Philosophical Witnessing: The Holocaust as Presence

2. Truth at Risk and the Holocaust’s Response

« 2 » Truth at Risk and the Holocaust’s Response The title of “humanist” emerged as a recognizable if loosely defined norm in the “humanistic” Renaissance.1 Vague as its boundaries were, the emphasis of that norm on human nature and history and thus away from God’s nature and rule�both tendencies furthered by an ambitious retrieval of the classical past�distinguished its advocates from contemporaries still 18 the holocaust at philosophy’s address fixed in place by the theological anchor of scholastic learning. As with all paradigm shifts, to be sure, the drama of this revolution gradually lost its edge, but its focus on the human as a match for nature (literally and figuratively ) persisted, overcoming sporadic dissent and eventually being absorbed and advanced by the Enlightenment in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries. Near the end of the latter period, however, a countermovement stirred from small beginnings that eventually would challenge the intellectual and moral optimism of this stride into modernity, one with sufficient staying power to sustain itself into our own present. This reaction was impelled by a number of “philosophers of suspicion” who, more or less independently and often at odds with each other on other matters, launched an attack in various registers against the philosophical foundations of the humanist tradition (indeed, against the idea of foundations as such), pushing forward in virtually all areas of thought, within but also outside the humanities.2 In biology, economics, theology, geology, linguistics , psychology, and of course philosophy, an incipient skepticism gained momentum against the essentialist grounds on which the Renaissance and the Enlightenment following it had depended, protesting (among other things) that the very concept of a human nature was misbegotten�and that even if one sidestepped this issue, the claims that had been asserted of what human nature was were tendentious and empty, conclusive evidence (if more were needed) of the very concept’s problematic status. The “humane sciences” that over time built on this intervention focused increasingly on the way in which the world and its human inhabitants could be represented or known rather than any basis they might have in the metaphysical natures or essences emphasized previously. This shift of attention�in effect, of commitment�would subsequently (and still now, into the present) spread broadly, extending from interpretations of literary texts to those of theories in quantum physics, from the anthropological study of cultures to justifications for human rights in political theory. The effect of the shift heralded a radical conceptual reformation: replacing substances or essences by emphasizing method and perspective; foregoing the search for the real in favor of the means by which knowledge might (or might not) emerge; subordinating historical or social or linguistic “facts” to systems-analysis of the signs or symbols used to represent them. So far as philosophy was concerned, this revision was still more fundamental, since the revision positioned itself against the metaphysical tradition that Truth at Risk and the Holocaust’s Response 19 had been a traditional center, shifting that center to epistemology, with the assurance that the latter would not only survive but thrive with the displacement. To be sure, achievements in the “hard” sciences and technology realized during the same span of time seemed from their practical results alone to contravert these currents of skepticism and antifoundationalism, but as “science” they also could be (and were) viewed as extraterritorial in contrast to what was humanly significant. In the event, they hardly deterred the revisionary arguments for suspending or bracketing traditional (or as the philosophers of suspicion would have it, ideological) claims in philosophical realism of truth or fact. Admittedly, this same reflexive impulse produced findings that were familiar from earlier motifs of the humanities and philosophy. The stipulation , for example, that philosophical (indeed, all) discourse also must consider its own structure as part of its subject does not entail giving up the independence of either speaker or object: knower and known may still retain a certain autonomy. But the rising tide of suspicion came to view even such minimal concessions as unnecessarily generous. At the farthest extreme of this view, then, consciousness or reason would appear not only as “slaves of the passions,” in Hume’s daring pronouncement, but because of the passions’ newly extended reach as expressing an indefinite variety of forces, no potential source of displacement would be excluded. There could be no reason to do so. Into this unstable setting, the mid...