Philosophical Witnessing: The Holocaust as Presence (review)

This important book, which consists of twelve essays—five are revised versions of previously published pieces—has two main aims: to explore neglected aspects of the "presence" of the Holocaust (by which Lang means its "continuing place . . . in the contemporary world" [ p. xi]), and to inquire into, and show by way of example, what might be distinctive about a specifically philosophical manner of "witnessing" this presence.

Lang's book is organized into three parts. The first and most tightly focused of these, "The Holocaust at Philosophy's Address," includes chapters on philosophical witnessing, the implications of the Holocaust for understanding the nature of truth, philosophical and theological responses to the problem of evil in the context of Jewish history and meta-history, and a discussion of Karl Jaspers' 1946 exploration of German guilt, Die Schuldfrage. The second part, "Vs. the Unspeakable, the Unshowable, and the Unthinkable," begins with an essay that identifies the aesthetic, moral, and philosophical uses of silence and its analogues (including visual absence and intellectual aporia) in responding to the Holocaust. This section is followed by a reflection on the representation and misrepresentation of the Holocaust, primarily in literature and film. These essays sustain the theme of philosophical witnessing introduced in the book's first part; in subsequent chapters, however, this theme fades from view. The next two essays offer various observations under the rubric of "applied ethics," as well as a discussion of Theodore Kaufman's Germany Must Perish! (self-published in 1941), which Nazi propagandists used as evidence that there was a Jewish conspiracy to destroy Germany. But it is not clear how either of these chapters sheds light on the larger issue of what can (or should) be said, shown, or thought about the Holocaust. The third and final part of Philosophical Witnessing, "The Presence as Future," reflects on some of the ways the Holocaust has shaped—and may continue to shape—both institutions and individuals, and includes chapters on group rights, metaphysical racism, "hyphenated Jews," and the lessons of "reconciliation" in post-Apartheid South Africa.

The first thing to be said about philosophical witnessing in relation to the Holocaust is that there has been precious little of it. Lang notes that few of the many, mostly German or Austrian philosophers who managed either to survive the Holocaust or to leave Europe prior to the Nazi deluge—a group that includes Theodor Adorno, Hannah Arendt, Martin Buber, Marvin Faber, Emil Fackenheim, Herbert Feigl, Aron Gurwitsch, Carl Hempel, Hans Jonas, Paul Oskar Kristeller, Emmanuel Levinas, Herbert Marcuse, and Leo Strauss—made the Holocaust an explicit theme in their work. (Arendt, Adorno, and Fackenheim are exceptions.) And although one might suppose that the Holocaust would "hold the attention of anyone thinking seriously about the human condition" ( p. 8), it is rarely mentioned in contemporary philosophical discussions of ethics and politics. What accounts for these striking omissions?

Lang observes that the anti-historicist tendency of contemporary philosophy, together with philosophy's preference for drawing universal conclusions, militate against serious engagement with a concrete historical moment. I believe he draws nearer to the mark when he comments that "the extraordinary improbability . . . of the Holocaust" is "partly responsible for the philosophical silence that followed it" ( p. 14). Viewed philosophically, the Holocaust is "improbable" because it is inconsistent with the guiding presupposition of normative ethics and politics—namely, that human social existence is characterized by intelligible and relatively stable moral structures. Precisely this presupposition is called into question by the behavior of the perpetrators, the bystanders, and—in their most degraded condition—the victims of the Holocaust, in which one may observe very few exceptions to the twin principles articulated by certain Polish peasants in Claude Lanzmann's film Shoah: one can get used to anything, and if you cut your finger, it doesn't hurt me. One suspects that at least some academic philosophers choose to ignore the Holocaust so as to avoid having to confront the implications of this scandalous...