Outline of Argument
I. Introduction
1. Theoretical bases; definition of terms
2. Methodological bases
II. Is the Holocaust Unique? Fackenheim's "five ways"
A. Reasonlessness/Baselessness of Genocide
1. Nazis didn't believe it was reasonless: propaganda.
2. Objection: Propaganda are lies
a. resp. 1: Lies for reasons: power consolidation
2. resp. 2: Antisemitism/baseless hatred not new
B. Verminization of Jews
1. Verminization is not unique: content. Precedents
2. Verminization is understandable: context. Germany
3. Objection of extent. Resp: Magnitude not a category
C. Unusual methods, Cruelty, Radical Evil
1. Cruelty has precedents. Question of policy.
2. Question of Evil and theology not unique to holocaust.
Only scale has grown; problem only more obvious
3. Torture and cruelty not per se unique
4. True radical evil is internally contradictory: renders
holocaust irrelevant and philosophy unintelligible
D. Judenrein objective
1. Motives explicable as in II.A.2.a
2. Final solution = judenrein + world domination
3. Objection: This combination is unique
a. Is uniqueness an emergent property?
b. Whole greater than sum of parts idea
c. Reply: Implication that everything is thus
unique, and label becomes meaningless
E. Murder of Jews more important than survival of Germany
1. Desperation not unique. Relevance of responsibility
2. Objection: That holocaust defied reason is the point
3. Reply: Discussion of "Late Holocaust" idea, that
holocaust only really began once war was lost
a. Late Holocaust has only one characteristic
b. on its only leg, Late Holocaust is not unique
c. Late Holocaust is emptied of meaning
4. Discussion of the bombing of the camps by the Nazis
III. Explanation and philosophy
A. The holocaust is not philosophically unique. But is
traumatic
1. Contradiction reveals insufficiency of philosophy
2. Contradiction calls for new idea of explanation
B. Wittgenstein and the limits of philosophy
1. Auschwitz radically outside philosophical
language-game
2. Meaning of vs. Leading a life
3. Antireductionism and religious belief
C. Resistance and Explanation after the holocaust
1. The Story as medium
2. Claude Lanzmann and Martin Buber
D. Conclusion: Speaking against paralysis
On the Question of the Uniqueness of the Holocaust
and its Ramifications on the Relevance of Philosophy
"Every explanation is an hypothesis"
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Remarks on Frazer's Golden
Bough
That the holocaust was a searing event of human history is immediately apparent to anyone who learns of its extent and its horror. The magnitude and extent of its perpetrators' cruelty would seem to make explanation impossible. What I shall suggest in this paper, however, is that explanation is possible, but irrelevant. Although Fackenheim has said that evil explained is no longer evil, I hope to show that the holocaust is explicable on a logical-philosophical level, and that coherent accounts of the phenomenona (if not the motives) of the holocaust are possible without recourse to the concept of "uniqueness." What this tells us is not that the holocaust is a minor event, but that what we expect from philosophical explanations is radically problematized not by the holocaust itself but by the elements of the human experience which were taken to such extremes in it, that as a result the type of destruction the holocaust represents is not within philosophy but of philosophy as a Boethian 'consolation.'
I think it will be useful, particularly as this essay is to take the form of a personal exploration of the matter, to outline the course of the argument here. It begins with the question of the uniqueness of the holocaust. This matter is not an idle one, because it is on this uniqueness that Fackenheim is able to pin the necessity for a 614th commandment; if the holocaust were just another historical event, we should expect our present 613 (as interpreted by Jewish tradition, of course) to be adequate. The holocaust must, then, offer something radically new, and--to use Fackenheim's language--be a radically evil anti-miracle, an epoch-making event which calls for a revision of Jewish and secular philosophy and renders any new philosophy which does not respond to the holocaust inauthentic.
Uniqueness, then, cannot be a "mere" description (the
impropriety of the word 'mere' will be discussed in the latter
portion of this essay). It must be a philosophical category, and
Fackenheim offers five characteristics of the holocaust that 'defy
explanation.' Uniqueness--the holocaust as
The latter portion of the paper will thus address the inadequacy of philosophical accounts, insofar as they limit themselves to making rational propositions about the world, to explain historical events. Perhaps Hegelian philosophy, for example, has answers for all of the questions of history, including the holocaust. But it does not give us the metalevel "answers" we require. It gives an account, but does not explain. Moreover, the success of the philosophical project undermines itself: because it comprehends the holocaust, it trivializes it, and thus cannot be said to truly comprehend it.
What I hope to suggest is that a more careful examination of
the process of rational enquiry itself, perhaps informed by the
thought of the Jewish philosopher Ludwig Wittgenstein, by
traditional Jewish conceptions of what a true explanation of the
world is to provide, and by contemporary pragmatist ideas about the
role of religion and of philosophy in the worlds of their
adherents, reorients the crisis of the holocaust. The
The holocaust is only a threat to philosophy generally if some philosophical systems can fully explain the holocaust. If none can, as Fackenheim argues, it might be possible to construct a new philosophical system (as Fackenheim does) which addresses the challenge of the holocaust and, while not overcoming it, is able to stand in the face of it. If some pre-holocaust philosophical systems can remain intact, then it is something about the systematic approach itself that limits systems from addressing the real discomfort with the holocaust, a condition which lies outside the traditional boundaries of philosophy. So, to begin, we must look at Fackenheim's arguments for the inability of pre-holocaust philosophies to account for the holocaust, i.e., for the holocaust's uniqueness.
Since uniqueness is more than a particularly intense example of evil, Fackenheim has pointed to five characteristics of the holocaust which make it utterly new--"radical evil." They are: (1) the reasonless of the Nazi genocide, (2) the verminization of the Jewish people, (3) the unnecessary and unprecedented cruelty of the Nazis, (4) the 'Judenrein' objective, and (5) the fact that the murder of Jews was more important than the survival of the Reich itself. I will address each of these arguments in turn, bearing in mind two methodological points: first that this is a theoretical inquiry, and due to space limitations, I have deliberately kept the factual-historical data to a minimum (assertions will be backed only by principle, not quotes or citations), and second that it will deal with Fackenheim's claims only as rational-philosophical propositions--that there are other types of responses to the holocaust, that the treatment of the holocaust given here is utterly inadequate,is preciselythe point of the latter part of the essay.
First of the holocaust's unique characteristics is the
baselessness of the Nazi genocide. Fackenheim accedes that other
genocides have occurred, but none have been as thoroughly without
reason as that of the Jews. In his discussion of the Nazi reasons
for the Holocaust, Fackenheim finds none of them acceptable. He
follows Raul Hilberg: "They did it because they wanted to do it."
But this is not new: the Colonializers of America wanted the land
of the Native Americans, the Turks felt threatened by the
Armenians, and so forth. (These two examples will also be dealt
with in the fourth argument, the mission of making the world
The objection may arise that these excuses were exactly that: excuses, insincere covers for utterly baseless hatred. There are two possible replies. First is an appeal to the strategic value of killing the Jews (which will be developed more below, in connection with demonization): while perhaps Hitler did not believe his own propaganda, the demonizing and extermination of the Jews provided a raison d'etre for the Nazi regime. This foundation was absolutely essential for the consolidation and maintenance of Hitler's power over Germany, his ability to lead the public through a devastating war, and his authority to exercise Fascist control over all sectors of German life. If Hitler did not kill the Jews because of the reasons he gave, he killed them to remain in power. One might ask why he wanted to remain in power, and claim that he wanted to remain in power in order to kill Jews, and this is unique, but does it not seem more likely that his deranged, insecure and egocentric mind craved power more than anything else? I believe this question to be rhetorical, but will, again, return to it below.
The second response to the objection is to admit it: one can agree that the German propagandic reasons for the holocaust were all lies, and that at the heart of what they were doing was baseless hatred. In this case, the question is whether baseless hatred of Jews is unique to the holocaust. Unfortunately, it is not: Jews being killed because they are Jews is not a unique phenomenon. Perhaps antisemitism is reasonless--although scholarship by Prager & Telushkin and others suggests otherwise--but even if so, its prevalence in Nazi Germany is not unique, save perhaps in magnitude. We may cite the Chelminisky massacre, the massacres in Worms and elsewhere during the Crusades--the list is lamentably long. What is different in the Holocaust is (again "merely") the size of the catastrophe, not the nature of the catastrophe itself. Effectively, we may go so far as to grant that the ultimate (although not immediate) motives of the Nazis were inexplicable, without allowing that the holocaust is unique. That the lust for power, or the hatred of other races, or the baseless hatred of Jews are on some level inexplicable does not mean that they are new to the holocaust. Finally, the philosophical systems Fackenheim is working with do not admit differences in magnitude as being differences in kind. Since the holocaust can be seen as a very large example of something that has happened before, it is not unique.
If the reasonlessness of the genocide if not unique,
Fackenheim presents us with a second unique aspect of the
Holocaust: the verminizing of the Jews, that Jews were to be killed
not because they were evil humans, but because they were infectious
vermin, a scum to be gassed away with antiseptic cleanser. While
this argument itself seems to refute the statement that Jews
were killed for no reason, it still fits the framework of the
expediency of exterminating the Jews for the Nazis' control of
Germany. Fackenheim calls this excuse "at best.. a half truth. Is
shooting a person--quickly, cleanly--harder than the slow,
methodical process by which a person is reduced to a dog, a rat, an
insect..?" (TMW 214) Again, however, while this lie (and the
muselmann concept discussed below) may provide adequate grounds for
resistance (discussed at the end of the paper), it is not itself a
Franz Stangl's rationale aside, the verminization of Jews does not seem unusual when viewed in the historical context of Nazism. While a lengthy historical digression would be beyond the scope of this paper, it is easy to cite the historical conditions of Weimar Germany that allowed the Nazi party to come to power: Germany, in shambles and dishonored by the war, in economic ruin and political chaos. In such a context, the enemy cannot be a mere threat to be 'scapegoated' or even controlled for economic or political reasons, because the economic depression was not Germany's only problem; its inferiority complex ran far deeper. Jews had to be 'verminized.'
The sociological truism that people must always find someone worse than they are is a useful account of both medieval anti-Semitism and the phenomenon of anti-Black racism being most widespread among economically disadvantaged whites. In the history of hatred of blacks in the United States, no economic argument can seriously be made: even if African-Americans did work for less money and thus competed with lower-class whites for jobs, this does not hold today, when neo-Nazi "skinheads" continue to harass and lynch blacks in America. And we find similar rhetoric is used against blacks as was used against Jews in Nazi Germany: racial corruption of the pure, uncleanliness, bearers of disease. And just as most skinheads are from poor, spit-upon families, Nazis came to power in a poor, spit-upon nation. The worse the Jews were, the nobler the Nazis became in getting rid of them. Obviously, there is a difference between the activities of marginal skinheads in the United States (and today's Germany) and those of the Nazis, but this difference is one of historical coincidence--that the Nazis had power, that the scope of their activities was much larger. The idea of Jews as vermin and the practice which attempted to make the idea true may seem radically evil, but is in fact a calculated move whose motives are readily explicable without the need to label them unique. The verminizing of Europe's Jews provided Germans with the nobility of cause and purity of ideological mission that they needed, and which Hitler needed to become Fuhrer. Verminizing is not radically evil (i.e. unprecedented and inexplicable), nor is it per se unique; it was a strategem that Hitler used to be the leader of a new German volk, to explain to his public why it was noble that their children were dying on battlefields. Enemies were 'jewified' to unite Germany against them, and Jews were verminized to make the cause noble. Standard historical analysis has a complete account of why verminization was used by the Nazis, and how it has been used elsewhere, and even how the extent to which it was followed in Nazi Germany is possible: this is not the philosophical rupture we need.
Fackenheim's third argument for the uniqueness of the
holocaust claims that the unusual methods of cruelty used by the
Nazis, including but not limited to senseless torture and the
muselmann idea, is evil previously unknown in the
world. Following Primo Levi's description of the muselmann,
Fackenheim states that
The Nazi state had no higher aim than the murder souls while bodies
were still alive. The Muselmann was its most characteristic, most
original product. He is a novum in human history.
(TMW 100)
Fackenheim adds, noting that Spinoza's sages would have also been
so reduced:
Eternity itself is invaded by historicity: The plunge into history
is complete
(Ibid.)
I will not attempt to analyze Fackenheim's claim in the light of the particular material spiritualism of Spinoza's metaphysics, which I think claim that with a particular form of 'resistance' the Nazi victory could never be complete. However, Franz Stangl's excuse for the muselmann practice aside, there are again precedents in the Hadrianic persecutions, the Crusades, and elsewhere for the same dark practice. This may well be ultimately inexplicable, Freud aside, but it cannot be said to be radically new.
If the muselmann is not unique, Fackenheim argues that it is certainly inexplicable. Fackenheim finds the muselmann a product of a deliberate system, and this is new. He states that it is really about the victims--"not a single one of the torturers and murderers was simply 'conditioned' to view or treat them as [an insect]," (TMW 241; emphasis his) and the practice was institutionalized sadism. Yet Fackenheim himself implies that whether a practice is policy or not does not alter its moral status: "Hoess was at all times free to volunteer for the Russian front: he chose not to use that freedom," (Ibid.) and the Nuremburg Trials agree. Fackenheim then takes the other argument, that people were turned into muselmanner just to make it so, not for practical or even ideological gain, that when they were non-systemic, the unusual cruelty shown by Nazis is yet more horrifying. Yet perhaps these last instances represent the success of the policy itself. If cruelty was instituted turned the guards into monsters, and it succeeded, the cruelty would continue after it was rendered useless. Not only the victims were less than human. Theoretically (although not legally) speaking, this point is significant, because it allows humanistic philosophies--the sort that Fackenheim wants to say are no longer valid--to get through Auschwitz unscathed, just as Spinoza's might. We can provide an account for the evil and cruelty of the Nazis as either a deliberate, hyperrational policy, or the irrational results thereof. Gcd may well have gone to the gas chambers with the victims, but ideas about Gcd and morality did not.
In this vein, the evil of the Nazis begs the question of the theological implications of the Holocaust. If we can explain the Nazis' conduct, we are still left with Gcd's. The question returns to uniqueness because, while the Jewish tradition suggests some explanations of the suffering of the innocent (punishment for sins lasting until the 3rd generation, masterplans of history, etc.), its dominant response seems to be that we cannot get answers. Perhaps we should not even expect them. Unless the holocaust is so radically new that it is a second Sinai, as Fackenheim holds, it--like any other event, wonderful or terrible--cannot convey information about Gcd. The evil of the holocaust qua evil does not problematize theology any more than any other evil does--actually, the suffering of a child with AIDS is even more difficult than the whole of the Holocaust, because there is no human agent to blame. The evil must be unique in history for it possibly, only possibly, to constitute a new revelation of Gcd a la Rosenzweig. Otherwise, following Buber, eclipses of Gcd happen without apparent cause, and it is the conduct of humans that is explicable and accountable. Certainly, the intensity of the holocaust confirms the fact that our response to evil must take forms other than a Cartesian questioning of a logical deity. Perhaps the best argument against doing so is the sour taste many of the resultant ideas leave in our mouths: punishment by Gcd until the third generation, for example, is well within the "abilities," "rights," and "possibilities" of an omniscient, omnipotent, ineffable, immanent, transcendent deity. It just does not satisfy the rest of us. The radical (or just intense) evil of the Holocaust cannot tell us anything about Gcd, because nothing can. We cannot try and convict an entity/non-entity about "whom" we can know nothing. We can try and convict human criminals.
This is what Fackenheim, like many others, does. He wishes to show by the unusual-methods argument that the evil of the Nazis is radically unique, regardless of the motivations expressed two paragraphs ago. Again retaining our 'detached' philosophical perspective, however, it seems dubious to claim that the "inhuman" techniques of the Nazis are so different from the inhumanity of torturers elsewhere. Fackenheim confronts this directly: "we cannot disguise the uniqueness of [Hitler's] evil under a comfortable generality, such as persecution-in-general, tyranny-in-general, or even the demonic-in-general." (JRH 23) Yet the reasons this is so are unstated. I believe they are meta-issues not part of the philosophical analysis of what took place in the Holocaust. Yes, the holocaust revealed something horrible about human nature, but it was not something never before revealed. Yes, the scale of the holocaust made the revelation horrifying, and for that reason may represent a rupture in history, but the evil itself is not unique to the holocaust, the rupture equivalent only to the difference between a quiet alarm clock and a blaring siren: it is a difference in magnitude, not a difference in kind.
Radical evil, and the second (anti-)revelation of the holocaust, themselves have some troubling consequences. The first of these is that it would be irrelevant, because a unique event cannot happen twice. I cannot use the holocaust as an argument against fascism such as Vladimir Zhirinovsky's, because the holocaust is unique, totally, radically different. Fackenheim writes that Jews "can and must speak to those upon whom it [a catastrophe like the holocaust] or something resembling it, has come--starving African children, Gulag slave laborers..." (TMW 306) Beyond the question of resembling something unique, there are those of whether revelations are preventable, and if so, are they really revelations. Still more disturbing is that the resistance of the victims of the holocaust cannot provide any inspiration for us, because they were resisting something altogether different from what we could resist or understand. So Fackenheim argues that the Holocaust has introduced a new evil into the world, that can now surface again. But if this evil is a wholly new philosophical category, then it is possible that another wholly new category of evil will spontaneously appear tomorrow. This renders not just philosophy and theology but science and survival incoherent. (This issue was debated at length in the medieval period, between fundamentalist theologians who held that true knowledge can only be revealed by Gcd and philosophers who held that reason can also lead to knowledge.) If the holocaust is a new revelation, then under what supposition can I pretend to know anything about the world? Knowledge of the world becomes, under such a prognosis, totally dependent upon whims of Gcd and new revelations, and since reason is totally useless, Fackenheim's own project, along with science, is rendered completely unintelligible. While I will use pragmatist arguments to show the undesirability of such an argument, one does not need to move outside Fackenheim's framework to show that the case for a new anti-revelation undermines itself.
So, then, the unusual methods of the Nazis in the holocaust can be explained by a rational-historical and psychological account, and the 'radical evil' they represent is not unprecedented. If it were so, Fackenheim would have to distinguish in kind between Nazi evil and the evil of past torturers, which I do not believe is possible, and would also have to go to great lengths to show why more than one revelation does not destroy the very framework in which Fackenheim is operating. As Judaism has had to deal with evil generally well before the holocaust forced the question anew, the holocaust itself does not represent a new philosophical concept for Jewish philosophers or theologians. As for non-Jews, we must set theology aside as outside the scope of this paper, and instead allow any philosophical system that addresses cruelty and suffering to have addressed the challenge of the holocaust.
Continuing, then, to the fourth of Fackenheim's five anti-ways: the Nazis' ideal of making the world judenrein. Of course pogroms and massacres have occurred before, runs the argument, but never before has a nation attempted to wipe out all Jews on the planet. Here is where Fackenheim distinguishes the holocaust from the Native American and Armenian genocides, because there were no "Jewish reservations" and nothing prevented the Nazis from carrying out their genocide. (Morgan 135) Being born became a capital offense, and the universalism of the Nazis' pursuit of punishing it forms Fackenheim's central argument for uniqueness. "As a case of the class: 'intended, planned, and largely successful extermination,' it is without precedent and, thus far at least, without sequel. It is unique." (Ibid.) Fackenheim states that the means the Nazis used--the technology, the "army of murderers and.. accomplices", etc.--are also unique. (Morgan 136) Although he then moves on, it might be useful to stop and ask in what way it was unique. Allan Bullock states that not the ideas but the "way in which [Hitler] translated fantasy into reality," i.e. the means and the zeal. (cited in Morgan 138) Here, Fackenheim appears to agree--the "Reasonless" argument speaks to ideas and motives anyway. He states that the Nazis' efficiency was less "Teutonic efficiency" than "Weltanschauung," but the "banality" of the "army of accomplices," who by virtue of their very 'Teutonic' obsession with the mundane ignore the inhumanity of their actions, seems to contradict the stance. (Morgan 135) Perhaps the leadership was truly motivated by ideals, but can this be said of every Nazi, who unflinchingly obeys authority and 'does his job,' every paper-pusher who contributes to the evil? Agreed, the ideas-into-reality transition was remarkable and terrifying, but does not seem any more unique than post-war German efficiency.
If we disagree with Bullock, however, we still have the uniqueness of the judenrein objective itself, which is what Fackenheim himself explicitly states is unique. Of course, judenrein itself is a not new idea--many nations have sought to become Jew-free, from England and Spain to Egypt and Japan. What is new is the fact that the Nazis' realm was to be the entire world. Essentially, the Nazi program is reduced to an equation: Nazis = judenrein + urvolk of ruling the entire world. The revisionist 'push the Jews to the east' idea, regardless of its historical inaccuracy, contradicts with the aims of the Nazis themselves. All Jews had to be killed because the Nazis were to rule the entire world. Since neither term in the equation is itself unique, the only way for the holocaust to be unique because of this argument is for Fackenheim to argue that the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.
Let us say that he does so, as indeed one might on packaging all five large arguments together. Is uniqueness then an emergent property? If so, can emergent properties qualify something as a revelation? The issue this dilemma raises is relevant to the larger question, namely that even if all five ways are disproven (and I haven't yet come to the fifth), the confluence of the five render the holocaust unique. This may be so, but if it is so, we are returned to a dilemma similar to the contingent-world problem encountered earlier. Every event is unique, no matter how trivial. My writing this sentence may not be as traumatic as the holocaust, but it too is unique if uniqueness is a property defined by the confluence of all possible factors; must Hegelian philosophy treat the special case of this moment? The problem of classification dates back to Aristotle, and is well outside the bounds of this investigation, but it seems clear that emergent uniqueness is not what Fackenheim means when he says the holocaust is unique. If it is, that is very well, but then surely philosophy does not need to respond to every unique event. Who is to choose? Are there criteria for which unique events are revelations and which are not?
Essentially, once we grant that uniqueness is a holistic, emergent property, we remove all significance from calling the holocaust unique. The question is not whether the holocaust is extreme and terrible; the question is whether it is in a wholly different category from all other things and events. If uniqueness is an emergent property, then the holocaust is unique--but so is everything else. If uniqueness is not an emergent property, then neither the world-Judenrein objective nor the confluence of the five anti-ways makes the holocaust unique.
On then to the last, and most compelling, of Fackenheim's five arguments for the uniqueness of the holocaust: that motive-arguments are all false because, actually, the murder of Jews was more important than the survival of Germany at all. While it is clear that the effort put into the holocaust seems to be a vast strategic error, Fackenheim makes the best case for this argument in noticing the fact that trains were diverted from the Russian front at the end of the war in order to take Jews to death camps. What makes Hitler more than a new Haman is that Hitler had no purpose other than killing Jews. He was not doing it, argues Fackenheim, because his pride was wounded, or because he knew it would galvanize the German people behind the Nazis; rather, he wanted to galvanize the German people behind the Nazis in order to kill more Jews. Two linked questions arise: to what extent was the use of the Jews Hitler's own project, and to what extent did the Nazis actually favor killing Jews instead of winning the war? First, it has been convincingly argued by Fackenheim and others that it is both historically inaccurate and philosophically dishonest to pin the holocaust on one diseased mind. Many Nazis were in full possession of their faculties, and this is the point. One wonders, however, about the specific orders to rerout trains from the front. It seems plausible to suggest that, the war obviously lost, a desperate Hitler, fifteen years into believing his own propaganda, focused on the one victory that might be attainable: killing the Jews. That others did not successfully resist the train-rerouting orders (and I am unfamiliar with the historical facts regarding these orders and their context within the Nazi bureaucracy) is only as bizarre as the fact that they did not successfully kill Hitler, who was, as most Nazi elites knew, leading them to their doom even without the extra trains. One could suggest psychological reasons, worries over self-preservation, shared desperation among the Nazi elite, and a slew of accounts which would be internally consistent and quite plausible. In short, I think it is possible to see the rerouting of the trains specifically as either a last-ditch act of desperation or as a deranged, fanatical devotion to goals which no longer make sense, an order carried out by a bureaucracy so well-structured that by this late date no deviance was possible.
This last point leaves the door open, following Adorno, to say that the holocaust only really began when this change occured, i.e., when the goals of the holocaust (power) were no longer best served by the holocaust, and yet the holocaust continued at the expense of desperately needed resources and manpower. Leaving aside my concerns about what this does with the five or so million victims who died in the not-real holocaust, calling this late period the only "real" holocaust would seem to throw out all of the other arguments and work within a whole new set of rules. If we follow them, we construct a new entity--a "late holocaust" that is neither unique nor entirely coherent. The only leg the uniqueness of the Late Holocaust has to stand on is the supremacy of genocide to any other goal, including self-preservation. As before, we need only refer to history for similar examples, and any idealist who dies to kill another, from Samson to the kamikaze, is liable to the charge. Of course, the Nazis regarded genocide as an ideal, and other, more noble ideals are frequently defended at the cost of entire cultures: Native Americans, Carthage, Masada. Since the Late Holocaust is defined by its parameters as only that time when Nazi interests were no longer served by the holocaust, the reasons for the final solution itself are no longer part of the picture; they are part of the pre-existent context. We can no longer use any of the previous arguments, and can no longer even discuss the particularities of the holocaust, because these characteristics are not defining characteristics of the "real" Late Holocaust. So, by declaring the holocaust to be only those events which took place after 1944 or so, Adorno and others have emptied the new holocaust of almost all of its substance. We are left with a few desperate fanatics controlling a well-constructed, terror-driven bureaucracy which continued functioning after its relevance was extinguished. This is not unique to the holocaust, and even if it were, could not be the source for the revision of philosophy and new moral imperatives Fackenheim wishes to suggest. Quite the contrary, because it empties the holocaust of its specificity, the Late Holocaust idea leads one to the idea that when defeat is assured, ideals should be abandoned.
This conclusion is the exact opposite of Fackenheim's ethic of resistance, and so any attempt to say that the murder of Jews was more important than the survival of Germany must make its case from the ten years preceding 1944, when the survival of Germany was still at issue. I do not believe such an argument can be made, and have tried to sketch the outlines of the opposite. Further, if an argument based on historical facts could be made that the Nazis pursued the goal of killing Jews at the expense of Germany's survival, one would face the Scylla and Charybdis of selective history and the slippery slope of uniqueness-as-emergent-property. On the one hand, one would have to distinguish the fanatic murder of Jews from the fanatic militarism of Germany in general. Recall that the only war Hitler declared was that against America, that the opening of the second front was strategically unnnecessary, and that both moves were at least as suicidal as diverting manpower to concentration camps. And yet on the other hand, the fanatical pursuit of an ideal is not unique in and of itself--only the combination of the quality of pursuit and the ideal being the murder of an entire people is (perhaps) unique. Once again, uniqueness appears only as a description of a confluence of factors, and the slippery slope is again before us.
The only anomaly I see in the picture is the bombing of the camps by the Germans to cover their tracks. While a strong argument can be made in the name of self-preservation, I have indicated that I do not believe the Nazi leadership was that interested in it. The bombing also runs counter to the kill-Jews-at-any-price ideal; the consistent policy would have been to run the camps until the last possible moment, and bomb them when they were full. Avoiding the cop-out of attributing the bombing to someone other than the Nazi elite, I am forced to concede that this is a puzzling inconsistency; did the Nazis suddenly feel shame? Why did they try to hide what was done--to facilitate future attempts at genocide? Of course, Nazi decision-making at this stage of the war was anything but rational, and, more important to our study, their act has no relevance to the uniqueness, or lack thereof, of the holocaust. It is as if, at the moment the Nazis were about to reveal their highest ideal to the world, they became suddenly ashamed. Whatever its relevance to this discussion, that there may have been a spark of human shame left in the Nazis in 1945 makes the previous twelve years all the more terrifying.
As I have tried to show, however, the terror of the holocaust does not make it philosophically unique. All of Fackenheim's five ways speak to the horror of the holocaust, yet none, in my analysis, can truly be said to be unique. And if uniqueness is only a property of the five acting together, we can draw moral imperatives from the holocaust only insofar as we can do so from any traumatic event (the founding of the State of Israel being a subject for separate discussion entirely). Moreover, the arguments for the uniqueness of the holocaust do not make clear why only Jews should be subject to the 614th commandment; indeed, one might argue that the concern of bearing Turkish children in Germany today is more directly threatened by what the holocaust represents, and so perhaps Turks need the 614th commandment more than Jews. In any case, whatever unique resonance the holocaust has for us today, it does not seem to be in the realm of the philosophical. A wide variety of philosophical systems can comprehend and thus trivialize the holocaust, and of course none can in so doing address the unique status that the holocaust holds in modern Jewish existence.
What does this contradiction mean? The holocaust is an event which is certainly unprecedented, yet a logical analysis of its characteristics does not reveal anything itself unique. What I believe this points towards, and what I wish to spend the remainder of this essay investigating, is the incompetence of logical philosophy generally to address those concerns in human life which the holocaust raised so dramatically. We can explain everything, including reasons and motives, and then we find we have explained nothing. Ideas of pre-holocaust Jewish and non-Jewish philosophies, I believe, remain intact on a logical level throughout the holocaust. Yet they seem impossible to believe. If these two statements are true, then what the holocaust appears to have proven is the idea that the scope of rational philosophy's ability to provide accounts of the world is very limited.
I believe there is precedent for the delineation of such limits in philosophy. Although Ludwig Wittgenstein is not generally referred to as a Jewish philosopher, I think the label is at least as appropriate as it is for fellow-heretic Baruch Spinoza, given the former's consistent interest in the nature of religious belief and the relation of language to reality. Can a Wittgensteinian understanding of the bounds of philosophical inquiry inform a post-holocaust ethic? Clearly, Wittgenstein has a great deal to say about the unspeakable, and, while the treatment of his ideas here is of necessity quite basic, it might be fair to suggest first that Wittgenstein recognizes that the verbiage of moral and theological truth-propositions is at best irrelevant and at worst does injustice to the actual meaning of that which they pretend to describe. Post-holocaust theodicy, for example, makes use of human categories of judgment and justice in describing something outside the frame of reference of such linguistic terms. Moreover, the reductionist approach to the holocaust (and any other large-scale phenomenon) misses its significance by trying to break it into analytical pieces. It is understandable that murder camps would be set up for people deemed inhuman for political or psychological reasons, but understanding fails in the face of actual testimony from a victim or even from a text. Again, one may continue to be a Spinozan or a Hegelian or a Marxist (perhaps not a Heideggerian) after the holocaust; the ideas are unscathed. But they have been inadequate all along, and cannot be complete on the metalevel of explanation.
A Wittgensteinian analysis of the context of philosophical and metaphysical truth-statements seems also to echo Fackenheim's sentiment as to their unsuitability. One can cogently argue that Auschwitz is simply outside the frame of reference of normal ethical language-games, and their forms cannot have meaning there. This idea comes close, I believe, to Fackenheim's ethic of resistance. How can we say that Pelagia Lewinska was "under orders to live?" Because the source and structure of such orders is wholly different in Auschwitz from that in New York or Tel Aviv. Did Filip Muller's actions in the gas chambers follow Kant's categorical imperative? Both Wittgenstein and Fackenheim suggest that the rules do not apply. I do not mean to suggest that it follows that Kant cannot be a viable moral source today, because Kant's system has answers that are consistent and defensible for people today and for Filip Muller then; rather, the context of a Kantian ethical system must be appreciated. The casualty is not Kantian ethics, but Kantian universalism.
Thirdly, Wittgenstein suggests in the Tractatus that philosophers cannot speak of the meaning of life but only of the way to lead one's life (cf. most obviously Halacha and the Talmudic admonishment against asking "what is above and what is below, what came before and what will come after."). While such a stance might be attacked as relativist, both the autonomy of the human being predicated on Wittgensteinian uncertainty and Wittgenstein's own ethics undermine such a claim. With respect to religion, Wittgenstein likewise seems to advocate a transcendence of the factual. "To believe in G-d," he writes (dash mine),"is the see that the facts of the world are not the end of the matter." (Notebooks 1914-16, p.74) Within the context of religious life in the most general sense, it seems clear that appeals to 'the facts' cannot address the pressing concerns an event like the holocaust must invite. Wittgenstein's famous remark that he could conceive of a religion consisting entirely of jokes, suggests that it is not truth values but meaning-values that are the 'essence' of religion.
Lastly, in his Remarks on Frazer's 'The Golden Bough', Wittgenstein rejects scientistic reductionism as a means of analyzing religious claims. In critiquing Frazer's "narrowness of spiritual life," Wittgenstein appears to suggest that the value of the spiritual is in addressing those deep-rooted non-factual issues of concern in the believer's weltanschauung, precisely the sorts of issues raised by the holocaust. Critics label such views emotivist, as do critics of Fackenheim's own reasons for accepting or rejecting propositions--the usage of terms such as "disgusting" and "profound" bespeak a high degree of involvement with the subject. Yet what other sorts of 'involvement' should one have with events of searing meaning? Quaint Victorian ideas about the detached observer and objective analysis have long been discredited; the holocaust is perhaps the nail in the coffin (if not the coffin itself). The question is not whether one has subjective concerns or not; the question is what those concerns are.
A Wittgensteinian approach, besides being very similar to the anti-metaphysical trend in Talmudic and non-rationalistic (i.e. non-Maimonidean) medieval and modern Jewish thought, can help us recast the challenge of the holocaust from a philosophical one to what I will generally call a religious one. The question of suffering is a theological question that might be answerable with theodicy, descriptions of the Divine, or even quasi-Stoic desire-negation, but such explanations are usually not what is required. To the holocaust victim or the parent of a child smitten with terminal illness, philosophical conjectures do not address the emotional and/or spiritual void. When these explanations do work, one could argue that they do so because they incorporate the suffering into a larger worldview that answers such needs. From the Lurianic-Kabbalistic theory of exile and tikkun to Harold Kushner's contemporary American account of innocent suffering, successful explanations operate within a sphere that cannot be enclosed, delineated, or partitioned. As Richard Rorty has suggested, questions of belief are not epistemological; they are stylistic. We are called upon in offering explanation not to give accounts of the facts but rather, as Wittgenstein wrote in the Philosophical Investigations, to organize the facts in a coherent manner.
Such an approach is quite similar in practice, if not in underlying assumptions, to Fackenheim's idea of resistance as ontological category. In Part Four, chapter nine, part B of To Mend the World, Fackenheim refuses the sorts of historical explanations I offered earlier for the same reason that I feel that their success undermines them: they cannot address the real problem of the Holocaust. What Fackenheim thus proposes is that "philosophy go to school with life" and the holocaust be adopted as a base-phenomenon against which philosophies can be measured. Fackenheim states that since no philosophy could avoid the holocaust, all philosophies must be tested by it, and resistance to it is an a priori moral imperative, "ontologically ultimate." (TMW 248) Within the framework sketched above, there is both possibility and, Fackenheim would argue, necessity for such an imperative and it has been precisely my point that 'philosophy going to school' is a need made obvious by the holocaust, if not created by it. If imperatives based on the ontological facts of the holocaust fill a philosophical-ethical role, there is still the more difficult ex-philosophical project of explanation.
Successful explanations of the holocaust do not explain anything. Unsuccessful ones explain everything. Claude Lanzmann's masterpiece, "Shoah," does not offer answers for the "big questions," because these are questions whose answers defeat themselves. Why did the Nazis do it? It is a myth that reasonable responses to this question are not to be found. I have hinted at some of them: consolidation of power in the hands of a few leaders, historic German anti-semitism, the particularities of the German condition before World War II. All of these are plausible, and likely, from a historical point of view, and I believe that to deny that we have coherent responses to the question of the Nazis' reasons is self-deception. Rather, the dilemma is that these responses do nothing to reconcile the yawning 'Why' of the holocaust with our own concerns, be they intellectual, emotional, or spiritual, ethical, historical, or theological. None of the responses, in short, answer the 'larger question' of Why.
Lanzmann, without even asking it, addresses the question in his silence. Without the gruesome images that normally accompany holocaust documentaries, Lanzmann describes the indescribable. What we expect from an explanation of a radically traumatic event like the holocaust is an incorporation of the event into coherence. The way to do this is not to try to make it coherent, because this cannot be done with the holocaust; attempts to describe it in philosophical categories at once succeed and miss the point. Instead, Lanzmann and others present the incoherence of the holocaust's evil, not as a source for ethical norms or a new philosophical system, but as a story.
It has been alleged that Martin Buber, the great proponent of
the story as explanation, could never deal with the evil of the
holocaust. My response is that he is always dealing with it, that
just as his compilations of Hasidic Tales describe the
world-picture of the Hasidim better than expositions of their
philosophy, so too do
Abbreviations used in notes and Works Cited
TMW = Fackenheim, To Mend the World (New York: Schocken, 1982 ed.)
JRH = Fackenheim, The Jewish Return to History (New York: Schocken, 1978)
Morgan = Michael Morgan, editor, The Jewish Thought of Emil Fackenheim (Detroit: Wayne State University, 1987)
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, "Remarks on Frazer's Golden Bough (A.C. Miles trans., Atlantic Highlands: Humanities, 1979)
Wittgenstein, Ludwig, Notebooks 1914-1916 (G.E.M. Anscombe, trans. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1979, 2nd ed.)
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