Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction: philosophy as ethical exegesis
- PART I EXCEEDING PHENOMENOLOGY
- PART II GOOD AND EVIL
- 5 Alterity and alteration: development of an opus
- 6 Maternal body/maternal psyche: contra psychoanalytic philosophy
- 7 Humanism and the rights of exegesis
- 8 What good is the Holocaust? On suffering and evil
- 9 Ricoeur and the lure of self-esteem
- 10 In-conclusion
- Index
8 - What good is the Holocaust? On suffering and evil
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 22 September 2009
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- Introduction: philosophy as ethical exegesis
- PART I EXCEEDING PHENOMENOLOGY
- PART II GOOD AND EVIL
- 5 Alterity and alteration: development of an opus
- 6 Maternal body/maternal psyche: contra psychoanalytic philosophy
- 7 Humanism and the rights of exegesis
- 8 What good is the Holocaust? On suffering and evil
- 9 Ricoeur and the lure of self-esteem
- 10 In-conclusion
- Index
Summary
The Nazis are resorting to systematic atrocities on a gigantic scale. In Odessa 25,000 Jews were massacred in cold blood; in Kiev “after the Nazi occupation, 52,000 Jewish men, women and children were systematically put to death amidst scenes of undescribable horror”.
Jewish Standard, 28 November 1941Can I see another's woe,
And not be in sorrow too?
Can I see another's grief,
And not seek for kind relief?
William Blake, “On Another's Sorrow”, Songs of Innocence (1789)INTRODUCTION: GOD AND EVIL?
What about evil? If the genuine self is supposed to be – “ought” to be – for-the-other, how about the countervailing weight of being, being-for-itself, selfishness, refusal of the other, the “as for me”? Even if we cannot have a good conscience, after all the horrors of the twentieth century, are we really expected to continue to take any ethico-religious tradition seriously? After all, did not the Holocaust take place in the most Christian part of the world? And even if, to explain the failure of Christians and Christian Churches, one were to offer explanations based on contingent events, on fear, Nazi power, intimidation, would one not, with the best of good wills, still be trapped by a theo-logic incapable of accounting for evil, and then – built on this incapacity, and worse – also incapable of standing up to evil?
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Ethics, Exegesis and PhilosophyInterpretation after Levinas, pp. 266 - 282Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2001