Quotes from Susan Neiman

Every time you accept the claim that you can't change human nature or you have to accept the way the world is, you are accepting the foundations of the worldview that grounded the ancien regime.

A defence of the Enlightenment is a defence of the modern world, along with all its possibilities for self-criticism and transformation. If you're committed to Enlightenment, you're committed to understanding the world in order to improve it.

Reason drives your search to make sense of the world by pushing you to ask why things are as they are. For theoretical reason, the outcome of that search becomes science; for practical reason, the outcome is a more just world.

When consuming goods rather than satisfying work becomes the focus of our culture, we have created (or acquieced in) a society of permanent adolescents.

Rousseau introduced the idea of false needs, and showed how the systems we live in work against our growing up: they dazzle us with toys and bewilder us with so many trivial products that we are too busy making silly choices to remember that the adult ones are made by others.

Given all the forces arrayed against it, no wonder Kant thought growing up to be more a matter of courage than knowledge: all the information in the world is no substitute for the guts to use your own judgement. And judgement can be learned — principally through the experience of watching others use it well —but it cannot be taught.

Unlike kitsch, moral clarity is hard to come by. It means working to make sense of things you do not even want to acknowledge. It often means not knowing if you ever get it right.

There are pragmatic as well as moral grounds for the United States to follow Germany's lead [in dealing with it's past human rights crimes]. American media may have largely ignored the reasons we decided to destroy Hiroshima or oust the democratically elected governments in Iran or the Congo. Other nations' media has not. Few Americans are quite aware of how little credibility we retain in other parts of the world.

The capacity to return hate with love wipes reason off the map, at least for a while. I cannot understand it any more than I can understand how, knowing that story, black churches across America continue to open their doors and their hearts to white strangers again and again. What love and courage. What courage and love.

What the Enlightenment rejected in the South Sea islands was what it perceived as a stupor, the docile submission to whatever bit of the given is coming your way. And what's coming your way is unlikely to be a breeze or a cow or a coconut, but a new kind of screen you can zap or click to create the illusion that life isn't passing you by.

Twentieth-century philosophy is not unique in its ability to confuse puzzles with problems.

The dangers of sophistry and scholasticism are present in the possibility of philosophy itself.

What drives pure reason to efforts that seem to have neither end nor result?

Is reality exhausted by what is, or does it leave room for all that could be?

The line from Southern hatred of Reconstruction to Southern opposition to government programs is a straight one, though it's rarely explicitly drawn. So Mississippi prefers potholes that can ruin your wheels in its capital, and schools that leave their graduates illiterate in its countryside, to imposing taxes that might fix them.

Doing what you can to move your part of the world closer to the way it should be, while never losing sight of the way it is, is what being a grown-upmcomes to.

The historian Howard Zinn's remarks about the South make sense: it is "not the antithesis but the essence of American society which could therefore function as a mirror in which the nation can see its own blemishes magnified."6 If the South is a mirror, Mississippi is a microscope.

Clearly the students had been learning about racism—far away, and in another country

not only deprives workers of the fruits of their labour by paying them 1/200th of the salary that goes to their CEO (the international average as of this writing, not including bonuses and stock options); it deprives workers of the very meaning of labour itself

We want to make an impact on the world, but we end up making or selling playthings that are developed to keep us distracted and designed to deconstruct. We have turned the activities that were meant to be the stuff of life into mere means of subsisting in it.

Van de geschiedenis van de filosofie leren betekent niet haar zonder bedenkingen accepteren. Met behulp van haar inzichten kunnen we enig licht werpen op de onze. We kunnen niet op dezelfde stellingen terugvallen die eerder door de denkers van de Verlichting werden verdedigd, zelfs niet op die van haar modernste vertegenwoordigers. Misschien ligt de hoop niet in het beantwoorden van de vraag naar de zin van het leven, maar juist in het verwerpen van die vraag.

By the time you are old enough to pick up a book like this one, you have learned it: the world is not your world, and you don't have another. (p.107)

What we rarely see receive is a picture of adulthood that represents it as the ideal it should be. (...) What better way to keep people longing for childhood than to paint a picture of adulthood no right-minded soul could ever want?

While systematic racism infects processes and affects lives all over America, Southern awareness of history makes it impossible to ignore. Moreover, the influence of the South on American political culture is disproportionate to the size of the region. Focusing on the Deep South is not a matter of ignoring the rest of the country, but