Language:
English
Year of publication:
1985
Titel der Quelle:
Journal of Philosophy
Angaben zur Quelle:
82,10 (1985) 505-514
Keywords:
Holocaust (Jewish theology)
;
Holocaust, Jewish (1939-1945) Historiography
Abstract:
States that the doctrine of the banality of evil, which argues that the extreme evil of the Holocaust lies in the deeds and not in the doers, who only yielded to the deeds because they were enmeshed in a totalitarian system, is untenable. Rather, the doers created the system and the system created the doers - thought moves in a circle. In the case of the Holocaust, we can only comprehend its incomprehensibility. Discusses the roles of Nazi leaders in perpetrating the horror (Hitler, Eichmann, Göring, Höss). Concludes that the evil of the Holocaust world is philosophically intelligible after Auschwitz only in the exact sense in which it was understood in Auschwitz by the resisting victims - the Nazis' desire to destroy the victims' human dignity and fill them with horror and contempt towards themselves and others. That recognition of the motivating principle was the indispensable condition for resisting it.
Description / Table of Contents:
Lang, Berel. Uniqueness and explanation. [A comment on Fackenheim's article.] 514-515.
Note:
Appeared also in his "Jewish Philosophers and Jewish Philosophy" (1996) 129-136, and in "A Holocaust Reader" (2001) 250-258.
URL:
Locate this publication in Israeli libraries
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