At once a very inspiring and difficult read.

What I got from reading this is ehm, that growing up is difficult. Which, well, no surprise. But, she argues, that not only is it difficult, people seem to be encouraged to stay infantile. By our (mostly western, I think she implies) governments (or maybe rather, big companies/consumerism, but I think one sustains the other) and by some sort of common idea that your (+/-) 20s are supposed to be the best years of your life. The latter doesn't seem particularly encouraging when you know those years will end, and often these exact years can be really hard. And the argument for a government preferring infantile citizens who are being sedated into caring about things that don't really matter in the bigger picture, well, how convenient that then they can make important decisions that no one will really care about. This is me trying to kind of paraphrase how I understood it. Just the easy part and I might have misunderstood.

Susan Neiman takes you along in an argument about why we should grow up. And that being an adult is to accept that you constantly have to live in the gap between the "is" an the "ought". That you have to live accepting what is but at the same time not giving up on what society could and should be, to fight for that. To make her points she takes many philosopher's arguments, with Kant and Rousseau as her main focus.

I think this book woke me up a bit. For me Neiman inspires action, or the realisation to fight for your ideals and the next generations, that that is important (she makes a great argument on the importance of 'good' education/teaching). I don't mean that now I will completely turn my life upside down, but I kind of hope I would.

This subject doesn't stop here for me (I hope...). For my book is now filled with many question marks and the question: "But why?" - to a lot. She probably actually answered some of my confusion in the text, but I guess often I was left with more questions (which is not bad). I often struggled to follow her train of thought, she seemed to keep taking sidetracks back and forth, seemingly unsure what point she wanted to reach, leaving me confused. Maybe I just need to read this 10 more times. Or read all the sources she mentioned and just study this and philosophy for the rest of my life, so I won't have time to fight for my ideals.

This is a really amazing book. I highlighted so many passages, even though I never highlight or write in my books. There were just so many amazing, insightful parts I just had to accentuate. I spent last night going over the parts I had read, and trying to form my own opinions of the issues Neiman touches upon. Do yourself a favour and read this!

If I’d researched this more carefully, I would never have bought this book. It was a good title, it’s a shame it’s all centred on Kantian ethics. The writer’s dismissal of Hume didn’t seem to appreciate the depth of Hume’s criticism, missing the quote “Tis not contrary to reason to prefer the destruction of the whole world to the scratching of my finger. Reason's only purpose is to help us to satisfy our desires. Reason is, and ought only to be, the slave of the passions.” This whole statement has been validated as a psychological fact, one need only read “The Righteous Mind” by Jonathan Haidt, “Descartes’ Error” by Antonio Damasio and “Thinking, Fast and Slow” by Daniel Kahnemann to see that architecture of human minds requires emotional responses to function, that without emotions we cannot care enough to make moral decisions and that human rationality is subject to systematic biases that make Kant’s call to reason a quaint antiquated relic of a utopian vision. I confess, I never managed to make it to the point where maturity was assessed in these terms, aborting my effort halfway through, but then again, with such systemic issues in the basis for assessment, why would I give any credence to the conclusion.

I found this hard to read - it was simply not engaging enough to my layperson mind.