IS THERE A CURE FOR ANTI-SEMITISM'
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all of us. I sometimes ask myself how we are to navigate the nihilistic
abysses of the modern world. The thought suggests itself that Jews,
through the horrors of Jewish suffering, might logically stand apart from
Western nihilism. If they wished to separate themselves from modern
European nihilism, it is not impossible that they may have a legitimate
option to exercise. I am assuming here that they themselves have not
been contaminated by nihilism. I will not try here to define this condi–
tion more than to say that nihilism denies the existence of any distinct,
substantial self. This lack of self-substance makes all persons nugatory, in–
significant. If we are insignificant, what is done to us matters less perhaps.
Still, those who are killed need not accept their definition from the
killers and have their humanity taken from them as well as their lives.
The burden of valuation is on the killer, whose ground is nihilistic.
Those destroyed were not invited into Nothingness; they had it thrust
upon them. We are therefore free to withdraw (to withdraw our minds
where we cannot withdraw our bodies) from situations in which our
humanity or the lack of it is defined for us in such a fashion. It was the
judgment of the slayers that slaughter was permitted, that the slain had at
best a trivial claim to existence based on untenable fictions of their spe–
cial mission as a people. Theorists of euthanasia, of course, had long ago
consented to the destruction of the unfit. Even mild vegetarian Fabians
like George Bernard Shaw (there were others) agreed that measures
should be taken by a progressive society to rid itself of defective types.
These socially and historically "progressive" reforms were applied in
Central Europe by the Nazis with programmatic rigidity and with a de–
monic irony to the Jews and other peoples judged superfluous. It is the
concept of superfluity which is at the bottom of this nihilism.
It would be a mistake to set aside as unimportant, on modern
grounds, the age-long inclination to connect the spiritual order in the
universe with our own lives. In our pragmatic attitude toward the social
order, we leave no room for the influence of higher beliefs on our own
particular views of morality. In his short book
Death
if
the Soul,
the late
philosopher William Barrett offers a useful discussion of the consequence
of the disappearance, the destruction in fact, of the self. He examines
critically Heidegger's treatment of the human being. How, in
Heidegger's view,
are
we in the world? We ask of Heidegger: who is the
being who is undergoing all these various modes of being? Or, in more
traditional language, who is the subject, the "I," that underlies or persists
through all these various modes of our being? And here Heidegger
evades us. "We are nothing," he says, "but an aggregate of modes of
being, and any organizing or unifYing center we profess to find there is
something we ourselves have forged or contrived."
