Moral Philosophy and the Holocaust

Eve Garrard, Geoffrey Scarre

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2017
• eBook ISBN:
  9781351916752
• Topic: Philosophy
• Subtopic: Philosophy History & Theory

How far can we ever hope to understand the Holocaust? What can we reasonably say about right and wrong, moral responsibility, praise and blame, in a world where ordinary reasons seem to be excluded? In the century of Nazism, ethical writing in English had much more to say about the meaning of the word `good` than about the material reality of evil. This book seeks to redress the balance at the start of a new century. Despite intense interest in the Holocaust, there has been relatively little exploration of it by philosophers in the analytic tradition. Although ethical writers often refer to Nazism as a touchstone example of evil, and use it as a case by which moral theorising can be tested, they rarely analyse what evil amounts to, or address the substantive moral questions raised by the Holocaust itself. This book draws together new work by leading moral philosophers to present a wide range of perspectives on the Holocaust. Contributors focus on particular themes of central importance, including: moral responsibility for genocide; the moral uniqueness of the Holocaust; responding to extreme evil; the role of ideology; the moral psychology of perpetrators and victims of genocide; forgiveness and the Holocaust; and the impact of the `Final Solution` on subsequent culture. Topics are treated with the precision and rigour characteristic of analytic philosophy. Scholars, teachers and students with an interest in moral theory, applied ethics, genocide and Holocaust studies will find this book of particular value, as will all those seeking greater insight into ethical issues surrounding Nazism, race-hatred and intolerance.

Chapter 1

Philosophy’s Contribution to Holocaust Studies

Berel Lang

My title is intended as a provocation. Strictly speaking, it ought to be set off by a question mark – ‘Philosophy’s Contribution to Holocaust Studies?’ For surely, to go by the record, I should be questioning, not asserting, the impact that philosophy has had on the study of the Holocaust. To be sure, a more practical question might focus on the future role or contribution of philosophy – but the innocence, even naïveté, of that enquiry as undertaken in isolation becomes only too clear in light of the marginal role philosophy has so far had (or sought) in Holocaust Studies.

That this past role has been marginal seems indisputable – not in the sense that philosophical issues have not been raised or discussed in Holocaust writings, but that when they have appeared, this has been mainly in the contexts of historical, literary, or theological analysis, and shaped by authors with commitments and methods based in those fields, not in philosophy. I do not mean to imply that such other perspectives cannot be philosophical: it is a long-standing question within philosophy, after all, whether philosophy has either a subject-matter or a method apart from those defined in other, deliberately more restricted disciplines. But it also seems clear that ‘professional’ philosophers – applying that term as we otherwise recognize ‘professional’ historians or literary scholars – have contributed relatively little, in quantity or significance, to Holocaust Studies in its now more than half-century history. I would, furthermore, add to this summary description an assessment: insofar as philosophical issues have been addressed and/or might have been addressed but were not, the treatment of those issues has suffered from the profession’s absence.

I propose to say something more about these two assertions before suggesting an explanation for them and then, in conclusion, citing a number of potential, and needed, contributions that philosophy may yet make to the study of the Holocaust: that is, if it can bring itself and its practitioners to the point – and, of course, if what they bring is accepted.

First, then, on its heretofore marginal presence. If we are not to bog down in endless discussion of what counts or not as a philosophical account or contribution, the only practical criterion seems to me an ostensive definition; that is, a definition constituted by naming the philosophers or professors of philosophy (not quite the same, to be sure) with claims on the ‘universe of discourse’ of Holocaust Studies. Again, the conclusion here seems unmistakable: that given the scope and resources of Holocaust Studies as a field, a notably small part of it represents the work of philosophers. It is true that Karl Jaspers published a brief book titled The Question of German Guilt in the early postwar years (1946),¹ and that Jean-Paul Sartre published his also brief Anti-Semite and Jew at about the same time.² But the former was a summary account of issues that would resonate without much further word from Jaspers himself, and Sartre’s essay was extrapolated from his earlier Being and Nothingness with – by his own admission – only slight attention to the substantive factors affecting the history of anti-Semitism or the ‘Jewish Question.’ In the later ‘post-Holocaust’ period, philosophers who are cited, or better, re-cited in the literature of Holocaust Studies, remain scarce; that a list of them can be ventured at all (as I propose to) is itself indicative of this. So, for a first pass, in alphabetical order, and so mingling ideologies and nationalities: Theodor Adorno, Giorgio Agamben, Zvi Baron, Emil Fackenheim, Jürgen Habermas, Philip Hallie, Hans Jonas, Steven Katz, Sarah Kofman, Emanuel Levinas, Alan Milchman and Joan Ringelheim, Alan Rosenberg, Gillian Rose, Nathan Rotenstreich, John Roth, Leo Strauss, Laurence Thomas, Elisabeth Young-Bruehl, Michael Zimmerman (and analphabetically I should, I suppose, add my own name, as well as contributors to the present volume not otherwise cited).

Obviously, other figures appear on the periphery of this circle, some of them large indeed: Hannah Arendt, for example, whose own rejection of the title ‘philosopher’ would itself justify her inclusion even if there were no other, more substantial reasons for doing so. Jacques Derrida has circled the edges of the Holocaust from a number of directions. A small ‘Society for the Study of Holocaust and Genocide,’ founded by Alan Rosenberg, convenes regularly at the several annual divisional conferences of the American Philosophical Association – and a diverse group of mainly French and American philosophers who had not otherwise addressed issues bearing on the Holocaust have found in the Nazi history of Martin Heidegger an occasion for considering National Socialism more generally as they assert or deny the relation between Heidegger’s biography and his theoretical work. These include, in the USA, Richard Rorty, Tom Rockmore, and Hans Sluga; and in France, Victor Farias, Jean-François Lyotard, and Philippe Lacoue-Labarthe.

These may seem a not insignificant number, and they include some prominent names. But it also needs to be said that the Holocaust has been a minor theme for many even of these figures. One consequence of this is that few of them or of the positions associated with them have made their way into the canon of Holocaust Studies in its still provisional but nonetheless recognizable form. (Such a ‘short list’ seems to me reducible to Adorno, Arendt, Fackenheim, and Habermas.) I realize that additional or alternative candidates for these lists are likely to occur to many readers. But even if the compilations offered are at best approximate, their limited extent supports the representation of philosophy as marginal to the general field of Holocaust Studies, certainly off-center – as much off-center, at any rate, as the Holocaust has been to philosophy itself.

The question then remains ‘Why? How is this mutual exclusion to be understood, and what does it promise for the future?’ Obviously, if the marginality (or indifference or professional dissonance) should be endemic, marking the limits of any possible connection between philosophy and the Holocaust, the future will be much like the past, with the philosophical analysis or narrative of the Holocaust then permanently brief. I do not believe, however, that this need or should be the case, for the following reasons.

Even in its own short history, the field that has come to be known as Holocaust Studies followed an evolutionary pattern that has almost certainly not yet ended. Raul Hilberg’s The Destruction of the European Jews was published in 1961; although certain scholarly works concerning the Holocaust had appeared previously (for example Leon Poliakov’s Brevaire de la haine: le IIIe Reich et les Juifs (Paris, 1951) and Gerald Reitlinger’s The Final Solution: The Attempt to Exterminate the Jews of Europe (London, 1953)), Hilberg’s book proved foundational in the construction of the field of Holocaust Studies. It was no accident that this initiating moment should be a work in history (and historiography). In scholarly terms – in moral terms as well – the very first question impelled by the enormity of the Holocaust would, of course, be historical; that is, the question of what happened – then extending laterally to how, and finally venturing vertically to the more speculative ‘why.’ Thus began a dominant historical discourse, with history as a discipline continuing to hold center stage even in the constantly expanding circumference of Holocaust Studies – with little dissent from other disciplinary perspectives about either the persistence or the warrant of that centrality. If ever it was necessary to have the facts of the matter fully and accurately gathered, surely it would be for this event; even its moral weight clearly depended first on questions in the elementary form of who did what to whom – when, where, and how.

On the other hand and in sharp contrast: when Hegel wrote that ‘The owl of Minerva begins to fly only with the falling of the dusk’ (Preface to The Philosophy of Right), he evidently intended his use of a gentle metaphor to assert, not so gently, that in its relation to the ongoing rush of history, philosophy would always and only appear late in the day. And this, not as a matter of choice or style, but by necessity: the need of reflection or reason to have something present before it to reflect or to reason about. If this lag was for Hegel an intrinsic feature of philosophy in its ‘take’ on everyday circumstance, furthermore, it would be all the more emphatic for complex and extraordinary events, of which the Holocaust is obviously one. Undoubtedly, other modes of analysis or reflection are also characteristically deferred from the flow of immediate experience; historical writing itself is subject to this, as events require the passage of time before resolving themselves into even provisional historical entities. But even allowing for a common lag of this sort between act and word, it seems still undeniable that the primary figure or trope of the first period of Holocaust Studies has indeed been historical – a priority likely to continue not only in contrast to philosophy but also in relation to psychology or sociology, to literary criticism, even to the ever-increasing and popular expressions of the arts – all of these nonetheless dependent on the grist ground in history’s mill and the facts of the Holocaust that are still, constantly, virtually every day, coming to light. (Consider how recently valuable information has surfaced about such rudimentary matters as the role of the Wehrmacht in the ‘Final Solution’ or the implication in the Nazi war effort of the ‘neutral’ nations.)

To grant all this, however, is not to preclude shifts of direction and nuance in or around the center of historical reference; and there, it seems to me, a basis appears for suggesting what philosophy might have contributed before this but did not, or – more to the point now – for outlining those aspects of the Holocaust that philosophy might yet address and which, left untouched, would indicate probable lacunae or weaknesses in the accounts given. Admittedly, certain institutional factors that have so far obstructed this prospect – from the sides of both philosophy and history – are unlikely simply to disappear. For its part, contemporary philosophy, especially Anglo-American philosophy, has been notably a- or even anti-historical, even in respect of its own history, let alone in addressing ‘external’ historical events. Admittedly, there has been some movement recently to counteract this tendency – directly, in addressing the figures and concepts of philosophy’s past in relation to their historical contexts and not only as ‘contemporaries;’ indirectly, through efforts in ‘applied philosophy’ as in bioethics and the philosophy of law which have drawn philosophers (now sometimes appointed to medical or law faculties) into contemporary history in ways that would have seemed improbable a few decades ago. Even here, however, I suggest that there is danger, both from the outside and internally, of the mistaken attribution to philosophers, because they speak about ethical principles and values, of special expertise in practical moral judgment; that is, in assessing or themselves making ethical decisions. In any event, even taking account of these potentially fruitful connections between philosophy and the alltäglich world, the general claim seems to remain largely unshaken: that contemporary philosophy has yet to overcome its estrangement from history.

From the other side, the writing of history has not been notably receptive to philosophy, even when it could have benefitted from connections between the two. This wariness no doubt reflects to some extent a sense of territoriality: history as the primary mode of discourse in Holocaust Studies might feel entitled to address relevant conceptual questions also when those extend beyond its own ‘normal’ limits. The philosophy of history, after all – reflection on the conditions of historical explanation, the nature of the relationship between description and interpretation and then between them and evaluation – indeed comes close to the center of writing history, including of course the history of the Holocaust. And so historians have indeed presumed on these issues, understandably pleading the urgency of getting on with the task of unearthing and assembling data, but in any event resistant to what philosophers might have had to say about their theoretical frameworks. Even in the recognizably boundary issues of moral judgment, historians – no doubt because the moral questions posed by the Holocaust are so deeply embedded in its history – have at times simply assumed moral authority: an analogue in my view to the assumption of such authority by professional ‘ethicists’ among philosophers. The marginality of philosophy in Holocaust Studies has thus reflected an alliance of complementary imbalances: a too narrow or purist view of itself by philosophy acting in concert with a too generous or ambitious view of itself by history.

It may be objected that this account is a historical hypothesis in its own right (or wrong); in any event that even so far as it might be accepted for the sake of argument, it says little about what philosophy can in fact contribute to Holocaust Studies even in general terms, let alone by illuminating specific angles of vision. Here, let me for the moment conflate what philosophy might have contributed in the past but did not with the prospect of its future; thus, I outline a number of issues central to Holocaust Studies that also involve substantive considerations of continuing importance to philosophers. Again, I do not mean to claim that philosophy has special authority, let alone a monopoly, in the discussion of such issues – only that by joining its efforts to other modes of discourse, philosophy can add substantially to understanding them. I mention four such topics out of a larger number of possibilities – all four no doubt familiar but also, still, perplexing and unresolved in the context of Holocaust Studies.

1. The Concept of Genocide

When Churchill, in a speech about the unfolding Holocaust (late in 1942), dramatically asserted that ‘We are in the presence of a crime that has no name,’ he heralded an issue that continues to this day, one which the coining of the term ‘genocide’ two years after Churchill’s speech, by Rafael Lemkin, did something but not enough to resolve. The 1948 UN Convention on Genocide, however important symbolically, left virtually all the basic questions about the structural and moral character of genocide unsettled: the definition of the groups and types of action to which the term ‘genocide’ is applicable; the role of intention in those actions; the place of genocide in moral history. That ‘genocide’ as a term has since its first appearance become an all-purpose epithet, in common usage designating the most heinous crime to which a name has been given, only reinforces the need for elaborating its analysis – as the term and concept no doubt apply paradigmatically to the Holocaust but in their occurrences elsewhere as well. Both for this analysis and for its obverse side – that is, the implied assertion of group rights as violated by genocide (rights analogous to and yet arguably distinct from individual rights) – moral and legal philosophers have increasingly focused attention on the concepts and practices involved. And if their work on these issues is still exploratory, anyone familiar with that work will, I believe, recognize its usefulness for understanding the concept of genocide in principle as well as in its specific bearing on the Holocaust (for one small but contentious matter, on the ‘Uniqueness Question,’ concerned with the claim of uniqueness ascribed to the Holocaust).

2. Corporate and Individual Intentions

Although the heat of conflict surrounding the intentionalist and functionalist interpretations of the ‘Final Solution’ and the related Historikerstreit has diminished, the conceptual issues in those disagreements have arguably remained unsettled. What emerged from those discussions is a large middle ground occupied jointly by what might be called ‘intentional functionalists’ and ‘functional intentionalists,’ with other smaller groups still remaining at the far ends of the spectrum – an outcome which, however, seems to me the result of practical compromise rather than conceptual clarification. It is, I believe, a matter of record that a common assumption by all parties to this dispute supposed that what intentions are – whether for individuals or corporately; that is, for groups – is self-evident, requiring little or no systematic analysis. That a great deal of attention had been paid specifically to the concept of intention and its complexities in twentieth-century philosophy (both in phenomenology and in linguistic philosophy) never, so far as I am aware, entered the discussion. Would such reference have made a difference to analyses which simply assumed that they involved questions of fact, not theory? Perhaps; perhaps not; it may be too late now to determine this. What we do know is that the issue of how to ascribe responsibility within the bounds of the Holocaust – the extent and nature of responsibility on the parts of individuals and groups, and the differentiated relation of such responsibility to intentional or non-intentional acts – is very much alive in the retrospective assessment of the events constituting the Holocaust. Few commentators, whether philosophers or historians, would defend the claim that where there is no intention, there is no responsibility. But this makes it all the more important to consider how and to what extent intentions are legitimately found or ascribed to individuals or to groups, and then, too, of what the moral varieties are of non- or extra-intentional acts.

3. Classical Ethics

Whether an event with the dimensions of the Holocaust entails revision in considering the nature of ethical values or questions as such is itself a pertinent question. Even if that possibility is rejected, furthermore, the status of the classical – standard – ethical questions as they bear on the Holocaust will still be informative, perhaps also innovative, in respect both of those standard questions and of the Holocaust itself. Beginning with such concrete and immediate issues of judgment as the status of punishment and reparation, revenge and forgiveness, the relation between causes and moral reasons, such analysis eventually makes its way to the ‘Question of Evil’ that has long bedevilled the Western religious and rationalist tradition – how evil can subsist in a just or divinely ordered world. A specific and more concrete variant of the latter arises in respect of the Holocaust perpetrators in the question of whether evil or wrongdoing can be knowingly willed or chosen. For even the undoubted role of bureaucratic processes in the Holocaust does not preclude a role for consciousness or decision-making, and the specific question cannot be avoided, then, of whether Nazi actions were undertaken in the belief of a good to be realized – or with the agents’ own consciousness of wrongdoing. The historical issues here are inextricable from the philosophical one of whether the latter framework is indeed an option – an ostensibly empirical question which has too rarely in the history of philosophy been addressed empiricall...

Table of contents

• Cover Page
• Title Page
• Copyright Page
• Contents
• Notes on Contributors
• Introduction
• 1 Philosophy’s Contribution to Holocaust Studies
• 2 Ideology, Moral Complicity and the Holocaust
• 3 In a Class of its Own?
• 4 Knowledge, History and the Holocaust
• 5 Persons of Lesser Value: Moral Argument and the ‘Final Solution’
• 6 Perpetrator Motivation: Some Reflections on the Browning/Goldhagen Debate
• 7 Moral Responsibility and the Holocaust
• 8 Four Types of Mass Murderer: Stalin, Hitler, Churchill, Truman
• 9 Is Limited Altruism Morally Wrong?
• 10 Harming Some to Save Others from the Nazis
• 11 Tragic Decisions: Removing Jewish Children from their Christian Guardians in Postwar Europe
• 12 Forgiving the Unforgivable?
• 13 Forgiveness and the Holocaust
• 14 The Holocaust and the Possibility of Art
• 15 The Holocaust in American Life as a Moral Text
• Index