ambiguous figure of Jean-Jacques Rousseau, the philosophes, far from being radical democrats, were, for the most part, advocates of Enlightened despotism...
...Today's Western society has the same aspirations as the Fascists and Communists," he laments...
...In the nineteenth century, Enlightenment ideals were coopted by "scientism": the conviction that the only valid claims to truth are those that can be scientifically validated...
...One of her goals was to nudge philosophy away from the seminar rooms and scholarly journals, where it revels in arcane themes, and back into the public sphere, its proper dwelling ground...
...Evil, as personified by Osama bin Laden and al-Qaeda, had once again become eerily topical...
...The connection to everyday life has been all but severed...
...Kant defines reason as having the courage to employ one's own understanding rather than relying on the wisdom of another...
...According to this conception, "Joyce's Ulysses, Eliot's Four Quartets, and Proust's In Search of Lost Time, but also Picasso's cubism, Schoenberg's twelve-tone music, and Heidegger's Being and Time are great works indeed...
...A LEGACY OF IDEAS A bequest of any size can be of lasting benefit to Dissent and help ensure that the ideas and beliefs you hold dear will continue to have a public forum...
...Faustus, his penultimate novel, Mann mercilessly lambasted the mentality of the other-worldly Kulturmensch as pliable material for political authoritarianism...
...Philosophy was born in the marketplace of Athens, where Socrates and his adversaries would debate topics such as the nature of courage, justice, virtue, and truth...
...If it may be faulted on any score, it is that her account underestimates the difficulty of translating an eighteenthcentury lexicon of emancipation into an early-twenty-first-century idiom...
...Not without reason do its most important pillars, the mass media and social-capitalist economy, proclaim the virtues of what is new, fast, and progressive— all on the level of consumer goods—and then offer us the freedom to be happy with our gadgets...
...In many respects, the wounds exposed during this divisive, landmark Kulturkampf have yet to heal...
...Once art sets up shop in the middle of everyday life, our conception of aesthetic excellence must change...
...As an expression of hope, art would provide "the image and pattern of all happily balanced humanity...
...They naively wagered on the good offices of European monarchs to initiate change...
...RIEMEN' S STUDY is beautifully crafted and luminously intelligent...
...Enlightenment bashing," as Darrin McMahon remarked, "has developed into something of an intellectual blood sport, uniting elements of both the left and the right in a common cause...
...Today philosophy has succumbed to mindnumbing specialization...
...RICHARD WOLIN teaches history and political theory at the Graduate Center of the City University of New York...
...Diderot once opined, "There is a bit of testicle at the bottom of our most sublime sentiments and most refined tenderness...
...Riemen borrows his definition of cultural excellence from Vincent Van Gogh: calm in the face of omnipresent upheaval...
...Baudelaire's definition has remained remarkably timely...
...It was better to frankly acknowledge this BOOKS condition than to embellish it in misleading conceptual pretense...
...No artist can escape the question of whether his or her work could, or should, still have enduring value...
...It renounces moral argumentation as an abstraction that fails to speak to the specific needs of the group and the wrongs it has suffered...
...Until quite recently, the right has been maddeningly successful at providing a coherent moral narrative, much of which consists of blaming the left for the nation's post-1960s problems and failings: social permissiveness, loss of authority, cultural anarchy, the decline of the family, and so forth...
...Does that mean that culture in general must be consigned to the dustbin of kitsch...
...By the same token, unless claims to difference are mediated by old-fashioned Enlightenment ideals of toleration, postmodern politics risks degenerating into a contemporary analogue of the seventeenthcentury wars of religion...
...His rejection of aestheticism and turn to humanism was part of a wager that art would play an active role in shaping humanity's future...
...The Enlightenment thought that science and technology were veritable panaceas: harbingers of a realized utopia...
...And as Neiman points out, Voltaire's Candide, which took direct and merciless aim at Leibniz's suggestion (in his Theodicy) that "all was for the best in the best of all possible worlds," was perhaps the greatest send-up of rationalist dogmatics ever written...
...Can anything of lasting value, anything immortal, still exist in these new times...
...Given the prevalence of serfdom and illiteracy, they held little hope for progressive change from below and placed their trust in enlightened reform from above...
...Only those works that are themselves timeless are significant," he asserts...
...For the faithful, conversely, passion and sensuality were strictly proscribed...
...In 1949, the year of the Goethe bicentenary, he lectured in East Germany...
...During the 1930s, he became a tireless critic of fascist dictatorship...
...To him, Enlightenment was tantamount to humanity's emergence from a condition of bondage or servitude...
...In his 1938 pamphlet The Coming Victory of Democracy, Mann offered an impassioned mea culpa for his earlier missteps: "When I was young I was infatuated with that pessimistic and romantic conception of the universe which set off against each other life and spirit, sensuality and redemption...
...10025 (212) 316-3120...
...Identities surely count...
...Kant followed the model of the German dramatist G. E. Lessing, who vaunted truth's character as a quest and process rather than as a definitive result...
...Today, struggles for socalled first generation rights (i.e., civil and political rights) are largely behind us, and we are forced to face up to the limitations of those ideals...
...But what did the philosophes actually mean by "reason," a term whose self-evident veneer belies an underlying complexity...
...Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists is a sequel to Evil in Modern Thought...
...Neiman, who directs the Einstein Forum in Berlin, is a former student of the illustrious Harvard political philosopher John Rawls...
...Today we know better...
...Christianity may have celebrated the passion of Christ...
...it is one half of art, the other being the eternal and the immovable...
...Riemen indicates that as punishment for visiting the "Soviet Zone" American authorities cancelled Mann's annual lecture at the Library of Congress, where he had long served as a consultant...
...I bequeath S to the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas...
...My only quibble concerns Mann's suitability as a champion of eternal aesthetic ideals...
...I bequeath percent of my estate to the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas...
...Riemen views Thomas Mann as an advocate of hallowed and timeless ideals that, today, are almost everywhere at risk...
...He suggests that the ethos of Enlightenment may be encapsulated in the maxim, "Dare to be wise...
...Our legal name is the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas...
...Its anti-authoritarian disposition— a 1960s inheritance—has brought with it a fatal aversion to moral prescription...
...Yet, by overvaluing identity the left has fragmented irreparably— to the point where a meaningful and all-encompassing program seems almost inconceivable...
...Invocations of "difference," the mainstay of postmodern claims to justice and truth, reflect the current state of diminished expectations vis-a-vis one-size-fits-all, universal models of liberty...
...For edification, Neiman turns to the work of Immanuel Kant, whose 1784 essay "What is Enlightenment...
...remains a model of concision and insight...
...She describes how she once urged her mentor to address pressing contemporary issues such as the Holocaust...
...One of the distinctive features of postwar culture is that the gap between high and low art has become fluid...
...Politically, Kant was a republican, and his vindication of reason was never far removed from this progressive political agenda...
...Thus in "The Painter of Modern Life" Baudelaire defined modernism as "the transient, the fleeting, the contingent...
...It, too, is concerned with the task of making philosophy timely and accessible again...
...After distributing the specific bequests listed above (to others in your will), I leave the remainder of my estate to the Foundation for the Study of Independent Social Ideas...
...In the course of his life Mann metamorphosed from a serene German aesthete to something of an engaged intellectual...
...Collective self-assertion is often the only recourse DISSENT / Fall 2008 n 107 BOOKS for groups that have been systematically and unjustly excluded from the public life...
...Riemen's infallible guide to the parameters of cultural achievement—his Virgil, as it were—is the German writer Thomas Mann...
...Her attempt to recapture reason for the ends of the political left may be a sign that the tide has begun to turn...
...110 • DISSENT / Fall 2008...
...Her narrative is knowledgeable, accessible, and persuasive...
...The results were widely and deservedly acclaimed...
...HE SOLUTION Neiman favors is a surprisingly orthodox one: a return to the values of the Enlightenment...
...Kant wrote during the heyday of absolutism, when the majority of men and women existed as subjects rather than citizens, and when education remained preponderantly in hands of ecclesiastical authority...
...In 1945, he justly chastised German writers and artists who had refused to break with the regime under the cover of "inner emigration...
...Attention to values and the primacy of moral insight are two aspects of the Enlightenment worldview that Neiman prizes and that she seeks to actualize as a remedy for the left's current state of moral enfeeblement...
...The counterculture was avowedly hedonistic— an ethos that clashed volubly with WASP America's well-ingrained, "think right, live right," puritanical habitudes...
...In the course of her lively tour d'horizon of the Enlightenment sensibility, Neiman helps demolish the myth of the philosophes as a group of arid and inflexible rationalists...
...As Neiman sees it, the problem is that the terrain vacated by the left's aversion toward moralizing and morality in general has been filled by the political right...
...I need not think, if I can only pay—others will easily undertake the irksome work for me...
...In this way, the program of Enlightenment would succeed in putting an end to tyranny and oppression in all of its shapes and guises...
...As such, their prescriptions for social change entailed a good dose of social engineering...
...In Neiman's view the left has succumbed to moral confusion...
...By tracing philosophical discussions of evil from the Lisbon earthquake to the Holocaust, in Evil in Modern Thought Neiman sought to counter this trend: to render philosophy worldly again by demonstrating its capacity to treat vital and topical themes...
...Already during the nineteenth century one of aesthetic modernism's hallmarks was the attempt to lionize the ephemeral, to immortalize the everyday...
...As Lessing observed, "If God were to hold in his right hand all the truth and in his left the unique ever-active quest for truth . . . asking 108 n DISSENT / Fall 2008 me to choose, I would humbly take his left...
...But her efforts also benefited, in ways that could not have been foreseen, from the Zeitgeist...
...Thereby, Mann had come to realize that, in the modern age, eternity wasn't what it used to be...
...By voting Republican, large swaths of white, middle-class Americans have sacrificed their economic self-interest in favor of a party with whose values they could identify—or so they thought...
...Rawls demurred, sheepishly admitting that he lacked the requisite professional expertise—a response that left his protegee profoundly disappointed...
...Is there a refuge for the dethroned eternity...
...Consequently, identity politics often rebuffs reason in favor of brute, existential claims concerning group interest...
...Anyone who overlooks the Enlightenment's satirical and critical bent misunderstands it in its entirety...
...DISSENT / Fall 2008 • 109 BOOKS Nobility of Spirit's Prelude details a remarkable encounter between the author and Mann's last surviving daughter, Elisabeth Mann Borgese, who, at age eighty-three, offers to teach Riemen how to ski...
...As an anti-anticommunist, Mann was appalled by the rise of McCarthyism...
...For as the book went to print, two hijacked airliners smashed into the twin towers of the World Trade Center and another into the Pentagon, resulting in the deaths of nearly three thousand innocents...
...We ask you to consider one of the following options: 1.You can leave a specific amount or a particular asset...
...The other debility afflicting the left concerns the fractious communitarian egotism of identity politics...
...IN NOBILITY OF SPIRIT, Rob Riemen seeks out enduring humanistic ideals in order to offset the temptations of cultural decline...
...Riemen believes that higher cultural ideals possess the capacity to save humanity from the erosion of value and meaning endemic to late capitalist society...
...Since anticlericalism was a driving force behind much of Enlightenment doctrine, the philosophes shamelessly praised sensuality and passion...
...Riemen asks plaintively...
...Until 1789, the European continent (with certain exceptions) had yet to experience the blessings of civic freedom...
...Science has produced miracles—just visit the neonatology ward of your local hospital...
...What also seems to be missing is a sustained reflection on why disillusionment with the Enlightenment has become so pervasive...
...In celebrating the particularistic logic of the group, identity politics rarely rises to the level of principle...
...In 1952, he quit the United States (where he had emigrated in 1938) in disgust for Switzerland, where he died three years later at the age of eighty...
...In polemical opposition to Christianity's idea that life on earth was merely a shadowy prelude to eternal life, the philosophes reveled in worldliness, sensuality, and the vagaries of human experience...
...One cannot help but admire Neiman's efforts to swim against the tide...
...For after emerging as a confirmed cultural mandarin during World War I (in Reflections of an Unpolitical Man), following German foreign minister Walther Rathenau's brutal assassination in 1922, Mann was reborn as a vigorous defender of the Weimar Republic and democratic ideals in general...
...And during the Second World War he delivered a series of pointed radio addresses to his fellow Germans that sought to expose the Nazi regime's thuggish realities...
...However, here Neiman's point of departure is no longer evil but moral perplexity—specifically, the moral disorientation of the contemporary left...
...To her credit, Neiman wears her erudition lightly...
...At times his misgivings have the ring of a mandarin's disappointment with the realities of cultural leveling...
...In Dr...
...As Kant explains: "If I have a book which understands for me, a pastor who has a conscience for me, a physician who decides my diet, and so forth, I need not trouble myself...
...In Hume's view, humanity was governed and driven by its passions...
...The heart of her lucid and impassioned study is what one might call a labor of conceptual reclamation...
...For more specifics on this or other information on gift planning, feel free to phone or write Dissent, 310 Riverside Drive #2008, New York, N.Y...
...He is the author of The Seduction of Unreason: The Intellectual Romance with Fascism from Nietzsche to Postmodernism (Princeton University Press...
...In short, I was a Wagnerite...
Vol. 55 • September 2008 • No. 4
