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    Why Grow Up?: Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age
    Why Grow Up?: Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age
    Why Grow Up?: Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age
    Audiobook5 hours

    Why Grow Up?: Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age

    Written by Susan Neiman

    Narrated by Leslie Howard

    4/5

    ()

    About this audiobook

    Our culture is obsessed with youth-and why not? What's the appeal of growing old, of gaining responsibilities and giving up on dreams, of steadily trading possibility for experience?

    The philosopher Susan Neiman argues that the absence of appealing models of maturity is not an accident: by describing life as a downhill process, we prepare young people to expect-and demand-very little from it. In Why Grow Up? she challenges our culture of permanent adolescence, turning to thinkers including Kant, Rousseau, and Arendt to find a model of maturity that is not a matter of resignation. In growing up, we move from the boundless trust of childhood to the peculiar mixture of disappointment and exhilaration that comes with adolescence. Maturity, however, means finding the courage to live in a world of painful uncertainty without giving in to dogma or despair. A grown-up, Neiman writes, helps to move the world closer to what it should be while never losing sight of what it is.

    Why Grow Up? is a witty and concise argument for the value of maturity as a subversive ideal: a goal rarely achieved entirely, and all the more worth striving for.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherTantor Media, Inc
    Release dateJun 12, 2019
    ISBN9781630154134
    Why Grow Up?: Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age
    Author

    Susan Neiman

    Susan Neiman is the director of the Einstein Forum. Her previous books, which have been translated into many languages, include Why Grow Up?: Subversive Thoughts for an Infantile Age; Moral Clarity: A Guide for Grown-Up Idealists; Evil in Modern Thought: An Alternative History of Philosophy; The Unity of Reason; and Slow Fire: Jewish Notes from Berlin. She also writes cultural and political commentary for diverse media in the United States, Germany, and Great Britain. Born in Atlanta, Georgia, Neiman studied philosophy at Harvard and the Free University of Berlin, and was a professor of philosophy at Yale and Tel Aviv Universities. She is the mother of three grown children, and lives in Berlin.

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    Reviews for Why Grow Up?

    4/5

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    • 5/5
      Well worth a listen very insightful and a good narrator.
    • 4/5
      Excellent investigation into the joys of "growing up" drawing upon Enlightenment philosophy, really comes into it's own during the final section with some good advice. Very readable throughout.
    • 4/5
      Not to give away major spoilers or anything, but yes, the author is in favor of growing up. It's a third path between starry-eyed idealism and the bitter cynicism of adolescence. This book is in an annoying limbo for me. I think the author is making important points, and I want to run around to various friends and show them parts of the book and tell them to read it. But then again, a fair chunk of the book is devoted to explaining bits of Rousseau and Kant. And while this is Rousseau and Kant as "translated" by an intelligent modern author, they're still a pair of heavy-duty philosophers. There were parts of this book where I could only read for a short time, and then I had to go do something else and let the ideas sink in for a while. But even if you end up skimming those middle chapters, I think the book is worth the effort.