Echoes from the Holocaust: Philosophical Reflections on a Dark Time

Front Cover
Temple University Press, 2009 - 472 pages
The murder of six million Jewish men, women, and children during World War II was an act of such barbarity as to constitute one of the central events of our time; yet a list of the major concerns of professional philosophers since 1945 would exclude the Holocaust. This collection of twenty-three essays, most of which were written expressly for this volume, is the first book to focus comprehensively on the profound issues and philosophical significance of the Holocaust. The essays, written for general as well as professional readers, convey an extraordinary range of factual information and philosophical reflection in seeking to identify the haunting meanings of the Holocaust. Among the questions addressed are: How should philosophy approach the Holocaust? What part did the philosophical climate play in allowing Hitlerism its temporary triumph? What is the philosophical climate today and what are its probable cultural effects? Can philosophy help our culture to become a bulwark against future agents of evil? The multiple dimensions of the Holocaust-historical, sociological, psychological, religious, moral, and literary-are collected here for concentrated philosophical interpretations.

From inside the book

Selected pages

Contents

THE HOLOCAUST AS HISTORY
3
Assault on Morality
51
HOLOCAUST Moral Indifference as the Form of Modern Evil
53
WHAT PHILOSOPHY CAN AND CANNOT SAY ABOUT EVIL
91
LIBERALISM AND THE HOLOCAUST An Essay on Trust and the BlackJewish Relationship
105
THE DILEMMA OF CHOICE IN THE DEATHCAMPS
118
ON THE IDEA OF MORAL PATHOLOGY
128
THE RIGHT WAY TO ACT Indicting the Victims
149
THE CONCEPT OF GOD AFTER AUSCHWITZ A Jewish Voice
292
THE PSYCHOLOGY OF MAN AFTER AUSCHWITZ
306
CONCENTRATION CAMPS AND THE END OF THE LIFEWORLD
327
LANGUAGE AND GENOCIDE
341
Challenges to the Understanding
363
SOCIAL SCIENCE TECHNIQUES AND THE STUDY OF CONCENTRATION CAMPS
365
THE CRISIS IN KNOWING AND UNDERSTANDING THE HOLOCAUST
379
THE POLITICS OF SYMBOLIC EVASION Germany and the Aftermath of the Holocaust
396

ON LOSING TRUST IN THE WORLD
163
ETHICS EVIL AND THE FINAL SOLUTION
181
Echoes from the Death Camps
199
THE HOLOCAUST AS A TEST OF PHILOSOPHY
201
THE HOLOCAUST AND HUMAN PROGRESS
223
THE HOLOCAUST MORAL THEORY AND IMMORAL ACTS
245
TECHNOLOGY AND GENOCIDE Technology as a Form of Life
262
THE ABUSE OF HOLOCAUST STUDIES Mercy Killing and the Slippery Slope
412
THE INCOMPREHENSIBILITY OF THE HOLOCAUST Tightening up Some Loose Usage
421
STUDYING THE HOLOCAUSTS IMPACT TODAY Some Dilemmas of Language and Method
432
THE CONTRIBUTORS
443
INDEX
447
Copyright

Other editions - View all

Common terms and phrases

Popular passages

Page 95 - ... all sorts of things you can't imagine. People talk sometimes of bestial cruelty, but that's a great injustice and insult to the beasts; a beast can never be so cruel as a man, so artistically cruel. The tiger only tears and gnaws, that's all he can do. He would never think of nailing people by the ears, even if he were able to do it.
Page 335 - They crowd my memory with their faceless presences, and if I could enclose all the evil of our time in one image, I would choose this image which is familiar to me: an emaciated man, with head dropped and shoulders curved, on whose face and in whose eyes not a trace of a thought is to be seen.
Page 273 - All the men must be fed, sheltered and treated in such a way as to exploit them to the highest possible extent at the lowest conceivable degree of expenditure...
Page 225 - The development of Modern Industry, therefore, cuts from under its feet the very foundation on which the bourgeoisie produces and appropriates products. What the bourgeoisie, therefore, produces, above all, is its own gravediggers. Its fall and the victory of the proletariat are equally inevitable.
Page 248 - And the Lord God commanded the man, saying, Of every tree of the garden thou mayest freely eat: But of the tree of knowledge of good and evil, thou shall not eat of it: for in the day that thou eatest thereof thou shall surely die.
Page 120 - ... abnormal response and another, both imposed by a situation that was in no way of the victim's own choosing.
Page 215 - After witnessing hundreds of ordinary people submit to the authority in our own experiments, I must conclude that Arendt's conception of the banality of evil comes closer to the truth than one might dare imagine.
Page 328 - The world is pregiven to us, the waking, always somehow practically interested subjects, not occasionally but always and necessarily as the universal field of all actual and possible praxis, as horizon. To live is always to live-in-certainty-of-the-world.
Page 95 - ... a beast can never be so cruel as a man, so artistically cruel. The tiger only tears and gnaws, that's all he can do. He would never think of nailing people by the ears, even if he were able to do it. These Turks took a pleasure in torturing children, too ; cutting the unborn child from the mother's womb, and tossing babies up in the air and catching them on the points of their bayonets before their mother's eyes. Doing it before the mother's eyes was what gave zest to the amusement.

About the author (2009)

Alan Rosenberg is a Lecturer in the Philosophy Department at Queens College of the City University of New York.

Bibliographic information