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3 WHAT PHILOSOPHY CAN AND CANNOT SAY ABOUT EVIL Kenneth Seeskin With few exceptions, academic philosophers have had little to say about the Holocaust. There was a time when I considered this outrageous. How could a discipline that examines human values and aspirations ignore one of the most significant, if not the most significant, events of the century? We are rightly disdainful of the scientists and professors in Germany who continued their studies amid some of the most fiendish evil ever imagined. How can we criticize them if the present philosophical community sees nothing in the Holocaust worth discussing? Unless we entertain the dubious proposition that philosophy has nothing to do with the historical circumstances in which it is written, we must ask how the events in Germany force a reexamination of philosophical categories. I say there was a time when I considered philosophy's silence outrageous because at present the whole issue seems more complicated than it once did. It is not that I have given up the conviction that philosophy reflects the historical context in which it is written. Nor have I come to doubt that the Holocaust is critical for understanding the history of the twentieth century. But it is one thing to say that an event like the Holocaust demands philosophic reflection and another to identify the philosophic issues it raises. There is an obvious respect in which genocide and mass murder are beyond the scope of philosophic analysis. As the late Arthur Cohen put it: "There is something in the nature of thought-its patient deliberateness and care for logical order-that is alien to the enormity of the death camps."l If, as Cohen and others have argued, reason is overwhelmed by evil on this scale, it is unclear what philosophy can contribute to the discussion. It can clarify terms like genocide, murder, or intention. For example, unlike mass murder, genocide is directed to a specific group. It seeks the destruction of every member of the group without regard for individual differences. It may be said, therefore, that the "crime" that genocide attempts to punish is not what a person has done but 91 Copyrighted Material 92 I PART TWO: ASSAULT ON MORALITY what a person is. How large the group must be for the killing to count as genocide, and whether the group must constitute a biological division , are open to question. I believe, however, that when people ask philosophers to think about the Holocaust, what they want is not sharper-edged concepts. Rather than wishing us to claim that we have a firmer grasp of the categories at our disposal, they want to claim that these categories have somehow broken down. Thus Cohen speaks of a caesura, Emil Fackenheim of a rupture. In both cases, there is an underlying conviction that the philosophic paradigms of the Enlightenment are no longer valid. We cannot talk about reason, history, evil, or the liberal state in the way our forebears did. According to Fackenheim, the Holocaust poses radical "countertestimony" to traditional philosophy .2 He concludes that "where the Holocaust is, no thought can be, and where there is thought it is in flight from the event."J Behind this talk of conceptual breakdown is the assumption that the Holocaust constitutes a unique form of evil and is without precedent in human history. For many writers, uniqueness is the central issue. Affirm it and you force people to take the Holocaust seriously. Deny it and you relegate the Holocaust to the back burners of the modern intellectual's agenda. Unfortunately there are no available criteria for deciding what makes a complex event unique. As Alan Rosenberg has argued, the whole question of uniqueness is a peculiar one.4 Decisive events like the Peloponnesian War, the Renaissance, or the Protestant Reformation are unique in the sense that they involved specific people acting in unrepeatable circumstances. No one doubts that they changed the course of history. But any historian will admit that there were precedents and contributing factors. Although they may be unrepeatable in a strict sense, events like these are not anomalous. So if a person were to press us on the question of their uniqueness, the obvious response would be that the question has to be reformulated. To a religious believer, Sinai and Calvary were unique because they involved special cases of divine intervention. In secular events, like the Peloponnesian War, however, the participants are subject to general laws or at least some type of observable...

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