Auschwitz and inexpressibility
August 26th 2006 13:46
There are two Auschwitzes.
There is the historical Auschwitz, the three main camps, the million (at least) people who died there, the sign above the gate of the first camp, "Work will make you free."
Then there is Auschwitz the symbol. And like any symbol, it is inexhaustible. One can't represent the absolute evil that a human can do to another. One can't represent absolute suffering or absolute horror.
The historical Auschwitz can in theory be described. In theory (though not in practice) one could say what physical events transpired. In theory one could even describe the experiences, thoughts, feelings of those present.
But the symbolic Auschwitz resists definition.
Most conscious human life is irreplaceable. The death of every such life is a tragedy. The good speaker can express this, can create in your mind the perspective and the understanding: Show me a corpse, and I shall make you weep for it.
And even then, will you not turn to the grieving family and say, I cannot fully know, I will never know, what you're feeling.
The lives at Auschwitz -- how is it possible for a human mind to contain that much information, or that much suffering? It is inherently unbelievable, absurd. How can all of that be made real? And how can you fully know?
There is a terrible sense in which no one, not even the Auschwitz survivor, can comprehend the tragedy in its entirety, can grasp the hell of one million people.
And perhaps there is at least one more inexpressibility.
We have legal categories for crime. We fix your sentence. We ask who you killed and how much pain you caused. We can speak of the "nervous shock" of relatives, of "aggravating circumstances", of transgression of law and morals. We can estimate compensation in dollar terms.
But what if, at Auschwitz, there is something else. Something we have no name for. What if the one million deaths are not simply one million murders? What if there is also something new?
Notes
-- Friday 19 September 2008: Arendt says many things about the inexpressibility of atrocities in The origins of totalitarianism, 1951.
There is the historical Auschwitz, the three main camps, the million (at least) people who died there, the sign above the gate of the first camp, "Work will make you free."
Then there is Auschwitz the symbol. And like any symbol, it is inexhaustible. One can't represent the absolute evil that a human can do to another. One can't represent absolute suffering or absolute horror.
The historical Auschwitz can in theory be described. In theory (though not in practice) one could say what physical events transpired. In theory one could even describe the experiences, thoughts, feelings of those present.
But the symbolic Auschwitz resists definition.
***
Most conscious human life is irreplaceable. The death of every such life is a tragedy. The good speaker can express this, can create in your mind the perspective and the understanding: Show me a corpse, and I shall make you weep for it.
And even then, will you not turn to the grieving family and say, I cannot fully know, I will never know, what you're feeling.
The lives at Auschwitz -- how is it possible for a human mind to contain that much information, or that much suffering? It is inherently unbelievable, absurd. How can all of that be made real? And how can you fully know?
There is a terrible sense in which no one, not even the Auschwitz survivor, can comprehend the tragedy in its entirety, can grasp the hell of one million people.
***
And perhaps there is at least one more inexpressibility.
We have legal categories for crime. We fix your sentence. We ask who you killed and how much pain you caused. We can speak of the "nervous shock" of relatives, of "aggravating circumstances", of transgression of law and morals. We can estimate compensation in dollar terms.
But what if, at Auschwitz, there is something else. Something we have no name for. What if the one million deaths are not simply one million murders? What if there is also something new?
***
Notes
-- Friday 19 September 2008: Arendt says many things about the inexpressibility of atrocities in The origins of totalitarianism, 1951.
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Comment by Anonymous
Comment by Adrian
Philosophy Blog
What I want to say, firstly, is that death is only part of what happened at Auschwitz. There was also suffering and injustice. And, depending on one's moral ideas, one might add that there was evil or sin. And I think that these things are inexpressible quite apart from the death. I wonder if you'd agree.
I want to say, secondly, that there is the feeling and the fact. If I feel death to be a horror, the problem of expressing what I feel still remains, regardless of the fact.
But your central problem is unanswered. Is death itself an evil? Or is it, for instance, simply a welcome passageway into a better world?
And this is also a problem for those who don't believe in afterlives. Can an atheist justify what exactly he/she thinks is bad about death? "Death is where I am not" -- it's difficult to say that death is an injury suffered by a person if there's no person around to be injured.
But let me restrict myself to discussing the question from some sort of Christian perspective, because this is where I'm presumptuously assuming you're coming from.
And in this sort of perspective, I would concede the point! In this belief system, death, by itself, is NOT an evil. Even if the suffering is an evil. Or even if the killing is an evil (in the same way that when Cain kills Abel, Abel's blood calls out to heaven).
However, your idea has two parts. You also suggest that the death was an act of divine love, was caused by God. You don't need this second part to make good your claim that death, in itself, is not an evil. But I want to comment on this second part anyway.
It is very hard, I would suggest, for most Christians (Calvinism might be one exception) to say that God commanded the Holocaust.
One of the main problems is free will. We want to say (or I want to say at any rate) that the SS were evil. But if the SS guards were simply tools of God, then they had no choice. In which case, can they be held responsible? Can they be thought evil after all? -- they were just puppets.
And another problem is the "problem of evil". How could God have allowed or commanded the suffering at Auschwitz?
There are many ways that the problem of evil has been addressed over the centuries, but I suspect that most Christians would want to say that God had nothing to do with the SS mutilating people to death. No benevolent God, they might think, could have had a hand in such a thing.